immune system

Tending your microbiome Part 2

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FOOD TO KEEP YOUR MICROBES HEALTHY The food that YOU eat is also the food that your gut microbes use to flourish or not.   Fermentation – the key to a healthy microbiome Fruits and vegetables and grains contain non-digestible carbohydrates (fibres) called pre-biotics. A pre-biotic is a microbe’s favourite food! Different gut microbes feed … Read more

Tending your microbiome Part 1

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HARNESSING THE POWER OF 100 TRILLION FRIENDLY BUGS This is the story of how you came to be home to an astonishing number and range of microbes. It’s one of the two hottest topics in health science now – the Human Microbiome and Epigenetics. The Human Microbiome is the sum of all the genes from … Read more

Vitamin D Depletion

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Vitamin D isn’t really a vitamin. Whatever the original source – sunlight, food or supplements – vitamin D is turned by your liver into a hormone called calcitriol – or ‘activated vitamin D’. Without supplementation you get most of your vitamin D from sunlight, because surprisingly small amounts are found in a relatively few foods – … Read more

The looming antibiotic crisis

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Dr Paul Clayton’s Health Newsletter May 2014 The WHO recently warned that “a post-antibiotic era in which common infections and minor injuries can kill … is a very real possibility for the 21st century.” The word is in common use, but what exactly is an “antibiotic” and why might they be in “crisis”? An antibiotic … Read more

How beta glucans prime the immune system

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Learning lessons from the Victorians – their immune systems were better at fighting infections In a recent series of articles published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr Paul Clayton revealed fascinating facts about the health and life expectancy of the mid-Victorians. They lived just as long as we do today, and … Read more