Women’s issues

As always new year starts with bombarding us with suggestions for the ‘new you’ – new diets, food fads, supplements, gym memberships – which on most occasions do nothing, but overwhelm us at the time when we need to gently transition from the season of festive indulgence back to busy lives in a cold time of the year, when body needs nurturing, not detoxing. Granted, some of those marketing tools have become somewhat less aggressive, but it still ends up putting you under pressure to ‘perform’. Instead of that, what I want to put forward for your consideration is the one tool in your arsenal that can help you make the right decisions for YOUR body thanks to the science and which can lead to profound changes and long-term benefits for you that you will see and feel. Say hello to a DNA kit called iamYiam.

The company was started by Lorena Pica and officially launched in February of last year. Lorena is a woman whose boundless activity and energy hides behind a calm demeanour. She was born in Romania and as often happens, her career now, as a company founder, was influenced by her own health woes, which started with pneumonia aged only six months old and continued with an auto-immune diagnosis of under-active thyroid aged 26. Unfortunately many conditions like this are becoming a somewhat ‘norm’ in our date and age and I wonder if some of them are pre-determined not just by own genetics, but by lifestyle and environmental factors, including the food supply chain, diet and quality of water we consume internally and externally.

Lorena left home at 17 to live in Germany, where she worked in business development, later moving to London and building a successful career in the investment business field. However, her health continued to cause her concern and when her GP suggested to cut her thyroid out, Lorena saw it as a challenge, as she had no desire to follow the ‘envasive’ route. She started researching the subject, which led to development of algorithms and focus on the fact that up to 75% of diseases are and can be preventable. With the spotlight firmly on data, health and genetics, iamYiam unique approach also takes into account your body’s nutritional needs, accounting for such individual factors as vitamin absorption and storage, as well as fitness. Armed with your unique DNA results, covering Diet, Nutrients, Fitness & Health, you will be able to focus of prevention, which is always better than cure. You will be able to make knowledgable choices when it comes to lifestyle, including nutrition, exercise and alternative therapies, that can be structured around your goals with the optimised efficiency plan, rather than celebrity advice or bloggers recomendations. The algorithm itself is based on 163,000 academic research papers (and growing) and genetic markers, so when you receive your DNA results and have a chance to read and process them – I am still contemplating mine a few weeks after receiving them, as it gives you plenty of information to process – you can be also matched to the suitable practitioners & therapies that will help you achieve your goals.

When it comes to setting goals most people tend to focus primarily on weight, energy, stress and sleep. When you look across the wellness landscape, it seems to be growing exponentially, but often the list of preventative therapies and practises can be fragmented and confusing to navigate, especially when one thing might work for your friend, but not you necessarily. And the nutritional advice is often given to us by people who aren’t actually qualified to give it to you or whose suggestions aren’t backed by scientific findings (have you watched recent Horizon’s documentary ‘Clean Eating: the dirty truth’ on BBC2 narrated by Giles Yeo?) or is based on the latest trends, which are often not coordinated with specific health goals or personal genetics. Lorena and her team extensively interview (based on their internal ‘code of ethics’) and test practitioners before they join the iamYiam rota of practitioners on the website. When they do, mini-video profiles are posted online about each one of them, which will help you form an initial opinion and decide who you want to potentially book in order to help you achieve your goals and build the right foundations. In each case effective activity and nutritional plan will be available, based on your aspirations and weakest genetics characteristics according to the algorithm.

iamYiam DNA kit box contains the following:

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