Yusuf Karaman
Gut health, stress-eating patterns, and the science of small steady changes
Yusuf Karaman trained as an NHS dietitian, worked in three London hospitals for nine years, and left in 2021 to set up a private practice that gives people the kind of time he was never able to give them on the ward. He is now one of the most rigorous nutritional therapists in central London and one of the few to have made the bridge from clinical dietetics into the slower private model.
The work
He works in two formats. The first is a long opening session, ninety minutes, where he takes a careful food and life history and lays out an evidence-grounded plan.
The second is a fifty-minute review every three to six weeks. He sends written notes after each session so the work is something you can actually re-read.
Background and training
Yusuf trained in dietetics at the University of Surrey, worked as a band-six NHS dietitian at Guy’s, then at the Royal London, then at Whittington Health where he led the gastroenterology dietetics team for four years. He holds the British Dietetic Association registration and the BANT membership.
What he works with
Most of his caseload sits at the intersection of stress and digestion: irritable bowel syndrome, reflux that has not responded to PPIs, the late-stage of an under-eating habit picked up in a person’s twenties, and the kind of stress-eating pattern that no diet has ever fixed because the diet was never the question.
In practice
He is not a supplement seller. He will recommend things you buy in a normal supermarket. He will sometimes recommend a specific test (for instance a calprotectin or a coeliac panel) and explain why; he does not run his own laboratory.
I left the NHS dietetics service because I could not give twelve minutes to a problem that needed an hour. That is the only reason. The science is the same.
Outside the practice
He runs a free Saturday-morning food and feeling group at a community centre in Bethnal Green, open to anyone who has had a difficult relationship with eating. He has been doing this since 2019.
Most of what I do is permission. Permission to eat, to stop, to feel hungry, to put it down.