Episode 3 – Nutrition and the Body
The foods we eat have a significant impact on how we live — from heart disease and cancer to brain and hormonal health. And our audience loves to learn about these connections. In this episode, we go behind the scenes with a look at how we decided on and developed our fall/winter 2025/2026 issue theme: nutrition and the body. During an uncertain time in our society, when much feels out of our control, we use this issue to focus on the choices we can control: the foods we eat. Yet, there are also choices our broader food systems make for us, often contributing to health issues. Hear how we used this issue to examine all aspects of health, through a food lens.
Guest:
Katie Scarlett Brandt, editor-in-chief of Chicago Health and Caregiving magazines
Related reading:
Fall/Winter 2025/2026 issue: Nutrition and the Body
Individual stories:
- Nourishing the Mind, Body, and Beyond
- Nutrition at a Glance
- Hormones in Menopause
- Menopause Meal Plan
- What’s in a Diet?
- Healing Foods
- Supplements, Superfoods, and Snake Oil
- Food Insecurity in Chicago
- Weight Loss Drug Revolution
Transcript
[00:00:00] Katie: Hello and welcome to the checkup from Chicago Health and Caregiving Magazines. I’m Chicago Health‘s editor-in-chief, Katie Scarlet Brandt, and today we’re going behind the scenes of our latest issue. I’m here with one of our health journalists, Dan Dean. And Dan, I’m happy to be on the other side of the interview today, so let’s hear your questions.
[00:00:25] Dan: Katie, I’m so excited to be talking to you.
[00:00:28] Katie: I’m happy to be here.
[00:00:30] Dan: The latest issue of Chicago Health Magazine, it’s the fall and winter edition that just dropped. Can you give us a sneak peek of what readers might expect to find inside?
[00:00:42] Katie: Of course. This issue’s theme is nutrition and the body. So most of the stories, but not all of them, have to do with nutrition, and that includes everything from — if you’re going through menopause, you can find a meal plan in there to support your hormones and your mental health. There’s a big feature on food insecurity. And there’s another feature on GLP-1s, which are the new weight loss medications. So looking at why people might start those, what some of the risks are and what that journey is like from starting them if you choose to go off them.
All different topics along those lines. And what we love about this is our magazine prints twice a year. So this is out, like you said, fall and winter. People can find it in their doctor’s office in the waiting room. So we get a lot of readers who get this information when they’re not even really looking for it, and then are pleasantly surprised, like, “Oh, this is actually helpful to me in my life. And I wasn’t having to go through all the information online and try to sort through what’s true, what matters to me and all of that.” So people can also subscribe and get it right in their mailbox.
[00:01:58] Dan: So there’s a whole range of health topics that you could cover for an issue. Why nutrition, and why does it make sense right now?
[00:02:07] Katie: Every issue, we focus on a different theme. We’ve done gun violence, we’ve done health literacy, we’ve done climate and medicine, and this just really is what our readers want to read. And I think it’s helpful in this moment to keep people grounded. And you know, I say in my intro letter to this issue too, if we wanna be out in the world taking care of each other and helping others, we have to nourish ourselves too. And food and nutrition is how we do that.
[00:02:38] Dan: So food and nutrition, that encompasses a lot of different things. And then from there, how do you figure out which topics to write about?
[00:02:48] Katie: With each issue, we put a call out to our writers and our sources who, you know, have been longtime sources that we’ve built relationships with. And we ask them what they care about, what they want to be covering, what they think is missing from the conversation. And then we get all those ideas together. Our core team has three or four meetings to go through them and see how they fit into coverage we’ve already done, how it fits into the theme. And then from there we assign them.
[00:03:21] Dan: And from your perspective, what stands out to you from the nutrition topic perspective that seems the most relevant to you personally?
[00:03:30] Katie: Well, I’m very interested in public health, and so the food insecurity angle of it and how even though we may try to make the best choices for ourselves with the information we have, there are bigger systems at play. So putting all of that into context for people I think is helpful because you might know how to eat healthy, but if you don’t have a grocery store that you can get to between work and doctor’s appointments and everything else you may have going on in your life, that’s going to affect your ability to eat healthy. Or if you do have a grocery store but you don’t have the knowledge of like, how many vegetables do I need on my plate? How do I eat the colors of the rainbow? How do I cook anything? Then are you going to be able to use what’s right there?
[00:04:20] Dan: I wanna ask you one kinda final question about the issue and, and that is: Why does health journalism matter? Why is it significant? Why should readers pay attention to this issue of the magazine or our issues kind of on the, over the course of the year?
[00:04:37] Katie: Um, that is a question I think about all the time. I was on a call recently with two former US Surgeons General, and one of the things we talked about was what went wrong during Covid. Their perspective, and I agree, is that there weren’t enough health reporters in the room talking to scientists and doctors. It was general reporters talking to politicians, and that let the core message get totally politicized. Our readers, our communities need to be familiar with the doctors and health experts who live amongst them, who are giving them guidance. I think that builds trust, and having health reporters who know who to ask what to ask, which studies to look at, which associations to check with — that is a great way to battle all the health misinformation out there and let people know their doctors in their communities.
[00:05:39] Dan: Thank you so much, Katie. I really appreciate you joining.
That was Katie Brandt, editor-in-chief of Chicago Health Magazine. To check out the most recent issue, visit chicagohealthonline.com.
[00:05:54] Katie: That’s all for today. Thanks for listening to The Checkup, a Chicago Health podcast. For more from us, visit chicagohealthonline.com where you can read stories, subscribe to our newsletter or print issue, and be in touch with any story ideas you’d like us to look into. See you next time.
Production support from Wolf Point Media | Intro and outro music by Dan Leu
