Is 30-year-old nutritionist Emily English Britain’s hottest cook? Oh, who am I kidding. With more than three million social media followers, three recipe books in two years (two bestsellers and a third tipped to go the same way), partnerships with brands such as M&S and Le Creuset, a thriving supplement line called Epetome and more than £1 million in the bank already, the answer is obviously yes.
Every generation has a celebrity cook who has shaped the way they eat at home. In the Nineties it was Delia Smith who dominated televisions, educating Britain on how to boil an egg or rustle up the perfect omelette. Then came the Noughties and Nigella Lawson, the high-camp domestic goddess who sauntered down the stairs in her dressing gown to bake brownies and once used a leopard-print shower cap to prove dough. All the while the likes of Jamie Oliver, Rick Stein and Gordon Ramsay were cashing in on restaurant empires with primetime TV shows. How times have changed.
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Enter English. She doesn’t own a restaurant, have a Michelin star or a cookery programme. But armed with a BSc in nutrition from King’s College London and her iPhone, she has become the go-to recipe source for millions of followers, mostly women like me (young, busy, healthy-ish) who watch and cook the hundreds of delicious, nutritious recipes English shares free on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where she is simply known as “Em the nutritionist”.
On a trip to Italyemthenutritionist/instagram
While Ottolenghi may have a monopoly on the dinner party, English is the reigning queen of the healthy midweek meal. Banish images of carrot sticks and bowls of bran flakes — English eats all the traditionally “unhealthy” no-gos: pasta, bread, dessert. Her recipes hit the sweet spot between tastiness and healthiness while ticking all the boxes every busy Gen Z or millennial person wants: prep-able; packed with “hacks”; high in protein; heavily reliant on my generation’s appliance of choice, the air fryer. Not to mention the catchy phrase with which English signs off each video: “So good.”
It’s why clips of her “prep-able protein sandwich fillings” or “salads that won’t go soggy” have racked up millions of views online, where everyone from Carrie Johnson to supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley follows her. Or why, when English shared a recipe for hot honey cottage cheese toasts, Marks & Spencer traced the online sale of 18,000 pots of cottage cheese directly to the video. Instead of the “Delia effect”, call this the “Emily effect”.
Each of her slick recipe videos is filmed by English on her phone in her newly renovated kitchen in prime southwest London real estate, where she lives with her husband, Aaron. This is where we are meeting today, pristine marble worktops decked out with copies of her latest book. Her first, So Good, was the bestselling debut cookery title of 2024, selling 35,000 copies in the first week. So I’m not surprised English is glowing when she opens the door. Although if you’re one of her followers, you’ll know she attributes her glossy skin largely to the consumption of pomegranate seeds, beetroot and sweet potato.
With her husband, brand consultant Aaron McFeelyemthenutritionist/instagram
“I get messages from people telling me how much [of those ingredients] they eat now. That and cottage cheese,” she says before, right on queue, listing the benefits of drained cow’s milk curds. “It’s versatile, high in protein and it adds this kind of rich, creamy loveliness. It’s also very different now from the terrible cottage cheeses we had back in the day.”
Part of English’s job today, she tells me, is to help women repair their relationship with food after decades of being bombarded with toxic diet culture. If you grew up thinking carbs were bad, and the secret to being healthy was eating as little as possible, keep reading.
Like millions of her followers, English came of age when fad diets were in constant rotation and cereal boxes were emblazoned with images of women holding measuring tapes around their waists.
“Can you believe that they had that on food packaging? It’s mad. And do you remember the Special K diet?” she says. The result is “this idea that nutrition is about restriction, reduction and misery. What I do is create food that you want to eat, but has been designed with nutrition in mind. I want you to look forward to every single plate. I want to bridge the gap between the science of nutrition and what actually tastes good. Because I love food. I love eating. I love restaurants.”
“Her recipes hit the sweet spot: high in protein and heavily reliant on air fryers”Tom Jackson for the times magazine.
