Personalised medicine, real food and herbal sleep

The title of this week’s heartbeat newsletter provides three ingredients in a classic recipe for a health revolution, one that’s gathering a head of steam across the world. We open with some insights from this year’s Thought Leaders Consortium at Dr Jeff Bland’s Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute in Seattle, from where I have just returned. What a meeting it was – and it’s fair to say, the personalized medicine revolution that puts nutrition and lifestyle centre stage is now really gathering momentum!

Moving across the land mass of the US and continuing across the Atlantic to the UK, you’ll find our piece on the latest real food ‘issue’ in the peer-reviewed journal of the British Holistic Medical Association. The contents of this issue are both fascinating and incredibly relevant to today’s dual and interrelated challenges around human health and the natural environment. The series of articles, including my critique of the EAT-Lancet report, are all authored by leaders in their respective fields. They are about the importance of real food and what needs to be done to create a transition from unsustainable nutrition and farming practices to ones that work in concert with natural processes.    

We follow up with the third in our 3-part series on sleep, this time looking at herbal solutions that have been tried and tested, often over hundreds of years. Perversely, that still doesn’t make them sufficiently worthy of entering the curriculum of the vast majority of medical schools around the world.

Finally, in our international news round-up, you’ll read about Pharma’s lack of interest in antibiotic resistance for which it was responsible, more blind adoption of EAT-Lancet’s ‘planetary health’ diet, Singapore’s sugary drink tax, pushback against GM in Europe, nature prescription, Brazilian bee deaths, and more.

In health, naturally and sustainably,