Why I believe Proven bread has saved my life.
Nothing like this has ever been done, and I have launched the Proven Bread 12 week course and our first loves have been going out. The launch was not without its challenges. I have had to redo the entire product, and it is too boring to explain, but this is the nature of this mad technical word we live in. I wanted this to be the opposite of technical. It’s why the self assessment is a paper and pencil one. I wonder sometimes how long I can keep up adapting to the latest app, or widget as the system changes almost daily. So as some of you may have seen, there have ben pretty personal insults thrown at me on social media. so I hope you will understand that I always welcome the chance to say my bit.
No I am not slim. I am curvy and I am in my 50’s. But I think that we have to reassess what success is. For me it was hearing yesterday that one of my students children who has to take iron is no longer constipated, and one of my students children who has an autistic child who was only going to the look once every 3 weeks ( traumatically) and is now having 4 – 5 bowls movements a day and asked to go to the loo. I guess this bread deserves its nickname big poops bread.
It’s Personal
I want you to understand why I eat the bread I bake is personal. It is not a marketing or sales tactic, but as preventative healthcare rooted in my genetics. I also want to explain that success is still having ankles. If I’d eaten standard white bread, I’d likely not be even writing this. I would have advanced lipedema, likely, high blood pressure, and no visible ankles. I would certainly not ben running classes, training practitioners to personalise bread or teaching, because I would not be able to run around to teach and prep.
Nowadays with nutrigenetics we can see clearly that if I’d eaten the standard Western diet and white bread, with my genetics and family history, I would almost certainly be facing the same fate: heart attacks like my grandfather, cancers like my aunts, and advanced lipedema crippling my legs.
Instead, Proven Bread — 30 plants, long fermentation, 12g fibre in two slices — has kept my predispositions at bay and to date been key in holding my lipedema in check, and protected me from the diseases that run in my family.
I realised many years ago that my way of approaching bread was helping my students and so very different from industrial bread, and so I began researching and determined to share this understanding.
THE NUTRIGENETICS EXPLANATION
My genome carries a cluster of SNPs that make maintaining metabolic and vascular health extraordinarily difficult. In this photo on the left you can see my English grandmother Lillian Hulme with my amazing mother, who is Italian. In this photos my mother is 16 and my grandmother is the same age as I am now in the photo below. I was often told she just ate too much but the reality is that she suffered from undiagnosed lipodema, and her detoxification load was being expressed through her vascular and lymphatic system rather than cleared efficiently through her liver. I remember her legs being painful and she struggled to walk very far, but she was a brilliant baker and a lovely grandmother.
FAMILY, GENES AND BREAD
So you can see from the photos that I look like my mother. But as I ave studied I have learned that our health is written not just in resemblance — it is carried in our genes, and our gut microbiomes and our genes are the framework. These genes come from both sides of the family.
When I trained and started using nutrigenetics to understand how I respond to bread I learned that from my mother’s line, I carry the methylation and detox bottlenecks that shape how I process nutrients and hormones. For example:
- MTHFR C677T (AA) means I convert folate to methyl-folate up to 70% less efficiently, impairing methylation and hormone detox.
- PEMT TT reduces my ability to make phosphatidylcholine, impairing bile flow and oestrogen clearance.
- COMT AG slows breakdown of dopamine, adrenaline and oestrogen, making me prone to oestrogen dominanceand stress sensitivity.
- UGT1A1 GG slows glucuronidation of oestrogens and thyroid hormones.
From my paternal grandmother’s line, I carry vascular and connective tissue fragility, the predisposition to lipedema, and the tendency to accumulate fat and fluid in my legs. This is amplified by:
- ACE GG and AGT GA, both raising angiotensin activity and blood pressure risk.
- IL6 GG and CD40 CC, driving higher baseline inflammation.
- FOXE1 GG, associated with autoimmune thyroid sensitivity.
