Dr Zia Knippenberg-Stratos

Dr Zia Knippenberg-Stratos is a medical doctor, registered nutritionist and functional medicine specialist with one of the most distinctive training backgrounds in her field. Internationally educated at Georgetown University and University College London, her career has been shaped by a single question: what is the body actually trying to tell us, and what would it take to properly listen?

Her academic journey began not in medicine but in psychology at Georgetown University, an unusual starting point that gave her an enduring appreciation for the mind-body relationship and the ways in which emotional, behavioural and neurological factors are inseparable from physical health. After completing her medical degree and early clinical training in US hospitals, she observed a pattern that would define her career: that nutrition and lifestyle were driving outcomes that conventional medicine was barely pausing to notice.

That observation took her to University College London, where she completed a Masters in Clinical and Public Health Nutrition. Her research on diet and autoimmunity was published in peer-reviewed journals, positioning her at the frontier of a field that has since moved decisively into the mainstream. She is a certified functional medicine practitioner through the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM), a WALSH Advanced Nutrient Therapy Practitioner, a UK Registered Nutritionist and a certified intuitive eating counsellor. She is also the founder of Food as Medicine, a platform rooted in the conviction that nutrition is not complementary to clinical medicine; it is clinical medicine.

Her specialist focus is the gut microbiome and its reach far beyond digestion. Dr Knippenberg-Stratos maps the connections that conventional medicine tends to miss: how the gastrointestinal system shapes immune function, metabolic health, hormonal balance, mood, cognition and the pace of long-term ageing. Through advanced diagnostics, personalised nutrition and targeted lifestyle medicine, she identifies and addresses the underlying imbalances that produce symptoms across multiple systems simultaneously.

A significant area of her work is the gut-brain axis and nutritional psychiatry. Drawing on advanced training in WALSH nutrient therapy, she supports patients experiencing anxiety, depression, ADHD, attention disorders, autism spectrum conditions and other complex mental health presentations, working to identify the biochemical, nutritional and microbiome-related factors driving them. She works with both adults and children, and is particularly devoted to the science of early-life nutrition: the growing body of evidence demonstrating that the first 1,000 days of life shape immune function, metabolic health, cognitive development and long-term disease risk in ways that no prescription can easily undo.

She has also contributed to global public health through organisations including the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and The Trussell Trust, and is fluent in six languages: English, French, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. That linguistic and cultural range is not a footnote; it reflects a clinician who understands that health is shaped by context as much as by biology.

Dr Knippenberg-Stratos joined The Schoeman Clinic because the methodology matches her own: investigate the root cause, treat the whole person, and never mistake the absence of disease for the presence of health.