In early 2020, before COVID had properly reached Ireland, dietitian Dr Dan McCartney noticed that the groups the virus was hitting hardest were the same groups most likely to be low in vitamin D. Within weeks he and consultant Declan Byrne of St James's Hospital had a paper in the Irish Medical Journal, the first in the world to propose the link. It drew a fair bit of blowback. Dan lectures in human nutrition and dietetics at TU Dublin and Trinity, and he takes Laura through what the research has shown since, from the Dublin hospital data to the immune switch vitamin D helps to flip. Then the conversation widens. Why a rich country is short on the nutrients that fight infection, why some guidelines were written to prevent scurvy rather than help us thrive, and why he's perplexed by European proposals to cut supplement doses. They finish on ageing, what happens in the womb, and his case for starting good habits early.

Kenneth Keavey has a PhD in chemistry and spent his early career in pharma and biotech. He now grows organic vegetables on twenty-five acres outside Galway, and he's the first...

Laura is joined by Dr Cillian Keogh, a GP and co-founder of Dublin City Clinic, for a frank and surprisingly funny conversation about haemorrhoids — what they actually are, who...

In this episode, former Connacht rugby player Fergus Farrell tells Laura what happened after he lifted a metal bench in his own yard in October 2018 — and severed his...

Daniel Buckley was thirty-two before he had a name for what was going on in his head. For as long as he could remember he had been restless, discontented, unable...

Anna Lechleiter works with people who have never been able to speak, and who have spent their lives being treated as though they had nothing to say. She is a...