Nutrition plays a vital role in our overall health and is also a key part of medicine, which is why we linked up with Ally Jaffee. Ally is a medical student at Bristol Medical School in the U.K and the co-founder of NutriTank.
NutriTank is an award-winning innovative information hub for food, nutrition, and lifestyle medicine which Ally had founded with her friend, Doctor Iain Broadley in 2016.Â
Doctor Iain Broadley is a year one foundation doctor in Brighton, England. He and Ally had met in medical school when Iain visited one of Ally’s nutrition medicine interest group meetings. The meeting was all about getting people’s attention on appetite, nutrition, and medicine. Ally and Iain had both got talking and soon discovered that they shared a mutual passion for nutrition and how it is viewed in medical education. They felt there was a gap in medical education as it relates to nutrition that had to be filled. They decided they wanted a change to the system and that was how the National platform, NutriTank was created.
Ally had realized while in medical school that they were only being taught around the physiology, the biochemistry, and the anatomy of the digestive system but not around the actual clinical practical application of nutrition and how nutrition interventions and modifications can help prevent and manage the chronic lifestyle-related disease.
Ally and Iain both had a huge passion for this topic even before they started medical school. They had already gone on the journey themselves to understand nutrition through their self-care, health, and trying to motivate family members to eat healthily. They had read loads of research papers and listened to podcasts, while also attending conferences around nutritional medicine.Â
With their previous knowledge of nutritional medicine, when they attended classes at medical school, they realized that nutritional medicine was not being touched upon. Even when they were in clinical practice, while shadowing general practitioners they realized that general practitioner seemed to miss a lot of opportunities to educate patients on nutritional medicine. They didn’t blame them as they understood that these practitioners were a product of a system that did not teach the perks of nutritional medicine and the G.P’s could not teach what they had not learned. They preferred drug prescriptions to offer lifestyle and diet advice.
Ally and Iain took a look at the guidelines provided by the regulatory body for the medical management of disease in the U.K (N.I.C.E) National Institute of Care and Excellence, which many doctors go off, they saw that the guideline’s first line of management for every chronic lifestyle-related disease management is to offer diet and lifestyle advice, the first line was there but it was not being used, it was being completely overlooked. The second line of medical management which is to offer drugs for the disease is the go-to management type for most conditions. It was not the fault of the doctors but the fault of the system and the medical education journey.Â
It was based on these research and experiences that Ally and Iain decided that they wanted to make a change, and so they went to work on NutriTank. They started to work on Tank branches and began speaking to medical students across the country. Eventually, NutriTank got bigger and better and got on social media, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and this helped to increase their membership. Currently, NutriTank has 25 branches across the country, in 33 medical schools, and a membership of about 2000. They have succeeded in creating a national movement and starting at the grassroots while also changing the system.
NutriTank launched its website https://nutritank.com in January 2020 and it’s loaded with a lot of functions. They have a blog section and a toolbox section that offers loads of incredible online courses that they’ve had licensed to them from all over the world.
Having a website could never have come at a better time for NutriTank, with the current pandemic rocking the globe. More people are taking advantage of online communities, and so NutriTank is making the best of the situation. They offer education at the touch of a click at very reasonable prices.
They’ve got a membership for students, healthcare professionals, and public membership. Students can pay in monthly installments of £2.00 per month, with a free trial of two weeks. With the membership, students have access to a huge array of online courses from all sorts of different organizations and they also get discounts to fitness apps.
Healthcare professionals are charged at 35 pounds annually and members of the public are charged 45 pounds annually.
They all enjoy so many benefits from the website through the educational materials, online courses, and special discounts to fitness classes, yoga classes form Hotpod, who have branches all over the country, and also other food brands.
When we asked Ally what role she thinks millennials are playing in today’s healthcare she shared her opinion with us.
She said…
“I’m a big believer in giving millennials a good reputation and in our podcasts tagged “Nourish your Mind”, which are available on Apple, Spotify and SoundCloud, in our introduction straight away you can hear the premise of the podcast saying we want to give millennials a good reputation.
Millennials get such a bad reputation for you know being lazy and entitled we want to show that millennials can be disruptive and create positive social and health change. So, I and my team, who are all millennials, work with senior experts to help show that if you have a belief or see a gap or a problem, you can make a change.
I believe we could make a change in this way and I think I’ll advise all millennials to be hopeful about the future and to try and create change. And also remember you can’t do it on your own, you need a team you need a community and you need a cause that you believe in because it’s such a lot of hard work there are so many long hours with creating a company and a network and putting on events for your audience and all of that, that you need to be passionate about the cause otherwise it’ll just take a back burner and you won’t see the impact that makes you feel fulfilled.”
NutriTank is sweeping the U.K right now, sharing the benefits of healthy nutrition and making an impact along the way. You can check out their website https://nutritank.com, follow them on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/nutritank/. This way you can become a part of the community and catch up with all the things they have been up to.
Listen on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-325761637
Listen on Apple:
Please give 5* and leave a kind review: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/nutritank-nourish-your-mind/id1507996049
Listen on Spotify:
