Introducing steering committee member Patrick Holford

BSc, DipION, FBANT, NTCRP

Patrick Holford has been a leading figure and spokesman on nutrition since 1984. He was the Founder of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, with his mentor, twice Nobel Prize winner Dr Linus Pauling, as patron. He also the founder of the Food for the Brain Foundation

Originally trained in psychology. He was one of the first promoters of the importance of zinc, essential fats, low-GL diets and homocysteine-lowering B vitamins and their importance in mental health and Alzheimer’s prevention.

He is the author of 46 books, translated into over 30 languages, including The Optimum Nutrition Bible and his latest book Upgrade Your Brain which will be released on the April 24th and available to buy on the WCH shop.

At the start of his career, Patrick opened a health shop and clinic in High Wycombe where he developed a method for treating people with nutritional therapy. This was a truly pioneering and ground-breaking approach at that time. In 1982 he took the knowledge gained from his clinical practice and considered that sub-optimum nutrition could be the cause of diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. This was before anyone had heard of omega-3, antioxidants, zinc, chromium, magnesium, and homocysteine, or had a sense that nutrition could affect the brain.

He studied with two of the leading pioneers in nutrition medicine and psychiatry – the late Dr Carl Pfeiffer and Dr Abram Hoffer. In 1984 he founded the Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION) which has since trained thousands of nutritional therapists in what is now a degree accredited profession. Twice Nobel Prize winner Dr Linus Pauling was the Patron of ION.

In 1998 Patrick left the ION to focus on writing down what he’d learnt and his first book, the Optimum Nutrition Bible{link to shop}, was published, selling over 2 million copies and catalysing a global revolution. He has attracted many supporters throughout his career such as Professor David Smith from the University of Oxford: ‘Patrick Holford is a superb communicator and teacher and his writings and teachings are soundly based on the scientific and medical literature and is very much at the forefront of nutritional medicine’.

Never afraid to stick his head above the parapet, he also championed nutritional medicine and fought the tide of legislation that big pharma used to stop natural medicine from becoming the new paradigm.

Patrick takes a holistic approach to health. He believes that as important as good nutrition, exercise, reducing stress, not smoking and creating a toxin-free environment are – our state of mind and spirit also have an enormous effect on our ability to be healthy and recover health, and this should not be underestimated. He teaches that we are physical, emotional, sensual, intellectual and spiritual beings living on the Earth in a human society, and understanding this connectedness is vital to feeling fully alive, awake and connected on all levels to live a purposeful life.

In 2014, Patrick was inducted to the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame, joining his mentors Drs Linus Pauling and Abram Hoffer. He is an Honorary Fellow of BANT. (The British Association of Nutritional Therapists). He is also a retired visiting professor at the University of Teeside.

Here’s what Patrick has to say about the current state of health in the British Isles:

”Our health services are broken and failing because they don’t address the true causes of disease. That is why we need the World Council for Health, to represent an intelligent way forward for true health care. As founder of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, which spearheaded the new profession of nutritional therapy, now incorporating lifestyle medicine, and the charitable Food for the Brain Foundation, focussing on the prevention of mental health problems from ADHD to Alzheimer’s, we can now combine under the umbrella of the WCH to help facilitate the emergence of a design for health that works and counter the distortion of healthcare driven by profit incentives, with little regard for the ethical principle of ‘first do no harm’.”

We are delighted to be running our first campaign, Alzheimer’s in Preventable with Patrick’s expertise and in collaboration with Food for the Brain. If this is a topic you would like to know more about do save the following key dates in your diary

April 24th - Upgrade Your Brain Summit
May 15th – Alzheimer’s Prevention Day aligned within ‘dementia awareness week’.

Subscribe to the British Isles WCH Substack below to keep up to date with these events and the rest of this campaign.