.png)
THE VAT-TRAP BOOK SERIES
Five short books. One framework for healthspan
Modern cardiology has spent fifty years measuring three of four things. The fourth is now measurable too — and it changes almost everything we thought we knew about heart disease, diabetes, and dementia.
Three pillars measured. One fire underneath. The fourth pillar — visceral fat — has been missing.
The Naked Heart principle — making something complicated simple, but no simpler than the truth allows.
ON THE GOAL
Metabolic health, not slimness.
This is not another weight-loss book series. The target is metabolic health — visceral fat down, insulin sensitivity restored, blood pressure controlled, strength preserved — and the target is achievable across body shapes. Some readers are large-stock and will never be slim; metabolic health is still entirely available to them. Some readers' weight goes up, sometimes substantially, as they add muscle while losing visceral fat. Their waist shrinks; the scale climbs; their blood markers transform. The scale is not the right marker, and never was.
Health is not a size. The right numbers are waist-to-height ratio, blood pressure, glucose response, and the strength you can demonstrate.
WHY THIS SERIES EXISTS
You walk into your GP's surgery. Your numbers look fine. You don't feel fine.
None of these tests can see the visceral adipose tissue (VAT) wrapped around your liver and pancreas — the metabolically active fat that drives inflammation, insulin resistance, and the silent inflammation of your coronary arteries for decades before any symptom appears.
Research-grade CT imaging with AI now lets clinicians see coronary inflammation and VAT directly, and that evidence is what reshaped the field. For the reader at home, the framework can be tracked with a far simpler toolkit — a tape measure, a home BP monitor, and a CGM — and the universal threshold to remember is a waist-to-height ratio of 0.5.
Something has changed in the last thirty years — and it isn't the lifts, the escalators or the cars, all of which existed in 1995. What has changed is the food. Hidden carbohydrates and refined sugars have been engineered into a steadily widening range of products, including many marketed as healthy. For people who are metabolically carbohydrate-sensitive — a substantial fraction of the population — the consequence is measurable: the waistlines of nations have expanded, and the visceral compartment along with them. This is the part of the picture that the four pillars makes legible.
When it comes to an intervention, the principle that runs through every book in this series is that it is better to start a lifestyle and dietary plan that you can do forever. Six months of high-intensity gym work that you cannot sustain is worth less than ten years of ten minutes a day. A diet you cannot imagine still eating in five years is not the diet that will move your visceral fat. The longevity-author orthodoxy makes heavy weightlifting non-negotiable; sound advice for the small minority who will do it for twenty years, less useful for the majority who won't. Small, repeatable changes — tested one at a time, measured honestly, kept only if they fit your life — are the engine of the framework. This is also why N-of-1 self-measurement matters: the test of whether something works for you takes weeks, and you can only run that test if the intervention is sustainable enough to keep going while the data accumulates.
The four pillars are what you measure. The needle is moved by what you do — diet, resistance training, sleep, and where appropriate, modern pharmacology. VAT-TRAP is a five-book series, an open-access education resource, and a set of free tools. It exists to put modern preventive cardiology in the hands of the people who need it — not just the clinicians who deliver it.
EXPERT ADVICE IN A NOISY ROOM
A cardiologist's view, written for the reader
The internet has democratised health information. It has also drowned it. On any given day you can find people insisting statins are essential, others insisting they are poison, and a third group selling supplements that will solve everything.
I cannot make the noise go away. What I can offer is the considered view of a consultant cardiologist with thirty years of clinical practice — written for the reader rather than the journal, and stripped of every piece of jargon that does not earn its place.
Make something complicated simple, but no simpler than the truth allows.
This is the Naked Heart principle that runs through the whole series. Five short books — most readable in an evening — that walk you from understanding the problem, to measuring it, to mastering it.
Dr Edward Leatham
Consultant Cardiologist · ~30 years invasive cardiology, 1991–2021 (NHS) · Director, Surrey Cardiovascular Clinic · Developer of the CGP™ framework and the CarbR™ test
THE SERIES
Five books. One framework. Read in order, or pick the one you need.
Each book stands alone. Together they form a roadmap from understanding the problem, to measuring it, to mastering it.
I
Sugars, Fats and Heart Disease
Book I of the VAT-TRAP series
Why your blood tests look normal while your metabolism is already in trouble.
