Romilly Hodges, CNS CKNS CDN IFMCP mBANT CNHC, is a clinical nutritionist and Programs Director for Dr. Kara Fitzgerald.
Romilly has written peer-reviewed publications, book contributions and many online articles. She is the author of the book Immune Resilience; The Breakthrough Plan to Protect Your Body and Fight Disease published in 2022 by Avery, a division of Penguin Random House. She has contributed to professional training courses and supervised practice programs for functional medicine and nutrition professionals. Romilly has also worked in clinical research, including designing the study diet for the first-of-its-kind epigenetic diet study run through the National University of Natural Medicine, as well as follow-up clinical research. She currently serves on the Board of the Accreditation Council for Nutrition Professional Education.
We have both the opportunity and responsibility to change the trajectory of chronic disease through targeted, personalized nutrition, lifestyle and environmental interventions.
We think this might be controversial – let us know your thoughts! As a functional medicine clinician, our daily work often revolves around a simple yet profound philosophy: the body has an innate ability to heal if we remove the obstacles and provide the right inputs. For decades, the “right inputs” have often been synonymous with “back to basics,” including whole, unprocessed foods and organic farming. The image this conjures is of going back to our traditional agricultural roots. We have long viewed “engineered food” as the problem, the very source of the ultra-processed, hyper-palatable “food-like substances” that drive the chronic disease epidemic we see today. Now a new report, “Engineering Food Systems to Enable Precision Nutrition,” recently released by the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA) and supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, demands a reconsideration of the boundaries of our field. Its central argument is provocative: while nutrition problems manifest biologically, they cannot be solved through biological research alone. The translation of personalized, root-cause care into scalable, population-level health is currently constrained not by our lack of biological discovery, but by our lack of engineering capability.
What an obscure mouse strain reveals about antigen uptake, immune reactivity, and gut barrier function. In functional medicine, we think about PUFA (polyunsaturated fatty acid) metabolism constantly. Yet we don’t often think about where that metabolism actually happens first: in the gut itself, in intimate conversation with the microbiome. This month, Romilly Hodges, CNS, walks us through a fascinating scientific story, starting with a single gene in an obscure mouse strain that provides a surprisingly rich window into fatty acid metabolism in the gut, including how it shapes barrier function (broadening our thinking beyond tight junctions), immune reactivity, and antigen uptake. The implication is that we need to be considering the microenvironment of PUFA metabolism in the digestive tract.
This blog was written by Romilly Hodges MS CNS CDN IFMCP Last month I was honored to be invited to speak at the American Nutrition Association annual summit on the topic Targeting Biological Age with Diet and Lifestyle. Not only was it a much-appreciated opportunity to connect face-to-face with colleagues, but it was also…
Have you wondered whether you should be avoiding lectins? Some consumer health sites caution about the potential negative effects of these natural food compounds, but (as often is the case) there is more to understand. In this article, you’ll learn about 5 potential benefits of lectins and how to decide whether you should be including…
Digestive complaints are common and can significantly impact quality of life. Not only that but they can also often be dismissed by conventional medical thinking or swept into the bucket of irritable bowel syndrome without much relief offered. In functional medicine, restoring gut health and balance is right at the core of what we do.…
I deeply appreciate this important topic brought to us by Dr. Michelle Barrow as she answers questions put to her by our Nutrition Programs Director, Romilly Hodges. This exchange was prompted by Dr. Barrow’s recent peer-reviewed publication – Transforming Personalized Nutrition Practice – a worthwhile read which came across Romilly’s desk earlier this year. After all, personalized nutrition is a core component of the Functional Medicine toolkit. As a profession (of both functional medicine and personalized nutrition practitioners), we need take steps to bridge the gap between currently-accepted evidence models and what is actually needed to support our practice. We need to ask the hard questions; and take the steps to build a better model. It’s something I have proposed before, and I am absolutely delighted to continue to champion. – DrKF
A huge part of our immune resilience comes down to the inputs we give our immune system – the food we eat and the lifestyle choices we make. These choices can either help build a strong and balanced defense system or it can weaken those defenses, encouraging them to flop, misfire or overshoot. If you’re…
Reviewed by Romilly Hodges (October 2020) Leaky gut is often written and talked about as a black and white concept: Either you have it or you don’t. And if you have it, you’ll want to ‘heal’ it. While this is true to some extent – after all, health begins in the gut, and we know…
As you know, here at drkarafitzgerald.com we like to push the boundaries of what we know, and sometimes this means being a little contrarian. In this blog, our Nutrition Director, Romilly Hodges CNS takes us on a tour of some of the emerging research on Th17 prompted by a new paper in the journal Cell, that postulated a reduction in Bifidobacteria may mediate some of the benefits of a ketogenic diet for epilepsy by reducing Th17.
Diet has a strong influence on a woman’s cycle. In our clinic, we have successfully used dietary and lifestyle strategies to help individuals with painful, heavy, periods and other types of menstrual and hormonal concerns.
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Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, ND
Dr. Fitzgerald is an internationally-recognized expert clinician, as well as nationally-bestselling author, who is actively engaged in clinical research on epigenetics and longevity using a diet and lifestyle intervention developed in her research and practice.
She has published two clinical studies on the potential bioage-reversing effects of an 8-week DNA methylation-supportive diet and lifestyle in middle-aged men and women in the journal Aging. She continues to lead the conversation around interventions for healthy aging and their extensive potential in improving individual and population level disease burdens, while also providing evidence-based and practical advice that cuts through the hype.
Dr. Fitzgerald is on faculty at the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM), is an IFM Certified Practitioner, and lectures globally on functional medicine, longevity, and epigenetics to practitioners and consumers.
She maintains an award-nominated podcast series ranked in the top 1% of global podcasts by Listen Score, New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, and an active blog and Clinic Immersion webinar series through her website, www.drkarafitzgerald.com.
