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Zestt Wellness, 8 Stafford Street, Dunedin (2025)

27/11/2025

I have a reading chair where I look out on the Lancewoods in my garden as they are buffeted by the coastal winds. 💨

I studied the Lancewood (Pseudopanax crassifolius) as an undergrad botanist; its evolutionary history stayed with me. It remains in its spindly juvenile stage for 15-20 years; it evolved to grow tall quickly to escape grazing moas.

It’s an odd-looking tree to say the least. Its thin trunk belies its strength, made possible by its its trunk being:

✅ High in lignin (a strengthening, rigidifying plant polymer), densely wound with long fibres oriented vertically, like tightly packed cables.
✅ Low in soft parenchymal tissue.

The Lancewood demonstrates that strength 💪🏼 can be rendered by what is unseen (or not logical) at first glance.

Similarly, human strength and resilience originate from your gut microbiome, a world of unseen microbes living within you that drive your mood, immunity, sleep, appetite and digestion 🩺

Your microbiome, in turn, is influenced by how you sleep, what you eat, your stress levels, and your interactions with nature and each other.

A healthy microbiome population helps buffer you from the equivalent of coastal winds - so tend it with care, nourish it well and let the resilience woven through the natural world remind you of the strength rising quietly within 💜

24/11/2025

Improve VO2 Max even when in your 90s!

Thanks for the handwritten letter ... We loved it 💜

22/11/2025

The Athletes’ Gut Problem 🤸 5 Key Triggers + The Menstrual Cycle Factor

Your intestine is 7-9 metres long! The small intestine is roughly 6-7 metres and is highly folded to optimise nutrient absorption. The large interesting (colon) is about 1.5 metres long.

That’s a lot of tubing for something to go wrong and go wrong it does, especially for elite athletes who push their bodies to the limit.

Here are the reasons gut issues are common for athletes:

🧠 1. Reduced Blood Flow to the Gut

🍀 During exercise, especially endurance or high-intensity training, blood is redirected from the digestive system to working muscles and skin (for cooling). This can reduce intestinal oxygen by up to 80%, damaging the gut lining and impairing digestion and absorption. This, in turn, can:
🍀 Increase intestinal permeability, “leaky gut,” allowing bacteria and endotoxins to enter the blood system, triggering an immune response leading to inflammation and discomfort
🍀 The effect is greater in hot environments or with dehydration.

💧 2. Dehydration and Electrolyte Imbalance

🍀 Sweating and insufficient fluid replacement can concentrate the gut contents and alter motility (making food move through the gut faster or slower). Dehydration slows gastric emptying, and an electrolyte imbalance can cause nausea, cramping, and diarrhoea.
🍀 Sodium and potassium losses affect smooth muscle function in the intestines.
Athletes often under-replace fluids during long events, which can compound gut distress.

🍞 3. Nutrition Timing and Composition
Many athletes consume carbohydrate-rich gels, drinks, or bars during training or competition.
🍀 Excess simple sugars (especially fructose) and artificial sweeteners can draw water into the intestine, leading to diarrhoea or bloating.
🍀 Large pre-event meals, high-fibre, or high-fat foods slow digestion, which can cause reflux or cramps when combined with exertion.
Inadequate adaptation to fueling strategies, “training the gut,” also plays a role.

🦠 4. Microbiome Disruption
Regular heavy training can alter the gut microbiome balance (the trillions of microbial species in your gut):
🍀 Stress hormones, like cortisol, can affect gut motility and microbial diversity
🍀 Frequent antibiotic use or restricted diets can further disrupt microbial stability
🍀 Microbiome imbalance (dysbiosis) can contribute to inflammation, poor nutrient absorption and even mood disturbances (not helpful if you need to be performing at your peak).

