Essential Ingredients Podcast

"One day is a mental marathon, and so it is very difficult for the brain to be the best version of itself for everything. You don't have to be— your average is good for average experiences. Your best is needed for your most important experiences." —Dr. Izzy Justice
The 10 Hertz brain state is the frequency neuroscientist Dr. Izzy Justice says separates your best decisions from your worst ones — and it's hiding in plain sight, 10 to 20 seconds away at any moment. After running more than 18,000 wireless EEG brain scans on everyone from NBA players to executives to trauma survivors, Dr. Justice discovered that peak focus, deep empathy, and total presence all cluster around the same low-noise brainwave frequency: roughly 10 Hertz.
In this conversation with host Justine Reichman, Dr. Justice explains why wireless EEG technology changed how we understand the brain, how trauma physically "polarizes" specific neurons decades after the event, and why the fix isn't suppressing the memory but giving it a final chapter. He also walks through three practical neurohacks — techniques that take seconds, require no equipment, and can be used mid-conversation, mid-pitch, or mid-panic.
This episode is for anyone who has ever felt foggy under pressure, reactive in a stressful moment, or unsure why their body remembers things their mind has tried to forget.
Key Takeaways:
Peak human performance and full sensory presence both happen near 10 Hertz, a measurably low-noise brain frequency — not a mindset or personality trait.
Trauma creates highly "polarized" neurons that stay dormant until a matching sound, smell, or sensation reactivates them, sometimes decades later.
You don't need to be your best self all day — reserving these techniques for one or two high-stakes moments daily is enough.
The 10-10 technique (count fast to 10, then slow back to one) shifts brain state in about 20 seconds using nothing but your mind.
The palm-tap technique and 4-2-8 breathing pattern each take 10 to 20 seconds and can be done anywhere, anytime.
Healing trauma isn't about erasing the memory — it's about writing a final chapter where the experience serves a purpose.
Listen to the full conversation and subscribe to Essential Ingredients so you never miss an episode:  https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast 
Meet Izzy: 
Dr. Izzy Justice is the Chief Neuroscience Officer at Neuro580, a groundbreaking company at the forefront of human performance, sports psychology, and mental training. As a pioneering Sports Neuroscientist, he has certified over 300 coaches worldwide and has worked with elite athletes across multiple sports, many of whom have gone on to win Major Championships and Olympic Medals.
Dr. Justice is the creator of Neurohacks-rapid, science-backed techniques that remove mental distractions, boost focus under pressure, and help athletes access the flow state in real time. With over 18,000 EEG-based functional brain scans conducted during live performance, he brings unmatched insight into golf neuroscience, mental toughness, and brainwave management for peak performance.
As a consultant and executive coach, Dr. Justice has helped over 30 CEOs and dozens of Chief People Officers unlock leadership mindset, drive business performance, and build cultures of resilience through neuroscience.
From Zambia, Africa, and based in the U.S. for the past 40 years, Dr. Justice is the Best-Selling Author of 10 Books, including his latest, Your Brain Swings Every Club (Foreword by Brad Faxon), which bridges the gap between golf focus techniques, emotional control, and personal mastery.
