Amanda Harris - Wellness Detective

29/09/2026

The consequences of insulin resistance is involved in so many chronic health issues. This conversation needs a share

Prof Grant Schofield sits down with Dr Glen Davies to explore how l...

18/09/2026

My book selection from the college library this term break with some elder cuttings from the herb garden. I'm going back in for some more biochemistry brain bashing with Prof Seyfried's textbook

16/09/2026

I have to leave the college immediately after our award ceremony on our last day to attend this... but priorities

Join us for New Zealand’s first dedicated Metabolic Health NZ Summit. Metabolic health — how well your body converts food into energy and regulates blood sugar, insulin, lipids and inflammation — sits at the heart of preventing, reversing and managing chronic disease. It’s the physiological ...

13/09/2026

Does natural medicine have a credibility problem?

It is easy to be dismissive of something you don’t understand and most people will have a spectrum of knowledge and experience with natural medicine, from none at all to actively seeing a naturopath for health.

A naturopath is someone who practices medicine using natural methods including herbal medicines, nutrition and lifestyle changes. I often have people conflate natural medicine with homeopathy, which is within the scope of natural medicine but not the main modality. Actually, the scope of a naturopath is huge. It’s on a scale from patchouli to functional medicine, and there is enormous capacity for naturopaths to practice in a wide variety of different ways. In fact, it’s easier to define natural medicine by what it’s not; it is a way of practicing medicine that does not diagnose disease or use pharmaceutical medicines. However, it does use supplements that are largely made by pharmaceutical companies, which is why I prefer to work with herbal medicines, nutrition and lifestyle changes personally.

What I found really interesting with my involvement with the metabolic health movement is the doctors, scientists, nutritionists and dieticians that are advocating for nutrition and lifestyle change as a way to reverse and prevent modern chronic health conditions, don’t realise they are practicing natural medicine. I love that this movement exists and they are working tirelessly to see improvements in the way healthcare is provided but I’m miffed that there is no acknowledgement that this is exactly the kind of things naturopaths have been doing since the Eclectics. Yet I am told that naturopaths have a bit of a credibility problem and I wonder if that is due to the lack of title protection, as anyone can declare themselves a naturopath in NZ.

My experience in studying for my degree in natural medicine has been far more vigorously scientific than both my Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Health Science. This is because the science is challenged with different perspectives and the latest evidence, not just dogmatically accepted. It doesn’t have the extent of corruption from corporate interests and the profit-first model of healthcare, which is a sickness industry. There is a freedom to pursue the truth of an issue, not just blindly accept things as is.

I have never felt like more of a scientist than I have since starting my degree in natural medicine.

06/09/2026

Inspired by 's comment about imagine if you had to explain diabetes to an alien

06/09/2026

How much Vitamin D do I need?

Sadly, it’s probably a lot more than we’re led to believe. People have been writing about this issue for years and yet the official recommendations have not been updated.

One of the foundational studies by the Canadian Institute of Medicine (IOM) (Del Valle et al., 2011) used for the recommendations of dietary allowance of vitamin D, was statistically flawed. Shockingly, this is old news, as the researchers Veugelers & Ekwaru published their paper discussing this mistake in 2014, which was followed-up by Heaney et al. in 2015 and Papadimitriou in 2017. The statistical error in the Canadian IOM study was to use the average of a group of studies rather than the average of the individuals within these various studies. In this manner, they estimated that 600IU of Vitamin D was needed to give 97.5% of people a target serum Vitamin D of 63nmol/L. However, this calculation was achieved incorrectly and the actual value from their recommended 600IU would only give an estimated 26.8nmol/L of serum vitamin D. Veugelers & Ekwaru (2014) calculated that you would need approximately 8,895IU to obtain around 50nmol/L or more of serum Vitamin D (25-hydroxy-D) in 97.5% of people.

This is well above the recommended 400IU/day for adults in NZ (bpac https://bpac.org.nz/2025/vitamind.aspx), with 50,000IU/month (1 capsule) for 2-3 months recommended for moderate to severe deficiency. The upper limit of 4000UI/day of vitamin D in these recommendations likely needs a review as well, as many studies have reported no adverse at 10,000IU (of D3) or below.