Most people have the GSTM1 gene. I don’t. I’m GSTM1 null, which means I completely lack one of the key enzymes for clearing toxins and oestrogens.
From my mother’s side, I inherited reduced clearance and methylation pressure. From my father’s side came the vascular fragility and the predisposition to lipedema. Put together, my genetics stack the risk from both directions.
And then add in my MTHFR C677T variant, which slows folate metabolism, plus a family history of heart attacks and cancers. For me, the standard Western diet — especially white bread — wouldn’t just have been unhelpful. It would have been catastrophic.
The combination means I have inherited both impaired clearance of oestrogen (through methylation and detox SNPs) and a body that expresses this burden as vascular fragility, fat deposition, and inflammation in my legs. This is why my health challenges are not simply “weight” but systemic: oestrogen dominance, impaired bile flow, sluggish thyroid activation, and vascular lipedema risk.
WHY PROVEN BREAD MATTERS
This is precisely why I designed Proven Bread. It isn’t just bread — it’s a formula to counter the genetic vulnerabilities I carry:
- Fibre diversity: Each loaf has 30 different plants, delivering 6 g of fibre per slice (12 g in two slices). This fibre feeds short-chain fatty acid production (especially butyrate), supporting methylation, bile clearance, oestrogen metabolism, and reducing inflammation.
- Fermentation (18+ hours): This lowers FODMAPs, pre-digests gluten, and increases bioavailability of minerals (zinc, magnesium, selenium) that my SNPs demand in higher amounts.
- Polyphenols (botanicals, seeds, roses): These feed species like Akkermansia muciniphila, crucial for mucosal integrity and vascular health. They also downregulate inflammatory SNPs like IL6 and CD40.
- Choline and sulphur cofactors: Ingredients such as seeds, legumes, and greens provide choline, methionine, and sulphur compounds to compensate for PEMT TT and GSTM1 null.
- Adaptogenic effect of fibre: In trials we observed that fibre acts almost like an adaptogen — it goes where the body needs it. In me, it stabilises gut permeability, regulates oestrogen recycling, and helps keep my vascular tissue intact.
Put simply: my genes mean I’m hard-wired for inflammation, fat retention, impaired detox, sluggish thyroid activation, and vascular fragility. In the wrong environment — low fibre, high refined carbs, low diversity — my body would unravel fast.
So when I say Proven Bread has saved my life, I mean it literally. It is both a personal intervention and a model of Baking as Lifestyle Medicine: using bread — the most ordinary of foods — to compensate for extraordinary genetic vulnerabilities
This is where Proven Bread comes in. Each loaf is designed to counter the very pathways that fail me:
- 30 diverse plant ingredients ? feed microbial diversity, generate short-chain fatty acids, and increase resilience where my genetics reduce it.
- 6 g fibre per slice (12 g in two) ? pushes me towards 30 g+ daily fibre, supporting bile clearance, oestrogen metabolism, and stable blood sugar.
- Long fermentation ? lowers FODMAPs, increases polyphenol bioavailability, pre-digests gluten, and enhances mineral absorption.
- Botanical inclusion (roses, seeds, herbs) ? provides polyphenols that reduce inflammation and support beneficial species like Akkermansia muciniphila, linked to vascular integrity and metabolic health.
When you add education — teaching how to eat it as part of a wider BALM framework — you get behaviour change. And behaviour change is what prevents progression of conditions like lipedema, cardiovascular disease, and thyroid-driven metabolic decline.
So when I say Proven Bread has kept me healthy, it’s not rhetoric. It’s functional medicine in practice: bread tailored to meet my exact genetic vulnerabilities, holding the line where otherwise my health would have deteriorated.
If you are curious and would like learn about your own genes, and understand bread as preventative health please get in touch. You can book a free and book a free exploratory call with me here, or check out how I work and learn how to bake as preventative health.
If you just want to learn more and want to find out how Proven Bread could help you then you can join the 12 week reset programme see for your self.
Vanesaa
x