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Chapters:
01:03 Meet Dr. Izzy Justice: From Boardroom to Brainwaves
04:10 How Wireless EEG Technology Changed Brain Science
08:32 Redefining Trauma as a Neuroscience Problem
14:03 The Mothers Who Turned Grief Into Purpose
19:55 The 10 Hertz Scale: Why Less Brain Noise Wins
28:22 The 10-10 Neurohack for Instant Focus
30:26 The Palm Tap: A 15-Second Calm Reset
33:00 The 4-2-8 Breathing Technique
41:10 What We'll Understand About the Brain Next
42:45 Key Takeaway: Longevity Starts With Your Brain 
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Life Explained: Chasing 10Hz by Dr. Izzy Justice 
THE PRIMES 
✨ You're more capable than you have ever been, and somehow more invisible than ever. You keep handing out advice you do not take yourself. You keep saying 'after this next thing' to your own life, and the people around you have no idea because, from the outside, everything looks fine— that is exactly what The Primes was built for. 🤝
The Primes is the only membership community where high-achieving women in midlife stop putting themselves last and start building alongside the people who are already doing the work. 🏗️ Not a wellness program, not a Facebook group, a carefully curated room where your level of experience is the entry point, not the exception. 🏆 318 episodes and 1.5 million downloads of this podcast came from the same community The Primes is built on. 🎙️
👩🏻👱🏻‍♀️👩🏻‍🦰👩🏻‍🦳👩🏻‍🦱If this show has been an essential ingredient in your life, this community was made for you. 
⌛Founding member enrollment closes September 21st, 2026. 
🔗Go to: https://nextgenpurpose.com/the-primes

"You can taste the quality." —Katina Mountanos
Most of what's labeled "extra virgin olive oil" on grocery shelves isn't giving you the extra virgin olive oil benefits you think it is — and Kosterina founder Katina Mountanos found that out the hard way. 
In this episode, Justine sits down with Katina to unpack why so much store-bought olive oil tastes flat, what polyphenols actually do in the body, and why the "don't cook with olive oil, it has a low smoke point" advice you've been following is flat-out wrong.
Katina traces her obsession with real olive oil back to summers on her family's farm in Koroni, Greece — and the moment, years later, that a $12 bottle from a New York supermarket tasted nothing like it. That gap sent her through an olive oil sommelier certification, a deep dive into polyphenol research, and eventually a full-time business built on transparency: harvest dates, single-origin sourcing, and third-party testing for everything from acidity to microplastics.
This episode is for anyone who's stood in the oil aisle wondering which bottle is actually worth it, and for anyone rethinking what "seed oil vs olive oil" really means for their health.
• High-antioxidant extra-virgin olive oil can contain 500–1,000+ mg/kg of polyphenols, compared to roughly 150 mg/kg in average grocery-store bottles.
• Smoke point is not the right test for whether an oil is safe to cook with — free radical emission under heat is what actually matters, and olive oil emits far fewer than seed oils.
• A bottle labeled "Italian" or "Greek" extra-virgin olive oil can still be a blend of residual oils from multiple countries and harvests, bottled together under one label.
• Plastic packaging accelerates rancidity and can leach microplastics, so glass or tin with a visible harvest date is a stronger buying signal than the words "extra virgin" alone.
• Fresh, high-polyphenol olive oil produces a peppery burn at the back of the throat — the same sensation researchers first mistook for ibuprofen contamination.
• Cooking with avocado oil or genuine early-harvest olive oil, instead of canola or other seed oils, is a low-effort swap with a real anti-inflammatory upside.
Listen to the full conversation for Katina's grocery-aisle checklist and her at-home smell-and-taste test — then subscribe so you never miss an episode. https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast 
Meet Katina: 
Katina Mountanos is the founder and CEO of Kosterina, a premium Greek extra virgin olive oil and Mediterranean foods brand built at the intersection of taste, health, and transparency. Raised between New York and the olive groves of Koroni, Greece, Katina grew up knowing what truly good olive oil should taste like. After becoming a certified olive oil sommelier and uncovering the powerful health benefits of high–polyphenol extra virgin olive oil, she launched Kosterina as a passion project while working in consumer brands at Walmart. 
Today, Kosterina's early-harvest, cold-pressed, high-antioxidant olive oils, fruit-infused vinegars, and olives are nationally available at Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and online, and are recognized for both exceptional flavor and rigorous quality testing. Grounded in the Mediterranean diet, Katina's work champions cooking at home, clean ingredients, and replacing inflammatory seed oils with olive oil to support heart, gut, metabolic, and overall health. 
