Season 2: Episode 12 - Diet, health and wellbeing with Dr James Muecke AM

The Learning Future Podcast with Louka Parry

How does our diet impact our health and ability to live well? What must we know and do to decrease metabolic disease as parents, educators and citizens?

In this episode, we speak with Dr James Muecke AM, an eye surgeon, humanitarian, social entrepreneur, and the Australian of the Year for 2020. James lived and worked as a doctor in Africa and subsequently as an eye surgeon in the Middle East, battling malaria, wild animals, and rebel soldiers, he then co-founded Vision Myanmar and also Sight For All, a social impact organisation aiming to create a world where everyone can see. 80% of world blindness avoidable and James treats blindness as a human rights issue.

His focus now is type 2 diabetes – the leading cause of blindness in adults and a spiralling epidemic that's impacting nearly one-in-ten Australians. It's the fastest-growing cause of vision loss in Aboriginal people and the sixth-biggest killer in Australia like many other parts of the world. James wants to challenge our perception of sugar and the impact it has on the development of type 2 diabetes.