A friend of mine recently had a particularly nasty gastro bug that landed her in hospital. She sent me a link she’d found after googling her ongoing post-hospital symptoms. The online article was written by a blogger who had experienced a very similar illness to my friend’s and whole-heartedly prescribed a recovery path for others, which involved a restricted diet plan and special probiotics. I totally understand why my friend had turned to Dr Google. She’d been pronounced “better” and booted out of hospital after consulting with a specialist doctor for a grand total of eight minutes. Two weeks later,... Read full article »

This year I set myself an ambitious goal to be eating a completely whole-food diet by the end of the year. At a time when experts are increasingly concerned about the impact of junk food on our health, I wanted to see if was even possible to learn to cook everything from scratch while leading a busy life as a working mother of two young children.With the customary zeal that accompanies every well-intentioned “New Year New Me” resolution, I signed up for an intensive cooking course, gave my pantry a makeover, planted seeds for a fledgling herb garden and invented... Read full article »

Normally people discover they're iron deficient during a visit to their GP that was prompted by feeling unusually fatigued. I learned abut my anaemia in slightly more unusual way. During the production of my new film about mindfulness I had a team of scientists tracking my biological markers as I meditated every day for a year. This included various brain scans, blood tests and saliva analysis. When it came time to reveal my saliva results, we hit an unexpected anomaly; “If your cortisol levels were any lower, you’d probably be dead,” the scientist who was analysing the data told me.While... Read full article »