#onehealth
This is me. #onehealth.
I’ve been championing human health, fitness and wellbeing for almost 20 years now, and developing my business to focus on optimum nutrition, getting outside to exercise, breathing, sleep and stress management. Most of my personal training sessions are outside and outdoor group fitness takes us up onto the Malvern Hills benefiting from the incredible views and sunrises early in the mornings, improving both our mental and physical health. My health and wellbeing challenges take you outside for a good proportion of the exercise sessions and encourage you to go out for mindful walks in nature and use your breath to reduce anxiety and stress levels. Pure 21 focuses on gut health and bringing your body back into balance using real food - unprocessed, unpackaged, cooked from scratch, local and organic where you can, with as much colour on the plate as possible and leafy greens with every meal. I work holistically with my clients, looking at their lifestyle as a whole to help them reach optimum health.
I regularly post on Social Media with photos of my outdoor sessions, videos of fitness technique or stretching exercises, photos of colourful and nutritious food and tips for improving your diet, and ideas for dealing with the unavoidable stresses of everyday 21st century life. But I also post about climate change and environmental issues, regenerative farming and the benefits to the planet of eating less, but better quality meat, and more organic and local fruit and vegetables. I believe these three things are intrinsically linked, and I’m not alone.
When I was growing up, we spent school holidays in our caravan in Swaledale, a beautiful valley in the Yorkshire Dales where hill farming - sheep and a few dairy cows on a small scale - was a pretty tough existence. Hay meadows with miriad wild flowers filled the valley bottoms in summer when the sheep were up on the fells, feeding on a huge variety of different herbacious plants, maximising the nutrients in their diet. When the winter drew in, and the hay had been harvested, the sheep and cattle were put onto the meadows and fertilised the land with their dung, and in the spring, their calves and lambs benefited from this rich grazing which filled the milk with all the goodness they needed and then they too fed on fertile grass meadows until they went to market. Their meat was full of phytonutrients, not antibiotics. Their food full of natural goodness, not chemicals. The soil deep and rich in the valley bottom, often added to by silt brought down by the flooding river, rich in peat from the moors. The lamb tasted like lamb and melted in your mouth!
The cows were fed through the winter on the hay, rich with wild flower seeds which we helped to harvest, raking the edges of the fields with huge wooden rakes to get every last bit into the baler and then riding on top of the trailer, piled high, back to the farm. (Health and Safety would go nuts now!) The hay-making teas were a delight - home made sausage rolls, cakes, curd tarts and strong tea, eaten in the shade of a traditional Yorkshire stone barn. And we drank unpasturised milk warm from the cows all through the holidays and ate field mushrooms which sprung up in late summer on the hillside covered in animal dung! We didn’t get ill. We weren’t fat from the cakes and pies. We weren’t fat from the full fat creamy milk - we were outside running around and doing physical work and eating good, wholesome, natural food from local ingredients, full of nutrients! (And getting filthy in the process, topping up our immunity by topping up our microbiome!) All this has given us good immune systems. We don’t gain weight easily, we don’t struggle with allergies or (I’ve been told) look our age!
Good quality food, full of nutrients, has to come from good quality agriculture. Try to get anything to grow unnaturally fast or big, and it loses flavour. Why? Because it loses nutritional value. You only have to grow your own tomatoes and use a traditional variety of seed to see how the flavour is different to the really red, perfectly round tasteless ones we get in the supermarket. And buy a local chicken - free range, not factory farmed and treated with hormones to increase growth - living on organic land, and fed a natural diet with worms and grubs, and it doesn’t shrink when you cook it, its flesh is more succulent and it tastes like chicken! All the flavour you need without adding loads of herbs and spices because it is full of phytonutrients and minerals from the soil.
Industrial farming has been developed to provide large quantities of cheap food for the supermarkets. The supermarkets (and us) have demanded cheap produce, and the result has been crops grown for quantity and speed, not for quality, taste or nutritional value. Pesticides and fertilizers such as glyphosate, were developed from chemicals which were re-purposed after the war and their use has been increased since grains were genetically modified to be resistant to them. Glyphosate, which is found in groundwater due to run-off (and in our urine and breast milk because it does come through the food chain!), has recently been re-categorised by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a possible carcinogen and is being slowly but surely restricted in its use throughout the world. Unfortunately this isn’t happening in all agricultural situations or all countries. Progress is slow.
Dwarf wheat which is now one of the most widely grown strains of wheat because of its shorter stems and therefore quicker growth, has more amylopectin in it than ancient grains. This starch causes increased blood sugar as much as, or even more than sugar! No wonder we have a diabetic explosion! It also has much more gluten than ancient wheat, which is known to cause damage to the gut lining and can lead to all kinds of gut issues as well as allergies, autoimmune conditions and other chronic diseases linked to inflammation, including dementia.
The combined use of fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified crops is central to poor health in the developed world, and together with intensive agriculture - growing two crops a year, tilling and not leaving the ground fallow - is also causing poor soil health.
Raising animals outside, rather than in crowded barns or cramped enclosures, reduces the need for antibiotic use, as disease doesn’t spread as easily when animals aren’t packed together (ditto Covid and why outdoor socialising was encouraged during the height of the pandemic!). By moving the animals regularly, the dung is spread naturally across the ground and fertilises the soil ready for arable crops, reducing the need for fertilizers. The dung gradually sinks into the soil providing nutrients, rather than being pumped constantly into slurry pools and then seeping into our rivers, killing insects, fish and birdlife. Biodiversity increases - more insects feeding on the dung, leads to more birdlife leads to more mammals etc and rivers remain healthy, full of fish and clean enough to swim in!
AND, the depth of soil increases. Soil is lost more quickly on land which is left bare after the crop has been harvested in the Autumn and the next crop is planted in the spring, as it is washed away by rain. Addition of chemicals rather than natural fertilizers in the form of manure or cover crops, reduces the amount and variety of minerals in the soil and leads to poor soil structure. But if farmers don’t till the soil but plant cover crops, some of which are grazed by cattle or sheep between harvests, then soil depth can be increased and the dung and rotting cover crop provides more hummus and structure to the soil as well as adding nitrogen which itself will then reduce the need for pest control and fertilizers.
Regenerative farming, is beneficial to the planet. It can increase soil depth and quality, so improving yields without the use of fertilizers, or at least reducing negative impact on nature while seeing no reduction in the bottom line. It increases carbon sequestration - the drawing down of carbon from the atmosphere - by leaving the stalks of the crop and the whole cover crop to rot down into the soil, AND it is thought, the products of photosynthesis being moved into the soil and feeding the microbes within it. It can improve domestic animal health, and by improving the health and nutritional value of the land and plants and animals raised on it, it improves the nutritional value of our food, so improving our health!
It’s a win, win, win situation! And I realise now why my passion has always been for good food, fitness, health and wellbeing, and why I feel so drawn to nature and so passionate about the health of the planet. They are all so inextricably linked, that you can’t have one without the other.
So this is why you will find my social media and blogs about health, fitness and wellbeing interspersed with political comment, climate change activism, support of regenerative agriculture and tons of science to support it all. I hope you will continue to follow me and perhaps do your own research into these areas and see if there are some areas where you can change your lifestyle to help improve the health of the planet and your own in the process. Shout if you need my help!
#onehealth.