There are some ideas that arrive before we are quite ready for them (reversing Type 2 diabetes is a good example that was pushed back on for a long time).

The Planetary Health Diet may be one of them.

When the first EAT-Lancet Commission published its report in 2019, proposing a way of eating designed to support both human health and the health of the planet, it generated considerable interest. It also generated criticism. Some questioned whether a global dietary framework could ever adequately reflect different cultures, food systems and nutritional needs. Others pointed out that a diet containing generous amounts of fruit, vegetables, nuts and legumes is not necessarily affordable or accessible to everyone.

Then came a pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, wars affecting global food and energy markets and a period in which most of us had rather more immediate things to think about than planetary boundaries.

But I wonder whether the idea may be about to have its moment.

Not because we have suddenly developed a collective enthusiasm for eating lentils to save the planet, but because the relationship between climate, food and health is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

At the moment, one particular climate phenomenon is attracting attention again.

El Niño is strengthening. In its 13 August 2026 assessment, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there was a greater than 90 per cent chance of a very strong El Niño developing during the Northern Hemisphere autumn and winter of 2026–27. It is important not to turn that forecast into a prediction of specific crop failures or supermarket prices. El Niño affects different regions in different ways, and individual weather events cannot simply be attributed to it. But large El Niño events can alter rainfall and temperature patterns across major agricultural regions, which is one reason food-system resilience matters. (Climate Prediction Center)

Perhaps that is why a diet designed around both human and planetary health suddenly feels rather less abstract.

So what actually is the Planetary Health Diet?

Despite the grand name, it is not particularly exotic.

It is essentially a flexible, predominantly plant-based dietary pattern built around vegetables, fruit, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, with smaller amounts of animal foods.

It does not require veganism.

Nor does it prescribe a single menu that everyone in the world is expected to follow.

The original EAT-Lancet framework was intended as a reference pattern that could be adapted according to culture, geography and individual circumstances. The updated 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission goes further, describing the goal as a healthy, sustainable and just food system. That addition matters. The Commission explicitly acknowledges that we cannot talk sensibly about sustainable diets without also talking about whether people can access and afford nutritious food and whether those producing it are treated fairly. (EAT)

And when you remove the terminology, much of the dietary advice sounds remarkably familiar.

Eat more vegetables.

Choose whole grains more often.

Make beans, lentils and other pulses a regular part of meals.

Eat nuts and seeds.

Eat fewer heavily processed foods and fewer foods high in added sugars.

Use animal foods more selectively rather than assuming meat needs to dominate every meal.

This is hardly a revolutionary nutritional manifesto.

In fact, it bears a strong resemblance to another dietary pattern we have been discussing for decades.

It looks remarkably like a Mediterranean diet

This is probably the easiest way to understand it.

A Mediterranean-style diet is not vegetarian. Traditionally it contains fish, dairy, eggs and some meat. But plants occupy much more of the plate than they do in the modern Western diet.

Vegetables, beans, lentils, whole grains, fruit, nuts, seeds, herbs and olive oil do much of the heavy lifting.

The Planetary Health Diet takes a similar plant-forward principle and asks an additional question.

Not only, is this pattern of eating good for us?

But also, could billions of us eat this way without placing impossible demands on the natural systems that produce our food?

That is a rather different question.

The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission concluded that it is possible to provide healthy diets for a global population approaching 10 billion while remaining within planetary boundaries, but only with substantial changes in what we eat, how food is produced and how much food is wasted. (EAT)

This is where the idea moves beyond personal nutrition.

A healthy diet is usually presented as something we do for ourselves. Better blood glucose. Better cholesterol. Better gut health. Better weight management.

The planetary-health argument asks us to widen the lens.

What happens when the foods supporting our health are also the foods requiring less land, water or other resources to produce?

And what happens when those two aims conflict?

Those are harder questions, but they are becoming increasingly relevant.

What does the evidence say about our health?

This is an area where I think we need to be careful.

It would be very easy to say that the Planetary Health Diet has been “proven” to prevent chronic disease. That would go beyond the evidence.

Most of the human evidence is observational. Researchers look at how closely people already eat according to a planetary-health pattern and compare this with subsequent health outcomes. Such studies can identify associations, but they cannot establish cause and effect in the way a long-term randomised controlled trial could.

Even so, the accumulating evidence is interesting.

A 2025 analysis involving roughly 200,000 UK Biobank participants aged 39 to 72 found that greater adherence to a Planetary Health Diet score was associated with lower all-cause mortality. Each one-point increase in the 14-point score was associated with around a 3 per cent lower risk of death during follow-up, although associations with individual diseases were more variable. (ScienceDirect)

Other UK Biobank analyses have reported associations between higher adherence and lower cardiovascular risk. One study of more than 114,000 participants found that those with the highest adherence had lower risks of total cardiovascular disease, ischaemic heart disease, atrial fibrillation and heart failure compared with those with the lowest adherence. Another analysis reported a 14 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular disease when comparing the highest and lowest adherence groups. These are observational findings, and the fact that different studies produce somewhat different estimates is itself a reason not to oversell the precision of the effect. (ScienceDirect)

A broader 2025 analysis and meta-analysis, drawing on 37 cohort studies involving more than three million participants, also reported that greater adherence was associated with lower mortality and lower risks of several major chronic diseases. Again, association is not proof of causation, but the direction of the evidence is broadly consistent with what we already know about dietary patterns rich in minimally processed plant foods. (PubMed Central (PMC))

None of this should be particularly surprising.

A diet containing more vegetables, fruit, pulses, whole grains, nuts and seeds will generally provide more fibre, phytochemicals, unsaturated fats and a wide range of micronutrients. If those foods replace substantial quantities of processed meat, refined carbohydrates and highly processed discretionary foods, we would reasonably expect metabolic consequences.

The interesting part is not necessarily that the Planetary Health Diet has discovered a completely new way of eating.

It is that human health and environmental sustainability appear, in many respects, to point us in the same dietary direction.

And what about women in midlife?

This is where I would add some qualification.

I wouldn’t hand a woman in her fifties a diagram of the Planetary Health Diet and tell her simply to follow it.

Midlife nutrition deserves more individual thought than that.

Protein requirements become increasingly important as we age, particularly when we are trying to preserve muscle mass alongside regular resistance exercise. Iron requirements change after menopause, but calcium, vitamin D, vitamin B12, iodine, zinc and omega-3 intake still deserve attention. A predominantly plant-based diet can meet nutritional needs, but ‘plant-based’ does not automatically mean nutritionally adequate.

For women, the strongest argument for this way of eating is therefore not strict compliance with a global reference diet.

It is the overall direction of travel.

More beans and lentils.

More vegetables.

More whole grains.

More nuts and seeds.

A wider variety of plant foods.

Adequate protein distributed sensibly across the day.

Animal foods used thoughtfully where they contribute useful nutrients and fit the individual’s preferences.

That is a very different proposition from simply removing meat and hoping for the best.

It also fits surprisingly well with the nutritional priorities that become increasingly important through midlife: cardiovascular health, glucose regulation, gut health, bone health and maintaining muscle and physical function.

There is some emerging female-specific evidence, although it remains much less extensive than I would like. For example, a prospective study among Black women in the United States reported lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality among those with greater adherence to a planetary-health dietary pattern. Another recent study in women with a previous history of gestational diabetes found greater adherence was associated with some more favourable cardiometabolic and weight outcomes. These studies are useful additions, but neither should be taken as evidence that the diet has a unique or specifically menopausal effect. (PubMed)

That distinction matters.

The benefits are much more plausibly explained by the quality of the dietary pattern than by the label attached to it.

There is also an uncomfortable question about affordability

Whenever sustainable eating is discussed, there is a danger of turning it into another lifestyle aspiration available mainly to people with enough money, time and access to make it possible.

That would rather defeat the point.

The affordability problem is real.

World Bank data published in 2026 estimate that around 2.7 billion people were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2025. Research comparing dietary standards has also found that the EAT-Lancet reference pattern can cost more than some other healthy-diet benchmarks, depending on the country and the foods available locally. (World Bank)

So it is not enough to tell people to buy berries, walnuts, avocado and artisan sourdough and declare the problem solved.

Fortunately, that is not what sustainable eating has to look like.

Some of the foods sitting almost perfectly at the intersection of nutrition, affordability and sustainability are decidedly ordinary.

Oats.

Potatoes.

Carrots.

Cabbage.

Frozen peas.

Tinned tomatoes.

Beans.

Lentils.

Chickpeas.

Wholegrain bread.

Seasonal fruit.

Peanut butter.

These are not Instagram foods.

They are simply foods.

And perhaps one reason the Planetary Health Diet has struggled to capture public imagination is that its most useful message has been buried beneath a rather forbidding name.

What might this actually look like at home?

Probably not very different from food many of us already eat.

Porridge with fruit, seeds and nuts.

A thick lentil and vegetable soup with wholegrain bread.

A baked potato with beans, vegetables and a spoonful of yoghurt.

Wholewheat pasta with tomatoes, aubergine, lentils and herbs.

A vegetable curry made with chickpeas and served with brown rice.

A tray of roasted vegetables with hummus, grains and seeds.

A piece of chicken surrounded by far more vegetables than chicken.

A Sunday dinner in which meat is still present, but no longer occupies half the plate.

And this, I think, is where the idea becomes more interesting.

It does not require us to adopt an entirely new cuisine.

It asks us to change the proportions.

The plants become the meal rather than the garnish.

Animal foods become one component rather than the automatic centre.

And perhaps, occasionally, we discover that we do not miss them at all.

Food resilience may become part of the health conversation

For most of my working life in nutrition, I have spoken about food almost entirely in terms of personal health.

What should I eat?

What will improve my cholesterol?

How can I lose weight?

Which foods will improve my gut microbiome?

Those questions still matter.

But climate instability forces another question into the room.

How resilient is the system producing the food we rely upon?

El Niño does not provide a simple answer. Its effects differ enormously by region, and there is no credible way to look at a weather forecast and predict precisely what will happen to the price of an individual food six months from now.

But a very strong global climate event is a reminder that food does not begin on a supermarket shelf.

It begins with soil, rainfall, temperature, pollinators, farmers, transport, energy, labour and functioning ecosystems.

Nutrition sits at the end of an extraordinarily complicated chain.

Perhaps sustainable eating has sometimes been presented as though individual consumers carry responsibility for fixing that entire chain by choosing the correct carton of oat milk.

They do not.

Governments, agriculture, manufacturers, retailers and international food systems matter enormously more than any single shopping basket.

But our food culture matters too.

A population accustomed to eating a broader variety of grains, legumes, vegetables, nuts and seeds may ultimately be more adaptable than one heavily dependent upon a narrow range of resource-intensive foods.

That is not an argument for dietary purity.

It is an argument for diversity.

Perhaps this is the real reason it may gain traction

I am not convinced that many people will ever wake up thinking, Today I am going to follow the Planetary Health Diet.

The name alone probably guarantees that.

But I can imagine its central idea becoming much more influential.

Not as another diet.

Not as another set of food rules.

And certainly not as another opportunity to divide foods into morally good and bad categories.

Instead, it offers a useful way of thinking about what we eat.

Can we build meals around plants more often?

Can we eat more beans, whole grains, vegetables, nuts and seeds without turning eating into a project?

Can we buy more seasonal food?

Can we waste less?

Can we eat animal foods in amounts that support our nutritional needs without assuming that more is always better?

Can a way of eating support our health while placing a little less pressure on the systems that support all of us?

Those feel like increasingly sensible questions.

The Planetary Health Diet is not perfect. It cannot account for every culture, every income, every health condition or every individual nutritional requirement. No global dietary model can.

And sustainable food systems will not be created by individual dietary behaviour alone.

But perhaps the most valuable idea at its centre is actually a very simple one.

Our health does not exist separately from the health of the world around us.

The quality of our food depends upon the quality of the systems that produce it. Human health, soil health, biodiversity, climate, economics and food security are not separate conversations, however convenient it has been to treat them that way.

That is a much larger conversation than any diet.

It may also be one whose time has come.

What are your thoughts?

Kim

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This week brought two genuinely important developments around midlife brain health, both involving menopause and dementia risk, although neither gives us licence to tell women that HRT prevents Alzheimer’s disease. There was also a significant UK development for women experiencing severe hot flushes during breast cancer treatment, while several commercial launches showed just how rapidly the midlife health market is expanding into creatine, sexual health and menopause-labelled everyday products.

The recurring theme is becoming clearer. Research is increasingly recognising midlife as an important window for long-term health. Industry has noticed too. The challenge is separating the two.

The strongest research this week

Earlier menopause was associated with less favourable brain ageing decades later

A JAMA Network Open cohort study published on 25 August examined age at menopause in relation to cognition, Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis and brain structure in older women. Women who experienced menopause at younger ages showed less favourable neurological outcomes later in life, including faster episodic-memory decline and structural brain differences. The associations persisted, and in some analyses became more pronounced, decades after menopause. (JAMA Network)

The researchers argue that age at menopause might eventually help identify women who could benefit from earlier attention to modifiable brain-health risks. That does not mean early menopause causes Alzheimer’s disease. This was observational research, and factors associated with earlier menopause, including health conditions, smoking, socioeconomic circumstances or underlying biology, could also contribute to later neurological health. (JAMA Network)

The study is more useful as a risk-marker story than a hormone story. Menopause timing is information a woman and her clinician already possess. If earlier menopause is consistently confirmed as a marker of later neurological vulnerability, it could become one more reason to pay serious attention in midlife to blood pressure, physical activity, smoking, diabetes, sleep and other established dementia-risk factors.

Editorial note: important observational evidence, not proof that menopause timing directly causes cognitive decline.

Read the JAMA Network Open study

HRT and dementia: a large new UK study is encouraging, but the headlines need restraint

A second major brain-health study, published on 26 August in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, analysed 183,450 postmenopausal women in UK Biobank over more than 2.4 million person-years of follow-up. Researchers identified 3,948 dementia cases. Previous HRT use was associated with a 10% lower risk of all-cause dementia, with stronger associations in certain groups. (University of East Anglia)

The strongest associations appeared among women who had undergone surgical menopause, women carrying an APOE ε4 variant and women with shorter lifetime endogenous oestrogen exposure. Starting HRT between approximately 46 and 56 was also associated with the most favourable outcomes. (University of East Anglia)

Some media coverage has inevitably converted these results into variations of “HRT cuts dementia risk”. That is stronger than the study can demonstrate.