🏃‍♂️ 5. Mechanical and Mental Stress
🍀 Repetitive jostling (like running or cycling) mechanically agitates the intestines. When combined with pre-competition anxiety, this triggers the gut–brain axis, increasing motility and urgency.
🍀 “Runner’s diarrhoea” and “exercise-induced nausea” are partly driven by sympathetic nervous system overactivation.
Menstrual effects on gut stability

Female athletes often experience additional gut challenges because the menstrual cycle influences digestion, inflammation, and gut motility:

🍀 In the luteal phase (the week or two before a period), rising progesterone slows digestion, which can lead to bloating, constipation and a heavier, more sluggish gut during training.
🍀 As hormone levels drop right before menstruation, many women experience a sudden increase in prostaglandins, which stimulates uterine contractions but can also increase gut motility, triggering diarrhoea, cramping, or nausea.
🍀 Low iron stores, more common in female endurance athletes, can worsen gut sensitivity and impair oxygen delivery to the intestinal lining, amplifying exercise-induced gut symptoms.

The result is that digestion feels different across the cycle, and certain training loads or nutrition strategies may be better tolerated at specific times.

Understanding these hormonal rhythms helps female athletes tailor fueling, hydration, and recovery strategies to minimise gut distress and improve performance.

🩺 How Athletes Can Mitigate Gut Issues
Train the gut: gradually introduce nutrition strategies during training to improve tolerance.

✅ Hydrate strategically: maintain electrolyte balance and monitor sweat losses.
Adapt diet: reduce high-FODMAP foods or artificial sweeteners before events.
Support gut-lining integrity: include glutamine (helps reduce leaky gut), probiotics (support a healthy microbiome), and polyphenol-rich foods to help protect the intestinal barrier.

✅ Manage stress: recovery, sleep, and breathing practices help modulate gut-brain signalling.

20/11/2025

We are so pleased to be the naming sponsor of the Otago Sparks for the next two years and we look forward to supporting the team as they strive for excellence on and off the field.

Our reasons for sponsorship are many and include:
✅ A love of cricket (even Darcy the Canadian - he likens it to chess on a field).
✅ A passion for women’s sport and relief that it’s finally getting the airtime it deserves
✅ A desire to support a local Otago-Southland team with a global audience

On top of that, we have followed the Otago Sparks for many years and appreciate the personality and professionalism of the brand – a brand we want to be associated with.

17/11/2025

I am reading the latest Booker prize-winning novel, “Flesh” by David Szalay. In the book, the main character, István, responds with “okay” over 500 times. As a reader, you need to interpret what that “okay” means. And therein lies the magic of minimalist writing: asking the reader to think and interpret to create meaning.

It got me thinking about how we interpret our feelings daily. When I am asked how I am feeling, I am likely to reply, “Yeah, I’m okay.” Someone can take me at face value or interpret something in my body language which might suggest otherwise and probe further.

Similarly, we must interpret what our bodies are telling us. We tell ourselves (and others), “yeah, I’m okay, feeling tired, but that’s normal with age,” - isn’t it?

The onset of chronic disease starts many years before it shows up on blood tests or a diagnosis; many years of us telling ourselves that we are “okay,” while ignoring the warning signs of tiredness, poor sleep, digestive issues, aching joints and weight gain 😟

So are you okay? Really?

If something in you hesitates before answering, that’s your cue to look closer. Start by listening - properly listening - to what your body is trying to tell you. If anything feels off, get a medical check to rule out any underlying issues. Then give yourself an honest lifestyle audit. Choose one area to focus on, whether it’s sleep, movement, stress, or nutrition and make one small change, one tiny step - maybe it’s avoiding snacking after 8pm, or turning the lights out 30 minutes earlier.

Over time, build in more changes so that all the tiny steps accumulate, pulling you back from a slide into chronic disease and toward a life where “okay” is not a polite mask, but a genuine state of zest 🍀

“I’m okay, thanks!” 👌

10/11/2025

Don’t Wait for the Crash💥
Five Signs Your Body has Reached its Tipping Point

Tipping points exist in ecological systems in a way that parallels human health. Most of us understand that the planet is on the verge of an environmental tipping point (if not already past it). There are warning signs that the Earth is in crisis 🌏.

