Robin Daly: Hello, welcome to the Yes to Life Show on UK Health Radio. My name is Robin Daly, host of the show and founder of the UK charity Yes To Life, which helps people with cancer find out about and use integrative medicine to help regain their health and wellbeing. My guest on the show this week is someone who has been on the show before a few times. In fact, Kirsten Chick is a highly experienced nutritional therapist who specializes in supporting people with cancer. She is also about to publish Nutrition Brought to Life, a long-term project of hers.

Kirsten has a wealth of knowledge and experience to share so I was keen to get my hands on a copy and talk to Kirsten about it.

Kirsten, great to have you back on the show, it’s been a while.

Kirsten Chick: It has been a while, glad you are well, and really happy to be here.

Robin Daly: So the subject for discussion today is your new book, Nutrition Brought to Life.

Let me start out by saying how amazingly comprehensive it is for a compact volume. It is so much more than a regular nutrition book, or diet book, or recipe book. In fact, it’s all of those, and a lot more. I think it manages to tread a line of being scientific without being sciency, by which I mean, people who look to science as a reference point for personal decisions on health will be well satisfied and those who rely more on intuition for their choices won’t find this an off-putting textbook either.

So let’s get stuck in, we have a lot to talk about. One thing I would ask before we go into detail is that while your book is aimed at everyone, you have a history of having cancer and working for years specifically with people with cancer, how much does the book address specific cancer issues?

Kirsten Chick: Well, it creeps in quite a lot. It can’t not, really. I use other examples and it’s an accumulation of my practice and inquiry into nutrition over the last 17 years or so.

My serious inquiry into nutrition started as a result of having cancer myself. I studied and trained pretty quickly afterwards. I’ve always had a lot of patients, even before I started actually being known as somebody who specializes in that area. Other than seeing myself as a cancer specialist, my specialist area is the immune system, because I work with a lot of people with chronic illness.

People want to prevent chronic illness, and what really underpins all of that is the immune system, and really strengthening it. So there’s a lot about the immune system in the book. It was interesting when we were putting the index together, I like a book with an index. That way you can just quickly look up a word at the back. I’m just quickly flicking to the index in here, the cancer references are much longer than many of the other references. When I’m talking about the immune system, all the way through to when I’m talking about having a really nourishing relationship with food and that is something that working with people with cancer has really highlighted to me.

There are a lot of fears around food, especially for people with cancer and other chronic illnesses. I frequently get people, and still do get people, coming to see me that are too scared to eat anything. So they’re just eating lettuce leaves and maybe two other things and that’s not healthy.

Robin Daly: Right. Well you’ve gone straight into the first thing I wanted to talk to you about. Food is meant to nourish. Right at the beginning of the book, you make that statement in contrast to lots of other ideas about food that are unfortunately all too common today. I just wanted you to say a bit more. Do you want to explain that a little bit more?

Kirsten Chick: Absolutely. So we sometimes lose sight of why we’re eating food. We naturally, as human beings, like to put things in boxes to understand things.

We have really scientifically narrowed things down to proteins and calories, and this is that. It has all become a kind of currency. I refer to it as treating our bodies like slot machines and we are much more complex and dynamic than that. We all need to feel some kind of joy in eating food, some kind of satisfaction when we eat.

There’s no point ticking all the nutrition boxes. I’ve got my salad, tick. I’ve got my complete protein, tick. All of that, but I’m miserable because I’m not enjoying what I’m eating.

The really big thing that has become clear to me, working with everybody over the years, is that stress gets in the way of everything.

We all experience stress on a daily basis, to greater or lesser extent. Some of us are still processing stresses from years ago. Stress itself stops our digestive system from working. So if we are in a stress state, our digestive system has been demoted.

An example: if a wild cat were to jump out in front of us, digestion would be the bottom on the list of priorities. So what we put into digesting gets really decimated. It’s only when we’re free from stress that we can digest foods properly and absorb the nutrients.