UK Biobank participants were not randomly assigned to HRT. Women who use HRT can differ from women who do not in healthcare access, education, income, health awareness and other characteristics. Statistical adjustment reduces some of that distortion but cannot eliminate it. Independent experts responding to the study have explicitly cautioned that an association cannot establish causation. (Science Media Centre)

It is therefore premature to use HRT specifically as a dementia-prevention intervention. What the study does add is further support for investigating whether the timing, formulation and individual context of hormone therapy matter for longer-term brain health. (University of East Anglia)

There is an interesting connection with last week’s research linking oestrogen-only HRT with lower Alzheimer’s pathology. Two large observational studies appearing close together create a stronger research signal, but two observational studies still do not become a randomised trial.

Editorial note: large, well-conducted observational evidence. Interesting and potentially important, but not proof that HRT prevents dementia.

University of Exeter summary of the HRT study

Independent expert reaction from the Science Media Centre

The perimenopause confusion problem resurfaces

A survey released on 26 August by the new online community ThisIsMenopause questioned 1,000 US women aged 35 to 59 who identified themselves as being in perimenopause. Eighty-two per cent said they had originally attributed their symptoms to something else, most commonly stress, anxiety or burnout. Only 14% said they immediately recognised perimenopause as a possible explanation. (Yahoo Finance)

Among the 815 respondents who had discussed symptoms with a healthcare professional, 76% said they themselves had raised perimenopause first. Forty-two per cent said a symptom tracker or discussion guide would have made the appointment more productive. (AOL.com)

There is a potentially useful behaviour-change point buried within the publicity.

Women often arrive at healthcare appointments with a collection of symptoms rather than a neat diagnosis. Giving someone a way to notice patterns, record what is happening and prepare questions may improve their ability to participate in shared decision-making.

But the headline percentages should not be treated as prevalence estimates. The survey recruited women already identifying as perimenopausal, was conducted through an online Qualtrics panel and was commissioned to accompany the launch and promotion of ThisIsMenopause. It tells us something about the experiences of those respondents, not what 82% of all midlife women experience. (AOL.com)

There is another important caution. We should not replace years of under-recognising perimenopause with the opposite mistake of attributing anxiety, exhaustion, poor sleep or cognitive symptoms automatically to hormones. Thyroid disease, anaemia, sleep disorders, depression, medication effects and life circumstances still exist in women over 40.

Editorial note: useful consumer insight with clear sampling and promotional limitations.

View the survey methodology and findings

Product watch: creatine arrives as a specifically midlife women’s product

A UK company called Creatonics attracted industry and regional media attention on 26 August with a day-and-night creatine supplement system specifically marketed to women over 40. Olympic gold medallist Amy Williams is a founding ambassador. (Frome Times)

The system provides 5 g creatine monohydrate in a daytime formulation and another 5 g at night, alongside ingredients including vitamin D, vitamin K, B vitamins, magnesium, zinc, lemon balm and shatavari. The company positions the 10 g daily creatine dose around muscle, cognition, energy, sleep and healthy ageing. (Creatonics)

There is an important distinction here.

Creatine itself has a substantial research literature. The evidence for this particular day-and-night formulation is another matter.

This is worth watching because creatine is rapidly moving from sports nutrition into the female healthy-ageing market. That shift may have a legitimate scientific foundation, particularly around muscle and strength. It also creates an opportunity to sell a cheap, well-studied ingredient in increasingly specialised and expensive formulations.

The key consumer question becomes:

Which part of the benefit belongs to creatine, and which part has actually been demonstrated for the branded formulation?

Evidence status: credible underlying nutrient, but product-specific healthy-ageing claims require separate evidence.

See the Creatonics formulation and claims

Marketing watch: when ordinary products become “menopause-friendly”

Reckitt joined the GenM menopause collective this week, with 21 products from brands including Gaviscon, Optrex, Nurofen, Durex and KY receiving GenM’s MTick menopause-friendly certification. The scheme is intended to help consumers identify existing products that may address recognised menopause-related needs such as digestive discomfort, eye symptoms, pain or intimate health. (Retail Times)

There is something potentially positive here. Menopause does not occur only in the HRT aisle, and women may genuinely need support for a broad range of symptoms.

But there is also a useful critical question.

A product does not become physiologically specific to menopause merely because a symptom it treats can occur during menopause.

Ibuprofen does not become a menopause medicine because some menopausal women have headaches or joint pain. A lubricant may be useful for vaginal dryness without being uniquely formulated for menopausal physiology.

Certification schemes can improve navigation, but they can also expand the commercial category called “menopause” until a remarkable proportion of the pharmacy shelf qualifies for inclusion.

Editorial note: commercial and retail development, not new clinical evidence.

A broader industry shift: menopause care is becoming midlife healthcare

US telehealth provider Midi Health announced a broader brand and service strategy on 20 August, moving beyond its original menopause focus into metabolic and other women’s-health services. The company says it has treated more than 450,000 patients. (Women’s Tabloid)

That may be one of the more important commercial signals of the week.

The first wave of digital midlife medicine largely built businesses around menopause symptoms and hormone therapy.

The next appears to be moving towards metabolic health, laboratory testing, supplements, weight management, sexual health and longer-term prevention.

In one sense, this is exactly what women have been asking for. Midlife health is far larger than hot flushes.

But the commercial version of whole-person care can also create a very long list of things to test, track, prescribe and purchase.

The quality test should therefore be the same as it is elsewhere: does broadening care help women identify what genuinely matters, or simply broaden the number of services they can be sold?

What I wouldn’t claim is headline news this week

I wouldn’t conclude “HRT prevents dementia”. Two recent large studies strengthen an intriguing signal, but both are observational. (University of East Anglia)

I would not say “early menopause causes Alzheimer’s”. Age at menopause may become a useful marker of neurological risk, but the pathway is unlikely to be that simple. (JAMA Network)

I wouldn’t tell women they need 10 g of creatine split between morning and night because they are over 40. The wider creatine evidence and the evidence for this particular commercial regimen should not be conflated. (Creatonics)

And I would not interpret an industry survey showing that women mistake perimenopause for stress as evidence that stress, anxiety or burnout in midlife are usually hormonal. (AOL.com)

The thread running through the week

There was a time when menopause barely appeared in mainstream health conversations.

Now it seems capable of appearing almost everywhere.

Brain health.

Creatine.

Sexual health.

Mental wellbeing.

Sleep.

Metabolism.

Pain relief.

Gut health.

Healthy ageing.

There is something welcome about that expansion. Women’s health in the second half of life should never have been reduced to hot flushes and whether or not to take HRT.

But there is a difference between putting menopause into the wider context of health and putting a menopause label onto the wider health marketplace.

This week’s brain research points towards the first.

The commercial developments increasingly illustrate the second.

And perhaps that is the distinction worth carrying forward.

Midlife genuinely can be an important window for prevention. We can use it to look at cardiovascular risk, metabolic health, muscle, bone, sleep, mental wellbeing, cognitive health and the quality of a woman’s everyday life.

None of that requires us to convince her that every aspect of her body suddenly needs optimising.

Good midlife health support should make the picture clearer.

Not larger.

See you on Monday for recipes to start your well well. Have a great weekend.

Kim

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There is a sentence I have heard often. It is said lightly, usually with a small laugh, and almost always as an apology.

‘I’m no use after two’.

People say it the way they might tell you their shoe size. A fixed fact about themselves, filed under personality alongside being bad at mornings and hopeless with names. Once something has been filed under personality, nobody goes looking for a reason for it.

I would like to unfile it.

On Monday I said that a good deal of what happens at three o’clock was decided at one, and then moved on to a lunch box recipe. Today I want to go back and open that sentence up, because the mechanism underneath it is one of the most useful things I teach and one of the least explained.

What actually happens after you eat

Any meal with carbohydrate in it raises the glucose in your blood. This is supposed to happen. It is not a fault and it is not something to be frightened of. Bread, rice, potatoes, oats, fruit, the sugar in a biscuit, all of it arrives as glucose eventually, and glucose is the fuel most of your body runs on (it can run on ketones but that’s for another day). Your brain is the greediest customer of the lot.

What varies is the speed.

A meal made mostly of fast carbohydrate with very little sitting beside it moves into the blood in a hurry. Your pancreas answers with insulin, whose job is to move that glucose out of the blood and into your muscles and liver, where it gets used or stored. A steep rise tends to bring a firm response. And a firm response can leave you landing lower than you started.

That landing is the bit you feel. Not sleepy exactly. Foggy, a little short-tempered, hungry in a way that is not really hunger, and pulled towards something sweet because sweet is the fastest route back up. So you have the biscuit, and the biscuit works. That is the trouble with the biscuit. It works for about forty minutes, and then you are back where you were, only now with a story about your own weakness attached to it.

The part most articles leave out: not all of three o’clock is your lunch.

Human alertness has its own rhythm across the day, and there is a dip built into the early afternoon that shows up in people who have eaten nothing at all. It arrives on top of the sleep pressure that has been building since the moment you got up. Some of that flatness was coming whether you ate a sandwich, a lunch box of slaw or absolutely nothing (I do recommend that you go back to Monday’s article and try that recipe tho!). What lunch decides is how steep it is, and whether you spend the rest of the afternoon chasing it around the building.

There is a second complication, and it is the reason I have never been comfortable with lists of foods that supposedly ‘spike’ everybody’s blood glucose. Work using continuous glucose monitors has found the same meal producing noticeably different responses in different people. Identical bread, identical portion, different curve. Your sleep the night before moves it. So does stress, and movement, and what you ate at the meal before this one. The direction of travel is reliable. The exact numbers are yours, not mine, and not an influencer’s.

Four things that change the shape of it

None of these ask you to eat a different lunch from the one you already like.

The first is what sits beside the carbohydrate. Protein, fibre and a decent fat slow the whole meal down, so the same food delivers itself at a more even pace. This is the entire argument behind Monday’s lunch box recipe, and it is why red cabbage does more for your afternoon than a stern word with yourself ever will.

The second is the order you eat it in. There is a small body of research, mostly in people with type 2 diabetes or raised blood sugar, suggesting that eating the vegetables and protein first and leaving the starchy part until last lowers the rise after the meal. The studies are small and I would not oversell them I really, really like to eat my food together). But it is free, it changes nothing about what you eat, and you have a perfectly internal good laboratory available for testing it.

The third is what you do in the twenty minutes afterwards. Working muscle takes glucose out of the blood, which is why ten minutes of walking after eating does more than its size suggests. This is last week’s principle and this week’s shaking hands. A short walk after lunch is not a token gesture towards exercise. It is part of the meal.

The fourth is the gap before. If breakfast was small or skipped and lunch arrives at half one with you ravenous, you will eat faster and choose worse, and the rise will be steeper for both reasons. What you had at eight has a hand in what happens at three.

The shift for this week

Change nothing about what you eat. I mean that.

For one week, add the walk. Ten minutes, straight after lunch, outdoors if there is any outdoors to be had. Then notice what three o’clock feels like on the days you managed it against the days you did not. That comparison is worth more to you than any general rule I could hand over, because it is about your body rather than an average one.

If it makes a difference, keep it and add the order change the week after. If it makes no difference at all, that is information too, and worth bringing to a GP if the afternoons are severe or you feel shaky and unwell rather than merely flat.

None of this is about eliminating the dip entirely. A small drop in the early afternoon is part of being a human being with a body clock, and there is no plate of food that abolishes it. The goal is smaller and much more achievable, which is to stop making it worse by accident and then blaming yourself for the consequences.

One question before next Wednesday. When you next hit your own three o’clock slump, see whether you can tell what kind it is. Tired, foggy, hungry, or restless. Tell me in the comments what it feels like from the inside, because the answer usually points straight at what to change first.

Kim

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Three o’clock is about the time when ‘the slump’ shows up. The email you’re reading goes round your head twice without landing, and the biscuit tin starts calling from the other room. Most of us put it down to the meeting we’ve come out of, or a bad night’s sleep.

A good deal of what happens at three, though, was decided at one.

Lunch is the meal we seem to have agreed doesn’t matter (think in-work meal deals or WFM cheese sandwiches). Supper gets planned. Breakfast gets endless opinions written about it. Lunch gets whatever attention is left over, which usually means a sandwich eaten at a desk or in the car and forgotten within the hour. Vegetables aren’t factored in, neither is fruit. Precious little cognitive effort is spent thinking about the protein and/or fibre content.

A white bread sandwich with a packet of crisps is mostly fast carbohydrate, with little protein and not much fibre behind it (and, no, I am not denying they are delicious). Blood sugar climbs quickly and then dips just as fast, and that dip is what a three o’clock crash feels like. Put protein and fibre on the same plate, with a decent fat alongside them, and the same number of calories behaves differently (controversial, but the hill I will die on). The sugars release at a slower pace, so there’s no steep drop on the other side.

There’s a practical problem too. A sandwich made at eight is at its best at eight, and everything after that is a slow decline into soft bread and warm tomato. Which is why the lunch worth making is one built on raw cabbage, because a shredded slaw does the opposite. Dress it in the morning and by one o’clock it has softened into something better than it was when the lid went on.

Red cabbage is also one of the cheapest things in the shop. Half a cabbage costs very much less than a meal deal and gives you four lunches out of it. Lastly - and possibly most importantly - lunch (packed or not) should and can be nutritious AND delicious! This recipe is certainly that. Read on for the impressive functional benefits…

Crunchy red cabbage and chicken lunch box with lemon tahini yoghurt dressing

Finely shredded red cabbage, carrot and apple in a lemon tahini yoghurt dressing, with shredded chicken on top and toasted seeds added at the last minute. Made once, it gives you four lunches, and it improves by the second day rather than falling apart.

Note: I am a sucker for a gadget. Did you know that you can get extra-wide shredders ( a very impressive 9cm!)? They look like potato peelers but shred cabbage, carrots etc into very pleasing, extra thin shreds for coleslaw etc. One foodie on Instagram called it a ‘Life Changing Cabbage Shredder’ – so it’s not just me!

Serves

4 lunches (permission granted to go to IKEA and buy aesthetically-pleasing stainless steel or glass lunch boxes)

Prep time

20 minutes

Cooking time

None, unless you’re toasting the seeds, which takes 3 minutes in a dry pan

Ingredients

For the slaw

• Half a small red cabbage, about 350 g, shredded as finely as you can manage

• 2 carrots, coarsely grated or shredded if you have a gadget

• 1 crisp apple, cut into thin matchsticks

• 4 spring onions, finely sliced

• Juice of half a lemon

• A good pinch of sea salt

For the dressing

• 4 tbsp thick Greek yoghurt (Greek style just means it wasn’t made in Greece and is perfectly fine)

• 1 heaped tbsp tahini (optional)

• Juice of half a lemon

• 1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

• 1 tsp honey

• Half a tsp ground cumin

• Sea salt and black pepper

• A splash of cold water to loosen

To finish

• 300 g cooked chicken, shredded (a shop-bought roast chicken is absolutely fine and this recipe is perfect for leftovers)

• 3 tbsp mixed pumpkin and sunflower seeds, toasted in a dry pan (an extra few minutes but definitely worth it)

• A small bunch of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped

Method

1. Shred properly: take the cabbage as thin as you can, with a mandolin or the slicing disc on a food processor if you have one (ot the 9cm veggie shredder you have ordered!). Thick shreds stay tough and squeaky and put people off slaw for life.

