The Sourdough School

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.

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Why do bakers and healthcare professionals need to approach baking as Lifestyle Medicine?

Both Bakers and healthcare professionals need to understand why healthy bread matters.

"To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Most of the Doctors and healthcare practitioners I teach in the UK tell me that most of the diseases and illnesses that patients visit are suffering preventable illnesses and lifestyle diseases; this is echoed across the Western world. In early 2010, one student, in particular, triggered a way of looking at bread that changed the way I looked at bread. She had stage 4 bowel cancer, and as I had been teaching her how to bake and explaining that my approach to bread made me feel better, she said that she wished she had learned this way of baking and eating bread years earlier and that if she had done so, then she might have been able to live long enough to see her grandchildren grow up. Her name was Stephanie. I knew I couldn't make much of a difference to her, but she lived almost another year and baked most days, sharing her bread with her family. I resolved to make sure that I shared how baking as lifestyle medicine could bring a nourishing, holistic approach to lifestyle medicine, not just for individuals like Stephanie but for the healthcare professionals who are having to deal with a tsunami of preventable diseases to empower people to live the best life possible. In this video, I explain more about Baking as Lifestyle Medicine and how this approach aligns with the six pillars of Lifestyle Medicine as defined by the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine ( BSLM). I hope bakers will appreciate that we hold the key to the foundation of health in the bread that people eat every day. 

BALM is an Evidence-Based Practice in Lifestyle Medicine (  - aligning with The Definition by The British Society of Lifestyle Medicine)

Disclaimer: We’ve made this content available to showcase the work we do at the Sourdough School. However, the links embedded in this category are only accessible to students. If you'd like to learn more about our work, please get in touch.

Total estimated hours 17 hours

Bake Two Give one – Baking as a Mental Health Support Strategy

BALM Protocol: A Proactive Approach to Bowel Cancer Prevention for Your Patients

What is Baking as Lifestyle Medicine and why apply this to the way we bake?

Encourage healthy eating (particularly the adoption of a whole food, plant-based diet)

BALM helps people avoid UPFs

Foster Healthy Social Connections

Increase activity levels

Improve sleep quality

Nurture mental wellbeing

BALM – Baking as Lifestyle Medicine is an evidence based protocol that sets the gold standard for baking healthy bread

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