We can have this perfect plate of food, but if we are too stressed to digest and absorb it, then we might as well just be eating some fast food or something. So we’ve got to look at the whole picture. We’ve got to make sure that our figures, nutrition and needs are right now in this moment. We have got to make sure that we are relaxed and enjoying our food enough to really let it nourish us.

Robin Daly: I think that’s the one thing you can say about this book, it looks at nutrition from every angle. I thought that came across when I was reading the book.

What an extraordinary amount of detailed information there is nowadays about science and nutrition. I think it’s fair to say the lion’s share of this information has come to light in very recent decades.

Kirsten Chick: Yeah. We’ve been interested in nutrition for a very long time. People have always looked for tips, and there are tried and tested different scenarios, but it’s only in recent years that a lot of this research has been published in journals.

There are some really wonderful articles in there in BMJ nutrition now. It’s taken a lot more seriously and people are trying to find ways to present nutrition in a scientifically relevant way. What I mean by that is that there has been a lot of talk about evidenced-based nutrition.

Everything is evidence-based and there’s a problem with that because to make something evidence based, it has to follow very precise criteria. That’s quite tricky for food. The example I give in my book is with a carrot: how would you have a randomized controlled study of she wanted more carrots every day because the people in the control group would know that they didn’t have a carrot to munch on every day. You couldn’t provide something that was similar enough to a carrot for them to not know whether or not they have the carrots. So it’s really complex tying to produce this evidence based science.

So we’ve had to find new criteria for that, and it’s always going to be problematic. I think people are making more of an effort, it’s been taken more seriously now to try and find new ways to do that.

Robin Daly: Absolutely, [we] need the medical model for trialing foods.

So this is a lot more than your average nutrition book and an area it’s particularly strong on is the role of the mind-body connection. One of the topics you go into very early on is the selfish-selfless dichotomy. It kind of always puts me in mind of one of the Tintin cartoons where Tintin’s dog, Snowy, has to make up his mind what to do and has a little winged Snowy whispering in one ear and a horned one over the other.

So many people are in a battle between selfishness and selflessness. Would you tell us why you included this topic in the book?

Kirsten Chick: We need to be clear that we need to look after ourselves before we can look after other people, and we need to be in a strong position to do that. We are often torn between the two.

Looking at it recent social media trends, we can see it can swing quite wildly in different directions, so it can swing towards being completely selfish and self-obsessed. That’s not helpful either, but clearly we have to make sure that there is room, that there was space in our lives for looking after ourselves.

I think as human beings, generally, we have a drive to look out for other people and to make sure that other people are alright. Especially the people that we love.

On top of that, we have a lot of pressure to achieve, to perform, to meet targets and deadlines. That takes us out of that space as well. Modern life has kind of scattered our work lives and our private lives. So instead of going to work and coming home and having clear boundaries, now even when we look at social media, half the time, it’s partly for personal pleasure, for friendship reasons, partly because there’s a business on social media that we’re interested in.

So we don’t separate those two particularly well. So I think it’s just key to put it in the diary, even if it’s just five minutes every now and again, to put in “me time “in the diary, whatever that might mean for you.

That might be going for a run, it might be sitting staring at the window. It might be reading a book. It’s important that you find at least five, 10 minutes every now and again, to do it.

Robin Daly: Yes. Another similar kind of topic that runs through the book as a theme is the relentless categorizing of food and food habits and of being either good or bad.

Also the relentless shuffling of things from one category to the other, why are you so strongly against this approach and what do you favor instead?

Kirsten Chick: Great question. There are reasons I’m really against this, the first is because nothing is that straightforward. So rather than thinking of a particular food, or nutrient as good or bad, I would rather think “is this appropriate for me right now?” in this instance, because in some instances my body might require something that in other instances might be more detrimental for it. One of my favorite examples is oranges.

For me, I’m not great at eating oranges in that they give me a tummy ache. They mess with my digestion. I’ve had that since very early childhood. So for me they are in the category of bad. But, that’s just for me, for you, they might be the best thing ever.

If I was in the Sahara desert and I’d been there a few days and I was completely dehydrated and somebody rescued me and they handed me an orange. That would be the most hydrating, nourishing life-saving thing on the planet for me, right then.

Things are too complicated to put into boxes. The second reason that I feel really strongly about this is because it’s a simple leap from judging the food to judging ourselves, and we do it all of the time. For example, if you have a crisp habit or chip habit. If you have been trying to avoid eating crisps but [you] have a day where you have eaten four bags of crisps. We would ordinarily say is “I’ve been bad today.” The judgment of the food as being bad has very quickly jumped to the judgment of self as being bad.

We are very quick to judge ourselves by what we eat. If we are categorizing what we eat into good and bad, then we’re going to be putting that judgment on ourselves. There’s already too much judgment, too much blame, too much self-recrimination. I don’t want to add to that by saying to somebody, those crisps are bad. Don’t eat the crisp because that person and nine times out of 10, is then going to put that bad judgment onto themselves. I don’t want any part of that.

Robin Daly: Another topic that many might think is a tad esoteric for a nutrition book, is being present. Particularly the things working against being present and about being present when you eat.

So you devote a lot of space to how you are when you’re eating. There’s a whole chapter on mindful eating. What made you want to include this in the book?

Kirsten Chick: Well, this is another way of trying to take the judgment out, for a start. If we just sit, and we eat, sit really mindfully, then we’re not getting caught up in debates in our heads about whether it’s good or bad or, what’s going on, or whether I’m good or bad, we just don’t go there.

If we’re completely present we can just enjoy the food. So remembering that food is there to nourish us, the more we enjoy it, the more we nourished by it. The really key level it works on is with regard to something called the cephalic phase of digestion.

So cephalic relates to the mind, it’s all about when we see the food that we are about to eat. When we look at it, when we smell it, when we taste it, when we feel the textures of that food on our tongue, when we really engaged with that food, all of our senses are then sending messages to our brain.

The brain senses to wake the digestion, it actually triggers the digestive system into waking up and preparing to digest that food. The stomach and the saliva will start when you think about something that you really fancy.

There is an enzyme in there that helps start breaking that down. Your stomach acid might get stronger to process things in there and also to activate protein enzymes in your stomach. There are triggers that incite further things down in the digestive tract, but the initial trigger is engaging with our food.

Robin Daly: Well, you kind of explained that excruciating thing of smelling really great foods that you’re not going to eat, and just how bad that is in terms of getting everything going with no action to follow.

Kirsten Chick: Yeah, at the same time, that’s a mindfulness practice. Just as much as walking mindfully or following the breath or whatever you’re doing. A mindfulness practice is something where you’re really engaging in the present moment: you’re in the here and now, fully in your own body.

The thing about mindfulness practices is that they switch off or downplay your stress processes. They directly activate your nervous system and kind of unravel the effects of stress, one of those being downgrading your digestive system. So it helps in that way as well, to switch your digestive system back on.

So rather than eating mindfully, being as something that’s nice to do, alongside the diet. actually, the two are fully entrenched with each other: in order to fully digest and absorb the nutrients in your amazing meal that you have before you, you need to eat it mindfully. In fact, even it’s the meal you have before you isn’t something that you would consider to be amazing, maybe it’s a ready meal, or a piece of chocolate cake. Even then, there are some nutrients in there somewhere and to be able to get those nutrients, then saver it.

As a lovely side effect or byproduct of this, we get used to listening to how our body feels, because if we’re really present with our food, from eating, then we get. Feedback about how it’s feeling about and what we’re eating. So at the same time we’re practicing and listening to our body’s needs and actually wanting that salad or that bag of crisps, or whatever it is.

Listening to those little messages that tell us that it’s had enough, it’s full now, is also important. A lot of people ask me “how do I learn to listen to my body and what it needs?”  and this is eating mindfully.

Robin Daly: Okay, another topic that many might feel is a bit off-piste for a nutrition book, but that I love and links to what you’ve just said, is trusting your body. Would you tell us a bit more about this important topic and why you wanted to write about it in the book?

Kirsten Chick: Yes, it’s a starting point. A body is the only expert in itself. So my body is the only expert in my body. Your body is only expert in your body. We have amazing scientists, doctors, consultants, traditional therapists and healthcare practitioners. There are some really amazing people out there who are really very knowledgeable and experienced and wonderful, but nobody is an expert in your body like your own body is. It’s so complex, I’m not sure we’ll ever fully understand it.

So the more we can learn to listen in and hear the signals that our bodies are trying to tell us, the more we can behave in ways that are hopefully going to be helpful. The more we tune into that, the better. It can be quite difficult to trust our bodies.

If you’ve had some kind of life threatening or challenging illness, or event happen to you, especially with an illness, it can be hard to trust your body. Sometimes you can feel a bit betrayed by your body. It’s important to know and to understand that our body is a really only ever trying to do the best they can all of the time, even when they create lumps and bumps, they’re just trying to contain stuff that they can’t get rid of.

It’s a case of really understanding that if we want our bodies to do better, then we need to put in a little bit more support. Nutritional support is a no brainer really, but there are lots of other kinds of support we can put in as well. Massage, for example, mindful meditation and walking in the woods, hanging out with our favorite people, and the things that bring us joy and make us feel relaxed. They are just as important.

Robin Daly: Yeah. This kind of model of cancer as some kind of alien enemy inside people is unhelpful when it comes to trusting your own body. We’ve barely started to talk about food in terms of the more physical biochemical effects.

I would expect a few listeners are wondering if this is a book about nutrition, let me assure them, you give a comprehensive attention to all the important systems of the body, including all the nutritional building blocks, always within the context of the issues we’ve already spoken about, to set the context for the way you look at nutrition. Is that fair?

Kirsten Chick: Absolutely. I’ve been teaching nutrition for a long time now. Coming up to 15 years.

Every time I have a consultation with somebody, it is an education session, I have become very good at knowing what I want to say about proteins, what I want say about fats, what I want said about carbohydrates, what I want to say about all of these different things and how I want to say it and why I want to say it, why it’s meaningful.

I think that’s pretty important. If people don’t understand why it’s meaningful, then they’re just not going to feel inspired to do anything. It’s really important that nutrition is presented in a way that is meaningful and brought to life. So if it’s really clear to somebody, they understand, they get it, they’re going to remember, and it’s really easy to take on board.

Robin Daly: Hence the title of the book: Nutrition Brought to Life. I love putting it in this context. It does make the whole thing much more meaningful, rather than kind of some abstract diet book about what’s good and bad.

To give an example of how you actually address the more straightforward biochemical side of things, and you go to great lengths to take the reader beyond the bonds, specifically around sugar feeding cancer. That [concept] has been with us for far too long. You have two whole chapters on sugar. Do you want to say a little bit about that?

Kirsten Chick: Yes, I can. It’s not that simple, there are so many different kinds of sugars as well, and people get so confused about it. It’s something that we’re still learning about all of the time you know, and if I write a book in 10 years’ time, there might end up being four chapters on it, or two different chapters on it.

Currently what we know is that our bodies need sugar, but the way which it should enter the body, and how good we are at processing that sugar, determines whether that sugar is beneficial or harmful.

Again, it’s not necessarily the sugar that’s good or bad. It’s that relationship with it. Say it’s an emotional, psychological level. Our relationship with sugar really has an impact on how much of it we eat and how we feel about it, all of those sorts of things, our physical relationship with body and how well are our insulin receptors are working.

Is that sugar creating inflammation in our bodies? Or is it just going towards making useful processes and substances and energy? So, yes, there is a lot about that because I think there’s a lot to say, but hopefully I’ve written about it in a way that is not confusing or overwhelming, but in a way that’s actually makes it all clear and make sense.