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Chapters:
00:52 Meet Katina Mountanos: Growing Up in Greek Olive Country
06:09 Why Kosterina's Polyphenol Levels Triple the Average
08:46 Building Kosterina as a Passion Project While at Walmart
14:26 Busting the Smoke Point Myth About Cooking With Olive Oil
16:51 Canola Oil, the "Hateful Eight," and Why Blends Deceive
19:09 How to Spot Real Extra Virgin Olive Oil at the Store
21:48 The Smell-and-Taste Test for Good Olive Oil at Home
27:31 What's Next: Vinegars, Olives, and a 2027 Launch 
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Get a 15% discount when you shop at Kosterina
Use code: essential15
THE PRIMES 
✨ You're more capable than you have ever been, and somehow more invisible than ever. You keep handing out advice you do not take yourself. You keep saying 'after this next thing' to your own life, and the people around you have no idea because, from the outside, everything looks fine— that is exactly what The Primes was built for. 🤝
The Primes is the only membership community where high-achieving women in midlife stop putting themselves last and start building alongside the people who are already doing the work. 🏗️ Not a wellness program, not a Facebook group, a carefully curated room where your level of experience is the entry point, not the exception. 🏆 318 episodes and 1.5 million downloads of this podcast came from the same community The Primes is built on. 🎙️
👩🏻👱🏻‍♀️👩🏻‍🦰👩🏻‍🦳👩🏻‍🦱If this show has been an essential ingredient in your life, this community was made for you. 
⌛Founding member enrollment closes September 21st, 2026. 
🔗Go to: https://nextgenpurpose.com/the-primes

"You have to figure out how to make self-care a priority because you know the body does not sit still... Your mindset will allow you to move forward, or it will take you backwards." —Dr. Mitra Ray
Stanford-trained biologist Dr. Mitra Ray spent three decades building a career in women's longevity, but the habits she taught everyone else became something she never expected: the infrastructure that kept her upright after her husband, Doug, died suddenly in a paragliding accident in October 2023. In this conversation with host Justine Reichman, Dr. Ray traces her path from NIH- and Alzheimer's-funded cancer research to walking away from the lab, building a word-of-mouth wellness brand that sold 2 million copies with zero advertising, and eventually testing her own biological age during the hardest year of her life — and watching it go backward.
This episode is for anyone navigating midlife, grief, perimenopause, or the quiet realization that the wellness habits they've dismissed as trendy might be the thing holding them together. Dr. Ray and Justine talk candidly about cold plunging, sobriety, plant-based nutrition, sleep science, and the gut-microbiome research behind cravings — grounding every claim in the biology, not the buzzwords.
Key takeaways:
Dr. Ray's biological age measurably reversed during the year she grieved her husband, evidence that consistent habits can outperform circumstance.
Comparing your current body to a memory of your 25-year-old self is biologically counterproductive — memories change every time you access them, and the comparison itself triggers cortisol and inflammation.
Cold plunging activates the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, the brain region tied to willpower and will to live, which Dr. Ray leaned on deliberately after losing Doug.
Food cravings are largely dictated by gut bacteria, not willpower — feeding plant-based bacteria gradually shifts what your body craves.
"Superagers" in their 80s are still generating new neurons, making neurogenesis — not a return to a younger self — the more useful benchmark for healthy aging.
Grief lives in the body: cortisol, thyroid, and hormone levels shift during loss, and naming that process without judgment is part of recovering from it.
Listen to the full conversation and subscribe to Essential Ingredients for more real conversations at the intersection of food, purpose, and building a better future: https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast 
Meet Dr. Ray: 
Living a long, healthy life is not as complicated as the wellness industry would have you believe. Dr. Mitra Ray has spent more than 30 years helping people understand this—and more importantly, live it.
Her path into health was shaped by both rigorous science and lived experience. She completed her undergraduate degree at Cornell University and earned her PhD from Stanford Medical School, where her research was funded by multiple NIH grants and recognized with the Young Investigator Award from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Her work has been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Cell Biology—journals that do not publish ideas lightly.
