Food is medicine
Anna Campbell is a scientist and founder in Dunedin, New Zealand, whose whole career has circled one idea: food is medicine. Trained as a plant geneticist and biotechnologist, she now runs Zestt Wellness, working on the plant compounds that can downgrade chronic inflammation — the slow, sustained “always-on” state of the immune system that increasingly underpins chronic disease, from autoimmune conditions to dementia.
Her curiosity was inherited: her father was a geriatrician who drummed into her, young, that we don’t look after our elderly well. And she works in the shadow of one of longevity’s great data sets — the Dunedin Study at the University of Otago, one of the world’s longest-running longitudinal studies, which began in 1972, the same year Anna was born.
Her science is refreshingly humble. Modern medicine reduces a plant to a single compound; Anna is interested in whole plants and the interaction of their many compounds — and she’s the first to say no supplement beats lifestyle: “very few pharmaceutical drugs can have the impact on your health that your lifestyle has.” It’s why she sits in Longevity Basics on the Longevity Map, with a foot in Biohacking Upgrades.
And her single most practical rule is one anyone can start today: feed the trillion microbes inside you with diversity. “Aim for 30 different plant species a week.” Eat the rainbow.
