Dr. Jasmina Dedic-Hagan

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Turramurra, NSW
Dr. Jasmina Dedic-Hagan

Functional Medicine Doctor | CMO & Founder, Vitality360 | Helping Women Reclaim Their Energy & Health | PhD Molecular Biology

As Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer of Vitality360, I help people reclaim their energy, optimise their health, and achieve long-term vitality through evidence backed functional medicine. My approach identifies and addresses the root causes of fatigue, hormonal imbalances, stubborn weight, and metabolic dysfunction, delivering practical, science-based solutions for long-term health. With a backgr

ound in functional medicine and molecular biology, I bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and real-world application, with a strong focus on women’s health. In my clinical practice, I take a comprehensive approach - integrating nutrition, lifestyle, fitness, and, when necessary, targeted supplementation or medication - to help women feel their best at every stage of life. I am passionate about making complex medical science accessible and actionable. With extensive teaching experience, I specialise in translating the latest research into practical strategies through workshops, content, and expert guidance. At Vitality360, my mission is to empower women to take control of their health, restore their energy, and build long-term resilience.

06/06/2026

While the cardiovascular and cancer risks of UPF consumption have received significant media attention, the muscle-health implications remain under-discussed despite emerging evidence.

A recent study analysed over 10,000 adults and found that those with the highest UPF consumption had a 60% increased risk of low muscle mass, an association that held after adjusting for body weight and other factors.It's a cross-sectional study, so it shows association rather than proof of cause. But it points to something beyond simple over-consumption: ultra-processed foods may compromise muscle health through pathways unrelated to calories alone.

The proposed mechanisms are multifaceted:
- Protein quality and density: ultra-processed foods often appear protein-adequate on labels but provide lower-quality protein with poorer amino acid profiles, particularly leucine, the key trigger for muscle protein synthesis.
- Nutrient displacement: every UPF calorie is a calorie not consumed from whole foods. Even at adequate protein totals, the absence of supporting micronutrients (zinc, magnesium, B vitamins, omega-3s) compromises the metabolic environment muscle needs to thrive.
- Gut microbiome disruption: emulsifiers including carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80, common in UPFs, have been shown to damage gut barrier function and reduce microbiome diversity.
-Inflammatory load: UPFs consistently elevate inflammatory markers including hs-CRP and IL-6, both of which interfere with muscle protein synthesis and accelerate sarcopenia.
-Insulin and blood sugar volatility: refined carbohydrates and added sugars in UPFs drive insulin resistance, which directly impairs muscle's ability to take up nutrients and maintain anabolic balance.

Many UPFs market themselves as healthy: protein bars, sugar-free desserts, "plant-based" alternatives.

What's the most surprising UPF you've discovered in your kitchen?

PMID 38439924

04/06/2026

The conversation is finally shifting.

Your symptoms have always deserved this attention and the system is finally catching up.

For the first time, menopause screening becomes a standard component of routine assessment for women aged 40 to 74, potentially benefiting nearly 5 million women across England.

Why does this matter to women in in the rest of the world? Because the conversation is shifting globally!

The screening tool will assess symptom burden across multiple domains, including hot flushes, night sweats, sleep disturbance, mood changes, joint pain, libido, vaginal dryness, cognitive function, and fatigue. This integrated approach finally moves beyond the reductive "are your periods stopping" framework toward something resembling whole-person care.

The takeaway: the door is finally opening. Your job is to walk through it with the information that helps you receive precise, individualised care rather than generic protocols.

30/05/2026

Only 1 in 5 women lift weights. The ones who do cut their cardiovascular death risk by 30%.

That stat stops me every time.

Not because strength training is some secret but because four out of five women still aren't being told it's the single highest-leverage thing they can do for their long-term health.

Here's what I want every woman over 40 to understand: As estrogen declines, your body develops what researchers call "anabolic resistance" - you need heavier loads and more protein just to hold the muscle you've got.

Do nothing, and you lose it silently.

Women need less training time than men for the same longevity payoff, and most still aren't being handed this information by anyone.

- Two to three sessions a week.
- Compound movements.
- Enough protein (most women eat nowhere near enough).

That's the protocol.

The window doesn't close, but it does narrow.

What's your current relationship with strength training?

PMID: 38383092

28/05/2026

The biological mechanisms behind connection as medicine are now extensively documented:

Inflammatory pathways: lonely individuals consistently show elevated C-reactive protein and interleukin-6, both implicated in cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, and depression.

- Autonomic nervous system function: meaningful connection activates parasympathetic responses, improving heart rate variability and reducing the chronic sympathetic dominance that drives so many midlife symptoms.
- Hormonal balance: oxytocin released during genuine connection counterbalances cortisol, supports mood regulation, and influences metabolism in ways no supplement can replicate.
- Cognitive resilience: the Harvard Study of Adult Development, now in its ninth decade, has consistently identified relationship quality as the single strongest predictor of cognitive health and life satisfaction in later life.