2. Soften it: toss the shredded cabbage with the lemon juice and a good pinch of salt, then leave it for 10 minutes while you do everything else. The salt draws out a little water and takes the raw edge off without turning anything limp.

3. Make the dressing: put everything for the dressing into a jar, screw the lid on and shake hard. Tahini seizes and looks split when the lemon first hits it. Keep shaking and add water a teaspoon at a time until it loosens into something pourable.

4. Bring it together: add the carrot, apple and spring onions to the cabbage, pour over the dressing and toss thoroughly with your hands. Taste and adjust with more lemon or a grind of pepper.

5. Box it up: divide between four containers, lay the shredded chicken over the top and put the lids on.

6. Keep the crunch separate: seeds and parsley go in a small pot or a twist of foil, scattered over when you sit down. This is the one step people skip and the one that makes the difference between a nice lunch and one you look forward to at eleven o’clock.

Functional Benefits

• A steadier afternoon: protein from the chicken and yoghurt alongside fibre from the cabbage, carrot and apple slows the whole meal down, so energy arrives at a more even pace than it does after a sandwich and crisps.

• Plant diversity: cabbage, carrot, apple, spring onion, parsley, lemon, sesame in the tahini and the two seeds bring nine plants toward the weekly variety your gut bacteria depend on (we’re aiming for 30+).

• Raw brassicas: red cabbage belongs to the same family as broccoli and kale, and some of the sulphur compounds these vegetables are known for are reduced by long cooking. Eating them raw keeps more of them intact.

• Anthocyanins: the deep purple colour is the same pigment family that colours blackberries and red onion, and one of the reasons red cabbage is worth choosing over white.

• Polyphenols: extra-virgin olive oil carries the anti-inflammatory compounds at the heart of Mediterranean eating.

Cook’s Notes

• The slaw keeps for 3 days in the fridge and is at its best on day two. The apple browns a little as the week goes on. The lemon slows that down, and nobody has ever complained.

• Call it a salad rather than a coleslaw if you’re selling it to anyone sceptical. Coleslaw brings to mind a tub of something claggy at a barbecue, and this is nothing like it.

• Vegetarian version: swap the chicken for a tin of chickpeas, drained, dried on a tea towel and air fried at 200°C for 12 minutes with a little oil and cumin until they crackle. Halloumi, cut into fingers and pan or air fried, also does the job.

• No tahini in the cupboard? Peanut butter with lime instead of lemon sends the whole thing in a satay direction, and works better than it sounds.

• Make double the dressing. It’s good on roast carrots, and spooned over more or less anything that came out of the oven looking a bit dull.

• If you’re taking it any distance, pack the box upright and keep the chicken on top rather than mixing it through. Mixed in, it goes cold and heavy. Sitting on top, it still looks like lunch.

One made-once lunch this week is plenty. Four boxes on a Monday morning takes twenty minutes and removes a decision you’d otherwise make badly at half twelve, four days running.

Tell me in the comments: what’s your standby lunch when you’re eating at your desk or on the move?

See you in the kitchen,

Kim

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I mention it because two of the studies that landed this week circle back to exactly that sort of unremarkable decision. Not the big overhaul. The soup you made because the lentils were there.

Here’s the lowdown on what I have found out this week that I want to pass on to you.

Oestrogen-only HRT and Alzheimer’s changes in the brain

The one everyone will be talking about. A Stanford team published in Neurology on 12 August, looking at women who had used oestrogen-only menopausal hormone therapy and comparing what was actually found in their brains after death with women who had never used any form of HRT.

They looked at 258 autopsied brains from oestrogen-only users against 2,701 from non-users, drawing on two large US databases covering 21,462 women. After adjusting for age, education, APOE4 status and blood pressure history, oestrogen-only users had around 35 per cent lower odds of showing the amyloid and tau hallmarks of Alzheimer’s. They also had roughly 39 per cent lower odds of having received a clinical dementia diagnosis in their lifetime.

Why it matters: most previous work relied on clinical diagnoses, which are famously imprecise for dementia. This is the first study to go to the tissue in reasonable numbers.

Why I’d still be careful. It is observational, so it cannot tell us that HRT did the protecting. The women averaged 70 years old and most had had hysterectomies, which is why they were on oestrogen alone. The findings do not apply to combined oestrogen-plus-progestogen, which is what most women in the UK are actually prescribed, and topical users were excluded.

Dr Tom Blackmore at Alzheimer’s Research UK put it well in the UK coverage: this is not a reason for any woman to start or stop HRT with dementia in mind.

• Stanford Medicine news release, 12 August

• The paper in Neurology

• UK coverage with Alzheimer’s Research UK response, 14 August

Waist measurement outperforms the scales after 65

Published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and covered on 19 August. Researchers at the University of Rhode Island and University of Connecticut followed 6,905 older adults from 2011 to 2024, and crucially they updated both BMI and waist measurements every year rather than taking one reading and assuming it held.

Higher BMI looked protective, which is the familiar obesity paradox. Waist circumference told a different story. A high waist, above roughly 89cm in women, carried a 24 per cent higher risk of death regardless of what BMI said. Women with a normal BMI but a high waist had a 23 per cent higher mortality risk than women with a normal BMI and a low waist.

This is the practical one. If you work with women in this age group, a tape measure costs almost nothing and tells you something the scales are actively hiding. It also fits the 2025 Lancet Commission on Clinical Obesity guidance, which asked clinicians to confirm excess adiposity with a second measure rather than leaning on BMI alone.

• Coverage and study details, 19 August

Discrimination, early trauma and heart failure risk in Black women

A cohort study in JAMA Network Open on 18 August, using the Black Women’s Health Study. Some 48,320 women followed for a median of 24 years, with 1,343 heart failure events.

Investigators asked about discrimination in three settings: employment, housing and encounters with the police. Women reporting it in all three had a 27 per cent higher risk of heart failure than women reporting none in any. A history of frequent sexual assault during adolescence carried a 44 per cent higher risk after adjustment. Body mass index accounted for somewhere between a fifth and a third of the link between early sexual assault and later heart failure, which the authors read as a plausible stress-and-eating pathway rather than a proven one.

Heart failure was self-reported, with 78 per cent concordance on review, and the design is observational. Even so, this is a serious piece of work on something we tend to leave out of cardiovascular risk conversations entirely.

• Coverage, 18 August

• The paper in JAMA Network Open

When there isn’t enough fibre, gut bacteria turn on the mucus layer

This one is preclinical, so file it under mechanism rather than advice. A Princeton team published in PNAS, covered on 15 August, tracing what gut microbes do when dietary fibre runs short. Using isotope labelling in mice, they found bacteria start breaking down proteins from the mucus lining of the gut itself, and that this shift produces the less helpful phenol metabolites rather than the beneficial ones.

The genuinely new bit is a category they’ve named Prif, or proteins imitating fibre. These are indigestible plant proteins that reach the microbes intact and give them something to work with. Fibre reduced the mucus-eating. Prif increased the supply of the good stuff.

Mice, not women. Nobody should be counting Prif grams. But it does give a tidy mechanistic explanation for something we already suspected, which is that low-fibre weeks cost the gut lining something.

• Summary of both papers, 15 August

Midlife movement and blood sugar, cognition decades later

UT Health San Antonio, covered widely on 16 August. They followed 402 people from the San Antonio Heart Study into later life, mean age 57.9 at baseline, 58.5 per cent women, roughly half Mexican American and half non-Hispanic white.

Any physical activity at all, compared with being sedentary, was linked to slower cognitive decline, and this showed up most strongly among Mexican American participants. Lower fasting glucose was linked to slower decline among the non-Hispanic white participants.

Caveats: it was a small sample. Cognition measured with the Mini-Mental State Examination, which is a screening tool rather than a diagnostic instrument. The ethnic differences need replicating before anyone builds a message around them. What survives all that is the modest, useful finding that any is doing a lot of work in the phrase “any physical activity”.

• Study summary, 16 August

Handle with care

Coffee, body composition and sex hormones

University of Oulu, reported 17 August. 2,264 Finns aged 46 from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort. Higher coffee intake tracked with lower visceral fat and greater skeletal muscle mass at similar BMI, plus lower branched-chain amino acids in both sexes. The hormone findings were mostly in men. In women the associations were limited to higher SHBG and slightly lower free androgens (Sex Hormone-Binding Globulin (SHBG) is a liver-made protein that binds to sex hormones like testosterone and oestrogen to control their activity in the body). It’s cross-sectional and observational, and the lead author is upfront that they cannot say coffee caused any of it. Interesting. Not yet advice. Read the coverage

The anna perimenopause app, launched 18 August across 39 markets

Reads existing wearable data and issues one lifestyle suggestion each morning with the research attached. Self-funded, built by two women in Riga, tested with UK women over three months. £13.99 a month or £99.99 a year after a free trial. The company says recommendations draw on more than 300 published studies and are reviewed by a clinician. It is explicitly not a medical device. My honest read: the design instinct is sound, giving one action rather than a wall of metrics, but there is no published validation and a three-month pre-launch test is not an evidence base. Read the coverage

One small thing for the week

The waist measurement study is the one I’d act on. Not as a project. Just once, this week, with a tape measure, noted down somewhere you’ll find it again in six months. I like this for several reasons but primarily because surely in 2026 we can’t still be using and making decisions based on BMI? (more of this in a separate article because it deserves it).

And if you want a second, gentler one: put something with fibre in it on the stove tonight because it’s already in the cupboard. The lentils don’t need a plan.

Have a great weekend!

Kim

I am easily put off things. Especially things I can be somewhat ambivalent about. When I have 20 minutes while dinner is finishing in the oven I could (and should) head out for a walk. It’s dry but I’m tired. I mull it over. Not worth going out for twenty minutes (which is probably now more like fifteen). So the trainers stay where they are and the remaining minutes go on a load of washing instead.

It gets even worse: the sea is a five minute walk away from home and I have no good reason on earth not to go and look at it. To this end, the image in this article is where I live - doubly ridiculous that I don’t walk this 6 mile coastal walk more often!

In my defence: some of us learned about exercise in an era when it was sold as a transaction: a way of paying off what you had eaten. Under that arithmetic a short walk barely covers the effort of lacing up, so it gets filed as pointless. The arithmetic was poor, and it has cost a lot of women a couple of decades of movement they would have enjoyed. Let’s not add in those gym classes and communal showers - urgh.

Here is what the arithmetic left out.

While you are moving, and for a good while afterwards, your muscles take up glucose from your blood more readily. That is a large part of why a walk after a meal steadies things, and it links this principle straight back to the first one. Mood and sleep respond too, usually within days rather than months. None of that shows up in a calorie counter, which is one of the reasons the calorie counter was (and still is) such a poor guide.

And then there is muscle itself, which is where this principle changes shape in midlife.

From around our forties, muscle starts to slip away unless we give it a reason to stay. Through perimenopause and menopause the pace picks up, because falling oestrogen affects how well the body maintains both muscle and bone. Muscle is not decoration. It is where a good deal of the glucose from your last meal goes. It is what keeps your hips steady on a wet pavement in twenty years’ time, and it is the tissue that responds fastest to being asked for something.

The UK guidelines have two parts to them. The one everybody remembers is 150 minutes a week of moderate activity, the walking and gardening end of things. The one almost everybody skips is the second: activities that work your muscles on at least two days a week. Strength has an image problem. It sounds like a gym, and a class full of people who already know what they are doing. It is really carrying the shopping in one go, taking the stairs with the laundry basket, standing up out of a kitchen chair ten times while the kettle boils, or a pair of tins of chopped tomatoes lifted over your head until your arms complain. Start where you are. The point is that something has to feel a bit heavy, regularly.

Now the part I added when I rewrote this principle, because the original says nothing about it.

Where you move seems to matter.

There is a growing body of research on green and blue spaces, the parks and woods and rivers and coastlines. One large English survey found people who reported spending around two hours a week in natural settings were more likely to report good health and wellbeing than people who reported none, and the two hours worked whether it came as one long visit or several short ones. Something to point out: is a survey, so it tells us these things travel together rather than proving one causes the other, and the people who are already well may simply get out more. The research on forest walking in Japan points the same way, with small short-term improvements in blood pressure and stress markers, though those studies are small and I would not build a religion on them.

What makes the direction plausible is attention. A pavement beside a dual carriageway asks a lot of you. It wants monitoring, and it keeps your system half braced the whole way round. A hedgerow or a stretch of water occupies your attention without demanding anything from it, and the difference in how you arrive home is hard to miss.

Which is where a brisk walk somewhere green becomes two principles for the price of one, and why I keep saying it.

My own version of this should be the seafront, most days, in whatever the weather is doing. I will try to do better. I have also signed myself up, in the way you do at eleven at night with a glass of wine and an idea, to join the gym from 1st of September. To be fair, it is a very nice gym and if that looks like a few lengths of the pool and the steam room for now, that’s OK.

So here is the small shift for this week, and it has two halves rather than a list.

Take one thing that already happens indoors and move it outside. The phone call to your sister. The coffee you drink standing at the worktop. It does not have to be exercise to count as being outside, and being outside is often what makes the walking happen by accident.

Then find two moments in the week where something feels heavy. Ten minutes each is plenty to begin with. Put them somewhere they already have a natural home, like the kettle boiling or the ad break, because a plan with no home in your week is a plan you will be renegotiating with yourself every day.

One question before next Wednesday. Where is your nearest green or blue space, and when did you last go there for no reason other than being in it? Tell me in the comments, and if the answer embarrasses you a little, you are in excellent company.

Kim

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Yesterday afternoon I stood in the kitchen doing sums out loud. A fortnight or so until the alarm gets set an hour earlier and the roads fill at half eight, whether you’ve anyone in the car or not (we live in a leafy suburb - right in the middle of a nursery school and a primary school - the time of day/parking becomes something needing careful planning). Nobody had asked me to think about the fridge. I was thinking about the fridge. What’s in the fridge? Some courgettes (a shocking price this summer when they are usually the butt of glut jokes), some feta, half a bunch of mint. The freezer had the requisite frozen peas and the veg basket offered both onions and lemons. Read on for recipe inspiration…

Here’s the belief I’d like us to set aside this week: that a well-run week starts with a Sunday given over to cooking. You know the version I mean. Five containers in a row, the same supper in each, photographed from above with the lids off. It looks like everything is sorted. By Wednesday, though, the sight of box number four puts most of us off our food entirely, and the whole lot ends up in the bin on Sunday when the next batch goes in. I will confess that, even though I love them, I have fallen into this trap with my lovely little containers of chia pudding. NOTE: I have recently discovered that you can freeze them! My current favourite is cacao with hazelnut milk. I thaw them overnight, then add berries, Greek yoghurt and pumpkin seeds.

