Dr Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed is on a mission to improve our health with diet over drugs
One recent weekend working as the registrar in a London hospital, Dr Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed was responsible for all the patients that were admitted. “At the end of the weekend I took a step back and looked at all of the patients. I realised that every one had been admitted with a non-communicable illness. And of those illnesses, like heart disease or a stroke, the majority of them could have been prevented to a certain extent by long-term beneficial patterns of healthy eating,” she says.
Dr Mahmood-Ahmed is on a mission to fix this. Emerging science over the past two decades shows that our gut influences weight gain, high cholesterol, mental health, poor sleep, as well as chronic diseases. “Our understanding has advanced so much that today we can actually say that it is important to feed your gut micro-biome,” she says.
As a gastroenterologist, chef and winner of the BBC’s MasterChef competition in 2017, Dr Mahmood-Ahmed’s dual background in food and medicine means she’s in the perfect position to understand the role of diet in our health. Her message to us? It’s time to feed your gut the food it loves most.
“I like to think of the gut as the organ that’s inside you that you never knew existed – a mass of gut bugs, full of trillions of micro-organisms, that’s living inside each and every one of us.” What we eat directly influences their composition and these gut bugs in turn influence many aspects of our health. “It’s a symbiotic relationship,” says Dr Mahmood-Ahmed.