That she does. One of the reasons English is trusted among women is that alongside nutritional advice she leads a relatively normal life, going out for drinks, sharing recommendations for her favourite restaurants (these include Chelsea’s hottest spot, Martino’s, and the Notting Hill bistro loved by the Beckhams, Dorian) and enjoying wine. And — shock — her life hasn’t turned upside down. “The community that I’ve built are people who want to be healthy and prep their meals, but they also want lasagne and like a burger.”
English’s own nutritional non-negotiables are straightforward: an hour’s walk first thing, morning sunshine and three balanced meals a day, prioritising fibre and protein.
Her nutrition journey began during her school years. Having grown up on a council estate in Bedfordshire until the age of eight, the second of five children, she won a full scholarship to study at a local private school for sixth form. A self-professed straight-A science buff (she got one of the highest chemistry grades of her school year in the international baccalaureate) she planned on going to university to study biochemistry or biology. That was until the summer she turned 17 and was scouted for Asos, the online shopping mecca of the 2010s.
It was the era of thigh gaps and Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, and while English did well as a model, after a summer of travelling she was told by a new agency that she needed to lose weight. Her legs, they said, had got too fat.
She describes how her relationship with food changed “like a light switch” being flicked. Her perception of her body was transformed, triggering an eating disorder that turned her life “upside down. I’d come from a family of food lovers. We’d never talked about dieting or bodies, and suddenly I had lost all that sense of normality.”
It took six months and a therapist — English credits these sessions with saving her life — for her to quit the fashion industry, eventually revisiting her plans to go to university, this time to study nutrition at King’s College London.
In the summer of 2020, English, then working as a private nutritionist, began sharing videos on Instagram of recipes she wrote for clients. Her following built quietly until four years ago when her recipe for Greek salad with garlic bread went viral. From there, things snowballed.
‘My proudest achievement’
English’s success ever since has been stratospheric. As well as three books and a fourth in the works, in 2024 she launched her science-backed gut-health supplement company Epetome, which bagged a multimillion-pound funding round in February and has started clinical trials. “It is my proudest achievement to date,” she says.
English is impressive — polished, articulate, confident and driven. She is also a millionaire, a milestone she achieved by the age of 29 mostly through paid partnerships — “collabs” as they are called today — with brands from the premium cookware brand Le Creuset to the online retailer Cult Beauty, which pay English to advertise their products. Her influence is now so great that it’s not just her pills and books followers want to buy but also the make-up and even the toothbrush she uses.
“I remember seeing [£1 million] in my account for the first time. My dad was the first person I told because he is so entrepreneurial as well. I’ve never met anyone who’s more resilient and hardworking.” English’s dad owns a sign-making company that took off during lockdown.
She doesn’t see herself as an influencer — “I hate being called it” — but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been subjected to the modern phenomenon that comes with operating online: trolling.
‘People told me I looked too skinny or ill’
Most comments, she tells me, would be about her appearance or her face. Surprisingly, they would come from accounts run by women in their fifties or sixties. “It’s mad, isn’t it? It would never be about food,” she says.
Does she think some people are snobby about her success? “Absolutely. I am a small blonde girl. And while there are so many things that I am fortunate to have had — my family, my education — I think people believe I couldn’t possibly have done it myself. I must have had a leg up.”
The most cutting comments, however, were those she got about her body, that she looks “too skinny or ill. It’s body shaming. And you never know what’s going on in someone’s life — if they have a health issue or just gone through extreme stress. It was horrible. I’d feel really self-conscious of my body, or I’d want to cover up or not post things because I look too small.”
Today, after a stint in therapy, English is able to look past the trolls, using Instagram’s safety features to automatically block aggressive messages. “I feel really passionately that we need to stop commenting on women’s bodies. I’m disengaged [with trolls] now. And at the end of the day I cook food, make delicious free recipes, and so if you don’t want to make my tuna melt toast, just f*** off. You don’t have to follow me.”
So Good Express by Emily English (Seven Dials, £25) is published on May 7. To order a copy, go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935
Hair and make-up: Alice Theobald at Arlington Artists using Armani Beauty and Cloud Nine. Dress and jumpsuit, self-portrait.com