Tend The Terrain Podcast with Dr. Nasha Winters

Dr. Nasha Winters
  • 4.9 (14)
  • Medicine

Tend the Terrain with Dr. Nasha is a weekly podcast about the conditions that shape our lives, biological, emotional, relational, cultural, and ecological. The ground beneath our health. The rhythms that regulate us. The environments, internal and external, that determine whether life thrives or quietly begins to unravel. Hosted by Dr. Nasha Winters, a three-decade integrative oncology thought leader, two-time author, cancer thriver, and creator of the Metabolic Approach to Cancer® and Terrain Ten™ framework, this show invites scientists, farmers, clinicians, artists, and lived experience leaders into conversations that prioritize pattern recognition over protocols, meaning over metrics, and restoration over force. This is not a show about fixing what’s broken. It’s about understanding what supports life. If you’re curious about how timing, relationships, nervous systems, land, story, and self-trust shape human health and capacity, pull up a chair. New episodes weekly.

  1. 5d ago

    From the Spreadsheet to the Soul with Mark Sean Taylor | Ep. 024

    In 2016, Mark Sean Taylor was told he had pancreatic cancer — and then, almost in the same breath, that it wasn't bad enough to treat. Caught early through circulating tumor cells, he fell below the threshold standard oncology uses to justify care, and was sent home to wait. Mark had spent two decades in finance and technology, trained in mathematics and statistics, and he did the only thing that training left him able to do: he started gathering data. On himself first, then on hundreds of others walking the same uncharted ground — building Patient Led Oncology, an independent effort to track what real people actually experience with the integrative therapies the world argues about. But this conversation isn't really about the data. It's about the man behind it — and the quiet, almost improbable thing that has happened to him along the way. Dr. Nasha has watched Mark change: the most linear, analytical, spreadsheet-minded person she knew has slowly become someone tending his terrain from the inside out, beginning in the mental and emotional ground where she herself now starts. This is the story underneath the story. So they go straight to the heart of it. What has surprised Mark most — not about cancer, but about himself, ten years into a life that was never supposed to last this long? What is he learning about the human spirit from the hundreds of journeys he's witnessed — the things his numbers can only hint at? And where does he see all of this going over the next decade, for himself and for a growing movement of patients who've stopped waiting to be told what's possible? A conversation about capacity over compliance, about what the data couldn't teach him, and about a man learning, in real time, to tend what he once only measured. Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners. More From Dr. Nasha Winters

  2. Oct 21

    The Ground Under Your Feet and the Universe Around You with Dr. Maya Shetreat | Ep. 023

    Dr. Maya Shetreat is board certified in adult neurology, child neurology, and pediatrics — a résumé that could have kept her comfortably inside the walls of academic medicine for the rest of her life. Then her own young son started having seizures, and the cause turned out to be nothing she had been trained to look for. It wasn't in his brain. It was in their home, in the mold, in the invisible environment that no neurology text had ever asked her to examine. A pediatric neurologist could not neurologize her way out of her own child's illness, and that failure sent her somewhere her training never would have: into the soil. What she found there became The Dirt Cure — the microbes, the food, the earth, the whole living world we have spent a century scrubbing out of children's lives. But she kept going. She apprenticed with indigenous teachers and communities in Ecuador, Mexico, Australia, and Africa. She studied plants not only as pharmacology but as relationship, and wrote The Master Plant Experience on the science, the safety, and the sacred ceremony we keep trying to strip out of medicine in order to make it respectable. Along the way she arrived at a definition of terrain that is far bigger than the one most of us are working with: terrain is personal and it is global. The ground under your feet and the universe around you. In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Maya sit with the sensitive ones — the people who feel everything, who get labeled fragile, and who so often shut down the very parts of themselves that were never the problem. They talk about what it costs to keep the sacred and the scientific in the same body without letting either one win. And they go where two women in the middle of becoming inevitably go: to what had to be lost, grieved, and composted before the next version could grow. This is a conversation about the ground — under your feet, and everywhere else. Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners. More From Dr. Nasha Winters

  3. Oct 14

    A Bold Return To Giving a Damn with Will Harris | Ep. 022

    Will Harris was raised to farm the way America taught a whole generation to farm — with chemicals, confinement, monoculture, and a single-minded focus on pounds and efficiency. For twenty years he ran his family's Georgia land that way, and he was good at it. Then he looked at what all that efficiency had actually produced: soil that couldn't hold water, animals that couldn't express a single natural instinct, a hometown that was quietly dying. And he made the boldest decision of his life. He dismantled the entire industrial operation and went back — 130 years back — to the way his great-grandfather had farmed before anyone had invented a reason not to. Today White Oak Pastures is one of the most watched farms in the country: a sixth-generation, radically traditional, multi-species operation where the cattle, sheep, hogs, goats, and poultry all have a role in tending the land, where the animals are raised and slaughtered on the same soil with a reverence most of us have been trained never to look at, and where a nearly-dead town called Bluffton has come back to life around the work. In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Will go underneath the food-system headlines to the terrain of it — soil as a living body, the farm as an ecosystem that heals in relationship or not at all, and the unflinching honesty about death that sits at the center of any honest relationship with life. This is a conversation about unlearning what you were most certain of, about the difference between forcing yield and creating the conditions for life, and about what it means to give a damn in a system built to reward the opposite. It's about grief and legacy and worms and blood and six generations of a family bound to one piece of ground. And it's a mirror held up to all of us — because the same question Will asks about the land is the one this whole show asks about the body: are we manufacturing health, or are we tending the conditions that let it grow? Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners. More From Dr. Nasha Winters

