Providing independent clinical excellence since 2005
Join us in our ambition to help patients with, or who are at risk of, heart disease. Learn more about your metabolism, muscle and visceral fat, leveraging our medical expertise to find lifestyle and food choices that offer the best chance of a long and healthy life, with less dependence on medication.
With our metabolic toolkit, guidance and educational material, you can manage a great deal of prevention for yourself.
Gut hormone and metabolic processes that once gave a survival edge to our ancestors during famine and ice ages, can be counterproductive in modern times, where there is an abundance of carbohydrate-rich food sources. Many families have inherited gain of function mutations that preserve glucose but subsequently contribute to gut and pancreatic overload leading to insulin resistance and build up of visceral fat stores, which further contribute to a metabolic syndrome. This is a major risk factor for medical conditions such as fatty liver, ischaemic heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, obesity, dementia and even some cancers.
The first step towards improving your metabolic health may therefore be to run a CarbR test, to determine your glucotype (GT), food intake profile and current glucose profile (CGP), then use the results to guide yourself towards healthier food choices.
Using Dr Shape, many patients will discover food group deficiency and surplus, which leads to a switch to healthier food choices.
While excessive visceral and subcutaneous fat stores are major contributors to insulin resistance and poor metabolic health, maintaining or enhancing skeletal muscle also plays a major role in battling glucose and insulin dysregulation.
At SCVC’s cardiometabolic clinic, we offer very low dose x-ray DEXA scans which are by far the most accurate way of tracking your bone, fat and muscle mass.
A DEXA scan is an important part of our metabolic toolkit because anything that increases muscle mass generally improves metabolic health and lowers glucose and the risk of muscle loss (sarcopenia) in later life, while anything that lowers muscle mass, (potentially including GLP-1 mimetics), could be unhealthy. By tracking your muscle mass alongside visceral fat, your medical team are better placed to advise counter measures that may be required.
The metabolic toolkit is offered to all patients attending our Specialist Nurse Practitioner (SNP) led GLP-1 mimetic clinic and included in our 8 month GLP-1M care package. This has been created at SCVC in order to offer team-based care, overseen by specialist consultants, which provides our patients with cutting edge, cost effective treatment that also promotes wellness and healthspan.
To find our more, please complete our SCVC enquiry form at the top of this page and one of our patient care coordinators will be in touch to guide next steps or alternatively, take a look at our home test pages