One warning sign is the demise of coral reefs. Coral animals live in a mutually beneficial relationship (symbiosis) with a type of algae. The algae are what give the coral its beautiful colours. The fragile relationship between the algae and the coral breaks down as the seawater temperature rises and the beneficial algae die. This causes coral bleaching, a warning sign that foretells a catastrophic collapse of the marine ecosystem.

Similarly, our bodies are interconnected ecosystems—a web of organs, tissues, blood, food, hormones and microbes. When one element becomes unbalanced, the system teeters until nothing holds you up.

The parallel between planetary decline and increases in rates of chronic disease strikes me as noteworthy. By making better choices for the planet (such as consuming and flying less and being more active), we can improve our health, and vice versa.

And like the coral reefs, before any tipping point, there are warning signs for your health journey that you should not ignore.

The trick, of course, is to know what to look out for. Here are five warning signs that you might need a health overhaul, which may come in the form of lifestyle improvements and/or medical care:

1️⃣ Persistent fatigue that rest doesn’t fix
If you’re tired all the time, even after a good night’s sleep, it’s a sign your system is struggling to maintain balance. It’s time to dig deeper to understand why this is happening to you.

2️⃣ Unexplained weight gain or loss
Sudden changes in body weight can be your body’s way of saying, something’s off. Hormonal shifts, inflammation, or a metabolic slowdown may indicate that a medical check-up and/or lifestyle changes are necessary.

3️⃣ Brain fog and mood swings
Most people have phases of feeling sluggish or struggling with emotional balance. It’s easy to put this down to the ageing process, but be more critical than that. Brain fog and mood swings should be occasional, not constant. Keeping a brain diary and noting when you feel this way (and for how long) helps identify contributing factors.

4️⃣ Digestive discomfort or bloating
The gut is your body’s coral reef, home to microbes that keep everything in balance. If you regularly experience bloating, bowel irregularity, or food sensitivities, your internal ecosystem may be under stress (Zestt Gut+ lozenges will help here too!).

5️⃣ Frequent infections or slow recovery
In nature, a weakened environment becomes vulnerable to invasive species; in humans, a weakened immune system leaves you open to frequent colds, slow wound healing, or lingering illnesses. It’s a clear call to rebuild your foundations.

The message from both nature and your body is simple: pay attention early so you can make the steps to bring your health back into balance.

04/11/2025

One Doctor Drank Bacteria. I Just Burned the Broccoli 🥦

Darcy is forever self-experimenting and I am constantly reminding him that one person (n=1) does not prove a hypothesis. Interestingly, though, many great discoveries have been made through self-experimentation 🧪.

One of the most famous examples is the work of Australian physicians, Dr Barry Marshall and Dr Robin Warren. Marshall used his own body to test a medical hypothesis, overturning decades of medical dogma.

Marshall and Warren conducted investigations into the spiral-shaped bacterium, later identified as Helicobacter pylori, in patients with gastritis and peptic ulcers.

The thinking during the eighties was that gastric ulcers were caused by stress and other lifestyle factors, whereas Marshall and Warren hypothesised that a microorganism was the cause.

Reviewers rejected their scientific papers and their attempts to infect animal models failed; no lab animal would reliably develop gastritis from the bacterium 🐁.

So, how to prove their hypothesis?

In July 1984, Marshall swallowed a broth culture of Helicobacter pylori derived from a human patient to become infected. He said:

“I went home and told my wife about it, and of course, she was like, ‘Oh, my God, you're gonna infect the whole family. That's why you've got such bad breath. This is a disaster.’ ”

He then monitored his symptoms: nausea, vomiting, acute gastritis and took gastric biopsies. The biopsies revealed the bacterium adhering to his stomach lining.

The scientific community reacted with scepticism and even ridicule. Gastroenterologists dismissed the idea of a bacterial cause as “crazy” or “impossible.” When Marshall and Warren first presented their findings, one reviewer wrote,

“This is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard.”

The tide slowly shifted; there were enough people who listened and began to use antibiotic treatments to treat stomach ulcers successfully.

