The Blog
Dive into insightful articles, discover nourishing recipes, and uncover lifestyle tips that will help you discover the old you.
The menopause gold rush, and the questions you need to ask
Every week, someone asks me what I think about HRT. I can’t give you a yes or a no on that, it genuinely isn’t my call, but I can tell you something that rarely gets discussed: the body a hormone lands in is never identical from one woman to the next.
This article walks through the biology sitting underneath hormone decisions, from oestrogen’s relationship with your immune system to the three pathways your body uses to clear it (including a personal confession about my own Gilbert’s syndrome). I’ve also brought in GP and women’s health specialist Dr Sara Moran to answer the questions that sit firmly on the medical side of the conversation.
If you’ve ever felt confused, dismissed, or like you’re being offered more medication as the only answer, this is the piece I’d like you to read before your next appointment.
Why your ‘5 A Day’ might be holding back your health
If you've been hitting your five a day and still wondering why you don't feel better, you're asking exactly the right question.
5 A Day was never designed to optimise your health. It was a global public health floor, set to address micronutrient deficiency and then the food industry got hold of it. Most UK adults aren’t even reaching it and the evidence now points to double that number as the level at which meaningful reductions in disease risk actually start to show up.
In this article, I break down where the guidance really came from, what a large-scale study of over two million people tells us about how much we actually need and why diversity of plant foods may matter just as much as quantity, particularly if you're navigating fatigue, persistent symptoms or an immune system that isn't behaving itself. Plus practical ways to close the gap without overhauling your entire life.
Why your immune system isn't broken… it's confused (and what confused it in the first place)
If you've been handed a diagnosis and sent on your way with a prescription and a leaflet, you are not alone and you deserve a better explanation than ‘your immune system is misfiring’.
Autoimmunity is not a random malfunction. It is a loss of immune tolerance, usually years in the making, driven by a specific set of conditions that conventional medicine rarely investigates. Understanding what those conditions are, and why your immune system ended up where it did, changes everything about what's possible from here.
In this article I walk you through what autoimmunity actually is, how and why the immune system loses its ability to distinguish self from threat, why the same diagnosis looks completely different from person to person and what we know about the factors that drive immune confusion in the first place. This is the context nobody gives you in a 10-minute appointment. It's the explanation I needed and didn't get and it's the foundation of everything that follows.
The most significant thing missing from your health might not be on any blood test
What if the next step in your health isn't another supplement or protocol, but a step outside into the trees?
What happens inside your body when you spend time in nature is extraordinary and most people have never heard of it. Within minutes of entering a woodland, your nervous system shifts, immune cells are activated, inflammatory markers reduce and your blood literally flows more freely. None of it requires effort. Your body already knows exactly what to do.
In this article I walk you through the real-time physiology of a walk in the woods, look at why our disconnection from the natural world may be one of the most significant and overlooked drivers of immune dysregulation and chronic illness and ask a question that is worth pondering: in our pursuit of optimal health, have we engineered out the very inputs that make it possible?