But credentials alone do not explain why audiences across four continents keep coming back to hear her speak, or why her books and lectures on health, beauty, brain function, and longevity have resonated as widely as they have. The reason is simpler: she translates what the science actually says into something you can do and sustain.
Her focus has always been whole plant foods, an active body, and a clear mind. These three things, she has come to understand, are not a wellness trend. They are the foundation. Everything downstream of that foundation—how you look, how you feel, how you age—follows.
In addition to her research and teaching, Dr. Ray is also a Juice Plus+ Partner, aligning with her commitment to making whole food nutrition more accessible in everyday life.
The Elder's Evolution, her Substack publication, is where she writes about what it means to age well, with full attention paid to both the biology and the deeper questions that biology alone cannot answer.
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Chapters:
01:31 Meet Dr. Mitra Ray: From Stanford Lab to Wellness Pioneer
05:41 Leaving Science: How Her Family and Peers Reacted
09:03 Why Doctors Still Ignore Whole-Food Nutrition
16:52 Stop Comparing Yourself to a Body That No Longer Exists
19:45 Building a 2-Million-Copy Word-of-Mouth Wellness Brand
23:03 After Doug's Death: The Habits That Became Her Infrastructure
32:36 Cold Plunging, the AMC, and Rebuilding Willpower After Loss
51:02 The Real Benchmark for Aging Isn't Your 25-Year-Old Self
54:34 Cravings Aren't Willpower — It's Your Gut Microbiome

"It is getting pesticides out of the vineyard. It's making sure that when we send a worker home, they're not going home and hugging their child with any other pesticide or herbicide. It is a mission, but it does start with the dirt, and it has to flow all the way through the winery into the bottle." —Jeff O'Neill
"A lot of times, people think about the environmental side of sustainability, but it's also about the social pieces— how you treat your employees, worker health and safety, and also how you exist within the community." —Allison Jordan
Regenerative organic wine sounds like a buzzword — until you stand in a vineyard that's actually living it. This week, Justine Reichman sits down at Ram's Gate Winery with Allison Jordan (VP of Environmental Affairs, Wine Institute) and Jeff O'Neill (founder, Ram's Gate and O'Neill Vintners & Distillers) to unpack what real stewardship looks like when an entire industry commits to it.
Key takeaways:
How the California Code of Sustainable Wine Growing turned 200+ best practices into a statewide movement, covering everything from soil health to worker safety
What it actually takes to earn CCOF Organic and Regenerative Organic Certification — including the 3-to-5-year soil conversion most people never hear about
Why Ramsgate planted fruit trees inside its vineyard rows, and what that agroforestry bet could mean for the next 20 years
The honest answer to the question every skeptic asks: Does regenerative wine actually taste as good?
This conversation is proof that sustainability isn't a marketing layer — it's a rebuild from the soil up, and it's changing what "good wine" means.
🎧 Listen to the full episode now: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/essential-ingredients-podcast/id1534417325 
Meet Jeff:
As the visionary founder and owner of Ram's Gate Winery, Jeff O'Neill is a transformative leader in the wine and spirits industry. An accomplished entrepreneur and CEO of family-owned and operated O'Neill Vintners & Distillers, Jeff brings decades of expertise to his craft. Ram's Gate Winery is the culmination of Jeff's passion for producing world-class wines, offering an unparalleled visitor experience at an Estate designed by architect Howard Backen and interiors by Orlando Diaz-Azcuy. A passionate advocate for the planet, Jeff has been a leader in environmental stewardship for over 20 years. His deep commitment to building a more sustainable future for the wine business earned him recognition as Wine Enthusiast's Person of the Year in 2022.