The Blue Zone framework is replicable, and you don't need to relocate to apply it.

- Identify two or three anchor relationships and prioritise weekly contact at minimum. These are the people who would notice if you went quiet for a fortnight.
- Embed connection in movement. Walk with a friend rather than alone. Exercise together. Cook together. Movement plus connection is doubly therapeutic, and far easier to sustain than either in isolation.
- Initiate rather than wait. Many women report feeling forgotten when in fact others are simply waiting too. Be the one who reaches out, repeatedly, without keeping score.
- Reduce passive social media. Scrolling through others' lives produces a measurably worse mood profile than direct contact, even brief contact. A 10-minute phone call beats an hour of feed scrolling.
- Build into community structures with repetition: walking groups, book clubs, faith communities, volunteering, adult learning environments. These offer natural infrastructure for connection without requiring you to organise it from scratch.

Relationships aren't separate from your health. Possibly the most important work you can do, and certainly the work most likely to be missed by every wellness protocol you've ever tried.

PMID: 25910392
PMID: 20668659
PMID: 20668659

21/05/2026

The figures deserve our attention. Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), formerly called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, now affects approximately 1.3 billion people globally.

That's a 143% increase in just three decades, and projections suggest 1.8 billion will be affected by 2050.

Here is what I want people to understand about MASLD:

High blood sugar is the leading risk factor globally, followed by elevated BMI and smoking. This is fundamentally a metabolic condition, not a fat-eating problem.

Second, MASLD is not just about appearance or weight. Lean MASLD is increasingly recognised, particularly in women navigating hormonal transitions when insulin sensitivity changes regardless of body size. You can be a healthy weight on the outside and still have a metabolically struggling liver inside.

Third, the symptoms are vague enough to dismiss that get attributed to busy lives, ageing, or stress, when they may actually be your liver asking for help.

What I encourage my patients to request when investigating metabolic health:
- HOMA-IR for insulin resistance
- HbA1c for a three-month blood sugar picture
- full lipid panel including the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio (a strong marker of insulin resistance)

and where indicated, a FibroScan to actually assess liver tissue.

Standard liver enzymes alone often miss early MASLD entirely.

The genuinely hopeful piece in this story is that early-stage MASLD is one of the most reversible conditions in medicine.

The interventions that work are not exotic: reducing refined carbohydrates and added sugars, building muscle mass, walking after meals to blunt glucose spikes, prioritising protein and fibre, and addressing sleep.

Thankfully, the liver is remarkably regenerative.

PMID: 41990758

19/05/2026

Why I never recommend at-home food intolerance tests 👉🏽

Almost every week in clinic, a woman arrives with a long list of "intolerances" generated by an at-home finger prick test.

Here's what most consumers are never told.

A journalist recently ran an experiment: she sent her blood to three at-home intolerance companies on the same day. An IgG blood panel, a clinical-grade allergy test, and a bioresonance hair test.

She had no known food issues. All three should have shown the same thing. The clinical test did. The other two did not.

The IgG test flagged her as reactive to cardamom, bay leaf, cuttlefish, mulberry, rooibos and venison - the exact menu of a birthday lunch she'd eaten the day before.

That is what IgG does. It's your immune system's record of foods you've recently eaten, not a marker of intolerance.

The hair test told her to avoid apples, almonds, coconut, banana, and iridium, a metal so rare she'd almost certainly never encountered it. With 900 items tested, false positives are mathematically inevitable.

Here is what disturbs me most:
The British Dietetic Association, the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology have all stated clearly that IgG testing has no validated clinical use for diagnosing food intolerances. Yet the global market runs into billions.

One study followed 298 children on exclusion diets for eczema. None had IgE allergies at baseline. When foods were reintroduced, 54 had immediate allergic reactions. Fourteen experienced anaphylaxis. Cutting foods out can train the immune system to forget what is safe.

The actual drivers of food-related symptoms are almost always:

- Digestive enzyme insufficiency
- Low stomach acid
- Microbiome imbalance after antibiotics or stress
- Histamine overload
- A chronically activated stress response that suppresses digestion

None of these show up on an IgG panel.

If your symptoms are real, please don't let an unregulated test convince you the answer is to keep narrowing your plate. The answer is almost always to address what your gut and nervous system are actually asking for.

16/05/2026

Save this for the next time you find yourself reaching without thinking.

What I want women to understand is that we live in what neuroscientists describe as a supernormal, overstimulating, engineered food environment.

The smell of pastries pumped through bakery vents, the deliberate crunch designed into ultra-processed snacks, the visual cues on every screen, all of these activate your appetite circuitry whether or not you need food.

