185: Yes To Life Show with Robin Daly MBE and guest Dr Larry Scherwitz185: Yes To Life Show with Robin Daly MBE and guest Dr Larry Scherwitz
UK Health Radio Podcast
Robin Daly MBE talks with Dr Larry Sherwitz about how lifestyle medicine, social connection, language and purpose can influence heart disease, diabetes and cancer care. The conversation contrasts pharmaceuticals with everyday habits, highlighting diet, movement and mindset as key parts of long-term health.
46:06•13 Aug 2026
Lifestyle Medicine, Language and the Will to Live with Dr Larry Sherwitz
Episode Overview
- Turning attention outward towards pets, plants and people can reduce anxiety and hostility and support heart health.
- Frequent use of self-focused words such as "I, me, mine" may be linked with a higher risk of future heart attacks.
- Early weight loss, especially abdominal fat, can strongly improve diabetes markers and sometimes lead to remission.
- A whole-food plant-based diet and avoiding ultra-processed foods are presented as central to preventing obesity and chronic disease.
- Pharmaceutical options like GLP-1 drugs may aid weight loss but still require emotional and behavioural changes around food and lifestyle.
“Lifestyle medicine is what you do every day, and it all adds up to better health and better healthy lifespan.”
What insights can experts and survivors share about addiction? This conversation on the Yes To Life Show zooms out from individual symptoms and looks at health as a joined-up whole, with Robin Daly MBE talking to lifestyle medicine researcher Dr Larry Sherwitz. You’ll hear Robin frame integrative oncology as an approach that values lifestyle and complementary medicine alongside conventional cancer care.
Dr Sherwitz then walks through his 50-year journey from social psychology to heart disease, cancer and chronic illness, showing how "I've seen the field progress from psychosomatic medicine... to behavioural medicine, and now we have lifestyle medicine." A standout moment is his research on language and heart disease.
People who frequently say "I, me, mine" in lifestyle interviews were more likely to have heart attacks, whereas turning attention towards "pets, plants, and people" is described as a "healing way of looking at life." It’s a striking reminder that self-absorption, anxiety and hostility don’t just feel bad – they show up in the body. The pair talk about lifestyle medicine being driven from both directions: public demand from the grassroots and research evidence from the top.
They touch on Covid-19’s mixed impact, the rise of social prescribing, and the UK’s focus on diabetes remission through weight loss and radical changes in diet. Nutrition versus exercise gets a frank comparison: exercise has charged ahead as mainstream "medicine", while nutrition is held back by ultra-processed food, big marketing budgets and the comforting myth that what you eat doesn’t really matter.
Dr Sherwitz argues for whole-food plant-based eating and warns that GLP‑1 obesity drugs are "a shortcut" that still need emotional and behavioural changes around food. Threaded through the chat are themes of purpose, will to live, and the need for health systems to reimburse time spent on real lifestyle change. It leaves you wondering: where could small lifestyle shifts start to make a difference in your own health story?
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