  4. Oct 7

    The Land Was Never the Problem with Nicole Masters | Ep. 021

    Nicole Masters gets called out to look at damaged ground. Compacted, crusted, lifeless dirt on ranches and farms across New Zealand, Australia, US, S. Africa, the UK. She is an agroecologist, she has been doing this for more than twenty years, and she is very good at reading what soil is telling her. But somewhere in those two decades she noticed something that changed the whole shape of her work: the people calling her about their soil almost never had a soil problem. They had a mindset problem. An overwhelm problem. A debt problem. A grief problem. A generations-of-being-told-the-land-is-an-adversary problem. Nicole points out that the products lining the shed wall are named things like Guillotine and Rifle — that a farmer can get up in the morning and, without ever hearing themself do it, ask who am I going to kill today. Decades of that language does something to a person. It also does something to the ground underneath them. So she began troubleshooting the human standing in the field, and the field started to change. In this conversation Dr. Nasha and Nicole Masters talk about the language of dominance we use on land and on bodies, about grown adults on their knees in dirt laughing for the first time since childhood, about why more information is often more damaging than none at all, and about what it takes to see a landscape — or a life — that you long ago stopped actually looking at. Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners. More From Dr. Nasha Winters

  5. Sep 30

    The Disease of Being Good with Dr. Jeffrey Rediger | Ep. 020

    Dr. Jeffrey Rediger has spent more than thirty years asking the question most of medicine steps around: why do some people recover from illnesses that are supposed to be incurable? He is a Harvard psychiatrist with a Master of Divinity, a man raised close to the land in a deeply religious Midwestern world who went on to study both the soul and the body — and in his book Cured, he did the unglamorous work of tracking down the documented cases of “spontaneous” remission and asking what those survivors actually had in common. What he found kept pointing past the biology alone, toward something quieter and harder to measure: whether a person had come home to their own life. His new book, Relationsick, co-authored with Dr. Lissa Rankin, MD (bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine), names the pattern out loud. Relationsickness is what happens when a lifetime of over-giving — being the good one, the one who anticipates everyone’s needs and buries their own — stops being a story about character and becomes a story about physiology. A nervous system kept in chronic self-abandonment never fully stands down; the body stays inflamed, the immune system frays, and disease finds its opening. In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Dr. Jeff sit with the reframe at the center of it all: that being endlessly, selflessly good — the giving tree who ends the story as a stump — can be an express lane to illness, and that self-protection is not selfishness but medicine. This is a conversation about what heals when the diet and the supplements aren’t enough — about fawning mistaken for kindness, about the difference between martyrdom and love, and about the strange grace of an illness that finally gives a person permission to matter to themselves. For anyone who has done everything right, given everything they had, and quietly wondered why their body still broke. Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners. More From Dr. Nasha Winters

  6. Sep 23

    A Mitochondrial Colony with Dr. Petra Davelaar | Ep. 019

    Dr. Petra Davelaar came on Tend the Terrain to talk about deuterium — the heavy hydrogen she's chased for the better part of a decade — and within minutes made it clear she'd walked through that door into something far larger. Recorded, almost too fittingly, during a solar eclipse, this is a conversation about how light governs life, and about a frontier that quietly upends the textbook: the idea that the body is not a machine assembled from parts, but a field of living processes. Petra has been building this thinking alongside a small, unlikely circle of collaborators — the ninety-year-old theoretical physicist Barry Ninham, the farmer and synthesist Logan Duvall of Sowing Prosperity, and the microbiome citizen-scientist Martha Carlin — sparked by their preprint tracing the gut, the brain, and the glycocalyx. At the center of it is a reimagining of the mitochondria — not the powerhouse of the cell but its field governor, an emitter of heat and charge and light and metabolic water. We are, by weight, some ten percent mitochondria, Petra points out; we are a mitochondrial colony. From there the terrain gets a physical address: the glycocalyx, the fuzzy sensing-layer at the edge of every cell and every vessel, where the body's inner state meets the outer world and the two try to stay in tune. The pancreas is recast as a terrain organ, an unguarded gatekeeper at the center of the body. And cancer is seen in a wholly different light — not a cell gone broken but a reverted one, cloaking its own surface until the immune system is, in their collaborator's phrase, asked to stand down: immune illegibility. What Dr. Nasha and Petra keep circling back to is the sobering clinical truth underneath all of it — there is no one node. Ketogenic diet, high-dose vitamin C, mistletoe, even a blockbuster immunotherapy: each addresses a single signal in a system that governs from the whole, which is why so many responses run their course and stall. The only way through, they agree, is restoring coherence — matching the body's inner signals to a life lived in closer alignment with nature, and light, and rhythm. There is no shortcut. And there's a quiet grace threaded through it all: that some of the most establishment-shaking thinking in this field is coming from far outside the establishment — from a researcher who left the city, got back into the green and the light, and let her own terrain teach her what no laboratory ever could. Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners. More From Dr. Nasha Winters