Neuroscientists call this hedonic hunger, and it's manufactured by design.

Before eating something you didn't plan, ask yourself one question: "What is generating this signal right now: energy need, stress, habit, or exposure to a cue?"

That single pause activates your prefrontal cortex and shifts the behaviour from automatic to intentional.

Often the answer is not hunger. It's a 3pm energy dip that water and a five-minute walk would resolve, or stress that needs ten slow nasal breaths, or a habit that can be intentionally rewired, etc.

Once you name the driver, you can choose your response.

Just clarity about what is actually being asked for in the moment is often all that is needed.

PMID: 19176746
PMID: 17543357
PMID: 19336238

14/05/2026

Your evening glass of wine is doing something far more complex to your brain than most realise, and explains why you can wake up anxious after just one or two drinks.

For most psychoactive substances, you get one or two effects, but with alcohol, it delivers the lot.

This is precisely why alcohol can feel so versatile, helping us celebrate, commiserate, switch off, socialise, and self-soothe. It also explains why the after-effects are so confusing.

Once the alcohol clears, you are left in what researchers call a "temporary rebound state of hyperexcitation". Cortisol remains elevated, sleep is disrupted, neurotransmitters are temporarily out of balance, and the result is a brain that feels wired but depleted, anxious and restless.

On top of this, alcohol increases intestinal permeability, allowing bacterial fragments into the bloodstream where they trigger immune responses and inflammation. This low-grade inflammation directly influences mood, cognition, and fatigue.

Some alternatives I love to reach the same self-soothing effects in the evening:
- Magnesium glycinate which genuinely supports GABA function without the rebound.
- Ten minutes of slow nasal breathing that activates your parasympathetic nervous system.
- A warm bath before bed with epsom salts and your favourite adaptogenic chia. This shifts core body temperature in a way that supports natural melatonin release.

What is your evening wind down ritual currently looking like? I would love to hear in the comments below.

PMID: 28988571
PMID: 23347102
PMID: 23347102

07/05/2026

By midlife, your NAD+ levels have fallen to roughly half of what they were in your 20s.

NAD+ is a coenzyme present in every living cell. It powers the mitochondria, drives DNA repair, and activates sirtuins - the proteins most closely associated with cellular longevity and resilience. When researchers study the biological hallmarks of ageing, NAD+ depletion appears consistently across the mechanisms that drive cellular deterioration over time.

It's worth being transparent: the human evidence is still maturing, and decline is most clearly documented in skeletal muscle, skin, and the brain. The trajectory, however, is consistent and clinically meaningful.

What is not in question is the foundation: resistance training, quality sleep, reduced alcohol consumption, and a whole-food diet rich in tryptophan and B vitamins all meaningfully support the body's ability to produce NAD+. These are the interventions worth prioritising before targeted supplementation is layered in.

02/05/2026

A 2025 paper (PMID: 40522859) has brought this topic into sharp clinical focus.

Estrogen is not only a reproductive hormone. It actively regulates fat metabolism inside liver cells, maintains insulin sensitivity, suppresses hepatic inflammation, and directs fat storage toward safer subcutaneous deposits rather than visceral and organ-surrounding locations.

When perimenopause begins, this starts to shift.

Estrogen deficiency significantly impairs the liver's ability to process fat efficiently, promoting accumulation of liver fat, worsening insulin resistance, driving inflammation, and in susceptible women, accelerating fibrogenesis - the early scarring process that precedes more serious liver disease.

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD, previously called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease) rises sharply in prevalence and severity following menopause.

Almost no women are told to expect this, let alone assessed for it.

The liver is also the primary site of estrogen metabolism and clearance - a two-phase process that, when burdened by inflammation or nutrient depletion, slows significantly.

Processed estrogen metabolites recirculate rather than being excreted, producing symptoms of estrogen excess at the very moment estrogen is objectively declining. This contradiction - falling hormone levels alongside estrogen dominance symptoms - is one of the most clinically confusing presentations in perimenopause, and the liver is frequently at the centre of it.

The evidence is clear:
- cruciferous vegetables provide the sulforaphane and DIM that actively support Phase II liver clearance.
- Choline is essential for liver fat metabolism and consistently under-consumed.
- Adequate protein is non-negotiable for the amino acid supply Phase II conjugation requires.
- Alcohol directly competes with estrogen for liver processing and should be minimised during this transition.

Standard blood tests won't reveal this level of dysfunction - the DUTCH Complete test and a comprehensive stool analysis offer a far more clinically useful picture of what is actually happening with your hormones, your liver, and your gut microbiome.

Address

Turramurra, NSW
2074

Website

http://www.lindenhealth.com.au/, https://v360.health/

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