Batch cooking does have one real advantage: a decision already made for the evening when you’ve no capacity left to make one. What trips people up is the sameness. Appetite isn’t a machine. Eat the identical bowl four nights running and your body starts voting with its feet, usually somewhere around the biscuit tin at nine o’clock (or, ahem, toast with Dairlylea – almost as if I have experience of that!).

So the middle path, and the one we actually try to live by here, is to cook one generous base and send it in two different directions. Same pot, two suppers. The second doesn’t taste like the first one’s leftovers. Thirty-five minutes on a Sunday or a Monday evening, and nothing lined up in identical containers.

The base I come back to at this time of year is pearl barley. Nutty and a bit chewy, and it drinks up stock the way arborio rice does without the standing and stirring. Barley carries a soluble fibre called beta-glucan, the same family of fibre that gives oats their reputation for cholesterol. Beta-glucan thickens as it moves through you, which slows the whole meal down: energy arrives at a steadier pace and hunger comes back later than it would after a plate of white pasta. Barley is also cheap and keeps for months in the cupboard, and every supermarket here has it in the rice and grains aisle.

Lemony pearl barley with courgette, peas and feta

Description

A one-pot barley supper with courgette, peas, lemon and mint, finished with feta. Creamy without cream, ready in about thirty-five minutes, and deliberately generous so half of it becomes a completely different supper later in the week.

Serves

4 as supper, or 2 people twice with the second supper below

Prep time

10 minutes

Cooking time

35 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to finish

• 1 onion, finely chopped

• 2 garlic cloves, finely sliced

• 300 g pearl barley, rinsed

• 1.2 litres hot vegetable or chicken stock

• 2 medium courgettes, 1 coarsely grated and 1 cut into small dice

• 200 g frozen peas

• Zest and juice of 1 unwaxed lemon

• A small bunch of mint, leaves torn

• A small bunch of flat-leaf parsley, chopped

• 150 g feta, crumbled

• Sea salt and black pepper

• Optional: 2 tbsp toasted flaked almonds or pine nuts

Method

1. Start the base: heat the olive oil in a wide, deep pan over a medium heat and cook the onion for 6 to 7 minutes until soft. Add the garlic for the last minute.

2. Toast the barley: tip in the rinsed barley and stir it around in the oil for a minute or two until the grains look glossy and smell faintly nutty. Skipping this step gives you a duller pot, so give it the two minutes.

3. Simmer: pour in about two thirds of the hot stock, bring to a gentle bubble, then leave it at a low simmer for 25 minutes, stirring now and then and topping up with stock as the barley drinks it. You’re after tender grains with a little bite left, sitting in a loose, creamy sauce rather than a dry pile.

4. Add the courgette and peas: stir in the grated courgette, the diced courgette and the peas, and cook for 5 more minutes. The grated courgette melts into the sauce, the diced pieces stay recognisable, and between them you get texture without anything collapsing.

5. Finish: off the heat, stir through the lemon zest and half the juice, most of the herbs and half the feta. Taste, add salt and pepper and the rest of the lemon if it needs sharpening.

6. Serve: ladle into warm bowls, scatter the remaining feta, herbs and nuts over, and finish with a drizzle of olive oil.

The second supper

Set aside half the pot before you serve, and cool it quickly. Two or three nights later, tip it into a bowl straight from the fridge, break in a tin of mackerel or salmon, add a big handful of rocket, another squeeze of lemon and a spoonful of thick yoghurt loosened with a little olive oil. Cold barley firms up and goes properly chewy, so this eats as a substantial grain salad rather than yesterday’s dinner reheated. Ten minutes, no hob, and the tinned fish brings omega 3 to a supper you’d otherwise not think of as a fish night.

Functional Benefits

• Steadier energy: the beta-glucan in barley thickens as it digests, slowing the release of sugars into your blood and pushing hunger further down the evening.

• Cholesterol: beta-glucan is the fibre behind the cholesterol claims made for oats. Barley carries it too, and gets a fraction of the attention.

• Plant diversity: onion, garlic, barley, courgette, peas, lemon and the herbs bring seven plants toward the weekly variety your gut bacteria depend on.

• Protein and fibre together: peas and feta add protein alongside the fibre in the barley, which is the pairing that makes a bowl of grains sit like a meal rather than a side dish.

• Polyphenols: extra-virgin olive oil carries the anti-inflammatory compounds at the heart of Mediterranean eating.

Cook’s Notes

• Pearl barley has had some of the bran polished off, so it cooks faster than pot barley. Either works here, but pot barley needs closer to 50 minutes and more stock.

• Barley contains gluten, so if you’re coeliac, swap in buckwheat or brown rice and reduce the liquid.

• Grating one courgette and dicing the other is worth the extra thirty seconds. Do both the same way and the pot goes either watery or bland.

• Feta is doing the salt here, so hold back at the seasoning stage until it’s stirred in.

• If you want more protein on the plate, a couple of chicken thighs roasted alongside, or a tin of cannellini beans folded in at step 4, both work without changing the character of the pot.

• Barley is a big fibre step up if your usual base is white rice or pasta. Start with a modest bowl and let your gut catch up over a few weeks.

• The finished pot keeps for 3 days covered in the fridge and thickens as it sits, so loosen with a splash of stock or water if you’re reheating rather than eating it cold. (Hubby looked into the pan, said ‘is that porridge?’, then ate two bowls and asked what was in it. I’m choosing to take the win.)

One pot this week is plenty. Cook it once, eat it twice, and let the second supper feel like a different night rather than a punishment for being organised.

Tell me in the comments: when the week tightens up again, what’s the one meal you’d happily eat twice?

See you in the kitchen,

Kim

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The strongest new research looked at something that receives far less attention than hormones: social disadvantage. Elsewhere, new survey data highlighted the continuing mental-health gap around perimenopause, while media discussion became noticeably more critical of the idea that every difficult experience in a woman’s forties must automatically be explained by menopause. At the same time, the conversation around GLP-1 drugs is moving beyond weight loss towards muscle, strength and long-term capability.

The strongest research this week

Early menopause plus social disadvantage may create a particularly vulnerable health trajectory

A large study published online in Menopause on 12 August examined nearly 20,000 women with early natural menopause and followed them for a median of 10.8 years. Researchers considered 14 social determinants of health and grouped women according to relatively favourable, intermediate or unfavourable circumstances. (The Menopause Society)

Greater cumulative social disadvantage was associated with poorer long-term outcomes, including all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease and dementia. Unemployment showed the strongest individual association with both mortality and incident dementia. No significant association was found with cancer. (The Menopause Society)

This matters because it challenges a very individualised version of midlife health.

We talk extensively about diet, exercise, supplements, sleep and hormone therapy. Those things can matter. But a woman’s health also develops inside her financial circumstances, employment, education, relationships, neighbourhood, access to healthcare and available support.

Early menopause may identify a group already at increased long-term health risk. This research suggests that social disadvantage may compound that vulnerability further. (The Menopause Society)

What it does not show

This was observational research. It cannot establish that unemployment itself causes dementia or that changing one social factor would necessarily remove the additional risk.

There is also an important definitional point. For this analysis, the researchers included women whose natural menopause occurred before age 48, which is broader than the usual definitions of premature menopause before 40 and early menopause before 45. (The Menopause Society)

Evidence status: strong observational evidence, but not causal evidence.

The bigger lesson may be that effective prevention cannot rest entirely on asking women to make better individual choices.

Mental health deserves a place in midlife care, but survey headlines need caution

A new LifeStance Health survey released on 11 August questioned 1,000 US women who said they were experiencing or suspected they were experiencing perimenopause or menopause. One-third said they had not known that perimenopause could be associated with mental-health symptoms. (LifeStance Health)

Among respondents, 66% described their anxiety as somewhat or extremely severe and 54% said the same of depression. Of those who had tried therapy for symptoms they associated with perimenopause or menopause, 83% reported finding it helpful. Almost half, 47%, thought mental-health support should form a standard part of perimenopause care. (LifeStance Health)

The findings fit a broader argument for integrating psychological support into midlife healthcare rather than separating “mental or psychological” symptoms from physical health.

But there are substantial caveats.

This was a commercial survey commissioned by a mental-health provider, not a clinical prevalence study. Participants already believed or suspected that they were experiencing perimenopause or menopause, so these percentages cannot be interpreted as estimates for all midlife women. The finding that therapy was “helpful” is self-reported and does not establish treatment effectiveness. (LifeStance Health).

I think that it is useful to identify where we need to interpret with caution research findings that are associated with marketing opportunities. It also means not ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ as the old adage goes. In this case, the findings are useful.

Women experiencing anxiety, low mood, disrupted sleep or cognitive difficulties need access to appropriate psychological support as well as a careful assessment of what may be contributing to those symptoms.

Evidence status: useful consumer insight, not clinical evidence of prevalence or treatment effectiveness.

Has the pendulum swung too far towards blaming perimenopause?

One of the most interesting media conversations this week was a long Times investigation asking whether symptoms such as brain fog, insomnia and anxiety are now sometimes being attributed too readily to perimenopause. The article highlighted clinicians concerned about a growing market of private clinics, hormone testing, supplements, coaches and highly certain social-media explanations around an inherently variable life stage. (The Times)

This does not mean perimenopause is being invented or that women should once again accept dismissal of genuine symptoms.

The problem is the opposite form of oversimplification.

For years women struggled to have menopause recognised at all. We now risk reaching a point where almost every new symptom in the forties is interpreted through a hormonal lens.

Anxiety can occur during the menopause transition.

It can also have psychological, social, medical, medication-related and lifestyle causes.

Fatigue may be associated with poor sleep during perimenopause.

It may also relate to anaemia, thyroid disease, sleep apnoea, depression, insufficient energy intake, medication or any number of other possibilities.

Brain fog is real as an experience. It is not a diagnosis.

The better position sits somewhere between dismissal and overdiagnosis.

Midlife should prompt a broader health review, not simply a hormone explanation.

The GLP-1 conversation is shifting from weight loss to what women can afford to lose

I think that this is an important topic that deserves a closer look.

A prominent women’s-health feature published on 7 August focused on a concern becoming increasingly visible around GLP-1 weight-loss treatment: loss of lean tissue alongside fat. It also discussed pharmaceutical attempts to develop treatments that preserve muscle during medically induced weight loss. (Marie Claire UK). Of course there are money-making opportunities around medicating for this. It’s an open door, in a way - we’re already injecting ourselves weekly - what’s another medication?

The precise proportion of weight loss that comes from lean mass varies between studies and depends partly on how lean tissue is measured. Claims that GLP-1 users routinely lose 40% of their weight as muscle should therefore be treated cautiously. Lean mass is not identical to skeletal muscle, and current trials were generally designed around weight and cardiometabolic outcomes rather than long-term strength, falls or independence. (Marie Claire UK)

The underlying concern is nevertheless important for midlife women.

Weight loss is not automatically synonymous with improved body composition.

The conversation becomes particularly relevant as women move through later life, when preserving muscle, bone and physical function becomes increasingly important.

For decades the successful outcome of a diet has been a smaller number on the scales.

Increasingly, a more useful question may be: what happened to strength, muscle, fitness and function while the weight was being lost?

That is a much better healthy-ageing question.

Proteinmaxxing is now part of a broader backlash against optimisation

Proteinmaxxing continued to receive criticism this week as part of a wider reassessment of wellness culture. A 12 August commentary argued that both proteinmaxxing and fibremaxxing reveal the limitations of trying to mathematically optimise a human diet around individual nutrients. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Separately, The Guardian’s review of the year’s major wellness trends included proteinmaxxing among a collection of behaviours where legitimate health concerns have become amplified into internet-driven optimisation projects. (The Guardian). As you know, I have many thoughts and feelings around the optimisation trend.

There is a useful distinction to preserve.

Protein matters, particularly when the aim is to maintain muscle during ageing or weight loss.

The criticism is not of protein.

It is of turning protein into the primary measure of whether a food is “good”, assuming ever higher intakes are automatically better, and reformulating foods largely so that an impressive protein number can appear on the packaging.

Fibremaxxing deserves a slightly different interpretation. It can also become unnecessarily competitive, but increasing fibre intake generally moves people towards foods already encouraged within established dietary guidance, particularly beans, lentils, wholegrains, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds.

It is disappointing and unfortunate that the 2 things are being conflated. We are far from our fibre requirements - we need to work to meet these (not optimise or maxx - simply meet our daily requirements). Have you ever counted and realised how hard it is to hit 30g fibre a day?

While I don’t love optimising and ‘maxxing’ as general health targets, fibre intake is the hill that I will die on. This is another example of how carefully we need to critically examine a health trend, influencer say-so and research quietly funded by industry.

Social-media watch: health content is becoming more certain just as the evidence becomes more complicated

There is a revealing tension in this week’s stories.

Women are hearing increasingly confident messages about what perimenopause looks like, how much protein they need, which hormones need replacing and how their bodies should change with age.

At exactly the same time, the research is pointing towards greater complexity.

Social disadvantage modifies health trajectories. (The Menopause Society)

Mental wellbeing is influenced by more than hormones. (LifeStance Health)

Weight loss can improve metabolic health while raising legitimate questions about body composition. (Marie Claire UK)

And social-media optimisation can turn sensible nutritional principles into unnecessarily rigid rules. (San Francisco Chronicle)

That suggests an important role for evidence-based midlife health communication.

Not more certainty: better judgement.

Product and service watch: longevity is increasingly being grafted onto menopause: the cynical part of me senses marketing opportunities packaged as self-care.

The commercial language around menopause continues to shift towards longevity, healthspan, metabolic optimisation and future-proofing.

A Midlife Women’s Health Summit being promoted this year is explicitly positioning menopause care within the “longevity era”, with sessions intended to distinguish evidence-based approaches from supplements, protocols and interventions being promoted through longevity clinics and influencers. (HERmedicine)

The direction is understandable.

Midlife genuinely is an important period for cardiovascular health, metabolic risk, bone, muscle and future function.

But the longevity framing creates another commercial opportunity.

The risk is that menopause moves from being undertreated to overtreated, with ordinary preventive health repackaged as highly specialised optimisation.

Strength training becomes longevity medicine.

Eating vegetables becomes metabolic optimisation.

Going to bed consistently becomes circadian engineering.

Sometimes a new scientific framing helps us understand health differently.

Sometimes it simply makes ordinary good habits easier to sell.