Additionally, sunseeking behaviour appears protective for all-cause mortality risk (Lindqvist et al., 2016). Whereby, Lindqvist demonstrated that although higher sun exposure is linked to higher risk of skin cancer, it is also associated with a lower risk of dying from any cause, including skin cancers.

References

Del Valle, H. B., Yaktine, A. L., Taylor, C. L., & Ross, A. C. (Eds.). (2011). Dietary reference intakes for calcium and vitamin D. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK56056/?report=reader

Heaney, R., Garland, C., Baggerly, C., French, C., & Gorham, E. (2015). Letter to Veugelers, PJ and Ekwaru, JP, A Statistical Error in the Estimation of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for Vitamin D. Nutrients 2014, 6, 4472–4475; doi: 10.3390/nu6104472. Nutrients, 7(3), 1688-1690. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu7031688

Lindqvist, P. G., Epstein, E., Nielsen, K., Landin‐Olsson, M., Ingvar, C., & Olsson, H. (2016). Avoidance of sun exposure as a risk factor for major causes of death: A competing risk analysis of the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort. Journal of internal medicine, 280(4), 375-387. https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12496

Papadimitriou, D. T. (2017). The big vitamin D mistake. Journal of preventive medicine and public health, 50(4), 278. https://doi.org/10.3961/jpmph.16.111

Veugelers, P. J., & Ekwaru, J. P. (2014). A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients, 6(10), 4472-4475. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu6104472

02/09/2026

A small randomised, double-blind, crossover clinical trial looked at whether high-cocoa, polyphenol-rich chocolate could help improve symptoms in people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For 8 weeks, participants ate high-cocoa, polyphenol-rich chocolate and compared it to a similar low cocoa chocolate and the results were intriguing.
During the high-cocoa phase, the fatigue scores in participants improve significantly, day-to-day functional impairment and anxiety/depression scores also improved.
When the participants switched to the low-cocoa chocolate, their scores deteriorated again.
This research suggests that only the darker chocolate with high polyphenol content will benefit CFS, so it’s probably best to go for the 85% or above, if you want to do some self-experimentation.
You can read the research here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21092175/

30/08/2026

Fantastic weekend at the PacHealth Symposium with Leah Hechtman, among other great speakers. I was so thrilled to meet the author of one of our most substantial textbooks: Clinical Naturopathic Medicine

23/08/2026

I had an awesome time at the Low-carb foundations training day at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. It felt so energising to be amongst doctors, med students, dieticians, health coaches, nutritionists and scientists that are trying to improve the health of people with type 2 diabetes, pre-diabetes and chronic health conditions using nutrition and lifestyle changes, which I would argue is natural medicine😉

29/07/2026

The beach is like a foot reflexology footpath – but only if you take your shoes off!

I read a journal article in the Australian Journal of Herbal & Naturopathic Medicine recently by Mithun et al. (2026) that described how using a multisensory foot reflexology footpath was able to lower blood pressure and autonomic variables in people with hypertension compared to the control group. I immediately had to look up what a multisensory foot reflexology footpath was and I thought it would make a beautiful garden path idea. Then later that day when the sun was up, I went to the beach for a walk. I’m so grateful to live near the beach. It is one of my simple pleasures to be able to walk barefoot in the surf; even in winter when the water is freezing. With this research showing a shift to parasympathetic nervous system activation (the rest and digest state) with these multisensory foot reflexology footpaths, I realised that this can be directly applied to the various contrasting textures found at the beach, such as soft sand, crushed seashells and rocks. It must be especially activating when navigating uneven rocky surfaces, such as high tide at my local beach. With all that increased parasympathetic tone, it’s no wonder that people enjoy beach walks. For us naturopaths, it could form a pleasant lifestyle recommendation for anyone with hypertension. Just make sure to go barefoot!

Reference:

Mithun, A. C., Shetty, G. B., Sujatha, K. J., & Shetty, P. (2026). Effect of multisensory foot reflexology path walking on blood pressure and autonomic variables in essential hypertensive individuals--a randomised crossover trial. Australian Journal of Herbal & Naturopathic Medicine, 38(2), DOI: 10.33235/ajhnm.38.2.70-76