Privacy Policy for startinthegut.com

At startinthegut.com we are committed to the principles of data security, outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If you are a client of startinthegut.com, we hold some information about you. This document outlines how that information is used, who we may share that information with and how we keep it secure.


1. What we do

As part of our business, we provide nutritional therapy services to clients to improve their health through diet and lifestyle interventions. We focus on preventative healthcare, the optimisation of physical and mental health and chronic health conditions. Through nutritional therapy consultations, dietary and lifestyle analysis and testing, we aim to understand the underlying causes of your health issues which we will seek to address through personalised dietary therapy, relevant nutritional supplements and lifestyle advice.

We also offer other services such as corporate wellness programmes, workshops and educational talks and online events.


2. How we obtain your personal data

Information provided by you

You provide us with personal data in the following ways:

  • By completing a nutritional therapy questionnaire and food diary
  • By signing our terms of engagement form
  • During a nutritional therapy consultation
  • Through email, text, over the telephone or by post
  • By taking credit card and online payment
  • This may include the following information:
  • Basic details such as name, address, contact details and next of kin
  • Details of contact we have had with you such as referrals and appointment requests
  • Health information including your previous medical history, dietary, lifestyle, supplement and medicine details, biochemical test results, clinic notes and health improvement plans
  • GP contact information
  • Bank details

We use this information in order to provide you with direct healthcare. This means that the legal basis of our holding your personal data is for legitimate interest. Following completion of your healthcare we retain your personal data for the period defined by our professional association. This enables us to process any complaint you may make. In this case the legal basis of our holding your personal data is for contract administration.

Information we get from other sources

We may obtain sensitive medical information in the form of test results from biochemical testing companies. We use this information in order to provide you with direct healthcare. This means that the legal basis of our holding your personal data is for legitimate interest.

We may obtain sensitive information from other healthcare providers. The provision of this information is subject to you giving us your express consent. If we do not receive this consent from you, we will not be able to coordinate your healthcare with that provided by other providers which means the healthcare provided by us may be less effective.


3. How we use your personal data

We act as a data controller for use of your personal data to provide direct healthcare. We also act as a controller and processor regarding the processing of your data from third parties such as testing companies and other healthcare providers. We act as a data controller and processor regarding the processing of credit card and online payments.

We undertake to at all times protect your personal data, including any health and contact details, in a manner which is consistent with our duty of professional confidence and the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) concerning data protection. We will also take reasonable security measures to protect your personal data storage.

We may use your personal data where there is an overriding public interest in using the information e.g. in order to safeguard an individual, to prevent a serious crime or where there is a legal requirement such as a formal court order. We may use your data for marketing purposes such as newsletters, but this would be subject to you giving us your express consent; this is achieved through you signing up for our mailing lists.


4. Do you share my information with other organisations?

We will keep information about you confidential. We will only disclose your information with other third parties with your express consent with the exception of the following categories of third parties:

  • Any contractors and advisors that provide a service to us or act as our agents on the understanding that they keep the information confidential
  • Anyone to whom we may transfer our rights and duties under any agreement we have with you
  • Any legal or crime prevention agencies and/or to satisfy any regulatory request


  • if we have a duty to do so or if the law allows us to do so

We may share your information with supplement companies and biochemical testing companies as part of providing you with direct healthcare. We will not include any sensitive information.

We will seek your express consent before sharing your information with your GP or other healthcare providers. However, if we believe that your life is in danger then we may pass your information onto an appropriate authority (such as the police, social services in the case of a child or vulnerable adult, or GP in case of self-harm) using the legal basis of vital interests.

We may share your case history in an anonymised form with our peers for the purpose of professional development. This may be at clinical supervision meetings, conferences, educational seminars, lectures and workshops, online forums, and through publishing in medical journals, trade magazines, books or online professional sites. We will seek your explicit consent before processing your data in this way.


5. What are your rights?

Every individual has the right to see, amend, delete or have a copy, of data held that can identify you, with some exceptions. You do not need to give a reason to see your data.

If you want to access your data you must make a subject access request in writing to startinthegut.com. Under special circumstances, some information may be withheld. We shall respond within 20 working days from the point of receiving the request and all necessary information from you. Our response will include the details of the personal data we hold on you, including:

  • Sources from which we acquired the information
  • The purposes of processing the information
  • Persons or entities with whom we are sharing the information

You have the right, subject to exemptions, to ask to:

  • Have your information deleted
  • Have your information corrected or updated where it is no longer accurate
  • Ask us to stop processing information about you where we are not required to do so by law.
  • Receive a copy of your personal data, which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit that data to another controller, without hindrance from us
  • Object at any time to the processing of personal data concerning you

We do not carry out any automated processing, which may lead to automated decision based on your personal data.

If you would like to invoke any of the above rights then please write to the Data Controller by email contact@startinthegut.com.


6. What safeguards are in place to ensure data that identifies me is secure?

We only use information that may identify you in accordance with GDPR. This requires us to process personal data only if there is a legitimate basis for doing so and that any processing must be fair and lawful.

Within the health sector, we also have to follow the common law duty of confidence, which means that where identifiable information about you has been given in confidence, it should be treated as confidential and only shared for the purpose of providing direct healthcare. We will protect your information, inform you of how your information will be used, and allow you to decide if and how your information can be shared.

We also ensure the information we hold is kept in secure locations, restrict access to information to authorised personnel only, protect personal and confidential information held on equipment such as PCs, laptops and smartphones with password protection (so that unauthorised users cannot access it). We ensure external data processors that support us are legally and contractually bound to operate and prove security arrangements are in place where data that could or does identify a person are processed.

Startinthegut.com is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as a data controller and collects data for a variety of purposes. A copy of the registration is available through the ICO website (search by business name).


7. How long do you hold confidential information for?

All records held by startinthegut.com will be kept for the duration specified by guidance from our professional association.


8. Age of consent

You must be over 18 years of age to use this website and have to agree that access to and use of this website are subject to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions and other applicable law. If you do not agree to this Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions, please do not use this website.

9. Change to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to modify this Privacy Policy at any time, so please review it frequently. Changes will take effect immediately upon their posting on this website.


10. Website technical details

We use cookies to collect information about how visitors use our site. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited.

Cookies are small. We do not make use of cookies to collect any private or personally identifiable information. The technical platform of this website uses cookies solely to aid the proper technical functioning of the website. The cookies used contain random strings of characters alongside minimal information about the state and session of the website – which in no way collects or discloses any personal information about you as a visitor.

Advanced areas of this site may use cookies to store your presentation preferences in a purely technical fashion with no individually identifiable information. Note also our statement on analytics software below – as analytics software also uses cookies to function.

Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.


11. Third-party links

This website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.


12. Analytics

Like most websites, we make use of analytics software in order to help us understand the trends in popularity of our website and of different sections. We make no use of personally identifiable information in any of the statistical reports we use from this package. We use an analytics package called Google Analytics who provide details of their privacy policy on the Google website.

To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.


13. Complaints

If you have a complaint regarding the use of your personal data then then please write to the Data Controller by email contact@startinthegut.com and we will do our best to help you.

If your complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction and you wish to make a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), you can contact them on 01625 545745 or 0303 1231113.