By the 1990s, Helicobacter pylori was accepted as the leading cause of ulcers. In 2005, Marshall and Warren received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery.

Marshall and Warren clearly knew what they were doing💡. I am not advocating that anyone swallow ulcer-producing bacteria in the name of science, but I have been conducting some of my own self-experimentation.

In the past, when I wrote about improving breathing, some of you suggested that I read the book "Breath" by James Nestor. I am finally doing that (it's a great read; I recommend it).

I have suffered from poor sleep, connected with anxiety, for many years, so my interest in this is highly motivated. As I read the book, I began gently experimenting with some unexpected results.

The first time I undertook breathing exercises to slowly increase my carbon dioxide levels (slower, longer breathing, four counts to six, with an extended exhale), I was sitting in my chair, reading my book. I woke up half an hour later, book in my lap after an unexpected nap. Delicious!

The next day, I experimented with controlled breathing to a meditative track. I became so entranced that it took the smell of burning vegetables to bring me out. Dinner that night was broccoli and cauliflower crisps!

My learning points:

✅ Like Barry Marshall, you don’t have to accept conventional wisdom when it comes to your health. His experiment reminds us that progress begins with curiosity and a little courage to test the status quo. You don’t need a lab coat or a Nobel Prize to learn from your body. Sometimes the best data comes from your lived experience, one breath (or charred dinner) at a time.

✅ If you have been grappling with issues like poor breathing or poor sleep, don’t just accept the status quo and rely solely on an overburdened medical system. Conduct your own research and understand that even small changes can have a significant impact on your health. I have been sleeping rather well since my breathwork experimentation!

✅ Your body, even as you age, is remarkably adaptable, and it is just that - your body, your life, to do what you can to improve your outcomes.

To finish with some inspiration, here is a quote from Marshall after their Nobel prize win:

“We couldn't knock down our own hypothesis. That's the thing, be critical of your own data, and then go with the data. And once you've got a pathway, and you're getting facts, then it doesn't matter how many people there are out there who don't believe you. Science is not a democracy.”

Photo: Nobel Prize winners (2005): The late Dr James Warren (left) and Barry Marshall.

30/10/2025

Stop the Leaks and Reduce Insulin - Feed Your Gut Wall with Butyrate

In your gut, there are trillions of microbes which form your microbiome. In your microbiome, there are healthy bacterial species that produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), including butyrate, a five-star compound for your health ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Butyrate and other SCFAs (sometimes called postbiotics) serve as the energy source for your colon cells, which play a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the tight junctions between your intestinal cells.

Think of it like this 💡:

Imagine your intestine is a castle wall; the gut lining is the wall and the gut microbes are the security team, lining up in front of the wall. The tight junctions are like the mortar between the bricks, holding the wall tight 🏰.

When the security team (the microbes) are compromised, holes can appear in the mortar and the wall. Then, undigested food (including faecal matter) and toxins can leak through the holes (the leaky junctions).

Your body may view these undigested food particles and other compounds as a threat, triggering an inflammatory response.

If your gut wall repairs are successful, the inflammatory process is short-lived; however, if leaky junctions remain, the body continually mounts an inflammatory response against the leaked food particles and bacteria.

A leaky gut can lead to autoimmune and autoinflammatory conditions, as well as other diseases associated with chronic inflammation.

The Butyrate Makers

The stars of butyrate production include Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, Roseburia, Eubacterium rectale, and Coprococcus. These species thrive on resistant starches and plant fibres, the kind found in lentils, chickpeas, oats, cooled potatoes and rice, as well as onions, garlic, apples and citrus.

Other bacteria, such as Bifidobacteria and Lactobacilli, produce short-chain fatty acids (mainly acetate and lactate) that feed the microbes, which in turn produce butyrate.

When these microbes ferment fibre, they release butyrate that:

1. Nourishes your gut lining to maintain its integrity.
2. Lowers inflammation in the gut and throughout the body.
3. Improves insulin sensitivity and metabolic health.

