– TO EXPLORE NEW WAYS OF OVERCOMING
HEALTH INEQUITIES CAUSED BY COVID
A new charity, The Sustainable Health Foundation (SHF) has been launched to find new ways of addressing, with the hope of overcoming, for the greater good, the profound impacts of poor-quality diets and often deleterious lifestyle choices on people’s health. These impacts have been laid bare by the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic. If not addressed promptly and effectively, the consequences will reverberate for decades to come.
Dr Jan Knight a trustee of The SHF said, “The NHS has done an amazing job helping the many survivors with severe covid-19 disease, but communities now desperately need state-of-the-art, hands-on nutrition and lifestyle guidance and health monitoring to help them rebuild their resilience.” She added, “Top down public health guidance is simply not enough and has been shown time and time again to be ineffective for those who need it most.”
Covid-19 has contributed to well-documented inequities in health with the most disadvantaged communities receiving a double blow. They already carried a disproportionate amount of the nation’s chronic disease burden. But once Covid struck, they have also suffered the most severe outcomes, as a greater prevalence of comorbidities has made them more susceptible.
The Sustainable Health Foundation will be piloting new systems of community health guidance and monitoring – to help individuals in targeted communities to better understand how their choices in life, from what, when and how they eat, to how they move, interact with others, or recreate, affect different systems in their body.
“Covid has affected so many different strands of people’s lives,” said another trustee of the new foundation, Mr Liam Young. “That means if we’re to help empower people to make changes that provide tangible benefits both to their health and their lives, we need to change the way we look at health. This will mean focusing more on how we create health, and not just how we manage disease.”
The new approach helps people to explore their “ecological terrain” – their level of function across 12 different domains of their lives. Taking into account their genetic and environmental backgrounds, it helps them to assess, among other things, their metabolic flexibility, their response to stress, their emotional health, and even their sense of purpose in life.
Rachel Hoyle, the foundation’s final trustee, said, “Given our health is so deeply interconnected with how we eat, move, sleep and relax, inspiring better natural wellness through self-care and, where needed, professionally-guided care, is key. We’re now raising funds to build the digital platform for the ecological terrain that will allow people to identify health and fitness professionals familiar with the approach who can guide and advise them in specific domains of their health.”
The SHF charity aims to go live with pilot testing of its new approach that applies sustainability principles to human health in April 2022. It will be launched at their conference “The Great Health Reset” planned to take place at The Institute of Directors in London on 18th and 19th March.
ENDS.
Contact
Please contact Michelle Hallworth, Relationship Manager, on +44 (0)1483 362210 or m.hallworth@yourshf.org for further information about The Sustainable Health Foundation and “The Great Health Reset” symposium.
Website: yourshf.org
EDITOR’S NOTES
About the Sustainable Health Foundation – (Registration no. 1188471)
The Sustainable Health Foundation (SHF) seeks to advance the education of the public and health professionals, in nutrition and its health benefits; also to preserve and protect good health through research into nutrition and its health benefits, and to disseminate and publish the useful results of such research for the benefit of society as a whole.
It is our mission to revitalise communities by co-creating health, wellbeing and vitality — especially through improved nutrition and lifestyle.
Health inequalities, which have worsened significantly as a result of the pandemic, exist throughout different parts of our country and addressing them is one of our top priorities.
Our aim is to regenerate health in communities using a proactive, people-led, sustainable model guided by health professionals who will focus on optimising functional markers of health, rather than disease.
About the Trustees
JAN KNIGHT PhD
A co-founder of Knight Scientific (a world leader in products for oxidative stress, antioxidants and free radical research), Jan has been a scientist for many years – having earned a First Class Honours degree in Science from the Open University and then her PhD from London University in the field of Marine Biochemistry. Since 1984, she has been involved in professional research into inflammatory diseases, free radicals, cardiovascular diseases, biocompatibility of medical devices, antioxidants and diet, and monitoring the health and performance of elite athletes, as well as developing research methods. Jan collaborates with scientists and clinicians in numerous universities and hospitals in the UK and abroad and is co-inventor of a number of patents. In 1999, she became a lifetime Millennium Fellow.
LIAM YOUNG
Liam began his life-long career in medicine and medical research with a Bachelor of Veterinary medicine and Surgery at Glasgow University and an honours degree in veterinary pathology, specialising in virology, HIV, cancer pathogenesis. Thereafter he added a diploma in veterinary homoeopathy (D.VetHom) and a diploma in herbal medicine (Dip.Herb). In 2000, Liam left veterinary practice to study traditional and naturopathic approaches to human medicine abroad, visiting established integrated health care hospitals around Europe and the Americas. In 2004 Liam founded The Natural Health Choice Ltd, as an online retailer of the natural healthcare products required for some of those hospital integrated healthcare programs. In 2008, he completed a Masters Degree (MA) in Medical Humanities at Swansea University, studying from the perspective of philosophy, politics, history, sociology, art and literature the limits of the conventional medical paradigm and how the “human being” might be reintroduced.
RACHEL HOYLE
Rachel is a science graduate from the University of Birmingham (1984) and has centred her career around health research – for both animals and humans. This research has led to her being recognised as a major contributor to establishing the conditional essentiality of nucleotides for human health. In the early 2000’s, having proven the benefits of nucleotides in animal health, Rachel began feasibility and clinical studies for nucleotide-based human food supplements, ultimately leading to the launch, in 2008, of the food supplements, IntestAid®IB and NuCell®IM. More recently Rachel has been studying the impact of high intensity stress on sports men and women supplemented with these ground-breaking combinations of nucleotides. She has been the CEO of Nucleotide Nutrition Ltd since its formation in 2011.
