I was diagnosed with Juvenile Inflammatory Arthritis (JIA) when I was 12 years old so I’ve had well over 20 years of learning to live with and manage this condition. I struggled through my teenage years and the early part of my university education trying endless NSAIDs with lots of courses of oral steroids thrown in as well. As a child my mum took me to see so many different people, desperate to try and find me help and relief. We tried physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, saw an osteopath, a homeopath and several different rheumatologists; some of these things made a little…

Exciting news in! My husband and I are going to be part of the BBC programme, ‘Trust me, I’m a Doctor’! This was early spring in 2017.

In that trial, all participants were allocated to one of three groups with consumption of different fats; butter, olive oil or coconut oil. Straws were drawn and I was allocated 50g of butter to be ingested every day for four weeks and my husband was given olive oil (50mls per day for 4 weeks). Although I had been told previously at every visit to the GP that I was pre-diabetic, it made no…

Highly successful Industry marketing has convinced many that coconut oil is a ‘health food’. This well conducted meta-analysis of 16 studies confirms this not to be true. Coconut oil consistently leads to an increase in blood LDL-cholesterol. It is unlikely, given current knowledge, that the corresponding rise in HDL-cholesterol will counteract the adverse effects of the raised LDL. Shockingly, the effects were worse than for palm oil.

This meta-analysis found that compared with nontropical oils, coconut oil significantly increased total cholesterol by 14.69 mg/dL, increased LDL-cholesterol by 10.47 mg/dL , and increased HDL-cholesterol by 4.00 mg/dL. Based on these changes…

As a Personal Trainer and Whole-Food Plant-Based Lifestyle Advocate, I am dedicated to helping my clients lead vibrant, resilient and active lives as they age through a combination of plant-based eating and exercise.

But it wasn’t always like that for me.

Growing up, my family ate meat with dinner every night. While my mom was healthy and lived to the age of 97, my dad died at the age of 79. He was morbidly obese, took insulin for type II diabetes and had numerous heart attacks and bypass surgeries. In his later years, he suffered from severe neuropathy to the…

‘Where do you get your calcium?’ is one of the questions I am nearly always asked when I tell people I’m vegan. Most people assume we have to eat meat and dairy to get sufficient calcium in our diets and if we don’t, we are more at risk of fractures and developing bone disease. I myself was concerned when I decided to make the transition from being vegetarian to vegan a few years after I had been diagnosed with osteoporosis. It was rather unnerving to stop eating dairy and went against everything my osteoporosis nurse advised me.

My journey to…