Robin Daly: Yes. Well, I think it does. I actually really liked the fact that it leads you to move beyond the superficial. A black and white story about things and to actually take a look at them in context.

It’s not that something’s inherently bad. In one context it might be harmful, but in another it might not. Without that context, it’s just like some sort of dogma, which is very unhelpful to somebody.

Kirsten Chick: Exactly. And it brings the fear back in again.

Yes. People get really scared of sugar and are terrified of things because they might contain some kind of sugar or they might contain something that can be converted into sugar. In which case, they end up pretty much eating nothing, so you end up with a deprivation and malnourishment. A diet driven by fear, which shuts down the digestive system and the immune system, and everything else. It has such a detrimental effect on the body. I would rather keep eating what one might consider to be the wrong foods, but joyfully, I think the fear does more damage [than that].

Robin Daly: Interesting. Well, that’s a strong statement coming from a nutritionist.

Kirsten Chick: It’s not that controversial of a book. In terms of the information, statements like that, that may come across as being quite controversial, actually though I’ve kept it really quite grounded.

Robin Daly: You even managed to bring in the sun in as a source of nutrition, which is broadening it out pretty well. Do you want to say anything about that?

Kirsten Chick: Well I certainly didn’t realize, until I gave it proper thought, that actually the energy that we’re getting from our food comes from the sun originally. So every time that you’re sitting down to eat a meal or a snack or an apple, you’re actually eating a bit of sun.

I find that really quite amazing, really quite beautiful. I wanted to describe that process and how that all works. There’s been a lot of scientific interest in how we might all get our energy more directly from the sunshine. Like plants do, using the same kind of processes, but using electrons that are around our cell membranes, which have these things called double carbon bonds, sitting in the structures. Around those double carbon bonds, there are certain kinds of electrons that can harness that would literally absorb the energy from the sunshine in the same way.

Scientists have been looking at it for decades now, and, it kind of make sense, in terms of how we get the energy, or how we get the energy that we need for cellular activity. So I talk about that too, in the book, the different ways that we can get our energy from the sunshine. As a concept in itself, it just amazes me the fact that we run directly on sunshine. I think that’s wonderful.

Robin Daly: It makes complete sense. It’s a far cry from the sort of paranoia about the sun, that predominated really until quite recently. A bit of a lack of trust in the environment. The natural environment is a bit of a parallel to a lack of trust in our bodies, isn’t it?

Kirsten Chick: Exactly. We need some sunshine to get some bits of nutrition. Again, if we are being a bit more present in our physical bodies and listening, we get clear indications of when we should step into the shade against. stuff.

Robin Daly: The common sense of the body. Right, there’s a ton of stuff in this book, and a lot of it is covering the main areas to do with nutrition and the body and the body systems. We’re not going to do justice to all these today, there’s just too much in there. I just wanted to say that some of the things it does cover, the basic building blocks of nutrition and very importantly, our attitudes towards each of them. Ideas about the exploration of oils, again, striving to move beyond the good and bad fats, black and white picture.

[There is] a lot about the microbiome, the gut brain connection, a subject that you and I have explored on the show before. You go into adrenal support the physical side of managing stress, addressing stress, both from the practical, physical standpoint and from the point of view of the mind and the thought processes. Something I think is really important in many health issues actually the complete interconnectivity of the mind and spirit with the physical body.

So you need to look at the whole picture. There’s something in there that I think is particularly relevant right now, that I wanted to go into in a bit more detail. You talk about the possibility of bacteria, encouraging us to be sociable, to live in close contact with each other to kiss, hug, hold hands, and share joy. Right now we’ve been through this ridiculous period of enforced isolation, which is just so unnatural, but it’s been necessary given the circumstances.

When you talk about suspicion, or fear, or lack of trust of the body, of the environment and of other people, were there bugs and all the rest of it as well. This sort of thing can build on the paranoia. I just feel that contrasts so strongly with what’s going on right now, and if that’s what we need in order to be healthy, we’re going to have to make a concerted effort at the end of this lockdown, aren’t we?

