The challenges that we have all faced on so many fronts in the last two years are testimony to the fact that the better the condition we are in, the better we are able to cope with what life throws at us. This includes both spiritual and physical health.

Happy New Year and best wishes for your health in 2022! At the beginning of the year, people are most likely to consider making dietary adjustments, if only to get over the excesses of Christmas. But what is the right diet for you? What should you really be eating? The amount of dietary advice out there is conflicting, confusing and sometimes downright harmful to health. Labels can be meaningless. For example, a vegetarian diet to some people may mean pizza and doughnuts; to others, plant-based foods, beans and lentils.

Your best defence against infections is something that is frequently forgotten - your immune system. That is why it is worth looking after. People tend to know more about their cars and houses than their immune system and certainly put more effort into looking after the former than the latter.

Quite a few people coming to see me tell me they are taking iron supplements for fatigue. Have you been diagnosed with iron-deficiency anaemia or done any iron level tests? I ask. No, they reply, I just thought it would help me feel better. Taking iron supplements is a risky strategy because iron metabolism is more complex than you may think. You may do some serious damage if you don’t need them.

An important tenet of Functional Medicine is that if you don’t address the root causes of a disease, it will keep coming back, no matter what treatments are given. Using medical drugs to suppress chronic symptoms is like putting sticky plaster over the warning light in a car. It postpones the day when the machine stops but does nothing to address the root cause.

With the exception of butter, no food has been demonised as much as red meat in recent years, particularly beef. However, according to food activists, beef causes cancer, osteoporosis, mad cow disease, heart disease, impotence and much more. I see people who proudly tell me they have given up eating red meat, however they aren’t feeling that well and their lab results often tell me they are anaemic and running on low hormones. So, what’s the beef about beef?

Patients often ask me about things they find in the internet. Part of my practitioner hat is to help people educate and empower themselves to take control of their own health, so I always take this seriously. Sometimes people alight on something useful and sensible. But there can be a real downside to surfing the net that can seriously impair a person’s progress in navigating their way towards better health.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia and is the leading cause of death in England and Wales. Already, 850,000 people are estimated to be living with dementia in the UK. Over half the UK public know someone who has been diagnosed with some form of dementia. Statistically, a woman in the Western world has a greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease than breast cancer. The number of people with dementia in the UK is expected to rise rapidly in the UK over the next several decades, so things are not looking so good. Is there anything that we can do about it?

Everything in your body affects your immune system and the foods you put into it are no exception. Here are a few ways foods drive immune reactions…

We get so focused on the underlying biology of healing that we often forget the most important part of the healing process - the person themselves and their mindset. The mind is either in the right place to facilitate healing - or it isn’t. And when it isn’t, this acts as a major brake on recovery.

As many of you know, specific immune support supplements are key tools for improving chronic infection and inflammation conditions. The immune-specific supplements I recommend are made by Pure Encapsulations and specially formulated by Dr. Sam Yanuck, Assistant Professor of Functional Immunology and Integrative Medicine at the University of North Carolina.

It is natural to want to help family and friends when they are struggling with their health and current health interventions don’t seem to be working. However, it is equally frustrating when your well-meaning (and often well-researched) advice seems to fall on deaf ears and the person in question settles into a slow steady decline. Here are a few observations gleaned over the years in clinical practice on how to talk to friends and family about their health.

Autism is on the rise. Approximately 6% of British schoolchildren are on the autistic spectrum. One in 20 children in Northern Ireland has a diagnosis of autism, in New Jersey in the US, this is one in 14 children. At the same time, mortality rates from neurological diseases has now overtaken mortality from other diseases. Without going into the triggers for autism, there are a few tools below for families coping with autism.

Unlike your other organs, your immune system is everywhere in your body and is designed to protect you from illness. If your immune system is strong and flexible and your nutrient status is good, it puts you in a strong position to combat passing infections.

What you eat and drink is the single most important factor influencing your physical (and sometimes mental) health. The standard western diet, which is choc full of inflammatory wheat, dairy, refined sugars and chemicals, is also the single most important thing that can wreck your health.

Fatty liver disease is probably the fastest rising medical condition in the western world. I am certainly seeing lot more of it. Its origins are linked to western processed diets, the increased number of environmental toxins and ubiquitous wi-fi.

For a long time, we have been conditioned to relinquish responsibility for our health to others. We have become accustomed as a society to expecting “a pill for every ill.” This is the road to health disaster because, like it or not, we are all responsible for the condition we find ourselves in. 

It is important to understand why I ask you to be gluten-free as minute exposures to gluten can make your case fail.  Gluten is a general name for a group of proteins found in grains (wheat, rye, spelt and barley). It acts like a glue that holds food together. 

here is a pandemic within a pandemic which has been with us for some years. It is a pandemic of chronic disease occasioned by chemical-rich processed foods, increased toxins and poor lifestyle choices. These factors make people much more vulnerable to any other pandemic. And right at the top of the class in any pandemic is the immune system.

A lot of people’s brains are inflamed to one degree or another. One of the manifestations of this is ‘brain fog,’ the number one symptom in Functional Medicine! There is, however, a particularly severe condition where the brain becomes inflamed and under attack from its own immune system. This is known as PANS/PANDAS which stands for Paediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome. The ‘paediatric’ part is a bit of a misnomer as this condition can happen at any age!