Mario and Courtney Lopez Lead the Next Chapter of ‘The Balancing Act®,’ Beginning With Its Landmark 25th Anniversary Season on Lifetime®

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 1, 2026--

BrandStar Entertainment announced that Mario Lopez and Courtney Lopez have joined “The Balancing Act ® ” as co-hosts and executive producers for the program’s landmark 25 th anniversary season, premiering this fall on Lifetime ®.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260901505763/en/

The announcement marks a significant milestone not only for one of daytime television’s most enduring lifestyle franchises, but for the broader branded entertainment industry, and more importantly, for the thousands of brands, businesses, and organizations that have used the show as a cost-effective, high-impact platform to tell their stories to a national audience.

As part of the anniversary season, the program is reviewing select brands, organizations, and subject-matter experts for upcoming educational features across health, wellness, home, family, finance, technology, work, and other areas that affect everyday life.

Potential participants are considered based on the relevance of their expertise, the educational value of their story, and their ability to provide practical information that helps viewers make better decisions.

For 25 years, The Balancing Act has pioneered a model that the rest of the marketing world is only now beginning to fully understand: that the most effective, most trusted, and most versatile content a brand can produce is not an ad…it’s a story. And in an era when streaming has become the dominant media habit of American households, that story has never been more valuable, or more accessible.

“The addition of Mario and Courtney Lopez to The Balancing Act is a strategic amplification of what the show already does, connect brands with real audiences through trusted, relatable voices,” said Mark Alfieri, Founder & CEO of BrandStar, a pioneer in the branded entertainment space. “For most organizations, access to a celebrity of this magnitude to support their messaging would be cost-prohibitive. The Balancing Act’s format makes it attainable.”

Mario Lopez is a two-time Emmy ® Award winner, a Hollywood Walk of Fame honoree, and the host of NBC’s Access Hollywood and Access Daily, meaning brands featured on The Balancing Act now exist in the same ecosystem as one of television’s most recognized daily platforms.

He concurrently hosts national iHeart radio programs “On With Mario & Courtney Lopez” and “iHeartRadio Countdown with Mario Lopez,” reaching millions of listeners weekly. His four-decade career spans television, Broadway, film, and publishing, giving him cross-generational appeal that very few personalities can claim.

Courtney Lopez brings a dimension that is essential to the show’s mission and its audience: the authentic voice of a working mother navigating real life. A classically trained Broadway actress who has starred in multiple national productions, Courtney co-hosts “On With Mario Lopez” and appears regularly as a guest correspondent and co-host on E! News and Access. Her credibility with the show’s core audience, women managing the daily demands of family, career, and personal well-being, is immediate and genuine.

“Between work, family, and everything in between, life moves fast, and we’re all figuring it out as we go,” said Mario Lopez. “What I love about The Balancing Act is that it’s about real solutions that people can actually use in their everyday lives.”

“As a mom, I know firsthand how much of a juggling act life can be,” added Courtney Lopez. “This show speaks to that, helping families feel more confident, supported, and inspired in the day-to-day.”

Why Branded Entertainment is now the Smartest Marketing Investment a Brand Can Make

Research across content marketing, video performance, and consumer behavior shows that branded educational content can increase engagement, build trust, and help enhance the performance of a broader marketing campaign.

The Balancing Act’s Value Proposition is Truly Unique…

As to participation in The Balancing Act, each potential feature is evaluated for audience relevance, educational value, subject-matter credibility, and alignment with the program’s mission.

Brands and organizations that believe they have a meaningful educational story capable of helping viewers make better decisions may request consideration for an upcoming feature by contacting info@thebalancingact.com. All potential stories are subject to research, programming approval, and editorial development. Submission or inquiry does not guarantee selection.

About BrandStar Entertainment

BrandStar Entertainment is a full-service branded entertainment production company and the creator of “The Balancing Act ®.” For 25 years, BrandStar has pioneered the integration of branded educational storytelling into premium television content, producing Emmy Award-winning segments that give brands broadcast-quality video assets for use across television, digital, social media, sales, and marketing platforms, subject to the terms of their participation agreement. BrandStar’s model delivers national and local television reach with the added value of multipurpose content. For more information, visit www.BrandStar.com.

Mario and Courtney Lopez - Photo Credit: The Balancing Act

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists stumbled onto a hint that measuring a toxic protein tied to Alzheimer’s disease just might one day be useful in diagnosing a different brain disease in football players and others who have suffered repeated blows to the head.

Doctors evaluate symptoms such as mood swings and memory loss to try to tell if patients may have CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease linked to concussions and other brain trauma. But other diseases cause similar symptoms, and a CTE diagnosis can only be confirmed by examining the brain after death.

The new clue involves a protein called tau that normally supports neurons but becomes abnormal in Alzheimer’s, tangling inside those nerve cells. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis were using autopsy samples to study a tau fragment called eMTBR-tau243 that may help track those tangles when they found something unusual: a patient with high levels of that biomarker even though records showed the person didn’t have Alzheimer’s but advanced CTE instead.

The researchers turned to a larger collection of autopsied brain and other samples, and eventually tested blood stored from 11 people who had been classified as having CTE.

Compared to healthy people, levels of eMTBR-tau243 were higher in those with advanced CTE, said study coauthor Chihiro Sato, a WashU assistant neurology professor. That biomarker couldn’t reliably identify early-stage CTE.

It is an interesting but very preliminary finding, requiring far larger studies to see if there is a real connection, cautioned Dr. Rudolph Castellani, a neuropathologist at Northwestern University who wasn’t involved with the research.

Abnormal tau is found in several brain diseases, many of which can overlap in older adults, adding to the difficulty in teasing apart its role in any one disease, including CTE. Sato, who studies such tauopathies, also stressed much more research is needed.

The findings were published late Friday by the medical journal JAMA and presented at a scientific meeting in Japan.

—-

The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org

FILE - A human brain affected by Alzheimer's disease is displayed at the Museum of Neuroanatomy at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, N.Y., on Oct. 7, 2003. (AP Photo/David Duprey, File)