Kirsten Chick: Yes. I mean, we’re not just sociable in terms of what we need psychologically and emotionally, we’re sociable in terms of what we need physically as well. There’s so much regarding what we need around physical touch. We know so much already about how important that is for our mental health and our emotional health. But for our physical health, not just because our mental health is bound up with our physical health, but also because we need to be able to share microbiomes with each other.

Viruses are funky sorts of things. Again, we like to put those in columns of good and bad and to a certain extent, if there are too many of them, they can be disease-causing in the body. So we don’t want too many of those.

I quite like connect to a jungle, where we need biodiversity. We need lots of different species. We need the beautiful bugs and the butterflies, but we also need the snakes and the spiders. So if we think of pathogenic microbes as the snakes and the spiders, we need those in our bodies, but we don’t want to be overrun with snakes. Just bugs and butterflies,  then the ecosystem won’t work either. It’s all of those things, the birds, the butterflies and the snakes and the spiders, which drive our behavior and can be quite opportunistic as well.

There are some parasites as well. So there are some really, kind of remarkable stories that you can hear about parasites that make animals behave in a certain way that helps the parasite to grow and develop and so on. Actually, we need them, there’s no judgment in it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a, again, a good or a bad thing. And some of those microbes will have a beneficial impact and some of those microbes might not, but the impact it will have will depend on the immune system.

So if I get a couple of extra spiders and snakes coming in, they’re welcome and they’re happy and they don’t tip the balance.

Robin Daly: Right.

Kirsten Chick: Just the one little thing that I want to put in there is that we all come from different backgrounds. I’ve seen a lot being said around immune systems: “you’ll be okay.”

Actually, not everybody has that luxury. Some people are born with such a poor hand of cards, really that it will take several lifetimes for them to get their immune systems to a really strong position where they have an enormous amount of biodiversity.

So we all need of be kind and aware of each other. We need that physical contact, but for lots of different contexts and I think without it long term, it’s not going to be a great thing.

Robin Daly: So at the other end of this lockdown to actually start to get intimate with each other again.

Kirsten Chick: The transitions are always the trickiest bits in everything that we do. When we transitioned into different phases, it’s the fear kicking in. And that’s fair. It’s there to help us. It’s there to look out for threats to make sure that it doesn’t stop us from behaving in ways that are useful and nourishing and essential for survival.

Robin Daly: Interesting that human beings are largely unaware of the things that drive them. But I must admit, I haven’t been thinking about myself as being prompted to kiss somebody because of my bacteria.

Kirsten Chick: I mean, some scientists are really looking at that and maybe that is something. It’s a strongly held theory in some quarters.

Robin Daly: Interesting. People are paranoid about bugs and yet they go and kiss somebody, you know, and which, if you’re paranoid about bugs, you wouldn’t do that. They take the cat to bed and let them lick their face and everything. Extraordinary.

You know, I often think about the fact that I’ve lived with the same person for nearly 50 years and we must have a shared microbiome at this point.

Kirsten Chick: Absolutely. You have influenced each other’s microbiome enormously and we’re not just what we eat, Robin. We are who we hang out with as well. Who we spend time with we’re influenced by them in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine.

Robin Daly: Really interesting. So a few other things I didn’t mention the book covers, it covers tissue repair and a lot about the liver about balancing hormones.

Basically, anything anybody wants to know about nutrition, you have something to say about it. That’s really great. I wanted to hone in on the fact at the end of each chapter. You have a reflection time and an action plan.

You have links through to the section we haven’t even mentioned yet, which is a whole section of recipes at the back of the book. Do you want to say a bit about all that?

Kirsten Chick: I just wanted to give people a little bit which can be totally ignored if that’s not what you want to do. If you just want to read the book, that’s fine. But there were regular little prompts to actually reflect on the information in that chapter. How you can put some of that information to use, little changes you can make in your day or your relationship to food. Just an opportunity to pause for thought to see how you can relate that to your own life.