~120 PAGES
2-HOUR READ
COMING 2026
Book 1 is the foundation. It introduces visceral fat as the master driver of cardiometabolic disease, and shows that — for the first time at any scale — we can now measure it accurately enough to act on it.
The book is organised around three central ideas: the four pillars of cardiometabolic risk (ApoB, blood pressure, glucose, and VAT), the trap itself (how visceral fat accumulates almost invisibly), and the universal toolkit — what a tape measure, a home blood pressure monitor, and a CGM can tell you about each pillar, in any country, for under £100 of equipment.
If you have ever wondered why "normal" blood tests do not match how you feel, this is where to start.
II
Track Your Heart Health
The Metabolic Toolkit
Knowledge without measurement is just opinion. Turn your kitchen into a Cardiology 3.0 clinic.
~80 PAGES
90-MIN READ
COMING 2026
Book 2 is the practical toolkit. It hands you the equipment and methods to measure your own cardiometabolic health between clinic visits — using tools that together cost less than a single private specialist appointment.
You will learn how to run an N-of-1 trial on yourself: change one variable, hold the others constant, measure the result, iterate. Discover your glucotype. Read your Current Glucose Profile. Build a personal data trail your GP will thank you for.
Skimmable, manual-style, designed to be opened and used rather than read cover-to-cover.
III
The Great Escape
~90 PAGES
90-MIN READ
COMING 2026
How to Lose Visceral Adipose Tissue
Once you can see the trap and measure it, you can escape it.
Book 3 is the escape plan. Nutrition designed around your glucotype rather than someone else's diet. Resistance training to rebuild the muscle that midlife quietly steals. Sleep and brown-fat physiology. Feedback data to iterate rather than guess.
The goal is not weight loss. It is metabolic restoration — and the years of healthspan that come with it. Most readers see meaningful change in their first three months.
IV
The GLP-1 Advantage
Using Modern Medicine Wisely
GLP-1 opens the door. It does not build the house.
~80 PAGES
90-MIN READ
COMING 2026
Book 4 is the honest guide to GLP-1 medications. Semaglutide and tirzepatide are genuinely transformative when used well — and used carelessly, they strip muscle alongside fat and leave patients weaker than they started.
Micro-dosing. Muscle preservation. Behavioural integration. Planned tapers. Written for the patient already using or considering these drugs, and for the clinicians prescribing them.
V
Do As You Would Be Done By
A Cardiologist's Journey from Intervention to Prevention
The most honest book in the series — because it's about my own scan.
~180 PAGES
4-HOUR READ
COMING 2026
Book 5 is the backstory. Thirty years of cardiology, told through one career: from a cath-lab death in 2000 that triggered everything, to the founding of one of the NHS's first cardiac CT services, to the moment I looked at my own scan and recognised the same disease pattern in myself.
What followed was an unplanned research programme: a micro-dose GLP-1 trial on myself, serial VAT-CT measurements taken before and after, the discovery — via continuous glucose monitor — that my three sisters and I all had undiagnosed prediabetes, and a long search for the answer to why isn't this mainstream?
Longer and more narrative than the others. Not every reader will need it. Some will love it.
COMPANION WORKBOOK - PUBLISHED 2025
N-of-1
A 12-Month Heart and Health Tracker Diary
A practical, science-informed companion for anyone already taking GLP-1 mimetic injections — or who wants to improve metabolic and cardiovascular health without them — through slow, sustainable change.
Rather than another short-term programme, N-of-1 puts you at the centre of your own health journey. You experiment gently, observe your own biology, and make small adjustments each week. Over twelve months, modest changes accumulate into powerful shifts in appetite, sleep, energy, waist measurement, strength and long-term metabolic resilience.
Weekly tracking pages for waist and weight, blood pressure, body composition, GLP-1 dose adjustments, and your N-of-1 Review notes
Clear guidance on the four foundations: nutrition, movement, muscle and sleep
Optional tools including time-restricted eating, gradual caloric restriction, and alcohol moderation — nothing prescriptive
READ SAMPLE PAGES
Join Dr Leatham’s mission to prevent heart disease and improve your healthspan
Register your interest in The VAT Trap. Gain early access to a new five-part series on metabolic health, prevention, and longevity. Be notified when each volume launches. Access exclusive clinical insights. Follow the evidence and real-world cases behind the science
Want the full journey? Subscribe to our weekly mailshot to receive the stories and insights behind each chapter as they are released.