How to Boost Your Butyrate Levels

To feed these beneficial microbes, build your meals around:

-Resistant starches: lentils, beans, green bananas, oats and cooled grains
-Inulin-rich foods: onion, garlic, leeks, asparagus and chicory root
-Pectin foods: apples, pears, beets and citrus

Fermented foods, such as yoghurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi and miso, provide lactate that fuels butyrate producers.

Supporting your gut’s natural butyrate producers starts with feeding them the right fibres to deliver prebiotics and probiotics to help your microbes make more of this gut-protective fuel - and our Zestt Gut Lozenges are formulated to do exactly that!

For more information on butyrate-producing foods to eat over the weekend and how they can support lower insulin levels, refer to the two tables in this post.

28/10/2025

The Quiet Science of Staying Well 💪🏼
Because Staying Well Takes More than a Prescription 💊

One of the limits of health research is that the commercial realities of the pharmaceutical industry drive both the release of products and much of the research into disease.

Preventative health, which stops us from getting sick in the first place, is underfunded. Long-term studies in scientific fields such as nutrition, micronutrients and lifestyle factors do not receive the necessary funding because most lifestyle solutions cannot be patented and commercialised.

As an analogy, in nature, not every resource gets equal attention.

The flashiest flowers 🌺, designed to attract birds and insects, gain the ‘oohhs and the ahhhs,’ while wind-pollinated plants flower almost unnoticed. Yet these wind-pollinated plants form the backbone of an ecosystem, holding soil in place and feeding countless species 🌾.

Human health is similar; high-profile pharmaceutical breakthroughs draw the spotlight and funding, while the quieter, highly effective fields of prevention and lifestyle medicine go ignored (and desperately underfunded).

On top of this, the complexities of the human body and the environment make it nearly impossible to design experiments that factor in all the variables. Imagine trying to design an experiment with appropriate controls that evaluates the impact of dietary changes over 10 to 20 years, while factoring in differences in age, exercise programmes, sleep and stress patterns 🏃🏻‍♀️.

Epidemiological studies attempt to control factors statistically, but variables are often confounded and the popular media simplifies the findings.

A leading voice in longevity research, Dr Peter Attia, has said:

“I make no secret of my disdain for nutritional epidemiology studies. Between their reliance on weak methods, weak measurements, weak analyses and weak reporting, I would hardly know where to begin in simply describing the problems with these study types, let alone identifying their possible solutions.”

So what does this mean for you?

It means you can’t outsource everyday wellbeing to medicine alone. It means trusting medicine when you need it, but not waiting for it for good health. Your health power lies in prevention and lifestyle changes—in how you eat, move, rest and think.

Look after your body like it’s your only one—because it is! 💪🏼

23/10/2025

Your Gut 🌳 An Ecosystem on a Leash

It’s a war out there - or should I say, in there.

Trillions of bacteria, fungi and viruses are battling it out to survive in your body. Some are beneficial, assisting with cognition, immunity, and mood, others try to take down your system, growing into superinfections, upsetting the finely tuned orchestral balance within.

We as the “host organism,” try to keep the microbes on a leash. We can do this by eating well, exercising and sleeping well to create an environment that favours the “commensal” bacteria - the good ones. These commensal bacteria help us to manage the rise of the “pathogenic bacteria” - the ones that drive superinfections.

What’s interesting is that we, the hosting humans have co-evolved with these bacteria. Our bodies try to manage the microbes; but the microbes, evolve at a faster rate than we do. Sometimes our body is playing catch up. Right now, our bodies are struggling to evolve quickly enough for what modern life throws at us.

And we sure throw a lot at the microbes - good and bad (see graphic below for lifestyle influences).

The interactions of microbes with their human host are complex; living to their own rhythms and cycles, like any ecosystem in nature. Subtle changes made to your routine every day can shift this ecosystem for the better.

A diet high in plant fibres and fermented foods, good sleep, low stress, exercise and exposure to environmental microbes, from the garden, or pets all contribute to a healthy, biodiverse microbiome.

