Health trends for 2016: DNA testing and more

 

Essential Oils  - Essential oils are the volatile liquids found in a variety of plants, trees, shrubs, and citrus fruit rinds. They’re what give herbs, flowers, and fruits their distinctive scent. Sheading off their hippy dippy image and being solely used for aromatherapy massage or in as perfumes in manufactured products. Essential oils are heading into the mainstream with increased research and evidence that they can have powerful health benefits. Improving everything from sleep to sex drive, to digestion, pain management and stress levels. These powerful essences can help. They can be inhaled via dropping them in boiling water, used topically on the skin or with caution, consumed with food or drink. They are powerful so best avoided if pregnant or breast-feeding and be mindful of quality too. It’s estimated that only 2 percent of essential oils produced are of therapeutic quality. The rest are made simply to smell nice.

Fermented Foods – A healthy digestive system and specifically a well-balanced gut flora is a major part of optimal wellness. This is an area of intense research that we now know has far reaching benefits in terms of health. Helping to control not only your digestive and detoxification systems, but also in terms of immune system and mood health. Fermented foods are key for a daily dose of probiotics. We are becoming more comfortable with them. More people are regularly getting not just yoghurts but more adventurous foods such as kefir and raw sauerkraut into their diet. Last year saw brands of raw sauerkraut emerging; in 2016 year expect to be able to buy the spicy Korean version, kimchi, in supermarkets. Kombucha fermented tea is also gaining ground. In California, it is almost a way of life, being found on tap in cafes and restaurants, available at every corner store and there are plenty of home brewers too! This trend is set to fly over the pond so watch out for ‘Booch-Mania’!

Personalised Wellness – gone is the one size fits all; we are all different individuals, both from a biochemical and lifestyle perspective.  Wearable wellness trackers are developing fast, monitoring everything from our movement to our nutritional intake to our stress and sleep levels. We can easily test DNA to understand what will work best for us and what our health risks are from a genetic point of view. Here at VITL we are excited by these biotech developments and are ourselves developing personalised nutrition support, so watch this space in 2016.

Freaky Food Sources – The shift towards a more plant based diet will continue, both for health and sustainable environmental reasons. Even Arnie Schwartzenegger recently called for people to eat less meat to save the environment. Equally the demand for a higher protein diet will continue. These forces combined mean that 2016 we will see new kinds of proteins that are more sustainable and affordable than animal sources. Algae, nuts, vegetable, yeast and even insects will be used as ingredients to up the protein punch.

Peel-to-Stem is the new Nose-to-Tail – A few years back meat and fish got the ‘waste not want not’ make over. Previously discarded parts were reinvented as delicacies, fish cheeks, offal, pigs ears were in. Now it’s fruit and veggies turn. Rather than throwing you beet tops away they can be used as you would spinach. With the cauliflower, the leaves can be used in soups and the stem grated to make cauliflower rice and citrus peel is added to water to add flavour.