BALM – Proven as one of the healthiest approaches to bread in the world.
Based in the walled gardens of Dr. Vanessa Kimbell's beautiful Victorian home in rural Northamptonshire, UK, we tutor individuals and train bakers and healthcare professionals in Baking as Lifestyle Medicine (BALM). Personalising bread to your lifestyle, gut microbiome, and unique genetics for optimal health—tailoring fermentation, fibre, and diversity so that your daily bread becomes the foundation of your health.
A case study to learn how baking can connect people socially.
This is one of my favourite case studies around sourdough improving social anxiety, because in baking one and gifting one, The Sourdough course was about finding common ground with people she had initially thought she had nothing in common with.
Sharing your baking, sharing your stories and sharing food is the foundation of friendship. It doesn’t really matter what or who you are, where you come from, or what your views are, simply connecting to each other over something as simple and inexpensive as pizza is an enormously powerful way to build a community of people around you. That’s the way in which we teach the bake one, gift one (or make one, share one)…it’s a philosophy that has run through every class, every course, every recipe that I’ve ever written because it’s about far more than simply baking. It’s about social connection and it is an incredibly beautiful way to connect to each other.
Baking to improve social anxiety & make social connections.
Student log in
All reasonable care is taken when advising about health aspects of bread, but the information that we share is not intended to take the place of treatment by a qualified medical practitioner. You must seek professional advice if you are in any doubt about any medical condition. Any application of the ideas and information contained on this website is at the reader's sole discretion and risk.