The thread running through the week

Perhaps the most useful development in midlife health right now is that the conversation is gradually becoming bigger than menopause.

Hormonal changes matter.

But so do employment, money, relationships, healthcare access, psychological support, strength, food, movement, sleep and the conditions in which women are trying to look after themselves.

That matters because there is a limit to how much responsibility we can place on individual behaviour.

We can encourage women to eat well, move, build muscle, sleep, manage stress and attend screening.

And so we should.

But a woman who is financially insecure, exhausted from caring responsibilities, unable to access healthcare or struggling with her mental health has not failed at wellness.

Her circumstances are part of her health.

At the same time, women do not need every ordinary act of self-care turned into an optimisation strategy.

Perhaps the most useful version of personalised midlife health is simpler.

Understand what matters most for this woman.

Understand what is getting in the way.

Find the next useful step.

And leave enough room for health to support a life, rather than becoming another job she has to perform.

That’s the 3rd Friday Edit from the Whole Health Team

Have a great weekend!

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Whole Health 360: your Wednesday deep dive on a foundational pillar of Lifestyle Medicine (and how it fits into your real, everyday life).

Somewhere in the chiller aisle, between the yoghurts and the juices, there is a shelf that didn’t exist ten years ago. Kefir, kombucha, ‘biotic’ shots in bottles the size of an egg cup, green juices and smoothies, all promising to restore a gut they have never met. Last week I watched a woman stand in front of it all with the expression of someone sitting an exam she hadn’t revised for. I recognised the look. The gut health boom has a way of making everyone feel behind.

If your gut has become one more thing on the list you feel you should be doing something about, let me take the weight of the shelf off you before we go any further. You haven’t missed a memo. The science of the gut is some of the most interesting in nutrition, and I will happily talk about it for as long as you let me, but somewhere between the research and the chiller cabinet, the story got repackaged. ‘Eat a wider variety of plants - aim for 30 a week’ is hard to charge £4.50 a bottle for (or the £7 bottle of ginger juice I saw in the supermarket last week - tiny bottle but you only need a ‘shot’). Complexity sells, and the simple version rarely gets shelf space.

Here is the simple version.

When I introduced this principle, I said every meal feeds two parties: you, and the trillions of bacteria in your gut. You take your share in the early stretch of digestion. What reaches the bacteria further along is mostly fibre, the part of a plant you cannot break down yourself, which happens to be their favourite food. Fed well, they repay the rent. They produce compounds that help keep the gut lining in good repair and appear to calm the low-level inflammation I keep returning to in this series. A surprisingly large share of your immune system sits in and around the gut too, so the state of the neighbourhood matters well beyond digestion.

And then there is mood. The gut and the brain are in constant conversation, chemically and through nerve pathways, and the messages run in both directions (we are learning more and more about this every month - we have a way to go). A nervous stomach before a big day is the brain talking to the gut. The traffic the other way, the gut’s influence on how we feel, is some of the work I find most fascinating in the whole field, and one of the reasons I widened this principle beyond the plate in the first place.

Now the part the shelf never mentions: different bacteria have different tastes. The ones that thrive on oats are not the ones that thrive on onions or beans. A varied menu supports a varied community, and a varied community appears to be a more resilient one. Which makes the most useful question about your gut one no product can answer: how many different plants passed through your kitchen last week?

Before you answer, know the category is wider than it sounds. Beans and lentils count, tinned and pouched included. Frozen peas count, and herbs and spices too, dried as well as fresh. So do oats, nuts, seeds and the neglected half-jar of olives at the back of the fridge (my own current favourite addition is jarred artichoke hearts crisped up in the air fryer, which sounds far fancier than it is).

So this week’s small shift is a counting game rather than a change. Guess your number first and write the guess down. Then keep a casual tally on the fridge or in your phone for the week, everything plant-based, no target and no pass mark. The tally is a map. It shows you where the easy additions would fit: a spoonful of mixed seeds on the morning yoghurt, or a handful of frozen peas dropped into whatever was cooking anyway.

None of this is a case against the whole shelf, by the way. Kefir and live yoghurt are proper foods with reasonable evidence behind them, and if you enjoy them, carry on. What I would love you to put down is the obligation, because a more interesting menu does more for the resident trillions than any single bottle, and most of an interesting menu is already sitting in the cupboard.

So, guesses please. How many different plants do you reckon went through your kitchen last week? Tell me the guess in the comments, then count, and come back and tell me how wrong you were. I’ll put my own tally up too, artichokes and all.

PS: homemade kombucha is pretty easy to make - more of that later.

Kim

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Yesterday afternoon a shower arrived from nowhere and chased us in from the garden, teacups and all. By the time we’d got the cushions inside, the sun was back out as if nothing had happened. This week’s forecast promises more of the same: cooler air, with sunshine and showers taking it in turns.

After a fortnight of suppers with nothing switched on, the hob gets its comeback, and with it a belief worth overturning: comfort food has to be earned with effort. Somewhere along the way we learned a warming dinner means the full production, with a casserole dish, the oven on and half the evening gone. So when the sky turns grey and a salad stops bring appealing, cooking suddenly feels like a bigger job than it did in July, and the takeaway apps start looking friendly.

Appetite follows the weather. It always has. Wanting a warm dinner in a cooler week is your body keeping up, nothing more. The trick is holding on to the ease of summer cooking while the food itself warms up, and this is where the storecupboard earns its keep.

Which brings me to butter beans, the most underrated tin on the shelf. Beans carry protein and fibre in the same spoonful, the pairing which digests slowly and keeps blood sugar steady, so a bowl of them sees you through the evening without the nine o’clock forage for biscuits. Simmered briefly in a smoky tomato sauce they turn creamy and substantial, closer to something which took all afternoon than twenty minutes has any right to be.

Editorial note: I am a bean snob - it is the hill I would die on. Jarred whenever humanly possible. Are they more expensive? Yes. Are they worth the money? Also yes. If you have jarred beans as a veggie meal, you are saving on money that otherwise would have gone on meat of some sort - for me it’s a no-brainer.

Smoky butter bean and red pepper one-pot

Description

A twenty-minute pot of creamy butter beans and jarred roasted peppers in a smoky tomato sauce, with spinach folded through at the end. Everything comes from tins and jars, and the result tastes like far more work than it was.

Serves

4, or 2 tonight with lunch for tomorrow

Prep time

10 minutes

Cooking time

20 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to finish

• 1 onion, finely sliced

• 2 garlic cloves, sliced

• 2 tsp smoked paprika (sweet, not hot)

• A pinch of chilli flakes (optional)

• 1 x 400 g tin chopped tomatoes

• 1 x 700g jar of butter beans OR 2 x 400 g tins, drained and rinsed

• 150 g roasted red peppers from a jar, sliced

• 1 tsp red wine vinegar, or a squeeze of lemon

• 100 g spinach

• Sea salt and black pepper

• Crusty bread, to serve

• Optional toppings: crumbled feta, a spoonful of thick yoghurt, chopped parsley

Method

1. Soften the onion: heat the olive oil in a wide pan over a medium heat and cook the onion for 5 to 6 minutes until soft and sweet at the edges.

2. Add the spices: stir in the garlic, smoked paprika and chilli flakes for one minute, no longer. Paprika burns fast and turns bitter.

3. Build the pot: add the tomatoes, half a tin of water, the peppers and the beans. Simmer gently for 10 to 12 minutes until the sauce thickens and the beans turn creamy.

4. Finish: stir through the vinegar, then the spinach a handful at a time until wilted. Taste and season, remembering the toppings bring salt of their own.

5. Serve: ladle into bowls, drizzle with olive oil, add your toppings and put the bread within reach. The sauce is the point.

Functional Benefits

• Staying power: butter beans bring protein and fibre together, so the bowl digests slowly and holds you through the evening.

• Plant diversity: onion, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, spinach and the beans themselves count six plants toward the weekly variety your gut bacteria thrive on.

• Gut fuel: the fibre in beans travels down to feed your gut bacteria rather than being absorbed early on, which is exactly what you want from a Monday supper.

• Polyphenols: extra-virgin olive oil brings the anti-inflammatory compounds at the heart of Mediterranean eating.

Cook’s Notes

• Jarred butter beans are softer and creamier than tinned, and worth grabbing when you spot them. A 700 g jar replaces two tins in a recipe.

• No spinach? Kale works with a few extra minutes in the pot, or skip the greens and serve leaves on the side.

• The toppings matter more than they look: feta or a spoonful of thick yoghurt against the smoky sauce is the difference between nice and ‘when are we having this again?’

• If beans are an occasional guest at your table, start with a smaller helping. The gut adapts to fibre with practice, and beans reward the regulars.

• Better tomorrow, and it keeps for 3 days covered in the fridge. The beans drink up the sauce as they sit, so loosen with a splash of water when reheating.

One warm pot on the first grey evening this week is enough. The casserole dish stays in the cupboard until October, and supper still lands warm.

Tell me in the comments: what’s your storecupboard supper for when the sky turns?

See you in the kitchen,

Kim

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Welcome back to The Edit, where once a week I sift through the women’s health news and research so you don’t have to, and tell you which of it deserves your attention and which of it is trying to sell you something.

A small note before we start: this was a quiet week for big, definitive midlife research. I’d rather tell you so than dress up an old study as news (a manoeuvre you’ll spot everywhere once you start looking for it). As it happens, the smaller findings this week have something rather large to say.

The story of the week: the women who didn’t finish

You know how it goes. You sign up for the programme in a hopeful moment. Week one, you’re flying. Week two, a child is ill or a deadline lands, and by week three the app is sending you increasingly wounded little notifications you’ve stopped opening. (I have a folder of these on my phone. We don’t speak of the folder.)

This week a small trial captured this pattern in data, and I found it far more interesting than its headline results.

Researchers tested a four-week, self-guided online programme of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with 49 perimenopausal and menopausal women, average age a shade under fifty. ACT, if you’ve not met it, is a psychological approach with a solid pedigree. Rather than trying to argue difficult thoughts and feelings out of existence, you learn to let them be present without letting them run the show, and to keep moving towards what matters to you. As someone with a psychology degree and a long-standing soft spot for ACT, I was keen to see how it fared.

Here’s what happened. When everyone allocated to the programme was included in the analysis, anxiety and depression were no better than in the control group. Among the women who finished, anxiety improved, and so did psychological flexibility, the skill ACT is designed to build. Depression and menopause-related quality of life didn’t shift. And here is the number I keep coming back to: fewer than half the women completed all four modules. These were women who volunteered for a study. They wanted this. Life still won.

It would be easy to file this away as a failed trial, or worse, to headline it as “online therapy eases menopause anxiety”, which it did not show. The more useful reading is the one nobody puts in a press release: making good support available is not the same as making it possible. Regular readers might remember the breast cancer app trial from the first Edit, where a small amount of human contact was what kept women engaged. Same lesson, new setting: the support is the support.

A second study sits alongside it. Researchers surveyed 211 women in late perimenopause or beyond and found the women carrying heavier psychological symptoms, and more urogenital symptoms, scored higher for emotional eating. This is a snapshot study, so it cannot tell us what causes what. But it points at something I see constantly in practice: eating never happens in a vacuum. It happens inside anxiety, broken sleep, bodily discomfort and everything else a midlife week contains. When food has become tangled up with all of this, handing a woman a firmer set of food rules addresses the wrong end of the problem. Support the person, and the eating tends to ease. It rarely works the other way round.

Evidence status for both: early and observational respectively. Worth knowing about. Not worth rebuilding your life around.

When the sofa chat comes with a checkout

A UK launch caught my eye this week for what it says about where health marketing is heading. Holly Willoughby’s new YouTube series launched under the title Holly Willoughby Together With Voy, pairing the presenter with a digital health company whose services include weight-management treatment. Within days, press coverage reported the “With Voy” had quietly disappeared from the title, though the brand remained attached to the project.

Some context is worth having. Voy’s parent company has been on the wrong end of several Advertising Standards Authority rulings, most recently in May, when the ASA upheld complaints about promotional emails advertising prescription-only weight-loss medicines to the public with an undue sense of urgency attached. None of this concerns the new programme itself, and I found no ruling relating to it.

But the direction of travel deserves your attention. Lifestyle content and healthcare are blurring into one another. A viewer settles in for a warm conversation about midlife, and finds the sofa sits inside a branded ecosystem offering consultations, medication, coaching and a subscription. This doesn’t automatically make the service inappropriate. It does mean the most relatable content in your feed increasingly doubles as a shop doorway, and it’s worth knowing when you’ve walked through one. A presenter you’ve watched for years is a marketing asset precisely because you’ve watched her for years.

Social media watch

The big menopause community on Reddit opened its monthly weight discussion this month, and yes, I read the whole thread. The conversation moved through GLP-1 medication, big losses, loose skin, strength training and HRT. A Reddit thread is not evidence, and it doesn’t represent women generally, but it does show what women choose to talk about when handed an open space. The answer, still, is overwhelmingly weight.

I understand why, and none of this is a judgement on any woman in the thread. Body composition and metabolic health are real considerations in midlife. But reading it, I kept wishing a companion question sat pinned at the top, next to the one about the scales: what am I able to do this month I couldn’t do before? Strength, stamina, blood pressure and how you feel walking up a hill are quieter measures. They also say far more about what the next thirty years will hold.

One to feel good about

At a diabetes care conference in the US, a whole session was devoted to women’s cardiometabolic health as a continuum, from the reproductive years through menopause and beyond. A conference session is not new evidence, and I’m not presenting it as a finding. The reason it makes this week’s Edit is the framing. For years, the public menopause conversation lived in a symptom silo: hot flushes, periods, HRT, repeat. Increasingly, menopause is being placed where it belongs, inside the long arc of a woman’s heart and metabolic health. Menopause matters, and you are considerably more than a collection of its symptoms. What accumulates quietly over the coming decades, the blood pressure and the muscle and the sleep and the ordinary daily movement, will count for more than whichever supplement is trending this month.

That’s the third Edit, and this week’s thread is short enough to fit on a sticky note: midlife women are not short of programmes. There are apps for our minds, plans for our plates, protocols for our hormones and now sofa chats for our prescriptions. What’s in shorter supply is anything designed around the week we are truly living, with support attached and no checkout at the end. The ACT trial put numbers on it. Half of a group of willing volunteers couldn’t finish a four-week course, and you cannot willpower your way through a design problem.

So here’s my question for you this week. Think of the last plan or programme you unintentionally stepped away from. If it had been built around your real week, what’s the one thing it would have done differently?

