The idea started after a lecture from the NHS called The Prophesy of Doom. This showed how our healthcare system had been under funded for years and was, as a result, understaffed.

Real unadulterated food has got to be more nourishing than anything produced in a factory

Instead of funding and support from parliament, the NHS gets used in election promises and then forgotten once a parliament takes power. Instead of providing the necessary funds to provide free healthcare, governments seem to add red tape, issue fines, create tests, commission their own research without proper impartial checks to ensure there are no conflicts of interest, to then impose on our existing healthcare, medicine, researchers and scientists to issue to the public.

Going it solo – trying to create the idea for an icon and logo for Hearth

An example of this is the Eatwell Guide, created by Public Health England and updated in 2016. The overall aim is to combat widespread malnutrition by suggesting everyone, no matter what their background or nutritional history, eats a starchy carb based diet.

Here is the history of nutrition in the British Medical Journal, leading to how fortified and enriched processed foods and dietary supplements have been used to tackle deficiencies from the 1920s, during the great depression.

My first idea centred around people being able to share their own kitchen innovations

As I was born without a working thyroid and with hearing loss, from a young age I took notice of my parents’ interest in diet and the food available in the UK, where I live. I sensed a lack of attention or provision for nutrient rich food. Even expensive restaurants do not focus on real, single ingredient, nutrient rich food.

Like many people, in my 30s I started to put on weight. I set out on a voyage of discovery and self-experimentation, which has included sugar tolerance tests (Langton Smith Health, hair samples) and DNA wellbeing tests (LivingDNA).

The idea of adding your own visual food diary so we can see what nourishment we get

My interest in food intolerances and recognising in my later 40s that I had an intolerance to standard cow’s milk sold in the UK, particularly semi-skimmed and mass farmed. This resulted in weight gain, fatigue, bloating, mucus and inflammation and would have been a key culprit for childhood acne and a constantly runny nose. I stopped smoking in January 2018, but breathlessness when climbing hills and steps didn’t stop until I stopped the dairy.

Of course then the fat and sugar bubble burst. We were told how we had been lied to for years about our diet by official authorities. Still Public Health England do not update their Eatwell Guide, featured predominantly on the NHS website. In America, the equivalent is MyPlate that advises us strongly to base meals on starchy carbohydrates.

Here is quote that resonates with me about the importance of knowing about all the essential nutrition the human body needs to prevent avoidable congenital and non-communicable diseases.

Field trials provided a basis for WHO recommendations for widespread micronutrient supplementation, especially during pregnancy, with iron and vitamin A, and for fortification of salt with iodine to prevent goitre and developmental abnormalities such as congenital hypothyroidism and hearing loss.

BMJ “History of Modern Nutritional Science”

Salad is a great way to get nutrients from some foods

In my 20s, I had read and followed Fit For Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, and it worked well. Once I stopped commuting to work each day, I started to put on weight. I now believe the structure of the working day, breakfast before leaving, period of walking, no food until lunchbreak, then part of commute home on foot, dinner then nothing to eat before bed. Office life generally means no snacking, even if the work canteen and all the cafes  are predominantly starchy carb laden.

Unfortunately, losing control of one’s weight can be disorientating. Instead of going back to find the principles that worked (3 meals a day with no snacking in between) I then went down many side roads, following lines of enquiry wherever they led.

This is not without the usual cries of propaganda from family and friends, most of whom are in office jobs and not facing the same challenges as working from home without a journey on foot everyday.

All in all, this keeps leading me back the main path, which is that if we eat nourishing food and get all the essential vitamins and minerals in our diet, we will naturally eat the right foods in the right quantity to be healthy.

Along the way we have to wade through the various fad diets, the “eat less exercise more” and “little and often” tropes of one-size-fits-all. These ignore our genes and the congenital or future health impact of deficiencies.

Good nourishment

Now we live in a world where deficiencies do not need to happen. Sadly, due to supermarket greed, we have lost independent shops and many people buy their fresh produce in a larger supermarket shop. Big grocery shelves are full of processed, preserved and nutrient depleted, enriched and fortified artificial foods, which are for entertainment, not for nourishment.

The burden on the NHS from these complex, stripped and preservative and fertilizer addled foods is the cost of treating a rapid increase in non-communicable diseases such as Type 2 Diabetes, Obesity, heart disease and cancer.

Circle of conflicted interest

Despite the dominating power of official guidelines from politicians and their funded accomplices (Public Health England is a typically named, just such an organisation cuddling up the government and industry, including unhealthy commodity stakeholders such as alcohol, tobacco, ultra-processed food and medicines) there are many good nutritional scientists out there wanting to find and tell us the truth. People such as Tim Spector, whose team Zoe created the COVID-19 symptom tracker app at the start of lockdown, Dr Zoe Harcombe, Gary Taubes, Harvey Diamond, Dr Joel Kahn and many more. Proper trials and research, transparent and free of conflict of interest from industry funding have been carried out.

Unfortunately, organisations such as Dietary Association of South Africa have worked against people such as Professor Tim Noakes to tell us that starchy carbohydrates are NOT an important part of a healthy diet.