  7. Sep 16

    The Woman Who Built the Road with Dr. Lise Alschuler | Ep. 018

    Some people spend a career inside a field. Dr. Lise Alschuler helped build one. When she began practicing naturopathic oncology, there was no board to certify it and no association to hold it — so she helped create them. She co-wrote The Definitive Guide to Cancer, a book that became something close to scripture for a generation of integrative practitioners, and for years she and Dr. Tina Kaczor have stood up at the OncANP conference to translate the newest research for the rest of the field. She’s past-president of both the AANP and OncANP, a professor at the University of Arizona’s Andrew Weil Center, and today she’s president and CEO of Sonoran University of Health Sciences — the school where Dr. Nasha herself trained. But this isn’t a conversation about a résumé. It’s a conversation between two women who both spent their lives mapping the cancer terrain for other people — and then were handed the diagnosis themselves. Lise is a breast cancer thriver, someone who walked the exact ground she’d spent decades charting for everyone else. In this episode, Dr. Nasha sits down with the mentor and quiet force who helped pave the way for her own path. They talk about what it takes to keep walking against the current when the establishment has no name for what you’re doing, how being the patient rearranges the physician, and why the future of this medicine depends on holding rigor and reverence in the same set of hands — data and soul, refusing to be separated. A homecoming of a conversation, and a tribute to the kind of person who builds the road and rarely stops to say so. Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners. More From Dr. Nasha Winters

  8. Sep 9

    The Body That Reacts To Everything with Dr. Kelly McCann | Ep. 017

    Dr. Kelly McCann has the kind of credentials that open any door in conventional medicine — an MD and a Master's in public health and tropical medicine from Tulane, one of only about 3000 physicians worldwide to complete Andrew Weil's integrative medicine fellowship. And then she did something that tells you everything about her: she went back to school for a Master's in Spiritual Psychology. Not because the science failed her, but because it kept running out before her patients did. Because her patients are the ones nobody else can figure out. The people who react to everything — a candle, a meal, a damp room, a new couch. The mold-sick, the mast-cell-activated, the ones carrying Lyme and a dozen labels and a quiet suspicion that they're being dismissed as anxious. In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Kelly sit with a radical reframe: that a body reacting to everything isn't malfunctioning — it's an intelligent system that has stopped trusting its ground. They go into the invisible terrain most of medicine can't see, or won't: the mold in the walls, the load in the air, the built world we've decided not to feel. And they follow it all the way down to the part Kelly refuses to skip — that no binder, no protocol, no perfect elimination diet heals a nervous system that doesn't feel safe. This is a conversation about the sensitive being right, not weak. About safety as biochemistry. About what happens when a physician stops treating the reaction and starts asking what the body is trying to protect. For anyone who's ever been told their symptoms were in their head — and suspected, correctly, that their body knew something the tests couldn't name. Tend the Terrain™ is proudly supported by DHA Laboratories, my exclusive lab partner and the testing pillar of everything we do here. Test, Assess, Address, Don't Guess™ only holds up if the testing behind it does — and DHA keeps it all under one roof: family-owned, CLIA-licensed, with standard tests as well as thousands of functional tests, and real people who actually pick up the phone. They've built special access and pricing just for my listeners. More From Dr. Nasha Winters

See All (24)

Ratings & Reviews

4.9
out of 5
14 Ratings

About

Tend the Terrain with Dr. Nasha is a weekly podcast about the conditions that shape our lives, biological, emotional, relational, cultural, and ecological. The ground beneath our health. The rhythms that regulate us. The environments, internal and external, that determine whether life thrives or quietly begins to unravel. Hosted by Dr. Nasha Winters, a three-decade integrative oncology thought leader, two-time author, cancer thriver, and creator of the Metabolic Approach to Cancer® and Terrain Ten™ framework, this show invites scientists, farmers, clinicians, artists, and lived experience leaders into conversations that prioritize pattern recognition over protocols, meaning over metrics, and restoration over force. This is not a show about fixing what’s broken. It’s about understanding what supports life. If you’re curious about how timing, relationships, nervous systems, land, story, and self-trust shape human health and capacity, pull up a chair. New episodes weekly.

Information

You Might Also Like