Kim

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Of all the advice handed to women in midlife, ‘eat well’ might be the most complete-sounding and the least useful. Two words, said as though they settle the matter, when what they’re carrying is an entire field of science, a food industry with other plans for you, a gut with opinions of its own, and a water glass nobody remembered to mention. So as promised, the Wednesday deep dives start here, with the first of the six principles of Whole Health 360. Before we unpack any single corner of it, I want to show you the whole room, because once you see how much this principle holds, the two-word version stops looking like advice and starts looking like a table of contents.

My version of this principle has four strands. I think of them as the fork, the gut, the glass and the-food-environment-where-you-have-precious-little-control-over-access-even-less-over-availability-and-none-at-all-over-marketing-and-misleading-labelling-except-with-knowledge (which is precisely what we are going to look at in-depth to empower the choices you DO have). You’ll notice one of these names is not like the others. It seems fitting, somehow, that the strand about labels designed to mislead is the one that refuses to fit on a tidy label.

The fork is the part you already know, and the original pillar gets the substance right: a wholefood, plant-rich way of eating, close to the Mediterranean pattern, built on vegetables, pulses, whole grains and good fats. On this I have no argument. My quarrel is with what the advice became on its way to us, squeezed through decades of diet culture until ‘eat well’ started to mean eat less, eat clean, eat perfectly, apologise for toast. It never meant those things. The evidence points somewhere warmer: variety, colour, pleasure and enough, eaten mostly from plants, most of the time. The real test of a way of eating is whether it survives a hard fortnight and stays the course, and everything I include under this principle is built with that in mind.

The gut is why I’ve widened the pillar beyond the plate, because how you digest and respond to food matters as much as what is on the fork. You are feeding two parties at every meal: yourself, and the trillions of bacteria in your gut whose favourite food is fibre and whose favourite menu is a varied one. Research increasingly connects the state of the gut to immunity and to inflammation, that chronic low-level kind the overall pattern of our eating appears to nudge up or calm down over time. And then there is mood. The conversation between the gut and the brain runs in both directions, which is why a nervous stomach before a big day surprises nobody, and the influence of the gut on how we feel is some of the work I find most fascinating in the whole field. Bloating, irregularity, reflux and food reactions belong in this strand too. They are information, not inconveniences to push through.

The food environment, to give it its short name, is the strand I suspect will surprise you most, because it isn’t about you at all. Your food choices happen inside an environment: what’s available near you, how ultra-processed products are engineered and marketed, and how labelling is designed to be misread. If you have ever felt you were losing a battle in the supermarket, I want you to know some of the aisles are not a neutral playing field. There are products on those shelves developed specifically to be hard to stop eating, and front-of-pack claims written to keep your eye off the ingredients list. This is the strand where blame most needs handing back. We will learn to navigate those aisles together.

Editorial note: I have VERY strong feelings about this one and I will try not to be biased.

The glass is the newest strand, and I owe it to one of you. After the introductory post, a reader made the case for hydration, and the case was good, so my extension of the original nutrition principle now includes hydration. We talk endlessly about food and barely at all about fluid, yet even mild dehydration shows up as tiredness, headaches, foggy concentration and a shorter fuse, the very complaints so many midlife women bring to their GP. Thirst also becomes quieter as we age, so waiting to feel thirsty serves us less well over time. The old eight-glasses rule is folklore rather than science, but the practical guide is simple and free: aim for pale, straw-coloured urine, and yes, tea and coffee count towards it. And where does alcohol fit? (spoiler alert: it doesn’t hydrate you, however cold the glass).

Four strands to one principle, and none of them about discipline. This is the ground the rest of the series stands on.

And thank you again to the reader who suggested hydration. The principle is better for it, and the comments are open if something here deserves a closer look.

Kim

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We are moving into the latter part of the summer holidays. It might still be very warm where you are - here, we don’t know from one hour to the next. So, I am planning for supper in the sun in the garden - we’ll just eat inside if it’s warm and wet. If you spent any of last week staring into the fridge thinking ‘I can’t face it’ (for whatever reason), this post is your permission slip.

Here’s the belief I’d like us to put down this week: a proper supper has to be a hot one. It doesn’t. Hot dinners are a habit we carry over from colder months, and appetite naturally dips in warm weather anyway. What makes a supper proper is what’s on the plate, not the temperature it arrives at. Protein and fibre to hold you, a good fat to make it feel like a meal. None of them needs heat. Half the Mediterranean has been assembling supper this way for generations, and nobody accuses them of not cooking.

So this week, instead of one recipe idea, I’m handing you a formula you’ll get four or five suppers out of:

• something ripe (tomatoes are still a good fall back here)

• something with protein and fibre

• a good fat,

• something sharp to pull the whole plate together.

Should/could these come from the cupboard an fridge? Absolutely!

Tinned sardines on toast with ripe tomatoes fit. So does a hummus plate with whatever the salad drawer offers. Here’s the version we eat on repeat, and the best part is it comes together from the deli fridge and a couple of jars, so nothing depends on catching an ingredient on its one perfect day (NO avocados in sight: Hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard whispers ‘ripe’, gone over, brown and mushy).

Feta, sun blush tomato and lentil platter

A ten-minute assembly supper of salty feta and sweet sun blush tomatoes over dressed lentils. Substantial enough to be dinner rather than a pretty starter, with optional crisped artichoke hearts if you want to show off a bit.

Serves

2

Prep time

10 minutes

Cooking time

None for the plate itself. About 10 minutes in the air fryer if you’re doing the artichokes.

Ingredients

• 200 g feta, broken into large chunks

• 150 g sun blush tomatoes (the soft, semi-dried ones in oil, not sun-dried), drained, oil reserved

• 250 g pouch of cooked Puy lentils

• 2 large handfuls of rocket

• A small bunch of basil

• 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus 1 tbsp of the reserved tomato oil

• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar, or the juice of half a lemon

• Black pepper

• Optional: 280 g jar of artichoke hearts in olive oil, drained and halved

• Optional: a handful of pine nuts or toasted flaked almonds

Method

1. Crisp the artichokes (optional): drain the artichoke hearts, halve them and air fry at 200°C for 8 to 10 minutes until the edges turn golden and crisp. They’re already cooked, so you’re only adding texture. (Optional - toss them in a tablespoon of nutritional yeast before roasting)

2. Dress the lentils first: tip them into a bowl, add the olive oil and the spoonful of tomato oil with the vinegar, and toss well. Go easy on salt, as the feta and tomatoes bring plenty of their own. Lentils soak up a dressing far better than leaves do, so they get first go.

3. Build the plate: scatter the rocket over a large platter, spoon the dressed lentils over, then arrange the tomatoes and chunks of feta on top.

4. Finish: tear the basil over, add the warm artichokes and pine nuts if using, then a final drizzle of oil and a grind of pepper.

5. Serve: with bread if you like, and barely anything to wash up.

Functional Benefits

• A supper with staying power: lentils bring protein and fibre, feta adds protein and fat, so the plate holds you through the evening instead of sending you back to the cupboards at nine.

• Plant diversity: tomatoes, rocket, basil, lentils and artichokes all count toward the weekly variety your gut bacteria thrive on.

• The artichoke bonus: artichokes are a source of inulin, a type of fibre your gut bacteria particularly like, which is a good reason to stop treating the jar as a pizza-only ingredient.

• Polyphenols: extra-virgin olive oil brings the anti-inflammatory compounds at the heart of Mediterranean eating.

Cook’s Notes

• Sun blush and sun-dried are not the same thing. Sun blush (sometimes labelled semi-dried) are soft and sweet, still juicy in the middle. Sun-dried are chewier and far more intense, and they’ll bully the feta. Hold out for sun blush.

• Don’t pour the tomato oil away. It’s already infused and does half the work of the dressing for you.

• No air fryer? The artichokes are lovely straight from the jar, or ten minutes in a hot oven does the same job.

• It scales up easily, and tomorrow’s lunch packs itself. (Hubby’s first response was ‘is this it?’. He then finished his plate and went back for the rest of the lentils, so I’d make extra if I were you)

One assembled supper this week is enough. Once you’ve felt how good it is to eat well without switching anything on, the formula starts doing the work for you.

Tell me in the comments what lands on your plate when it’s too warm to cook. I’m always after new no-hob ideas.

See you in the kitchen,

Kim

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The story of the week: from proteinmaxxing to fibremaxxing

Next time you’re in the supermarket, count how many times you see the word protein. Protein porridge, protein bread, protein puddings, protein crisps, and my personal favourite, protein water. Foods which were never short of protein now announce it proudly on the front of the packet (the other half recently came home with a protein mousse “for us to try”. It’s still in the fridge). Somewhere along the way this acquired a name: proteinmaxxing, the idea that more protein is always better and every meal is a chance to push the number a little higher.

This week the backlash gathered pace, with growing criticism of ‘maxxing’ culture and of the widening gap between meeting a nutritional need and buying ever more elaborate products promising to maximise it. About time.

Let me be clear about one thing first, because I don’t want the pendulum swinging too far the other way. Protein matters in midlife. From our forties onwards we lose muscle more easily than we build it, and getting enough protein, alongside some form of resistance work, helps preserve the strength we’ll be relying on for decades. If you have a small appetite, eat lightly, avoid whole food groups or train regularly, protein deserves your attention. The marketing works precisely because the underlying concern is real.

But here is the number nobody prints on a packet. The UK recommendation for fibre is 30 grams a day. Average adult intake sits somewhere around 18. Most of us have a genuine, well-documented fibre gap. Most of us do not have a protein gap at all.

So when “fibremaxxing” started trending as the answer to proteinmaxxing, I braced myself. But strip away the silly name and what’s left is mostly conventional public health nutrition in a fashionable outfit: beans, lentils, oats, wholegrains, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds. Those foods bring far more than fibre. They feed your gut, steady your blood sugar (regular readers will recognise the Steady Plate thinking here) and are consistently linked with lower risks of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and bowel cancer. Notice, too, what each trend adds to your plate. Fibremaxxing, at its best, adds food. Proteinmaxxing, more often than not, adds powders, bars, shakes and reformulated snacks.

One caution, because “maxxing” anything is where I get off the bus. If you increase fibre suddenly, your gut will let you know about it. Build up gradually and drink plenty of fluid. Go gently if you have IBS or another gut condition. And this was never a choice between protein and fibre. Both matter. The trick is making room for enough protein without letting it crowd the plants off your plate. A tin of lentils stirred into whatever you’re already cooking this weekend covers more ground than any pudding with a macro split on the front of the label.

The market has noticed you

A JAMA investigation published this week took a long look at the booming menopause marketplace, where regulated hormone therapy and non-hormonal medicines now sit alongside compounded hormones, off-label testosterone, peptides, supplements, skincare and influencer-led ‘optimisation’ programmes. Some of this growth is good news. Women who were once told to put up with their symptoms have more routes to information and treatment than ever. But more choice has not meant more clarity.

Here’s what the research says about the online end of the market. A content analysis published earlier this year looked at 1,000 Instagram posts using menopause hashtags and found 661 of them promoting branded supplements. Fewer than one in five of those promotional posts came from anyone with clinical credentials. Nearly half of the most promoted products hid their doses inside proprietary blends, and the average cost was around 43 US dollars a month. That is a lot of money for ingredients you can’t fully see, recommended by people who profit when you buy.

The high street is joining in. This week an Australian company expanded a billboard campaign using the words “vaginal dryness” plainly and without euphemism, and a vaginal moisturiser co-created by Halle Berry (‘Juicy like a peach’) rolled into more than 400 beauty stores in the US. Part of me cheers. Genitourinary symptoms of menopause are common and treatable, yet too many women still put up with them in silence because nobody told them otherwise. Plain language on a billboard chips away at that. But a celebrity’s good experience is not evidence a product works better than cheaper established options, or than the local oestrogen a GP prescribes. When menopause care moves from the pharmacy to the beauty aisle, visibility goes up, and so does the risk of treating a medical symptom purely as a shopping decision. Persistent pain, bleeding, urinary symptoms or ongoing discomfort deserve a clinician, not a checkout.

So before any midlife product goes in your basket, four questions. What specific symptom is it for? Is the evidence trials or testimonials? Can you see every ingredient and dose? And does the person recommending it also sell it? If it stumbles on two or more, leave it on the shelf.

Underneath all of this sits a shift worth naming (editorial note: I have feelings about this one). Midlife is increasingly framed as an urgent optimisation project, as though women who don’t start the right supplement stack or protocol in time have missed their window. Prevention does matter. Bone health, strength, sleep, blood pressure and heart health all deserve attention in this season. But there is a difference between supporting your health and being made anxious about it, and a woman who started out wanting better sleep should not find herself six months later with a drawer full of powders and a subscription she’s afraid to cancel. Being noticed as an audience is welcome. Being farmed as a market is not.

Approach with caution: Eating windows and dementia

You may have seen headlines this week claiming an earlier eating window “fights dementia”. Here’s what the study did. A small trial presented at a nutrition conference followed 47 women aged 50 to 79, all living with overweight or obesity, for six months. Everyone cut around 500 calories a day. Half also kept their eating to an eight or nine hour window, typically finishing by 6pm (a lovely idea until anyone else in your house has an opinion about dinner time). Both groups lost the same amount of weight, around 6.8 kilos, but the earlier-window group did a little better on some cognitive tests, mostly involving planning and problem-solving. The memory findings were trends rather than clear differences.

That’s it. No dementia measured, no brain scans, no long-term follow-up, and no peer review yet. It’s an interesting hint that meal timing might matter beyond weight, possibly through our circadian rhythms, and I’ll be watching for larger trials. In the meantime, if finishing dinner earlier suits your sleep and your evenings, lovely, carry on. But it isn’t a rule, and for anyone with a history of disordered eating, blood sugar concerns, a small appetite or medication needing food, a restricted eating window isn’t something to start off the back of a headline.

What I didn’t find this week

I went looking for strong new research on protein requirements, resistance training, Mediterranean-style eating or personalised nutrition in midlife women, and came back mostly empty-handed. I’d rather tell you that than dress up an old study as news. But the gap itself is telling. Menopause products and campaigns are arriving far faster than the independent trials which would tell us what midlife women need. The marketing is sprinting. The science is walking.

That’s the second Edit, and the thread running through this week is a simple one: midlife women are finally being noticed, and midlife women are also being sized up as a market, and those are two different things. A product can be convenient without being essential. A preliminary finding can be interesting without becoming a rule. Perhaps the most useful form of self-care on offer this week costs nothing at all: the confidence to ask what matters, and to leave the rest on the shelf.

So here’s my question for you. What’s one product or one rule you could put down this month, without your health noticing the difference?

See you next Friday!

Kim

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And yet, almost every time I present the slide, I watch a woman somewhere in the room quietly fold her arms.