So today, make it a day to munch on a carrot 🥕, walk in the trees 🌳, cuddle your cat 🐈‍⬛, sleep like a king (or queen) and spend time appreciating the world you live in.
Your microbial ecosystem will love you for it!

19/10/2025

Congratulations to the Otago Girls' High School Young Enterprise Team "Rhythm Periodcare" - who finished third in the region and received the Findex Innovation Award.

These girls have been fantastic to work with and we are pleased to be able to offer their menstrual health product on our website (description below).

You can buy this product from our website (all proceeds go to Rhythm Periodcare); www.zesttwellness.com

Rhythm's Menstrual Wellness Drink Concentrate is a thoughtfully formulated blend designed to support hormonal balance, ease period discomforts, and enhance your overall well-being—without adding clutter to your medicine cabinet.

Crafted with high-quality, organic ingredients, this concentrated wellness helps relieve cramps, bloating, fatigue, and mood swings, making it easier to stay in sync with your body.

Whether you're navigating day one or winding down your cycle, Rhythm brings innovation, care, and sustainability into every drop—so you can feel more comfortable, confident, and in control, every step of the way.

.periodcare

14/10/2025

Metabolic Health Isn’t About Being Thin 🤨
It’s About Being Metabolically Flexible

If you are reading this and you’re a farmer, 👩🏻‍🌾 you will understand what I say at a level that others might not.

Summer is coming and it’s the time when gyms and magazines are trying to get me to think about my “beach bod” (or lack thereof), in order to persuade me to spend money and time on something other than Netflix and a bowl of chips.

But while they’re selling abs, human biology tells a different spring story…
For our hominid ancestors, autumn meant storing fat; winter meant using it to survive. By spring, our ancestors were lean, if not underweight. In a similar vein, farmers know they need their livestock to be in good condition going into winter. Their animals will lose fat during winter when food becomes scarce and they use up energy in the colder weather.

Modern life drives us in the opposite direction.
It’s cold. It’s dark. We hunker by the fire. And because food is never scarce, the kilos sneak on, hence the “beach bod” advertisements.

As we age, it can be harder to shift the winter kilos.

The impact of this is significant as it can lead to metabolic disorders, such as type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, certain types of cancer, cardiovascular disease and dementia 🧠.

In the wild, environmental stresses ❄️ forced humans to evolve metabolic flexibility to cope with long periods of exercise (foraging and hunting), unpredictable food supplies and a wide range of food sources.

Human metabolic systems have multiple pathways to ensure they have a consistent energy source. Here’s how the body finds fuel when it’s able to function the way it is evolved to:

1️⃣ Glycolysis – burns sugar (quick, easy, energy)
2️⃣ Lipolysis – burns fat (preserves glucose for the brain)
3️⃣ Gluconeogenesis – makes new glucose from protein, lactate and glycerol (keeps blood sugar stable when carbs are gone)
4️⃣ Proteolysis – breaks down muscle for amino acids (creates material for gluconeogenesis)
5️⃣ Ketogenesis – produces ketones from fats (spares muscle and provides food for the brain).

When humans are in a constant state of food surplus (obesity), the body starts to lose its ability to switch between metabolic pathways as it becomes locked into sugar dependence 🍩.

Excess glucose requires greater insulin levels to bring down blood sugar levels. This can lead to insulin resistance, which drives metabolic inflexibility and in turn, leads to chronic disease.

What’s the real lesson here?

Our ancestors survived by switching fuels between fat, ketones, protein and glucose, depending on their needs. A modern lifestyle can lead to a loss of flexibility and we become metabolically “stuck,” relying on sugar for energy.

The ability to move easily between fuel sources, to fast without crashing and to eat without spiking inflammation is the hallmark of a resilient, healthy body.

Spring was once the season when humans rebuilt - lean, hungry and ready to grow strong again. The gyms may need to rethink their message, or we may need to adopt a farmer's mindset about our health! 🩺

Zestt Wellness

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