Dr Ula Heywood
Preventive and precision health physician; founder and medical director of Autonomy Health, an Auckland private clinic. Previously an emergency department consultant for around 15 years before moving into preventive medicine.
Preventive and precision medicine • metabolic health • biomarker-led health assessment • alcohol and its effects on sleep • gut and metabolic markers
About the expert
Focus: Argues that alcohol is a poison with no safe intake level, and that most people cannot judge their own drinking because it is normalised inside their friendship group. Uses biomarkers and wearable sleep data to make the harm visible, and recommends a three-month alcohol holiday as an experiment rather than a verdict.
Ula Heywood is an emergency medicine specialist (MBChB, FACEM) who spent around 15 years as an ED consultant before founding Autonomy Health in Auckland in 2021, a private preventive and precision health clinic. She works with patients over months rather than minutes, building a baseline from over 100 biomarkers and revisiting it at three, six and twelve month intervals. She describes herself as a storyteller rather than a doctor, and calls herself Dr Killjoy when the subject turns to alcohol. Her clinic sells the biomarker panels and genetic testing this episode recommends. This does not invalidate the physiology she describes, and the two are worth judging separately. It is still worth knowing that the person telling you to measure your baseline also sells the panel that measures it.
Why this matters
An emergency physician turned preventive doctor who is, unusually, careful about her own limits: she distinguishes what she has measured from what she believes, refuses to tell every patient to stop drinking, and offers a tiered answer rather than a slogan. Her physiology is mainstream and accurate — acetaldehyde, tumour suppressor genes, the gut lining, the sleep architecture — and the heavy-drinking thresholds she quotes match the standard definitions rather than a harder line of her own. Strongest when reporting established biology and when she declines to catastrophise: her answer for a metabolically healthy person having a couple of drinks is that it will not break the bank. Weakest where wearable data does the work of evidence — a single patient s ring showing lost deep sleep becomes equivalent to aging 20 to 25 years, and the recovery-time figures come from company datasets rather than the literature. She sells the biomarker panels and genetic testing the episode recommends, which is worth knowing without letting it stand in for the physiology.