I understand the arm fold, because I have done it myself. Read as a list of instructions, the pillars sound like they were written for someone with a personal chef, a spare hour at lunchtime and nobody waking them at 3am. Eat well. Move more. Sleep deeply. If those three phrases were as easy as that to implement, you would have solved it years ago. The evidence was never the problem. The translation was, and so was the world the pillars were written in. They come from a time before ultra-processed food filled half the supermarket, before the phone came to bed with us, and before an algorithm learned what keeps you scrolling at midnight.

So I have taken the six principles and extended them to reflect modern life. These are the foundations of Whole Health 360, and they are the spine of everything coming next here. Every Wednesday from now on, I’ll take one and go deep. Today, I want you to meet all six.

1. Nutrition, including your gut and your food environment

The original pillar calls for a wholefood, plant-rich way of eating, and on the substance I have no argument. But food no longer happens in a vacuum, if it ever did. My version of this principle takes in gut health and inflammation, because how you digest and respond to food matters as much as what is on the fork. And it takes in the environment your food choices happen in: what is available near you, how ultra-processed products are engineered and marketed, and how labelling is designed to be misread. If you have ever felt you were losing a battle in the supermarket, I want you to know that some of the aisles are not a neutral playing field. We will learn to navigate them together.

2. Physical activity, including time in nature

Movement still matters, and in midlife strength matters more than most of us were told. But my update adds where the movement happens. There is a growing body of research on green and blue spaces, the parks, woods, rivers and coastlines, suggesting time in them supports mood and stress recovery in ways a gym floor does not replicate. I’ll be honest about the strength of this evidence as we go, but the practical upshot is appealing: a brisk walk somewhere green is two principles for the price of one.

3. Restorative sleep, taken seriously

The original pillar prescribes good sleep as though sleep were something you order like a taxi. My version treats sleep as a health area with real conditions and real fixes in it. Snoring is information. So are insomnia, sleep apnoea and the particular chaos of shift work. Blue light in the evening has a seat at this table too. If your sleep is broken, the answer is rarely to try harder at sleeping. Sometimes it is a habit change, and sometimes it is a conversation with your GP. Both count as taking sleep seriously, and neither is a failure.

4. Stress management and building resilience

Manage your stress always sounded to me like an accusation dressed as advice, as though stress were a personal admin failure. Modern stress is chronic and low-grade, and it leaves fingerprints: on cortisol and adrenaline, on hormone balance, on the gut, and eventually on the state we now call burnout. My update pairs the management of stress with the deliberate building of resilience, because a body kept on constant low-level alert eventually sends the bill. Recovery has to be scheduled, the way you schedule everything else. It will not volunteer itself.

5. Reducing what depletes you

The original pillar says avoid risky substances, meaning tobacco and excess alcohol, and both still belong here, discussed honestly and without moralising. But I have widened this principle, because the things quietly draining us now extend well beyond what comes in a bottle. Screen time, social media, the newer habit of leaning on AI for everything, and the dopamine loops built into all of them. Let me be clear about the emphasis: the problem is not the technology, and this will never be a lecture about throwing your phone in a drawer. The problem is the pattern of overuse and dependency, which behaves remarkably like other dependencies we already understand. That means it responds to the same kind of strategies, and we will work through them.

6. Personalised positive social connection

Connection belongs in any honest picture of health, and loneliness harms us in ways researchers keep confirming. But the original pillar tends to assume one model of connection, all dinner parties and big friendship groups. My update adds one word: personalised. Neurodivergence and individual differences shape what nourishing connection looks like. For one person it is a full table. For another it is one trusted friend, a quiet walk, or a shared silence. The goal is connection which leaves you fuller than it found you, in whatever form your particular brain and life make real.

Those are the six. You’ll notice none of them asks you to become a different person. They ask smaller questions of the week you already have, and they make room for the world as it is now rather than the world the textbooks assumed.

One request before next Wednesday. Which of the six made you fold your arms? That one is where the work is, and I would rather start where you are than where a slide says you should be. Let me know in the comments.

Kim

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If you opened my fridge yesterday evening (Sunday), you would have found a row of glass jars, pale and speckled through with pink. Raspberry and chia puddings, made in ten minutes while the kettle boiled, one for each of the next few mornings (and a couple extra because hubby always says he doesn’t want any and then asks if there are any spares!). They are part of my plan for this week, and before I tell you why, I want to show you the shape of what Whole Health 360 is becoming.

From this week, the publication settles into a rhythm.

Mondays will bring Meals for Motivation from The 360 Kitchen: a short post to set you up for the week ahead. An idea, suggestion and a recipe for the days in front of you, sent early enough to be useful while the week is still unfolding.

On Wednesdays I’ll go deeper, with a longer piece built around the six principles of Whole Health 360. These are drawn from lifestyle medicine, the branch of healthcare with the strongest evidence for how daily life shapes long-term health: how we eat, how we move, how we sleep, how we handle stress, how connected we feel to other people, and our relationship with things like alcohol. One principle at a time, with no jargon and always with something practical to take away.

Then on Friday evenings, The Whole Health 360 Edit will drop into your inbox. A round-up of what has been happening in women’s health, psychology, research and more, with an unbiased, clear steer on which headlines deserve your attention, which ‘influencers’ to tune out (see note about bananas below: does ANYONE have a banana and blueberry smoothie to maximise polyphenol interactions?) and which ones are trying to sell you something not worth the hype. If you caught the first Edit, you’ll know the flavour.

Editorial note: This coming Friday I will try not to jump into the ‘bananas ruin blueberries in smoothies because, you know, polyphenols’ debate, but I won’t promise – this is exactly what over-optimisation look like and I have feelings about it!

A reset, as I mean it, starts with one simple question: what would help this particular week feel steadier? What a gentle reset looks like for me will be different from what it looks like for you, and both are allowed.

This week, mine looks like those jars.

Mornings are where my good intentions have historically gone to die. Not because I lack willpower, but because 8am is the worst possible time to be making decisions. So on Sunday evening, while I was pottering anyway, I made breakfast for the week. Chia seeds bring fibre and plant omega-3 fats, while the raspberries bring sharpness and colour. The coconut makes the whole thing feel like a small treat rather than a duty. And because the decision is already made, the first steady moment of my day happens before I have properly woken up. If I miss a morning, nothing is lost. A jar keeps.

Here is the recipe in full.

Raspberry and chia breakfast pots

A make-ahead breakfast of chia seeds soaked overnight in coconut milk, set over smashed raspberries with vanilla and a little desiccated coconut. Gently sweet, and ready before you are. High in fibre and plant omega-3s, it holds you steady through the morning without any cooking at all.

Serves: Makes 3 generous puddings

Prep time: 10 minutes, plus overnight in the fridge

Cooking time: None

Ingredients

- 6 tbsp chia seeds
- 500 ml milk of choice (I used a coconut milk – bought but it’s really simple to make your own from unsweetened dessiccated coconut)
- 12 to 15 raspberries (4 or 5 for each pot), plus extra to serve
- 3 tbsp desiccated coconut (optional)
- 3 tsp vanilla extract
- A drizzle of sweetener of choice for each jar (I use chicory syrup)
- A small handful of pumpkin seeds, to serve

Method

1. Start with the fruit: drop 4 or 5 raspberries into the bottom of each jar and smash them gently with a fork. Add a drizzle of your chosen sweetener to each.

2. Make the chia mix: in a jug, whisk together the milk, vanilla and desiccated coconut, if using. Stir in the chia seeds.

3. Wait, then stir again: leave the mixture for 10 minutes, then give it a thorough second stir. This is the step which stops the seeds clumping at the bottom.

4. Fill and chill: pour the mixture over the raspberries, put the lids on and refrigerate overnight. A couple of hours will do at a push, but overnight gives the best texture.

5. To serve: top each pot with more berries and a scattering of pumpkin seeds.

Functional benefits

Fibre, twice over: chia is one of the richest plant sources of fibre, and chicory syrup adds inulin, a prebiotic fibre which feeds your gut bacteria. Together they slow the release of sugars into the blood.

Plant omega-3s: chia provides ALA, the plant form of omega-3. The body converts ALA to the forms found in oily fish only partially, so this doesn’t replace your salmon, but ALA has value in its own right.

A steadier morning: fibre and fat digest slowly, so this breakfast produces a gentler blood sugar curve than toast or most cereals, and less of the mid-morning scramble for a biscuit.

One decision, made once: the quiet behavioural benefit. Prepping on Sunday removes five separate morning negotiations before they start.

Approximate nutrition per pudding

Made with a coconut milk drink and topped with berries and pumpkin seeds, each pot comes out at roughly 250 to 300 calories, with around 7 g of protein, 10 to 12 g of fibre and about 3 g of plant omega-3 (ALA). The fibre alone gets you about a third of the way to the 30 g a day UK guidance recommends. Please note these figures are estimates. They shift with your choice of milk, your sweetener, the size of your berries and the generosity of your spoonfuls, so treat them as a guide.

Cook’s notes

- Your milk changes everything. A coconut milk drink keeps things light. Tinned coconut milk turns this into something closer to a dessert. Dairy or soya milk will add protein.

- For a bigger protein start, stir a spoonful of thick Greek yoghurt or half a scoop of vanilla protein powder into the milk before adding the chia, with an extra splash of milk to loosen.

- Frozen raspberries work beautifully. Smash them straight from the freezer and they will defrost in the jar overnight.

- If chicory syrup is new to you, start with a small drizzle. Inulin suits some digestions more than others, and it is kinder to meet it gradually.

- The pots keep well for around four days in the fridge. Double the quantities if you want the full working week covered (and a spare for the other half).

- If the texture of whole chia isn’t for you, blitz the soaked mixture briefly before it goes into the jars for a smooth, mousse-like pudding.

So here is my question for you this Monday. What would a gentle reset look like in your week? Not the dramatic version. The version with a lid on it, waiting quietly in the fridge.

Kim

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The story of the week: safety, not willpower

You know the small adaptations. The baggier top instead of the leggings. The corner of the gym floor you never quite venture into. The headphones left at home so you can hear who’s behind you. The run rescheduled to daylight, or dropped altogether when the evenings draw in. Most women I know have a version of this, so practised by now it barely registers as a decision.

New research from Sport England, developed with This Girl Can and ukactive and reported this week, puts numbers to it. Among women aged 16 to 34, 86% had experienced harassment or intimidation while exercising in the previous three years. Of the women in this group who hadn’t used a gym or leisure centre in the past year, 43% said concern about sexual harassment had shaped the decision. And of those who had experienced or witnessed harassment, 62% changed how they exercised because of it.

The survey looked at younger women, but I doubt any of it surprises you. If you’re in your forties or fifties, you may simply have had longer to build your workarounds.

Here’s why this matters to me. For years, the conversation about women and exercise has been framed as a motivation problem. Not enough discipline, not enough confidence, download this app, find your why. This research says something quite different. A woman who avoids the weights area or stays home isn’t failing to want it enough. She is responding sensibly to an environment where she doesn’t feel safe. The fix for a safety problem is not a habit tracker.

There’s something hopeful in the response, too. Sport England, This Girl Can and ukactive are promoting a resource called Safer Spaces to Move, which helps gyms and leisure centres prevent and respond to harassment. Notice the direction of change: for once, the environment is being asked to adapt, not the woman.

Worth your attention

A trial published in JAMA Network Open this week tested a suite of self-guided mental health apps with 313 women recovering from breast cancer. The apps reduced anxiety meaningfully compared with an information-only app, though not depression. The detail I loved sits in the fine print. Women who struggled to engage in the first week were offered a small amount of human coaching, and with a little contact, they used the programme more. Not a whole new programme. A person, noticing, and reaching out. If you’ve ever abandoned a wellness app by week two, the lesson is worth keeping: the app was never the support. The support is the support.

Meanwhile, a large trial in JAMA sent carefully made safe-sleep videos by text to nearly 1,800 women in low-income US health programmes, during and after pregnancy, and found the videos changed almost none of the behaviours they targeted. Infant sleep is a long way from most of our lives now, but the finding belongs in this newsletter because it confirms something I come back to constantly: information alone rarely changes behaviour. Real life gets a vote. Exhaustion gets a vote, and so does everyone else in the house. If knowing better were enough, we would all be in bed by ten with a book. So the next time you fall short of something you knew perfectly well how to do, remember these women, and blame the plan rather than yourself.

Approach with caution

The luteal phase is having a moment. Search interest and social media content about the second half of the menstrual cycle have grown enormously, and some of this is overdue. Most of us were taught next to nothing about our own cycles, and recognising a monthly pattern in your mood, appetite, sleep or energy is useful self-knowledge. It helps some women identify genuine conditions such as premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which deserve proper recognition and care.

But where attention goes, commerce follows. There are now luteal phase teas, supplements, meal plans and coaching programmes, most of them built on far more certainty than the evidence supports. Your cycle is real. The idea of eating and moving in tune with your body is appealing, and not unreasonable. What hasn’t been shown is any need for a branded protocol to do it. Noticing your own patterns costs nothing, and no one profits from you doing it. That, I suspect, is why nobody advertises it.

On my radar

Two things I’m watching rather than reporting. There’s a growing conversation, currently loudest in Australia, about the overlap between perimenopause symptoms and ADHD, particularly around concentration, memory, sleep and emotional regulation. The overlap is clinically plausible and the conversation matters, but the claims circulating online are beyond what I can verify, so I’ll return to this when the evidence is firmer. If brain fog is making you wonder about either, a checklist on social media can’t tell them apart. A good clinician can.

And at the end of the month, the National Institutes of Health in the US hosts a research roundtable on the gut microbiome and women’s health, which may give us something meatier to chew on soon.

That’s the first Whole Health Edit. The thread running through this week is one I’ll keep pushing: you are not short of health information, and you never were. What makes the difference is whether your environment and your circumstances let you act on it.

What’s one adaptation you’ve been making for so long you’d stopped noticing it was there?

Kim

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The warm weather is showing no sign of packing up, and long may it last (I am NOT complaining!). A stretch of heat like this strips my cooking back to the techniques I trust most. Standing over a hob is out. What stays are the methods where the food mostly looks after itself, and after a few weeks of salads and no-cook dinners, one of them has been doing more work than all the others put together. The traybake.

So this week the tin gets its own post, because of all the hands-off methods I lean on, this is the one I rate above the rest for getting a good dinner onto the table with the least effort. One tin, a hot oven, and ten minutes of chopping before the kitchen runs itself. The scarpaccia recipe opened this publication and the summer rolls recipe gave the oven a day off, so it feels right for post three to introduce the workhorse behind half the dinners in this house.

I know what you’re thinking. The oven, in July? Hear me out. A traybake is not a hob dinner. Nobody stands over it. The tin goes in, the back door goes open, and you are in the garden with a drink for half an hour while dinner sorts itself out. And because a big tray happily feeds you twice, tomorrow’s lunch is already done and eaten cold, no oven required.

