Programme · Metabolic Natures · Personalised Nutrition
Most dietary advice is written for the average person. Metabolic Natures gives you a starting point instead: a reading on two axes from a questionnaire about how you have always run, built into a food guide, menu plan and recipes worked out for your plate, then adapted to how you cook and what you like at follow-up — with what should change written down before you begin, and checked when you return.
Updated 25 September 2026
The six names describe positions on two axes — oxidative rate and autonomic balance — and you are given a position on each rather than one label out of six. They come from a structured questionnaire about how you have always been, not from a laboratory test. Nothing measures constitution, and the questionnaire does not either: it is the starting hypothesis. Functional testing answers a different and more immediate question — what your biochemistry is doing now — and where the two disagree, current function governs the protocol until the constraint clears.
What the axes are meant to capture is a real observation: people respond very differently to the same food, and a high-fat, high-protein approach that suits one person can leave another flat. Whether a questionnaire position predicts which way a given person will go is not established. The point of the framework is to decide which direction to start in, and then to write down what we expect to change before we begin.
You get a direction and a strength on each axis, oxidative first — so a reading is oxidative: fast, lean 72%, strength 64% · autonomic: parasympathetic, lean 68%, strength 41% — low strength, with Catalyst · Grounded (low) as shorthand. Protein is not on this axis: it is set by your body weight and is the same on every plate. The autonomic adjustment is small — about two tablespoons of cooked rice a meal, and only when the reading is strong (50% or more) — and an interim position. Meal timing follows your own answers, not the label. See both axes on one page · These cards previously assigned the six names to the wrong axes — the correction is here.
Metabolic Natures is a framework for deciding where to start, not a test result.
What is well supported: people respond very differently to the same meal. One study tracked 800 people across nearly 47,000 meals and found high variability in blood glucose after identical meals DOI; another, of 1,002 UK adults, found the same for glucose, insulin and blood fats — several of its authors work for a commercial nutrition company, which we note as we would for any study DOI.
What is not established: that any one person does better long-term on one particular balance of food. When four named diets were compared for a year, weight loss tracked how well people stuck to the plan (r = 0.60) and essentially not at all which plan it was (r = 0.07, not significant). DOI The balance you can actually sustain is the one that works.
The specific categories are not validated by controlled trials, and we do not claim they are. No trial has tested whether assigning someone to an oxidative or autonomic category, and matching a macronutrient ratio to it, produces a better result. The closest test of that shape of argument is DIETFITS — 609 adults, healthy low-fat against healthy low-carbohydrate, twelve months, a difference of 0.7 kg between arms, and neither a genotype pattern nor baseline insulin secretion predicted which diet suited whom. DOI DIETFITS did not test oxidation rate or autonomic tone, so it is not a direct refutation — but it tested the logic, and the logic did not hold up.
So what are we claiming? That a structured way of recognising your own long-standing pattern, adjusted from what your test findings currently show, gives you an approach you can recognise yourself in and therefore sustain. And one thing more, which is the part that can be wrong: we write down, before your protocol starts, what we expect to change and by when — and we check it at retest. That prediction can come back not met. Nothing else in the framework can.
And what we are not selling. Metabolic Natures recommends no proprietary formula, and no product is required for the method to work. The lineage this framework comes from did the opposite — it defined its own efficacy as depending on a sole-source supplement range. That is named here because the same standard has to apply to a tradition we came from as to one we did not.
Read the corrections to the book, dated →In traditional nutritional therapy, ongoing dietary support meant a series of weekly or fortnightly sessions at £60–95 each — £360–1,140 over a programme — because the contact time was the only way to handle the ongoing questions, menu adaptations, and accountability that make dietary change stick. Every "what do I do with this ingredient?" and "I'm travelling next week — what do I eat?" required a session.
The DH Clinical Concierge changes that entirely. The ongoing questions that used to require session time are now handled between sessions through the concierge — which knows your reading, your plate, your allowable foods, your dietary framework, and your goals. The formal sessions focus on what only a practitioner can do: the clinical assessment, the protocol decision, and the review of what's working.
The most common reason dietary change fails is not lack of information — it is lack of support at the moment when the question arises. You're in a supermarket and unsure whether something is on your list. You're travelling and need a fast option that fits your plan. You want to adapt a recipe. You've been on the plan for three weeks and your energy is different on certain days and you want to know why.
The DH Client Concierge is available to answer all of these in real time — configured with your reading, your plate, your allowable foods, your dietary framework, and your goals. It is not a generic nutrition chatbot. It is a clinically-guided tool built with your specific picture in mind.
The second edition is being rewritten to the current method. Programme clients receive Volume 1 when it is complete. Note that all printed editions describe what the questionnaire and the tests measure the wrong way round. The dated correction lists the seven places by page.
Included in the programme: Volume 1 of the revised second edition, delivered when complete.
Included in programmeThe Metabolic Natures Programme works as a standalone service for people who want to improve their diet without committing to full functional testing yet. It is also included as an add-on within the TDG Five-Test Programme and the Three-Test Gut and Cellular Health Package — where the test results show what is currently in the way, and govern the plan until it clears.
If you complete the Metabolic Natures Programme and then go on to functional testing, the tests do not change your reading — no test identifies a position. What they add is whatever is currently in the way: where they find it, it takes priority in the plan until it clears, and your reading is looked at again after that.
Ready to start?
Once you have booked, the questionnaire link comes to you straight away. Not sure yet? Book a free 20-minute call, or ask the concierge how the programme works.