Dr Rupy Aujla is an NHS GP and founder of The Doctor’s Kitchen. He speaks about health through the realities of modern work. Skipped meals, late nights, caffeine instead of breakfast, and decisions made while running on empty.
A few months into his first job as a junior doctor, Rupy Aujla developed atrial fibrillation. He was 24, exercised regularly and looked fit, yet his heart rate would spike to 200 beats per minute while standing on the ward. Instead of treating the episode as a one-off, he began examining the quieter inputs most people ignore: ultra-processed food, irregular meals, chronic stress and lack of recovery. By changing how he ate, slept and structured his days, the episodes stopped. Fifteen years later, they have not returned. That experience reshaped how Auja practises medicine and how he talks about prevention.
On stage, Rupy Aujla translates medical evidence into everyday decisions. He explains how supermarket bread often contains close to twenty ingredients and what happens when you swap it for a four-ingredient rye loaf. Or why a sugary breakfast that “looks healthy” can spike blood sugar and leave you foggy by mid-morning, while fibre-rich oats do the opposite. These examples land because energy dips affect judgment. While inflammation and poor sleep show up as reduced focus, not just future illness. However, Aujla is clear that food does not replace medicine. What it does is shift risk, day by day, in ways most people underestimate.
Rupy Aujla is a regular media contributor, host of The Doctor’s Kitchen Podcast, and founding director of Culinary Medicine UK, a non-profit training doctors and medical students in nutrition and cooking.