The time saving is the obvious part. The flavour is the stronger argument. When vegetables roast in a hot, dry oven, their surfaces brown and their natural sugars concentrate, which is why a roasted tomato tastes so very good. Browning creates hundreds of new flavour compounds you simply never meet in a pan of simmering water. The edges of a roasted pepper, the sticky corner of a red onion, the crusty underside of a butter bean: none of these need a chef. They need heat and neglect.

The nutrition follows the same logic. Boiling sends a fair share of the water-soluble vitamins out of the vegetables and into the cooking water, which most of us then pour down the sink. Roasting keeps everything in the tin. Cooking tomatoes actually makes their lycopene, the red pigment being studied for heart and skin health, easier for the body to absorb, and the olive oil everything roasts in helps carry those fat-soluble compounds into you rather than through you. Add the fact the skins stay on, in keeping with this kitchen’s line-of-least-resisitance approach, delivers fibre, polyphenols and a respectable count towards your weekly plant diversity. No peeling. Not the courgettes, not even the garlic, which roasts sweetly inside its papery skin and squeezes out like a savoury caramel goo.

There is a behaviour change point hiding in here too, and it is the reason I keep coming back to this method with clients. The dinners we cook most often are not the ones we love most. They are the ones with the fewest steps between intention and plate (and taste great!). Lower the effort and the good dinner happens on an ordinary Wednesday, not only on a well-rested Sunday. A traybake asks so little of you and the number of combinations is endless. You can also reduce the cooking time and bung them in an air fryer for great results.

Here is the version currently on rotation at ours.

Mediterranean butter bean traybake with halloumi

Description

A one-tin summer dinner of peppers, courgettes, tomatoes and red onion roasted until sweet and blistered, with butter beans turning golden in the pan juices and halloumi on top. Ten minutes of chopping, half an hour of doing nothing, and enough left over for tomorrow’s lunch.

Serves 4, or 2 tonight with lunch sorted for tomorrow

Prep time

10 minutes

Cooking time

35 to 40 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 red peppers, deseeded and cut into chunky strips

• 2 courgettes, thickly sliced (unpeeled)

• 1 large red onion, cut into wedges

• 250 g cherry tomatoes, left whole

• 6 garlic cloves, unpeeled

• 1 x 400 g tin butter beans, drained and patted dry

• 3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

• 1 tsp dried oregano

• ½ tsp smoked paprika

• 225 g halloumi, sliced into 8

• 1 lemon

• A handful of fresh basil, torn

• Sea salt and black pepper

Method

1. Heat the oven: 180°C. Put your largest roasting tin in to warm while you chop. A hot tin gets the browning started the moment the vegetables land.

2. Chop chunky: cut everything roughly even and err on the side of big. Small pieces steam and sulk. Big pieces roast.

3. Load the tin: toss the peppers, courgettes, onion, tomatoes and garlic cloves with the olive oil, oregano, paprika and a good pinch of salt, straight in the tin. Spread everything out in a single layer. If the tin looks crowded, use two. Crowding is the difference between roasted and stewed.

4. Roast: 20 minutes, no peeking.

5. Add the beans and halloumi: scatter the butter beans over the tray so they land in the juices, lay the halloumi slices on top, and return to the oven for 15 to 20 minutes until the cheese is golden and the vegetable edges are properly browned.

6. Finish: find the garlic cloves and squeeze the soft insides out over the tray, discarding the skins. Add a big squeeze of lemon, a grind of pepper and the torn basil.

7. Serve: as it is, or with couscous, flatbreads or a grain of your choice to stretch it further.

8. If you’re feeling fancy, dollop some good quality pesta sauce on before serving.

Functional Benefits

• Plant diversity: eight plants in one tin before you’ve added a single side, feeding the range of gut bacteria linked with better digestion and immune function.

• Better absorbed antioxidants: roasting the tomatoes increases available lycopene, and the olive oil helps your body take up these fat-soluble compounds.

• Steady energy: fibre and protein from the butter beans alongside the vegetables make a dinner digested slowly, without the mid-evening slump.

Cook’s Notes

• This is a formula more than a recipe. Aubergine, fennel, squash and mushrooms all rotate through happily. Harder vegetables go in from the start, cut a little smaller.

• For a vegan version, skip the halloumi and add a second tin of beans with an extra pinch of smoked paprika, or crumble over a plant-based feta at the end.

• Leftovers are the hidden second gift. Eat cold with grains and a spoonful of yoghurt, fold through couscous, or chop through salad leaves with the lemony pan juices as dressing.

• The tin will look absurdly full of vegetables when raw. Trust the process. Everything shrinks as the water cooks off, which is exactly where the flavour comes from.

So the kitchen now has three moves: a bake, a no-cook, and the tin. Between them they cover most weeks of the year, and the slow cooker is still waiting patiently for October.

Tell me in the comments: what goes in your tin when it’s a fend-for-yourself kind of evening?

See you in the kitchen,

Kim

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The oven is having a day off. So is the hob, mostly. Quite frankly the words summer, sun, beach and picnic do not get rolled out very often here in Northern Ireland. But they do today!

There’s a beach (birthday) party this afternoon and my kitchen counter currently looks like a veggie bomb has exploded a little rainbow of veggies on every surface: herbs everywhere, a stack of rice paper wrappers, ribbons of carrot and cucumber, and a bowl of peanut sauce I keep “testing” with a spoon.

I’m bringing Thai summer rolls, and I want to make the case for them as the best thing you’ll ever carry to a beach or a picnic. Most party food falls apart in the heat. Sausage rolls sweat, and anything with mayonnaise becomes a gamble by mid afternoon. Summer rolls do the opposite. They stay cool and crunchy, a self-contained salad you eat with your hands, and they arrive looking better than most things you could have laboured over.

They’re also quietly one of the most nutritious things on any picnic blanket. Each roll is a bundle of raw vegetables, which means the fibre, the colour compounds, the vitamins and the water content all arrive intact. On a hot day the water matters more than we give credit for. Cucumber and lettuce are both over 95 per cent water, so you’re hydrating while you graze, which is more than the crisps are doing for anyone. The tofu brings protein, the peanut sauce brings fats, and together they slow everything down so you’re not riding the blood sugar wave between the bread and the birthday cake. Party food and steady energy are not usually on speaking terms. These two get along fine.

There’s a plant diversity win hiding in here too. Depending on what you tuck inside, one batch of rolls carries eight or nine different plants, and gut bacteria count wrappers full of raw veg exactly the same as any worthy salad. Nobody at the beach needs to know they’re eating strategically. They’ll be too busy asking how you got them so neat.

Which brings me to a confession: your first roll will not be neat. Mine never is. The wrapper tears, or the whole thing ends up shaped like a duvet in a pillowcase. The second one is better. By the fourth you’ve found the rhythm, and by the twelfth you’re wondering why you don’t make these every week.

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Thai summer rolls with peanut dipping sauce

Description

Cool, crunchy rice paper rolls packed with marinated tofu, rice noodles, raw vegetables and a scattering of fresh herbs, with a creamy peanut and lime sauce for dunking. No oven required, they travel beautifully, and they hold their own on a hot day when everything else on the table is wilting.

Makes

12 rolls, enough for 4 to 6 people as part of a spread

Prep time

40 minutes, including rolling (faster with helpers)

Cooking time

10 minutes, for the tofu only

Ingredients

For the rolls

• 12 rice paper wrappers (22 cm), plus a few spares for learning curves

• 100 g dried vermicelli rice noodles

• 280 g firm tofu, pressed and cut into strips (tofu is optional - these work really well with just veggies)

• 1 tbsp tamari or soy sauce

• 1 tsp toasted sesame oil

• 1 carrot, cut into fine matchsticks

• ½ cucumber, deseeded and cut into batons

• 1 red pepper, very thinly sliced

• 100 g red cabbage, finely shredded

• 2 spring onions, finely sliced lengthways

• A big bunch of mint and coriander, leaves picked

• 6 soft lettuce leaves, shredded little gem are best

• 1 tsp sesame seeds (optional)

For the peanut sauce

• 4 tbsp smooth peanut butter

• 1 tbsp tamari or soy sauce

• Juice of 1 lime

• 1 tsp maple syrup or honey

• 1 small garlic clove, finely grated

• 1 tsp sriracha or a pinch of chilli flakes (optional)

• 3 to 5 tbsp warm water, to loosen

Method

1. Cook the tofu: toss the tofu strips with the tamari and sesame oil, then fry in a hot pan for 8 to 10 minutes, turning until golden on all sides. Set aside to cool completely. Warm filling makes wrappers sticky and tempers are lost.

2. Soak the noodles: cover the vermicelli with boiling water and leave for 3 to 4 minutes until soft. Drain, rinse under cold water and snip into shorter lengths with scissors. This makes the rolls far easier to eat.

3. Make the sauce: whisk the peanut butter, tamari, lime juice, maple syrup, garlic and chilli together, then add warm water a spoonful at a time until you have a smooth, pourable dip. Taste, then adjust.

4. Set up your station: arrange all the fillings in bowls, and fill a wide shallow dish (a pie dish is perfect) with warm water. Have a chopping board ready for rolling and a plate lined with baking parchment for the finished rolls.

5. Soften the wrapper: dip one rice paper wrapper in the warm water for about 10 seconds. Take it out while still slightly firm. This is the secret: the wrapper keeps softening on the board, and an over-soaked wrapper tears the moment you look at it unkindly.

6. Fill: lay the wrapper flat and place a piece of lettuce on the lower third. On top, add a small pinch of noodles, a strip or two of tofu, a few matchsticks of each vegetable, a scatter of herbs and a few sesame seeds if using. Less is more. The most common mistake is generosity.

7. Roll: fold the bottom edge up and over the filling, fold in both sides, then roll away from you firmly but gently, like a small burrito. The wrapper seals itself.

8. Repeat: continue with the rest, spacing the finished rolls apart on the parchment so they don’t stick to each other.

9. Serve: halve on the diagonal if you’re feeling cheffy, and serve with the peanut sauce for dunking.

Functional Benefits

• Plant diversity: one roll carries eight or more different plants, feeding the range of gut bacteria linked with better digestion and immune function.

• Steady energy: protein from the tofu and fats from the peanut sauce alongside all the fibre make a snack digested slowly, without the spike and slump of most party food.

• Hydration on a plate: cucumber and lettuce carry water into a hot day at the beach, with potassium and vitamin C from the pepper and cabbage.

Cook’s Notes

• To transport: pack the rolls in a single layer with baking parchment between them, cover with a sheet of damp kitchen paper, and carry in a cool bag. Take the sauce in a jam jar. Avoid long stints in the fridge, as chilled rice paper turns tough and chewy.

• Make them yours: cooked prawns or shredded chicken swap in for the tofu without changing anything else. Mango strips are lovely with the peanut sauce if you want a sweeter roll.

• For a peanut-free version, swap the peanut butter for tahini and keep everything else the same. You end up with an equally good sesame sauce.

• Rolls are best made the day you eat them, ideally within 6 to 8 hours. Happily, they are quick enough to make the morning of.

The scarpaccia opened this kitchen with the oven on. The summer rolls show that we don’t always need one. Same idea both times though: good food with minimal fuss, eaten outside with people you like.

Tell me in the comments: what do you bring to a summer gathering when you want something better than a bag of crisps but still want your morning back?

See you in the kitchen at the beach,

Kim x

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If there is one idea I want this new, sibling publication to Whole Health 360 to stand for, it is that a good meal is allowed to be easy. So, we are opening with an absolute favourite from the archive, freshened up for its new home. I’ll be bringing a few more across over the coming weeks while the shelves fill, because some recipes deserve a second outing, and this one has been requested more than any other.

It is a scarpaccia: a thin, crisp courgette bake from the Tuscan coast, and the name translates as something close to “old shoe”. The Italians mean the shape, flat as a worn sole, though I like to think there is a lesson in a dish this good being named without a shred of vanity. It asks almost nothing of you. No peeling, naturally. The courgettes are grated, salted and left alone to do the hard work themselves, and the whole thing is happy eaten in the garden, warm from the tray.

July food, in other words.

Tuscan courgette scarpaccia

Description

A thin, golden, crisp-edged bake from the Tuscan coast that turns a glut of courgettes into something between a flatbread and a savoury tart. Plant-forward, olive oil rich, and just as good cold, which makes it perfect for eating outside.

Serves

4 as a starter, or 2 with a big salad

Prep time

15 minutes, plus 30 minutes for salting

Cooking time

35 to 40 minutes

Ingredients

• 500 g courgettes, grated

• 1 small onion, very thinly sliced

• 1 tsp sea salt, for drawing out moisture*

• 70 g plain flour

• 30 g fine cornmeal

• 250 ml cold water

• 4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for the tray

• 30 g hard cheese, finely grated*

• A handful of fresh herbs, chopped (basil or thyme work well)*

• Black pepper

• Pine nuts or sesame seeds, for the top

Method

1. Salt the courgettes: toss the courgette and onion slices with the salt in a colander and leave them over the sink for 30 minutes. This draws out the water and is the difference between crisp and soggy.

2. Squeeze: press out as much moisture as you manage, using your hands or a clean tea towel. Be firm. They take it well.

3. Make the batter: whisk the flour, cornmeal, water and olive oil into a smooth, thin batter.

4. Combine: stir in the courgettes, onion, cheese, herbs and a generous grind of pepper.

5. Bake: spread the mixture thinly over a well oiled baking tray, scatter with pine nuts or sesame seeds, and bake at 200°C (180°C fan) for 35 to 40 minutes until deep golden and crisp at the edges.

6. Serve: cut into squares and eat warm or at room temperature, ideally outdoors, weather be damned.

Functional Benefits

• Plant diversity: courgettes, onion, herbs and seeds all count toward the weekly plant variety your gut bacteria thrive on.

• Polyphenols: extra-virgin olive oil brings the anti-inflammatory compounds at the heart of Mediterranean eating.

• Light but steady: fibre from the vegetables and fat from the oil and seeds make a plate that holds you without weighing down a warm evening.

Cook’s Notes

• A mandoline makes the onion slicing quick, but a sharp knife and patience work fine. Aim for slices thin enough to see light through.

• Courgette glut season is when this recipe earns its keep. It swallows half a kilo without complaint.

• For a gluten-free version, swap the plain flour for a gluten-free blend. The cornmeal already does much of the crisping. For extra taste, fibre and nutrients, chickpea flour also works well.

So the kitchen is open. More favourites will follow over the coming weeks while the new recipes take shape, and the ‘No need to peel’ series starts soon. Bring your appetite, and your shortcuts.

Tell me in the comments: what is the dish you make on repeat when courgettes take over in July?

See you in the kitchen,

Kim

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