Molly Kimball
Registered dietitian and nutrition journalist. Director of Lifestyle Nutrition at Ochsner Health and founder of Ochsner Eat Fit, a nonprofit initiative working with over 500 Louisiana restaurants. Created the annual Alcohol-Free for 40 challenge in 2015 and hosts the Fueled podcast.
Applied nutrition • behaviour change • sports dietetics • community health programming • alcohol reduction challenges
About the expert
Focus: Runs a 40-day alcohol-free challenge built around before-and-after measurement — inflammatory and liver markers, blood pressure, body composition, and close-up photographs of participants faces. Argues that the subjective changes people notice, particularly to stress and sleep, matter more than the lab results.
Molly Kimball is a registered dietitian nutritionist and board certified sports dietitian who directs Lifestyle Nutrition at Ochsner Health, the Louisiana health system. She founded Ochsner Eat Fit, a nonprofit initiative that works with more than 500 restaurants across the state, and created the Alcohol-Free for 40 challenge in 2015 after running it on herself first. She has been the nutrition expert for New Orleans ABC affiliate WGNO since 2009. This episode is an in-house production: she works for Ochsner, the challenge is run by her Ochsner team, and the two in-person guests are Ochsner clinicians who refer listeners to Ochsner s rehabilitation programme at the close. This does not invalidate the science her independent guest supplies, and the two are worth judging separately. It is still worth knowing that the challenge, the hosts, most of the guests and the treatment programme all belong to one organisation.
Why this matters
The value here is that she has run the experiment on herself and reports a result she did not go looking for: in her first week without alcohol she stopped getting the escalating panic response she had been having before live television, something she had been attributing to a busy schedule. She is specific about it, including the parts that are unflattering. She is also unusually willing to report her own programme s failures — in earlier years some participants markers did not improve, and the reason turned out to be that they had swapped alcohol for ice cream and sweets, so she added sugar to the challenge. A person selling a challenge does not normally volunteer that it once did not work. Her weaknesses are the ones you would expect: the close-up face photographs are an uncontrolled before-and-after her own expert politely notes would need a comparison group, and the enthusiasm occasionally outruns the measurement. She is a dietitian, not a physician, and does not claim otherwise.