Dr Camilla Stokholm shows patients with a range of health problems how nutrition can help. By Sophie Morris
While most of us jostle for five minutes in front of a GP, Dr Camilla Stokholm invites patients into her home, cooks dinner and eats with them. On the menu might be vegetable lasagne, black bean and sweet potato stew, salads crammed with brightly coloured vegetables or even an Italian torta d’erbe, a traditional pie stuffed with greens and beans, a nostalgic dish for Stokholm who works in the UK but is Danish and grew up in Italy, Switzerland and Australia.
Her dinner guests are fed well, but a seat at Dr Stokholm’s table is no easy ride. She wants to show patients how to manage health problems, from indigestion and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to diabetes, through nutrition, and sends them home with reading lists and links to online tutorials to help them understand their symptoms and how to fix them.
The core message is that they must feed their microbiomes, avoiding calorie restriction, fad diets and processed foods. The reward is much better health, and probably weight loss along the way, though that isn’t the goal. If they follow her lead, Stokholm promises, they may never feel hungry again.
In 2022 Stokholm began an Instagram account under the name @whatyourdoctoreats. A year later, a chard soup reel “tickled the algorithm” and brought her a far bigger audience - almost 150,000 - than she could ever entertain in her GP surgery.
She is now sharing her wisdom in her book of the same name, What Your Doctor Eats, which she describes it as “a manual on everything I teach my patients to help them treat, prevent or even reverse disease”.
BOOSTING THE GUT MICROBIOME IS KEY
How do her patients react to being lectured on their diet by a medical professional who only eats during an eight-hour window? Stokholm insists that as soon as her patients understand why her approach brings results, they don’t question it.
“When I started giving this kind of advice, it wasn’t controversial, but it wasn’t part of my training,” she remembers. “With IBS you’re not taught to ask patients about diet at all, which I find baffling. You’re taught to rule out sinister causes and then tell them which over-the-counter medications they should buy.” Instead of a knife or a pill, Stokholm explains that all she needed to do was teach patients how to boost their gut microbiome.
The relief she has brought is considerable. One patient who hadn’t left the house in five years because of severe diarrhoea developed agoraphobia. After a phone call, Stokholm suggested a diet change, and the diarrhoea disappeared. “You gave me my life back,” the patient said. Another now craves healthy foods such as
Brussels sprouts and kale, which she previously hated.
One reason, perhaps the most important, that Stokholm’s patients trust her methods, is because while she appears a paragon of health today, she, too, has struggled with weight gain and debilitating IBS. Ironically, it was after becoming a doctor that she swapped home-cooking for readymeals and packaged snacks, a diet full of the ultra-processed food (UPF) we now know to be so bad for our overall health.
“Becoming a doctor is the unhealthiest thing I have ever done,” she explains. “The moment I left medical school, I suddenly gained weight, as well as a gaggle of unpleasant symptoms I couldn’t explain. To be so unwell was humbling and I’m sure it made me a better doctor.”
” After gaining weight, shefirst turned to “fitfluencers” and followed a range of restrictive diets, including lots of ultraprocessed snacks like protein bars. She even stopped using extra virgin olive oil, widely considered a golden ticket in nutrition circles, because it is high in calories. Nothing worked and her IBS symptoms became worse until, in 2019, her mother gave her one of Professor Tim Spector’s books, The Diet Myth.
Spector, founder of the ZOE health and diet app, is a pioneer of gut health in the UK and has popularised using nutrition as medicine. “I’d never heard of him or the gut microbiome,” recalls Stokholm. “But it changed my whole attitude towards health and obesity.
“It set me free from many years of being trapped in diet culture,” she admits. “I had a really unhealthy relationship with food and I think a lot of people do. Once you get to know your microbiome, that can set people free.”
EAT A PLANT-BASED DIET RICH IN FIBRE AND FERMENTED FOODS
So, what does Stokholm eat? Her diet is rich in fresh fruit and vegetables, plant-based protein, olive oil, lots off ibre, fermented foods and plenty of nuts, seeds and grains. She drinks water, herbal tea and black coffee, and very little alcohol. Nothing is out of bounds, she says, but after eating the foods she likes and which make her feel good, she rarely strays.
SCHEDULE MEALS WITHIN AN EIGHT-HOUR WINDOW
She also eats within a timerestricted window of eight hours, to fit with her shift pattern. Many people fast to cut calories, but Stokholm uses it to give her microbiome a rest. But she says 12 or 14 hours are just as good. She doesn’t recommend supplements, saying: “No antioxidant, vitamin or food chemical has ever been shown to produce the same result as the food it came from.”
Understanding how our hormones and microbiome affect our health, weight, hunger and appetite is all fairly new science. Stokholm explains how eating in a way that feeds our microbiome can cure patients of a lifetime of dieting.
The first part of What Your Doctor Eats explains the science, covering how we gain weight, what makes us feel hungry or full, why we might binge eat and why some people are skinny even though they seem to eat heaps. Sleep and stress play a huge role in weight gain, for example, which sheds light on why junior doctors often put on the kilograms.
Feeling hungry and full comes down to how a number of hormones are working in our bodies, including ghrelin, leptin and GLP-1, the appetite-suppressing hormone used in weight-loss jabs such as Ozempic. But if any of these aren’t firing correctly, our brains won’t know when we’ve eaten enough.
TRAIN THE BRAIN TO PUSH THROUGH HUNGER
Stokholm says our hunger hormone, ghrelin, sticks around for only 20 to 30 minutes, so we can train our brains to push through stretches of fasting. But if we drink soft drinks or add milk to tea or coffee, this will stimulate our hunger again. Likewise, if your body isn’t reacting as it should when you produce insulin, instead of cycling between fat storing and fat burning, you may get stuck in a fat burning state, struggle to manage your weight and ultimately develop diabetes. Those skinny people you know may have been born with certain gut bacteria that keeps them that way.
Genes and family history, however, do not tell the whole story. The genes that predispose us to certain illnesses, weight and even our height, can be turned on and off depending on where we live and how we eat, insights revealed by twin studies. “No health complaint has been oversimplified more than obesity,” says Stokholm. “Incredible research is emerging to demonstrate just how amazingly complex this condition is and yet the stigma lives on? there are several malleable and fixed factors which decide your weight, and lifestyle is just one of them.”
She is certainly persuasive. Since we spoke, I’ve been drinking black coffee and pushing breakfast back to 10am. I don’t feel like I’ve cut back on sweet treats consciously, but nor have I craved my afternoon sugar hits. I don’t remember feeling hungry, either. I really hope I don’t lose my appetite for my long-term friends, cake and chocolate, but maybe we’ll be hanging out less frequently for the foreseeable.
‘What Your Doctor Eats’ by Dr Camilla Stokholm is out now (Vermilion, £16.99)