Dr Joanna McMillan

Dr Joanna McMillan Nutrition scientist, speaker, author, TV presenter & food futurist Nutrition Scientist, TV Host, Speaker, Author & Food Futurist

14/08/2026

Weight-loss drugs can treat obesity. But they can’t fix what made us sick.

Let me be clear: these medications can be enormously valuable for people living with obesity, type 2 diabetes and metabolic disease.

People deserve access to effective treatment—without shame.

But medication doesn’t stop children being relentlessly marketed unhealthy food.

It doesn’t make nutritious food more affordable or accessible.

It doesn’t give exhausted families more time, cooking skills or support.

And it doesn’t redesign sedentary jobs, create safe places to walk, improve sleep or reduce chronic stress.

Obesity is not simply the result of individual choices. It is also shaped by our food systems, commercial pressures, built environments and wider social conditions.

That means treatment and prevention must happen together.

We should also be wary of powerful medical treatments shifting from people with a genuine clinical need to healthy-weight people pursuing an ever-thinner beauty ideal.

Because that isn’t treating metabolic disease.

It’s medicalising diet culture.

Medicines can help treat the consequences of an unhealthy system. But they must never let governments, the food industry—or the rest of us—off the hook for changing that system.

What do you think: are we investing enough in prevention alongside treatment?

12/08/2026

Are you using a continuous glucose monitor — or thinking about trying one?

CGMs can be incredibly useful, and genuinely game-changing for people living with diabetes. But I’m also seeing more people without diabetes using them — and sometimes interpreting perfectly normal glucose responses as something to “fix”.

Your glucose line is not supposed to be flat.

When you eat a meal containing carbohydrate, your blood glucose rises. Insulin then helps move that glucose into your cells, where it can be used for energy, and levels come back down again.

That rise and fall is normal physiology.

What we’re more interested in are unusually high or prolonged glucose excursions, or significant drops — particularly when they happen repeatedly.

But a gentle rise after a nutritious meal? That doesn’t mean the meal was “bad” or that you need to start eliminating perfectly healthy foods.

CGMs can give us fascinating information. The trick is knowing what the data actually means before changing your diet because of it.

11/08/2026

If you’ve ever had a colonoscopy, you know that the bowel prep is the hard part! It can be pretty hard to know exactly what to eat when there’s so many things you’re not allowed to. In particular, it means almost no fibre. So it’s the opposite of what I’m usually recommending!

But it’s just for three days, and the purpose is to try to clear out your colon so that the doctor is able to have a really good look at the lining of the entire length of your colon.

So here’s what I ate for, well really two and a half days as I had to fast from midday the day before the procedure. I did also have a few slices of cheese when I was hungry on top of this.

Boy was I glad to tuck back into my fibre filled meals when it was all done!

06/08/2026

Protein powders are everywhere—but for most people, they’re not essential.

They can be genuinely useful when you’re short on time, your appetite is low, you’re travelling, or you want something convenient after training.

But whole protein-rich foods bring more than protein alone.

Meat provides iron, zinc and vitamin B12.
Fish brings omega-3 fats.
Dairy provides calcium and iodine.
Beans, lentils, nuts and seeds add fibre, magnesium and phytonutrients.

It also matters how you spread protein across the day.

Many people eat very little at breakfast, a little more at lunch, then most of it at dinner. But if maintaining or building muscle is the goal, it makes sense to include a meaningful protein serve at each main meal.

A protein shake can absolutely fit.

Just think of it as a convenient extra—not the foundation of your diet.

Food first. Protein powder only if and when it’s genuinely useful.

05/08/2026

Still avoiding nuts because they’re “too high in calories”? 🥜

Here’s the problem: a calorie count doesn’t tell you the full story of a food.

Nuts are a complex whole-food matrix. We don’t absorb all the energy listed on the packet, particularly when nuts are eaten whole, because some fat remains trapped inside their cell walls. The energy from nuts can be over-estimated by as much 30%!

They’re also satisfying. Protein, fibre, healthy fats and plenty of chewing can help us feel fuller and naturally eat less later.

That doesn’t mean nuts somehow defy energy balance. It means the body responds to foods—not just numbers on a label.

More than two decades of research suggests that regularly eating nuts generally does not lead to weight gain and may even be linked with a slightly lower risk of gaining weight over time.

A brilliantly nutritious daily habit: around 30 g, or a small handful.

Judge the whole food, not just its calorie count.

More than 40,000 of you watched my reel on GLP-1 drugs last week. The comments told me this conversation needed to go de...
03/08/2026

More than 40,000 of you watched my reel on GLP-1 drugs last week. The comments told me this conversation needed to go deeper.

So I did.

My new Delicious Science episode is out now — and it covers the things the headlines aren't talking about:

→ Why the clinical trial data does NOT apply to healthy-weight people using these drugs
→ What actually happens to your muscle, especially when there's not much excess fat to lose
→ The emerging neuroscience around "Ozempic personality" — and why it's mechanistically plausible
→ The peer recommendation problem: women casually advising other women to try it
→ And the bigger question: are we using a medical treatment to bring diet culture back through the front door?

These drugs can be genuinely life-changing for the people they were designed for. That's not in question.

What is in question is what happens when a medical treatment becomes a trend.

New episode: GLP-1 Drugs & Diet Culture: Skinny by Prescription — link in bio.

30/07/2026

Animal foods including red meat contains a group of nutrients and bioactive compounds that rarely get much attention—but their roles in muscle, brain and cellular energy are fascinating.

Creatine, choline, taurine, carnosine, carnitine and coenzyme Q10 are called ‘zoonutrients’ because they’re concentrated in animal foods and are absent, or found only in tiny amounts, in plants.

You may recognise some from the supplement aisle. But a modest serve of lean red meat provides small amounts of several of them together—alongside high-quality protein, iron, zinc and vitamin B12.

Does that mean we need huge steaks or that plants are somehow less important? Absolutely not.

Plant foods bring fibre, polyphenols and the diverse compounds that support a healthy gut microbiome. Animal foods bring some unique nutritional strengths of their own.

Good nutrition isn’t plants vs. animals. It’s understanding what each does well and building a balanced diet that draws on both.

🎧 For a deeper dive, listen to my ‘Delicious Science’ podcast episode: ‘Animals vs Plants’.

27/07/2026

We need to talk about GLP-1s and the pursuit of skinny. These are drugs with legitimate medical uses… yet they are increasingly being used by healthy weight women to be even thinner. Are we going backwards in our fight against diet culture?

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