Programme · Metabolic Natures · Personalised Nutrition
Most dietary advice is written for the average person. Your Metabolic Nature — determined by how your body produces and uses energy, processes macronutrients, responds to stress, and tolerates different food groups — means there is no average that applies to you. This programme identifies your type, builds your personalised foods list, menu plan and recipe library, and supports your implementation with ongoing access to the DH Clinical Concierge.
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 describe is a real dietary difference. A high-fat, high-protein approach that suits one position produces fatigue and weight gain in another; a carbohydrate-led approach that destabilises the first is exactly what the second needs. 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 one position from each axis, with a percentage on each, in the fixed order oxidative first and autonomic second — so a reading is fast-oxidative dominant at 73%, parasympathetic subdominant at 37%, with Catalyst-Grounded as shorthand. 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.
The general idea is well supported: people do better on different balances of food, and the balance someone can actually sustain is the one that works. Dansinger and colleagues randomised 160 people to four named diets for a year and found weight loss correlated with how well people stuck to the plan (r = 0.60) and essentially not at all with which plan it was (r = 0.07, not significant). DOI
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.
Read the correction to Chapter 6 of the book →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 Metabolic Nature type, 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 works for your type. 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 Metabolic Nature type, 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.
607 pages covering the six Metabolic Natures in clinical depth — the two-axis framework, the separation of long-standing pattern from current function, blocking factors, and the dietary, supplement, exercise and stress management protocols. Note that Chapter 6 of all printed editions states the polarity backwards, and Chapter 7 of the same book contradicts it. The dated correction is here.
Included in the programme as digital edition. Physical copy available by arrangement.
Included in programme Also on Amazon →The 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 functional test results refine the type identification beyond the intake form alone and produce an even more precisely personalised dietary framework.
If you complete the Metabolic Natures Programme and subsequently proceed to functional testing, the type identified through the programme provides the clinical context in which test results are interpreted — and the dietary framework built in the programme is refined rather than replaced by what the tests reveal.
Ready to find your type?
Book a free 20-minute discovery call to confirm the programme is the right starting point — or talk to the concierge first to get a sense of what your Metabolic Nature might be before committing.