Media Kit

7 key facts about me:

1. I am a UK-based paediatrician (children’s doctor) with 28 years of experience in the NHS.

2. I am the founder and director of U-Turn Health®: the UKs first low fat, high raw, plant-based health education, coaching and consultancy company.

3. I am the author of the book: Diseases Have Causes: One Doctor’s Journey with an Apple and a Pen.

4. I have been vegetarian since the age of eight, vegan for thirteen years, and high-raw vegan for ten.

5. I was the first-prize winner in the 2014 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.

6. I am the author of the poetry collection Rupture (Hippocrates Press, 2015), and the forthcoming Collected Poems and Songs (1989-2024).

7. I am the mother of twin girls.

 

7 interesting facts about me:

1. When I was born my dad was a busker outside Tottenham Court Road tube station.

2. I grew up on a council estate in Lewisham, South-East London.

3. When I first went to medical school I had £12.50 a week to live on and I carried all my possessions to the halls of residence in a bin bag.

4. I was raised in the Japanese Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai International (SGI).

5. I’ve hiked to the Tengboche Buddhist monastery in Nepal.

6. I nearly died when a giant wave hit me in a wave-pool on Durban beach.

7. I once burst a lung diving in a quarry in Leicestershire.

 

7 qualifications:

1. BSc in biomedical sciences (1997)

2. Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB BS) (2000)

3. Membership of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (MRCPCH) (2004)

4. MSc in public health (2005)

5. Certificate in plant-based nutrition (eCornell) (2014)

6. MA in creative writing (2016)

7. Then I got thrown off my PhD programme after I wrote a rather controversial play (but I did get a distinction for module 2 of the PGCTHE before I left)…

 

About the book:

Dr Storm describes Diseases Have Causes as an ‘experimental interdisciplinary academic monograph’. It explores the genesis of her learning play Jam Tarts and Gingerbread and the subsequent controversy it caused. Jam Tarts and Gingerbread was written in the context of a practice-as-research (PaR) PhD project that sought to explore the potential of art, and later drama and the theatre arts more specifically, to function as an alternative to lifestyle interventions for childhood obesity. However, it rapidly became apparent to Dr Storm that the question with which her project was most concerned was what a play for the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity needed to say…

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Part-academic, part-creative and part-autobiographical, Diseases Have Causes will interest you if you have ever dipped your toe in the complex border-landscapes between science and the arts and suddenly found that everything you thought you knew was standing on its head. In considering the question of how nutritional knowledge is formed and shared, Dr Storm examines the philosophical relationships between knowledge and truth, and the sociological relationships between knowledge and power.

 

About the business:

Lots of people write books to promote their business, but Dr Storm founded her business after spending four years writing her book, during which time she became convinced of the need for a reliable, professional, evidence-based and effective service for people struggling with diet-related chronic health conditions of all forms, and also for more research into the value of low fat, high raw, plant-based dietary styles for their prevention and treatment.

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U-Turn Health® is the UK’s first low fat, high raw, plant-based health education, coaching and consultancy company, offering bespoke individual and group coaching, corporate and schools wellness programmes, and a modular ‘health recovery’ course with optional advanced certification modules for health and food retail professionals wishing to offer services to clients with diet-related health conditions.

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U-Turn Health® promotes a calorically adequate, appropriately supplemented, culturally inclusive and sustainable low fat, high raw, plant-based diet for health and wellbeing across the lifespan. Its mission is to eradicate diet-related chronic disease (DRCD) from the face of the planet. On a practical level it aims to do that by developing a range of products and services to assist individuals and groups with dietary transition, to offer certification for health professionals, and to advocate for more (and better) scientific research in the field. 

 

7 interesting thoughts to get the conversation started:

1. Anecdotally raw vegans report improvements in a wide range of conditions, including angina, diabetes, acne, asthma, eczema, psoriasis, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, overweight and autoimmune conditions, but little research has been done.

2. Heating food destroys nutrients, denatures proteins, increases the saturation of fats, and results in the production of toxic chemicals such as acrylamide, advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

3. If you have atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (fat accumulation in your blood vessels) and you stop eating fat your disease will most likely get better and go away without the need for drugs or surgery (but your doctor probably won’t tell you that).

4. Almost every long-term raw vegan I know thinks that cooked food is highly addictive. Addiction results in a phenomenon known as ‘primacy’, and ever since the discovery of fire human beings have displayed a communal form of primacy for cooked food.

5. Throughout human history addiction has been used as a means of control: getting people addicted and then offering the addictive substance as a reward is a way of getting people to do what you want them to do.

6. In health economics addictive substances are said to show greater ‘price-elasticity of demand’, meaning people will pay far above what the product is worth because what they are really paying for is the avoidance of withdrawal.

7. How those in power control the scientific generation of knowledge in relation to nutrition is an important subject for anyone concerned with how gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and other protected characteristics impact on health.