Over the years I’ve developed a real passion for gut health and how it affects the rest of our body and for children’s health. Given the rapidly changing diets and lifestyles of the families I work with, gut health has become a major issue and this in turn is affecting our health in a variety of different ways and that of our kids.

Processed foods have become more prevalent in the diet, what used to be considered “treats” are now every day foods. With lives being so busy it becomes very easy to go through the “drive through” or to stop and grab something quick for the kids knowing they’re going to eat it.

The problem with this approach is we are experiencing quite significant health issues as adults at an earlier age than we once were but even more alarming is our children are developing health issues such as obesity, metabolic syndrome and fatty liver in their teens or even pre teens. These are diseases we would normally expect to see in people that are middle aged and older so to see it in kids is quite a concern.

There’s also something emerging called “malnubesity” which is becoming very common in Western society. In simple terms this is where too much energy is being consumed and that energy is coming from ultra processed, high calorie foods that contain little to no nutrients.

This means people are overweight or obese, however, because all of their calories are coming from processed and packaged foods, that contain little to no nutritional benefits, their bodies are starved of nutrition.

Looking at all of these issues and working with a variety of people over the years I came to the decision to focus on a couple of main areas:

• Gut Health (and the multiple effects this has on the rest of the body)
• Children’s health / working with fussy eaters

The best way I felt I could do this was to delve further into a couple of protocols that I have personally found beneficial as well as developing a program to help families navigate the difficult task of working with their little fussy eaters.

When talking about gut health I tend to focus on The GAPS Diet (something we did as a family with great success a few years ago for my son who has Autism) and also The Wahls protocol.

One thing to note is I do work closely with my patients to develop in-between options for those that may struggle with what can be the difficult nature of these protocols or who aren’t quite ready to do them in their entirety.