Our Story

Hi, I’m Juls, founder of IMMUNENCE and this is our story. 

Although I’m English, I’ve been living in Spain for the last 20 years and have been with my soul mate, José, for 12 of those. As long as I’ve known him, he’s had issues with his stomach and keeping food down. 

It was basically an accumulation of scar tissue that had formed at the entrance to his stomach after 20 years or so of heartburn and acid reflux. 

This meant that the entrance to his stomach was much smaller than in most of us and if the food going down was heavy or dense (like bread, meat, pasta. etc.), it couldn’t get through the opening and his oesophagus would then push the food out the way it had come in.

He had a small operation about 7 years ago to cut away the scar tissue and increase the opening. It seemed to work fine and we more or less returned to normal life.

Then in the early spring of 2019, he started vomiting up food again. He visited the doctor, who made an appointment for him to see his specialist. 

The waiting list was around 6 months, but we didn’t worry too much at the time, because he was still doing reasonably well and it had taken a year or so before it got bad the last time. 

But very quickly matters got a LOT worse and within a month or so, he seemed to be throwing up any solid food he ate and was losing weight rapidly. We started to worry that it might be something else. 

Within just a few months he had lost over 10 kilos (22 pounds!) and could only keep down liquids, so the only real nutrition he was getting by this point were smoothies and juices. 

As there was still no news from the hospital about his appointment, he bought a tub of those ‘food supplement powders’ from the chemist. 

But when I read the label, I was horrified! It was nothing more than a huge list of processed vegetable oils (canola and sunflower), processed milk proteins, sugars, sweeteners and synthetic vitamins and minerals! It would literally do him more harm than good! 

And that ladies and gents was how the original formula for IMMUNENCE was created and where our story began. 

I had been studying evidence-based nutrition for around 3 years and it was (and still is) my big passion, so I decided to utilize all that I had learned, and put something together for him that was: 

  1. Whole-food, plant based
  2. A selection of healthy fats like nuts, seeds and oats to build him up
  3. Anti-inflammatory
  4. Heart and cancer protective (given the unanswered concerns at the time)
  5. A wide range of micronutrients
  6. High immune boosting. 

He started using it just in a small glass of orange juice every day because he couldn’t keep much else down. He would have 2 or 3 of these a day.  

In about 2 weeks, his appetite started to return and over the next couple of weeks he was getting more and more adventurous with the foods he was trying – more importantly, almost everything stayed down and it still is. 

By Christmas, he had steadily worked back up to a healthy weight and felt so good, that when the hospital called with an appointment to remove the blockage in his stomach, he told them to call back in a month. He didn’t see the point in taking a risk with the anaesthetic etc., if there were no symptoms. 

He has continued to postpone the intervention each month since then. In fact, coincidentally, they called today as I was writing this introduction and he pushed back another month. 😊