Elemental Health and Nutrition

Elemental Health and Nutrition Functional Medicine aims to find the root cause of illness by looking deeper into a persons biochemi When this balance becomes disrupted, illness can occur.

Every aspect of your body, even your DNA, is composed of an abundance of vitamins and minerals, which exist in perfect harmony. Nutritional medicine aims to bring the body back into equilibrium through dietary and lifestyle changes, and focused supplementation. A nutritional consultation involves taking a thorough case history, analyzing your diet, and taking lifestyle factors and day-to-day stres

sors into consideration. This holistic approach helps to get to the true root of your issue, and not simply treat your symptom. The following conditions are among those that can benefit from a nutritional consult.

- Constant stress
- Poor sleep
- Fatigue
- Brain fog
- Anxiety or depression
- Learning difficulties
- High histamine
- Methylation issues
- Poor weight management
- Digestive issues
- Cardiovascular issues

I also have a strong interest in mental health issues, methylation and genetic polymorphisms, which can benefit from targeted functional testing and precise supplementation.

Men get told it's just their age about as often as women do.The version I see in clinic: motivation gone flat, recovery ...
07/09/2026

Men get told it's just their age about as often as women do.

The version I see in clinic: motivation gone flat, recovery from training taking days instead of hours, weight settling around the middle, drive that dropped off and never came back. Each one on its own sounds like a busy life. Together they look like something measurable.

Testosterone is part of that picture, and it doesn't sit on its own. It tracks insulin, sleep, body composition and stress load, which is why a single total-testosterone number on a morning blood test so often gets read as fine when the man in front of me clearly isn't.

A proper look includes free testosterone, SHBG, LH and FSH, oestradiol, thyroid, iron studies and a fasting insulin. That's usually where the reason shows up, and it's usually something that can be worked on rather than something to accept.

If you're reading this and quietly recognising the list, it's worth measuring instead of assuming.

Every post you've seen about food and ADHD traces back to one study. It is almost always quoted about halfway through.A ...
06/09/2026

Every post you've seen about food and ADHD traces back to one study. It is almost always quoted about halfway through.

A hundred children in the Netherlands, aged four to eight. Half went on a five-week elimination diet, half got healthy-eating advice. The children on the diet scored far better on a standard ADHD checklist, and the paediatrician doing the scoring had not been told who was in which group. That's the part that gets shared.

Then came the second half. The children who improved had foods added back, one at a time, with nobody involved knowing which food was which. Symptoms returned in 19 of the 30.

And here's the part worth keeping. Whether a child reacted had no relationship to their IgG food-sensitivity blood test, the kind sold as a food intolerance panel. The researchers concluded that using IgG tests to decide what to cut out should be discouraged.

So the diet isn't a treatment for ADHD. It's a way of finding out whether food matters for one particular child, and it only tells you anything if you put the foods back.

Before anyone starts cutting things out, the simpler questions are worth asking. Iron, sleep, zinc, and what the everyday eating actually looks like.

One thing changes a first appointment more than anything else you could bring: your old blood tests.Not just the recent ...
05/09/2026

One thing changes a first appointment more than anything else you could bring: your old blood tests.

Not just the recent one. All of them.

A single result is a snapshot. Five years of results is a trajectory, and a marker drifting steadily in one direction while staying inside the normal range tells a story no one-off test can. Ferritin sliding down year on year. TSH creeping up. Fasting glucose walking north a decimal at a time. Each individual result gets reported as normal, because it is.

Most people don't realise they can just ask. Your GP clinic holds them, and so does the pathology lab that ran them. A request is usually all it takes.

Worth digging out: full blood count and iron studies, thyroid, fasting glucose, insulin and HbA1c, liver and kidney panels, and anything from a hospital stay.

If you're thinking about booking, do that first. It changes what the first appointment can see.

Book: https://natural-health-medicine.simplecliniconline.com/diary/rohan-smith

Most people book in for themselves. Their own energy, their own gut, their own sleep.Something I didn't expect when I st...
04/09/2026

Most people book in for themselves. Their own energy, their own gut, their own sleep.

Something I didn't expect when I started: a year on, they mention their kids.

Not because we planned it. Sorting out your own health quietly rewrites what happens in a house. What's in the fridge. What time the lights go off. Whether being tired all the time gets looked into or just endured.

Kids pick the whole lot up by watching. The pattern, far more than the advice.

And a lot of what gets handed down isn't fixed in the way people assume. Iron, blood sugar, sleep, stress. These move. What one generation sorts out, the next one inherits already solved.

That's the part of this work I didn't see coming, and it's probably the part I like most.

A lot of young women are being told their flat mood is anxiety or burnout. Sometimes it is. But there's one physical con...
03/09/2026

A lot of young women are being told their flat mood is anxiety or burnout. Sometimes it is. But there's one physical contributor that routinely doesn't get asked about, and it's sitting in the timeline.

