A little belatedly, I’d like to offer an end-of-2015 review and 2016 preview, all in one.

Best Blog Posts of 2015

Although we couldn’t blog much in 2015, due to other obligations (Luke, biotech startup, retreat, cookbook, in that order), we did manage 51 blog posts in 2015, almost one per week, and some of them provided important and novel health advice.

Our important science posts of 2015 were:

The best recipe of the year was our baby food:

We put other great recipes in our cookbook, but for now only retreat guests can see them.

We had a minor controversy early in the year when Jimmy Moore, who had come to our retreat as a guest, wrote an article I thought was unfair, and led to this attempt to set the record straight: Jimmy Moore on the Perfect Health Retreat.

We also had some excellent reader reports, including Matt Farina’s Recovery from Hypothyroidism and the autoimmune recovery stories in Happy Thanksgiving! Ebook Sale Continues, and Autoimmune Recovery Stories.

Finally, we posted a number of testimonials from retreat guests, which can be found at Perfect Health Retreat Testimonials. So far we’ve posted testimonials through the October 2014 retreat; but the retreat really became outstanding in 2015, and we have a lot of great video testimonials from the two 2015 retreats that we’ll be putting up this year. Watch for them!

Perfect Health Newsletter

Another big event of 2015 was the launch of our email newsletter. See New: The Perfect Health Newsletter for information. Signing up gives you a free gift ebook, “Seven Tips for a Better Body.” If you want to lose weight or look better, sign up for our newsletter and read the ebook!

Perfect Health Retreat

In 2015, the Perfect Health Retreat matured into a terrific product. There is nothing else like it. Some recent developments at the retreats:

• I do pre-retreat health coaching for every guest. For several years now, I’ve been building up a database of natural healing methods for the various health conditions guests have brought to the retreat. This database now has advice for almost 200 health conditions. With every new guest I do further research, and our advice has been getting steadily more effective at improving health. At recent retreats, several people have had rapid recoveries from longstanding debilitating health conditions. That is immensely satisfying.
• Shou-Ching has developed a terrific meal plan for the retreat. All recipes – over 70 of them – are made available to guests in an online cookbook. The food is delicious and easy to prepare. Guests are amazed how tasty nourishing food can be. The best part: it’s all made with simple recipes requiring no more than 30 minutes of effort at home. If you want to learn to cook for better health, the retreat kitchen is the best classroom you’ll find.
• We hired a Head of Movement in 2015, Jae Chung, and he has been a revelation. Jae was trained at the Postural Restoration Institute and is an expert in re-training the brain to enable better body positioning, posture, breathing, and movement. Jae does one hour one-on-one assessments with every guest and guests commonly come out raving at how much better they feel and how much more freely they breath and move. When Jae assessed me, I walked and ran more fluidly for days afterward – it was amazing. Jae is supported by a team of terrific trainers and has continued to improve our movement curriculum. We now have four movement sessions per day that teach movement modalities appropriate for that time of day – including a “night movement” session teaching relaxation, stress relief, and preparation for sleep.
• The science curriculum, consisting of a 1.5-hour lecture per day by me, is really solid now. Science motivates everything we do at the retreat and, surprisingly, about half the guests in recent retreats have named the science classes as their favorite part. A surprising number of people like to hear me talk!
• 2015 saw us form partnerships with Ubiome for gut microbiome sequencing and AOBiome for Mother Dirt skin microbiome products.
• The retreat offers many other amenities including a luxurious property with two salt water hot tubs and two heated salt water pools, a magnificent and nearly private beach, great kitchens and modern bedrooms and baths. Several guests have told me that the retreat is the most relaxing vacation they’ve ever had.

The next retreat is April 30 to May 7, 2016. We’re about half booked and taking reservations now. Please join us!

To learn more about the retreat, visit the various web pages under the Perfect Health Retreat tab, starting here. To reserve a room or for more information, please contact Paul Jaminet at paul@perfecthealthretreat.com or Whitney Ross Gray at whitney@perfecthealthretreat.com.

Perfect Health Diet goes to Europe

I was delighted to speak at the first German Paleo conference in Berlin, PaleoConvention.de. It was a lot of fun! It will be an annual event and I highly recommend keeping an eye out for the 2016 convention.

Another exciting development in 2015: a prestigious German publisher, the Thieme Publishing Group’s Haug imprint, agreed to bring out a German language edition of Perfect Health Diet. It should be out around October. It’s possible I may visit Germany around the time of the launch.

We also have a Hungarian edition, and I was able to meet a number of our Hungarian fans at the Berlin conference. We would love to find publishers in France, Italy, and Spain – if you know one, please encourage them to contact us!

Perfect Health Cookbook

Long-promised, but long-delayed, the cookbook has been a labor of love for us for over three years now, going on four. Why is it taking so long? All the recipes are of our creation and have been cooked and refined many times. If you consider that we cook once per day, and plan to include at least 150 recipes each of which we’ll have cooked at least 3-4 times, you’ll see why it can take 4 years to finish a cookbook.

It is shaping up at last; in fact we made the online cookbook available to retreat guests last year. We plan to finish it this year. Every recipe will not only be fully Perfect Health Diet compliant, it will also be easy and quick to cook (we aim for 30 minutes to make a complete meal), and highly nourishing and healthful. Moreover, the recipes are not so much recipes as templates: we show how to vary ingredients to make very different flavors with the same recipe design and cooking methods. With this technique you can mix and match ingredients, making shopping and cooking easy and stress-free, yet every meal is a delicious novelty.

The Formation of Angiex

I’ve mentioned over the years that Shou-Ching was doing important cancer research that might eventually lead to an effective therapy. She’s been studying a novel approach to treating cancer for 13 years, and by 2015 had developed it about as far as it can go in an academic environment.

It was time to take the next step: form a company, create a therapy, and bring it to clinical trials.

We started working on this last March and incorporated in December. The new company is Angiex Inc, and you’ll see updates about it on this blog from time to time. Wish us well!

Looking Ahead to 2016

The new year is shaping up as a busy one. Our top priorities are raising Luke and curing cancer. After that, we want to continue improving the Perfect Health Retreat, and publish the Perfect Health Cookbook. Blog posts will be our fifth priority – which means there won’t be many long science posts.

Still, we have a huge mass of interesting material ready to be turned into posts, so don’t give up on us.

We are more convinced than ever that a natural lifestyle and a nutritionally optimized, low toxicity diet are the keys to great health and long life. The evidence for natural healing grows stronger every year. We’ll continue to bring you practical advice that will help you and yours achieve a long lifetime of terrific health.

To a happy and healthy 2016! Our best wishes to all our readers.