About Elevated Food For Life

Our Mission

We want to empower people to create and cook everyday food that is naturally fortified and elevated in nutrition.

We help you find the best quality, most nutrient-dense foods to create dishes that are not only simple to prepare and taste delicious, but are also highly functional: energy giving, immune boosting and DNA protecting.

We teach you how to source, prepare, cook and eat – allowing you to fall in love with food again. Elevated Food for Life, is all about a life well-lived, not a fad diet and exercise regime.

Why Elevated?

About Professional Chef, Jason Shaw

Jason cut his teeth in the kitchens of the acclaimed Trust House Forte Hotel in the north Leeds suburb of Bramhope in the mid-1980s and his career has seen him work alongside some of cheffing’s biggest names, including the likes of Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsey and Raymond Blanc.

Along the way, his cooking has graced the restaurants of some of north Yorkshire’s finest restaurants, including Monkman’s Wine Bar & Bistrot and Tubby Wadlows where he was Chef Patron.

In the late 1990s, Jason moved into food development with Marks & Spencer before venturing into restaurant consulting, helping form the dishes, policies and procedures of groups such as Piccolino, Restaurant Bar & Grill, Bank and Zinc.

More lately, Jason has invested much of his time learning about autism and giving back. His work with SEN young adults at the renowned Lighthouse School has taught him the simplicity of instruction, Lego-style pictorial guidance, clarity of vocabulary and interesting ways to engage with foods.

About Clinical Nutritionist, James Ellis

James has an MSc in Nutrition, a post-graduate diploma in nutrition therapy and certification in conditioning and personal training… but it wasn’t always that way.

In a previous life, he was probably Fleet Street’s worst ever health editor when he took on the role just after Metro launched in London in 1999. It wasn’t that he was a bad journalist, he just couldn’t practice what he preached and burned the media candle at both ends.

The death of his father in 2006 where poor lifestyle choices were a contributory factor saw James hit the gym again for the first time in years and, buoyed by the fact he won a body change challenge amongst his newspaper colleagues, he was well and truly caught by the health and fitness bug.

In 2009 he took a voluntary redundancy and used some of his pay off to re-train as a personal trainer, whilst also devising the 1095 Mile Challenge – where people had to run three miles a day every day for a year. The running soon became a new addiction and James found himself going further and further, past marathons and into the world of ultra endurance where he has finished the world’s most gruelling footrace Spartathlon four times.

James added clinical nutrition to his bow in 2017 and gained his MSc in clinical sports nutrition in 2018. He is also a conditioning coach, a rehabilitation specialist and a fan of biohacking.

James is a member of BANT, the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine, and CIMSPA, the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity.

Our Philosophy

The discovery of fire and the cooking and preservation of food through techniques such as fermentation allowed humans to better digest what they ate and pushed us up the evolutionary curve. Somewhere over the last century though, some of those techniques that proved so beneficial in the past have been waylaid or forgotten as we have moved towards more processed foods.

The bread we buy in supermarkets today for instance is much different from that cooked by our grandparents and great-grandparents. Fermented foods that help promote beneficial gut bacteria are missing from many people’s diets, as is fibre that can help feed and promote those bacteria. Conversely, highly processed foods can strip out many of much-needed vitamins and minerals, while high levels of processed sugars promote inflammation, weight gain and many other illnesses so prevalent in society.

When one looks at many of the world cuisines associated with the famed Blue Zones where people are said to live the longest, they all retain an element of that ancestral way of eating. We’re not talking a Paleo caveman-style diet, but cooking food the way it used to be cooked.

At Elevated, we believe in taking some of these concepts and marrying them with elements of cutting edge biohacking to produce an eating plan that is not about fad restrictive foods and crash weight-loss programmes but one that includes tasty, natural ingredients to enhance familiar and not-so-familiar meal time dishes.

Your gut health and your metabolism will benefit from a philosophy that the more you put in, the more you get out. That’s why our meals include nutrient dense, wild and organic ingredients that are treated with respect and sensitively prepared to optimise both their organoleptic qualities and their health values.

That doesn’t mean everything has to be wild and organic – we know people don’t all have the time to forage their own greens or perhaps can’t always afford to buy organic, and so we always offer ideas for the best substitutes that will give you the best return from both a taste and a health-giving perspective.