196. Breaking the Stigma of Antidepressants & Anti-Diet Culture as a Vegan Medical Student with Beats By Brooke
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I’m so excited to share this special episode with you all, because it covers so many important topics I’ve been really wanting to share for a LONG time.
Today I have Brooklyne Palmer of Beets By Brooke on the podcast for an important conversation about true health and wellness, nutrition, anti-diet culture, and mental health in the black community.
Brooklynne Palmer is a vegan medical student and social media content creator who uses her platform to explore the intersectionality of all things health and wellness while sharing insights into her life as a future plant based doctor.
In middle school, Brooklynne learned about vegetarianism and slowly began to leave meat off her plate after connecting her love of animals to what she was eating. When she hit high school and began to struggle with body image and restrictive eating, she found that becoming vegan helped her see food differently–seeing it as an act of compassion and more nourishing than she had ever thought of it before. It became a way to live in alignment with her morals, and opened her up to the realization that as a society we are taught so little about true nutrition and wellness. It was really going vegan and wanting to share life-saving nutritional information with others that led Brooklynne to becoming a medical student later on.
Now as a full time medical student, Brooklynne also juggles being a content creator under the name BeetsByBrooke on Instagram. She uses her platform to educate on plant-based nutrition, to share her experience as a vegan medical student and future doctor, and to shed light on the destructive nature of diet culture. Brooklynne hopes to create a more size inclusive space in medicine that focuses on preventative nutrition–a huge contrast to our country’s ‘treat the symptoms, not the cause’ perspective.
In this conversation, she dives deep into why diet culture is set up to fail people (did you know the biggest risk factor of weight gain is DIETING??) and how dieting puts blame on individuals instead of the systems that make true health and wellness feel impossible.
This episode is energetic, lively, and still full of life-changing information and perspectives for y’all. I’m most excited to share the conversation we have about anti-depressants and the stigma around them, while responsibly sharing both of our experiences on the benefits of taking medication for anxiety/depression.
In this podcast episode you’ll hear about:
Life as a plant based medical student
Food security, size inclusivity, anti-diet culture and intuitive eating
Breaking stereotypes of what a vegan looks like
Mental health in the black community and breaking the stigma of antidepressants
Weighing the benefits vs risks of antidepressant and sharing our own experiences with taking medication
Why we need to bring nutrition and preventive medicine into the medical system