For roughly two million years, human biology was assembled under conditions that no longer exist. Agriculture arrived about ten thousand years ago. Industrial food, around a hundred and fifty. Our physiology has not caught up.

That gap is where I work.

My training is in biological anthropology, so I don't start by asking what has gone wrong. I start by asking what the body was built for — and where modern life pulls against it. For people whose health problems haven't resolved with the usual approaches, that turns out to be the more useful question.

The organ I keep coming back to

I'm particularly drawn to the brain. It is the organ that made us what we are — around two per cent of body weight, running on close to a fifth of our energy — and it is exquisitely sensitive to the conditions it operates under.

It is also, as McEwen put it, the central organ of stress: it perceives what counts as a threat, initiates the response, and is itself remodelled by that response when it never stands down. Much of my reading and research concerns how a modern environment meets an organ that took hundreds of thousands of years to build.

Two strands of work

Clinical practice The Allostatic Load Programme — nutrition and lifestyle medicine for people whose physiology has been carrying sustained stress for years. Usually people who have been running at a high level for a long time and can no longer stand down. Designed to sit alongside the care of your GP or specialist.
[Working with me]

Research I am an independent researcher in evolutionary medicine, with work deposited as a preprint and a PhD programme in development. It is exploratory work, kept separate from clinical practice.
[My research]

BSc (Hons) Biological Anthropology · MSc Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine · Institute for Functional Medicine