If we have those little pauses for thought all the way through, it’s less overwhelming as well. You might read this book and take on all this information and then do it all. That’s stressful. I just wanted to give people a little opportunities throughout to just reflect, make little changes.

So it’s a guide on how to bring the information from the book together into your own personal action plan. You can use that to work on whatever you want.

The people that are reading this hatefully will be nutrition students and nutrition practitioners, and other practitioners who may not be using it for their own self development. That may be.

Reading the book to take some of these ideas and work with their clients with them or incorporate it into how they work. It’s really optional, these pauses for reflection, but again, I think it’s helpful just so that you don’t get too stuck in your head with this information.

To try and make it meaningful at the end of each chapter as well, there are some references to the recipes at the end of the book relevant to that chapter.

There are 50 recipes at the back of the book. They’re tried and tested. All of these recipes have actually been made. I’m not a chef, but I am a bit of a whiz in the kitchen. I never used to be, I learned to cook after I had cancer. I had a number of years where I was vegan, sugar free, everything free. I suppose you would say a very clean diet and I didn’t know how to cook. I ended up just not really eating very much, so I learned to cook. I got really creative and I had lots of disasters, but over the years I became a really good cook.

If I can do it, anybody can do it. Most of them are vegan, a couple of them are vegetarian. If you eat meat, they’re all adaptable. That’s the other thing. All of the recipes are adaptable because I don’t actually follow recipes when I cook. I just see what’s in the cupboard and throw something together. So you can also use them as inspiration, but if you’re the kind of cook that likes the recipe and wants to follow it step by step, you can do that.

If you think, oh, that’s a good idea, you can work with all of them in that way. So they’re there to really inspire people to be creative, and to help you pull out and also because people need a hand with new ideas.

If you’re trying to eat in a slightly different way, then your go to recipes may not work. That can be a stress in itself. I just wanted to make it as easy as possible.

Robin Daly: Fantastic. So when’s the book out?

Kirsten Chick: Well, I’m having a virtual launch party on the 19th of October. The book can be purchased direct from the publisher and we’re selling a special edition, so it’s a special first edition and it will have a numbered plate in the front that I live signed. That’s available from the 19th of August and you can preorder it now, but it won’t get sent out until the 19th of August. It will be in all the bookstores from the end of September, depending on where you were in the world. I think in America, it’s October the 15th.

So, autumn is when it’s coming out.

Robin Daly: It’s been long time in the making, I understand. You can tell a lot of love and care went into it. This virtual launch party, if people want to be at that, can anybody go to it?

Kirsten Chick: Yes. So you just have to email me for the zoom link so you can email me at info@connectwithnutrition.co.uk. Email me there and let me know you’d like to come along to the virtual lunch. It’s great because you can sit in a really comfy chair and you can think what you like, just treat it however you like, and enjoy it.

I’m going to do a little bit of a book reading, I’ll answer some questions. I’m hoping that I’ll have a physical copy of the book in my hand so I can show you how beautiful it is because actually it’s not just informative. It’s beautiful.

Robin Daly: All right, we’re going to have to end it there. I just want to say that your new book is a really fantastic addition to the bookshelves, certainly for anyone with cancer and in fact, really anyone. Above all, I think it’s practical. It’s helpful. It’s going to go right up there amongst the front runners in books that I’d recommend to people looking to embrace lifestyle and integrative medicine.

Kirsten Chick: That’s so wonderful to hear. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

Robin Daly: Thanks for talking today, Kirsten.

It’s quite a challenge to come up with a new offering and a field as crowded as nutrition that genuinely has something new to offer, but I’d say Kirsten has pulled it off. Take a look for yourself. So thanks so much for listening today. I’ll be back again next week with another interview for you. So I hope you can listen again to the Yes to Life Show, here on UK Health Radio.

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Kindly written by Literary & Transcript Editor Amy MacLennon