My story

When I became pregnant with twins at the age of 33, I was advised by a midwife that if I wanted healthy, normal-weight babies I needed to gain five stone. Being a diligent and obedient sort of person, I did it, and my babies weighed 8Lb 3oz and 7Lb 2oz when they were born at 39+3 weeks gestation, but their size came at a price. To go from nine to fourteen stone in under nine months I ate not only a huge number of calories, but also a huge amount of fat.

Following a mostly vegetarian and occasionally pescatarian diet at the time meant that a lot of those extra calories came from eggs, dairy products, and sometimes prawns, all of which I now understand are loaded with cholesterol.

What I didn’t understand at the time was how scientists can clog up the arteries of laboratory animals like monkeys and rabbits in a relatively short period of time by adding known amounts of cholesterol to their ordinary food. I didn’t know that scientists have known this for a long time, or that the same thing can happen in humans.

After my daughters were born, I began to suffer with an abnormal heart rhythm and left-sided chest pain that travelled down my left arm and up the left side of my neck to my jaw.

My daughters are 14 now and I still occasionally get this pain, because my food journey over the last 14 years has been far from straightforward, but interestingly, it only happens when I eat fat. When I don’t eat fat, I don’t get it AT ALL.

My quest to understand this phenomenon led to me writing my book, Diseases Have Causes: One Doctor’s Journey with an Apple and a Pen, and then to founding U-Turn Health®, because I believe passionately that what I learnt from this experience is something that EVERYONE needs to know.

I became vegan when my daughters were 18 months old and began to experiment with raw food when they were about four. I encountered doctors who advocated a low fat cooked diet for heart health and raw food enthusiasts who advocated gourmet raw diets that were high in anti-inflammatory plant nutrients but also very high in fat. Neither of those worked for me. The low fat cooked food was bland, boring and hard work to make, while the gourmet raw food full of nuts, seeds and avocados still gave me pain.

This was interesting. Clearly it isn’t only animal derived cholesterol that damages your arteries and causes the kind of heart pain we know as ‘angina’. Plant fats can do it too. Avocados for example contain something called sitosterol, which has a molecular structure similar to cholesterol, but isn’t generally measured in hospital laboratories because there aren’t very many people in the world who eat too many avocados.

Anyway, I put two and two together and started to search for low fat high raw options on the internet. This led me to the fruitarian crowd. Some fruitarians do eat only fruit but most actually include vegetables and some nuts and seeds too.

Over the last decade I have developed my own version of low fat high raw that blends the best of these different approaches, to create a way of eating that is interesting, delicious, as hard or easy to make as you like, and as cheap or expensive as you make it. Most importantly, because it contains less than 10% of calories from total fat, which is quite a lot less than the 35% that people in western society consume on average, it causes the fat in your arteries to be cleared away by these little guys called macrophages.

Macrophages are white blood cells who are always hard at work in your body, trying to clear away any fat that has mistakenly made its way into your artery walls, but macrophages belonging to people eating the high fat standard western diet are usually totally overwhelmed by the amount of fat they have to deal with. So, I’m here to say be kind to your macrophages, because they’re always working really hard behind the scenes to heal you.

I set up U-Turn Health® because I want your food journey to be much more straightforward than mine was. I want you to get all the support I never got, and all the information I never had, right up front, when and where you need it.

Try the low fat high raw plant-based diet to improve your cardiovascular health and to increase the blood flow to all of your organs, because better blood flow to your brain results in a clear mind with less brain fog and less depression, better blood flow to your muscles results in better athletic performance, and better blood flow to your heart results in less angina pain and less risk of having a heart attack. Whatever your age, gender, sexuality or ethnicity, it’s never too early or late to start taking care of your arteries.