How much you earn directly affects your chances at good health. Straightforward enough, right?

Well, sorta. J. Paul Leigh, PhD, Professor of Economics within the Public Health Division at UC-Davis, clues us in this week on how it’s actually a lot more than simple cause-and-effect.

He caught our eye recently when he published a piece with Juan Du on the effects of minimum wage on the population’s health. We chat about the health effects of wages, job satisfaction, and unemployment – and why it’s taken so long for researchers to study all this.

Particularly interesting are the outcomes of a higher wage for lower earners. If they can now buy things that are better for their health, they can also buy things that are worse for their health. So which wins out?

Edgar Villanueva has a new book. But more than that, he has a set of solutions to the pernicious problem of white men controlling the flow of philanthropic money in our country.

His solutions are rooted in Native wisdom and he’s a member of the Lumbee Tribe, hailing originally from North Carolina.

We discuss how foundations are stuck in vicious cycles, often reluctant to engage in upending a system that generated their wealth in the first place. And when it comes to health, they’re often stuck on an endless carousel of being hesitant to solve the public policy issues that created the health problems that the foundation was set up to fix in the first place.

Author, professor, and general public health force-of-nature, Marion Nestle, joins us this week.

Her newest book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, examines the influence that food companies exert on the research that tags their products as healthy or not. As you might imagine, when food companies fund research, the results often come out looking prettttttttttty good for those companies.

Marion also shares some fascinating anecdotes, including how the how the Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails during the 2016 presidential election turned out to have a connection back to her and the Coca-Cola Company.

She’s the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University. She is also a professor of Sociology at NYU and a visiting professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University.

Three researchers are the first people to study how living in fear changes our health. How do you measure such a thing? What contributes to a person’s fears? What’s the political climate’s affect on fear, especially with constant threats of mass deportation and repeatedly stoked fears of crime?

Another dispatch from the American Public Health Association’s annual conference, we join Marie-Claude Couture, Dellanira Garcia, and Erin Grinshteyn of the University of San Francisco to examine how fear is damaging our chances at healthy lives.

With American life expectancy declining for the third straight year and substance use causing much of the decline, join our critical conversation to find out how fear is ratcheting up substance use rates and hurting our health in many other ways.

From a giant (echoey) conference room at the American Public Health Association’s annual conference, Jake sits down with Linda Blount, President and CEO of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

Linda explains BWHI’s mission of reducing health disparities for Black women and fills us in on what we can learn from Black women about the public’s health. She’s got fascinating thoughts as well on how we sell public health like companies sell products, that is, how we make people want better health.

Linda also joins in to bust some health myths – you know we love that – and brings the politics as well. With Black women more-or-less always saving the electoral chances of Democratic candidates, why aren’t those Democrats delivering for Black women? And what can we do about it?

Transportation Alternatives advocates for New York City’s streets to be safer for pedestrians and cyclists. They’ve got to navigate both the difficult physical and political terrain in their quest to make the city safe for residents who want to commute by walking and biking.

How do you organize to move elected officials? How do you change the characterization of injuries and deaths from “accidents” into “traffic violence?”

Transportation Alternatives Director of Advocacy Thomas Devito joins us to chat about the future of active transportation in the country’s biggest city.

Last night, Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives after a campaign waged on the issue of health care and as a check on President Trump.

With midterm-induced change ringing in our head, we check in with Rich Pelletier, who was Bernie Sanders’s National Field Director.

What’s next for Bernie? How did Bernie manage to so substantially outperform expectations? What do voters really want in the next presidential candidate?

Hey! It’s officially time for the Wooden Teeth to start chattering!

We’re here to bust some myths, find out where your health collides with politics, laugh, and take some action. For our inaugural episode, we’ve got Brad Woodhouse in Washington, DC, who runs Protect Our Care, the organization fighting to defend the Affordable Care Act. And Brad’s magnificent Carolina accent. We’ve got that too.

We’ll be up with our inaugural episode real soon.

For now though, to get a taste of where we’ll meander on the podcast, here’s a recent piece that our host wrote and was featured on Medium. Jake discusses his Native heritage, Elizabeth Warren’s recent DNA test to ‘prove’ hers amid insults from the president, what it means to erase a culture, and his own struggle with identity.

My father (my full-blooded grandfather’s son) presents as nonwhite and has spent much of his life working in Indian country. I present as white, and I get to reap all the benefits of that status as I walk through the world.

This status does not excuse me from what I now consider to be my responsibility to represent my Native heritage. There was a period in my life, however, when I concealed an important piece of who I am because of resentful mockery akin to the kind invoked by Trump.