We're in the grip of a podcast plague. I'm serious - everyone has one. Have you checked the children?! Not to ensure they're safe in bed but to be certain they're not broadcasting from there 🙃😆 And podcasts have now gone AV! We're able to watch people speak!! It's...
Rachel Arthur's Nutrition Blog
‘And Now, Please Welcome To The Stage…’🎤
What unites you as a family? For me, my kids & their partners, it's humour & the more absurd & unexpected the better. Know the type? You spend most of the show asking yourself, 'Is this the show?!' Confused as to whether you should laugh because you're...
Access Rachel's Premium Blog
Thyroid Health in a Time of (& after) COVID
Did you know that your thyroid expresses more ACE 2 receptors than your lungs? So while there is nothing new about the potential for a virus (or indeed even a vaccine against a virus) to impact thyroid form and function, the particular predilection this recent virus...
Weight Issues & Thyroid – Are We Asking The Wrong Question?
If I wrote down these 2 elements on a MindMap: Thyroid dysfunction and Adiposity, how would you connect them? Would you reflexively draw an arrow from the former to the latter to flag that the thyroid underpins the weight management issues? My arrow would be the...
A Growing Case of Practitioner Paralysis?
Over the years I've observed an increase in the incidence of practitioner paralysis. This occurs typically & understandably in the face of fearmongering. A good example is in the area of so-called 'methylation medicine' where we've been lead to believe that...
The Big SAMe Rethink Continued
You know the saying, 'If I had a dollar...', well there's so many ways I could finish that sentence, especially in relation to the most common questions I'm asked by praccies on a weekly basis and 'Can my patient on antidepressant 'X' take SAMe?', would be in the top...
The Big SAMe Rethink Starts Now
Recently a very experienced practitioner who uses SAMe frequently and successfully in her patients and also delivers education said to me, "I don't know what I am doing wrong - practitioners still come back to me with cases where they're throwing 8 different products...
How Long Do You Give The ‘How’?
I've been ruffling feathers over here while speaking at AIMA in Auckland. While I am pretty familiar and comfortable with that role (& responsibility?) - this topic ruffled my own, arguably the most. In fact, I kicked off the presentation with, 'What I'm going to...
An Obese Individual Walks Into Your Clinic
This is not about body shaming nor body positivity. I understand the crudeness of the body mass index, as a measure of (un)healthy weight - let alone (un)healthy muscle mass, so I don't use this as a stand-alone assessment of weight, nor rigidly adhere to the...
The Fig Fix for Potassium Goals?
My lord I can go on, I know. And for weeks now I've really been banging 🥁🥁 The 1st drum was me making us all salivate & suffer through my month-long Mediterranean feast The 2nd, my ongoing incurable fixation on the 'Power of the Ps' - Protein & Potassium, not...
My Big Fat Greek Feast…the End?
Ok look away now if you've already heard too much from me about Greece. I understand. For the rest of you, still prepared to tough-out the travel tales, we've been discussing my recent thrill at eating something very similar to the Mediterranean diet - often touted as...
The Protein & Potassium Riddle of Ageing – Muscles and Bones
Notice a bit of a theme? Me too. Ok, so 50 is a landmark year, for lots of great reasons & they are all staring me right in my (increasingly wrinkled) face. But just at the edges of my now newly bespectacled visual field, I catch a glimpse of that stealth threat...
My Big Fat Greek Feast Continues
But just like so many well-meaning researchers who purport to employ 'THE' Mediterranean diet while their dietary intervention is actually just a rough approximation, I can't claim that what I ate over my month in Greece was an identical replica of what the...
My Big Fat Greek (month-long) Feast!
Somehow it didn’t dawn on me immediately, that I was in fact living this nutrition nerd’s dream…I WAS ACTUALLY EATING THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET! 🤯 😍 Like, the real-deal, legit, bona fide, honest-to-goodness, original, dinkum 1960s Greek diet. That...
Suboptimal Thyroid Function? Could It Be Their Psych Meds?
Gone are the days, thankfully, when we could all easily identify any individual taking an antipsychotic 1) because they were the marginalised 'mad' and 2) stigma and shame were rife. With the seismic shift that has occurred both in psychiatry & society we now know...
Our *NEW* Prescribers Program in 2023
How much? How often? When is the best time & timing? do you know about friends, foes and frenemies? Which form, when? e.g. building blocks or bioactives? And for how long? aka are we there yet...? These are the kind of questions that one would imagine nutritional...
The Perfect TSH??
Have you been told somewhere by someone that the ‘perfect’ TSH is 1.5 mIU/L? This is a wonderful, terrible & wonderfully terrible example of ‘magical numbers medicine’. As a push-back against the published reference ranges we’re given, that are so wide you could...
The Silent Scream of Aging?
One of my dear friends told her husband several years ago that she had noticed he was now making, 'old man noises' upon standing up from couches & chairs. She told him that must simply stop. She pointed out that he was only 50 and that she neither could nor would...
MasterCourse II
13 years ago I was first asked to contribute to ACNEM's thyroid training 8 years ago I put together a little Masterclass on Diagnostics & 6 years ago co-created another one on Thyroid 2 years ago I dived deep into new literature to update my ideas & my...
*NEW* Advanced Thyroid Training Coming Soon!
I've spent the best part of about 4 months recording my *NEW* Advanced Thyroid Assessment training. I told my team this would be easy and quick, given it was to be based on a great little 2-part, 2hr updated presentation I delivered just last year for ACNEM!! Sixteen...
Keeping Things Real & Representative
Any pathology test is only of value if the result produced is 'real', or, representative of that individual, right? So the timing of the test is a major pivot point then: do I tell my patient to present for the test, or collect the sample themselves, on their 'best',...
Are You A Finger-Pointing-Prescriber Or A Change-Maker?
Are we doing ourselves out of a job? I've been talking treatment plans with my New Grads recently. Given, only recently these were major assessment items in their clinic units, they have been trained to create ALL-ENCOMPASSING (biopsychosocial) prescriptions and...
The GREAT Cortisol Capture! 35K Aussies Get Tested
And all 35K results have been collated, analysed & made available so we can be better informed regarding expected Cortisol values based on sex (spoiler alert: women win & when I say win I mean track higher generally🤷♀️), age &...
