A Danish study followed just over a million women and found hormonal contraception was associated with a later first prescription for an antidepressant. The association was strongest in teenagers, at roughly 1.8 times the rate of non-users on the combined pill, and it peaked around six months after starting.

Read that carefully. Association, not proof, and most women take it without any trouble at all. Nothing here is a reason to stop anything.

What it does mean is that the timeline is worth a look. If low mood started within a year of a new pill, patch, ring or IUD, that's information your GP would want. Worth checking B vitamins, magnesium and zinc too, because status for several of these shifts with hormonal contraception.

Talk to whoever prescribed it before changing anything. Just go in with the timeline.

Round one clears it. Three months later the bloating is back.Then round two. Same again.SIBO is a consequence of somethi...
02/09/2026

Round one clears it. Three months later the bloating is back.

Then round two. Same again.

SIBO is a consequence of something, and a round of antimicrobials clears the overgrowth without touching whatever let it settle there. One of the more common things sitting underneath it is a slow thyroid.

Between meals, a wave called the migrating motor complex sweeps the small intestine clean. Low thyroid function slows that wave down. Slow the sweep and bacteria stay where they shouldn't be, no matter how many rounds you do.

So after a relapse, the question I'd want answered is what's slowing the sweep.

How many rounds have you been through? One, three, lost count? Tell me below.

01/09/2026

"My liver tests were normal, so my liver's fine."

Not necessarily, and this one catches a lot of people out.

ALT and the rest of the liver panel are damage markers. They go up when liver cells are being injured. Fat can sit in the liver for years without causing enough injury to move those numbers. So a normal result tells you your liver isn't inflamed today. It doesn't tell you there's no fat there.

The other assumption worth dropping is that this is an alcohol problem. Most of what I see tracks insulin resistance, which is why it turns up in people who drink very little and whose weight looks completely unremarkable.

If you want to actually know: an ultrasound shows fat, a liver panel doesn't. Fasting insulin, a triglyceride to HDL ratio and a waist measurement fill in the metabolic side.

Normal enzymes are worth having. They just aren't the all-clear people think they are.

Is this a result you've been reassured by?

Two people live in the same house. One is exhausted, foggy and suddenly reacting to foods they've eaten for years. The o...
31/08/2026

Two people live in the same house. One is exhausted, foggy and suddenly reacting to foods they've eaten for years. The other is completely fine.

I see this often enough that I now ask about the building.

Water damage doesn't affect everyone equally. A susceptible subset reacts hard to what grows behind a wall after a leak, and because nobody else in the house is unwell, it gets put down to stress.

What makes me look at it: symptoms that ease on holiday and return within days of getting home. A start date that lines up with a leak, a flood, or a wet season. Sinus or cough that never quite clears.

It isn't the first thing I check, and it isn't the answer for most people. But when the timeline points at a building, the building is worth investigating.

Salt loading is everywhere at the moment, and if you've had COVID and your heart won't settle, you've probably seen it.E...
30/08/2026

Salt loading is everywhere at the moment, and if you've had COVID and your heart won't settle, you've probably seen it.

Extra sodium does help. In a controlled study it lowered standing heart rate and raised blood volume. But it's a management step, and most people are using it without ever finding out what they're managing.

The pattern has a name. POTS: heart rate climbs 30 beats or more within ten minutes of standing and stays up, while blood pressure holds steady. Dizziness, palpitations, nausea, exhaustion that worsens the longer you're upright, and brain fog that lifts when you lie down.

Across a survey of 4,835 patients, the median wait between symptoms starting and a diagnosis was 24 months. Most of that time it gets called anxiety.

Here's the part that frustrates me. The test is lying down for a few minutes, then standing for ten, with someone recording heart rate and blood pressure. It costs nothing.

Anxiety and POTS aren't alternatives, by the way. Living with unpredictable palpitations is genuinely frightening. The mistake is stopping at the psychological explanation without ever measuring the circulatory one.

Full write-up on the blog this week.

If fat loss feels impossible while you're doing everything right, leptin is worth understanding.Leptin is the signal you...
29/08/2026

If fat loss feels impossible while you're doing everything right, leptin is worth understanding.

Leptin is the signal your fat cells send your brain to say there's enough fuel on board, ease off. When that signal stops getting through, the brain reads scarcity even while stores are full. Appetite goes up. Resting metabolic rate quietly comes down. You fidget less and stand less without noticing.

Which is why eating less, harder, tends to make it worse. Cutting further reinforces the scarcity reading the brain has already made.

What does shift it is unglamorous. Sleep, because short sleep alone alters appetite signalling within days. Protein and fibre at each meal. Lowering the insulin load. And enough time at maintenance for the signal to be heard again.

This is a pattern, and patterns are testable. Fasting insulin, HbA1c, thyroid function and inflammatory markers together tell you a great deal.

If that sounds like your last three years, start with the free assessment: https://elementalpattern.scoreapp.com

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