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Meet Allison: 
Allison Jordan serves as the Vice President of Environmental Affairs for the Wine Institute and as the Executive Director of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance. In these roles, she oversees the California Sustainable Winegrowing Program and the Certified California Sustainable Winegrowing Program, while also representing the Wine Institute on the board of directors of the National Grape Research Alliance. Previously, Allison held leadership positions at SureHarvest and the Resource Renewal Institute. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the Goldman School at UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Psychology from Allegheny College. She is a fellow in the German Marshall Fund's American Marshall Memorial Fellowship program.
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Chapters:
01:08 Meet Allison Jordan: The Voice of California's Wine Institute
02:36 Inside the California Code of Sustainable Wine Growing
06:58 Meet Jeff O'Neill: 40 Years Building Regenerative Wine
09:51 What Regenerative Organic Certification Really Requires
12:38 Ram's Gate's Agroforestry Bet: Fruit Trees in the Vine Rows
14:23 Does Regenerative Organic Wine Actually Taste Better?
16:26 Why Today's Wine Consumer Demands Transparency
19:14 Scaling Regenerative Practices Across California Vineyards
23:23 Jeff O'Neill's 50-Year Vision for California Wine

"Farming in a way that's good for the health of the consumer and good for the product is also good for the environment. And so everybody wins, and then our consumer wins." —Andrew Salisbury 
Coffee health benefits aren't just marketing; they're backed by nearly 30,000 studies, yet almost none of that research made it into the bag of coffee sitting in your kitchen. 
In this episode of Essential Ingredients, Justine Reichman talks with Andrew Salisbury, founder of Purity Coffee, about the personal frustration that led him to rebuild coffee from the soil up. It started with his wife's low energy and a stubborn question: was her daily coffee helping or hurting? That question sent Andrew to two coffee scientists at Vanderbilt, who handed him a list of health benefits tied to coffee — and a gap no company was filling. 
Andrew explains why coffee is actually the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet, ahead of blueberries and kale, and why most companies stop at "avoiding the bad stuff" instead of maximizing the good. He walks through Purity's three-level testing process — bean, soil, and now the body — and explains why regenerative, shade-grown farming produces higher yields and more antioxidants than industrial methods, while also sequestering carbon rather than releasing it. The conversation moves from roast curves and chlorogenic acids to the real economics of paying farmers a premium, and why climate change is expected to cut Arabica coffee supply in half by 2035. 
This is a conversation about what happens when a company refuses to accept "that's just how it's done." Listen to the full episode to hear how one entrepreneur is trying to make your daily cup a genuine act of health: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/essential-ingredients-podcast/id1534417325  
Meet Andrew: 
Andrew Salisbury is the founder and CEO of Purity Coffee, a specialty coffee company built on a simple but radical premise: every decision from farm to cup should be made for human health first. After investigating his wife's low energy and digging into research at the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt, Andrew discovered that coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet—and that no brand was optimizing coffee specifically for health.
Partnering with leading coffee researcher Professor Adriana Farah, Andrew spent 18 months developing Purity's approach: shade-grown, regeneratively farmed, organic coffee that is independently lab-tested to minimize mold, mycotoxins, pesticides, and heavy metals while maximizing antioxidants and polyphenols.
Through Purity Coffee and the emerging concept of "circular health coffee," Andrew is helping reshape how the industry thinks about regenerative agriculture, soil health, and clean sourcing, proving that what's best for the drinker can also be best for farmers and the planet.
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Chapters:
01:19 Meet Andrew Salisbury: Founder of Purity Coffee
04:37 Coffee's Surprising #1 Antioxidant Ranking
05:31 Why No One Built Health-First Coffee Sooner
10:03 Inside Purity's Three-Level Coffee Testing
12:14 How Regenerative Farming Fights Climate Change
15:23 Clean Sourcing: Farm-to-Cup Transparency
23:54 Balancing Sustainability With Accessible Pricing
33:50 The Future of Coffee and Soil Health
40:44 Where to Find Purity Coffee