About PHĪME
Planetary Health Institute for Metabolic Ecology
The first institutional system built to connect soil health, food quality, and human metabolic outcomes — through research, clinical practice, and a living farm laboratory.
more-than-science means —
Disease is not a malfunction.
It is an ecological adaptation to a broken system.
The body does exactly what it should, given what it is given. The failure is upstream.
Fix the ecology.
Fix the health.
Origin
Born from a structural absence.
Metabolic disease is a civilisational problem, not a personal one. It is produced by the way we grow food. It is sustained by the way medicine is organised — treating symptoms in isolation from upstream causes.
PHĪME was designed to fill that gap. Not as a research paper. Not as a policy framework. As an operating institution — with a farm, a clinic, a data infrastructure, and a research programme that generates knowledge from real patients, real soil, and real food.
The institution is built on a founding conviction: health is ecological before it is medical. Soil biodiversity is the beginning of the chain that ends in human metabolic outcomes.
Rising fast
Metabolic Crisis
The largest growing non-communicable burden globally. The scale of need has never been greater. The institutional response remains inadequate.
Breaking down
Industrial Food System
Nutrition-depleted, toxicity-loaded crops. The system is failing on its own terms.
Capital moving
Convergence
Global health and regenerative agriculture investment are converging. The institutional infrastructure to receive it does not yet exist.
The system does not exist yet. That is the opportunity.
What we do
Treat. Grow. Track. Learn.
Treat People
Clinical
Real patients, real measured outcomes. The clinical encounter is a primary site of learning — not the final destination of knowledge.
Grow Better Food
Farm
Healthier soil → healthier crops. Farm8 produces food using regenerative methods, measuring soil and food quality continuously.
Track Everything
Data
Soil biodiversity to symptom onset — the full chain, measured. The data infrastructure is what makes PHĪME a research system, not merely a practice.
Learn and Improve
Research
The system gets smarter with every case. Every patient encounter improves the protocol for the next one.
Founding position
Operating institution, not advocacy.
PHĪME is not a think tank, a policy framework, or a campaign. It is an operating institution that does the work — treats patients, grows food, runs the data infrastructure, generates the research — and lets the evidence accumulate as practice. The argument is made by what the institution measurably produces, not what it advocates for.
This shape carries costs. An operating institution is slower than a research paper, costlier than a manifesto, and harder to fund than either. It is also the only shape that can hold the chain whole — from the soil to the gut to the cultural inheritance — because no single discipline can.
Where conventional health institutions abstract upward into policy or downward into pharmacology, PHĪME stays at the operational scale where the chain actually lives: the farm, the kitchen, the clinic, the cohort, the longitudinal record.
Located at
Farm8 Foundation · Aya Nagar, New Delhi. India is the leading edge of the metabolic-disease transition; the work has to be done where the curve is steepest.
2026 cohort
Type 2 diabetes
Five-fold rise in India over the last thirty years. PHĪME's first clinical programme reads the metabolic transition where it's happening fastest, in the population that's living it.
Living laboratory
3 acres, continuously measured
Farm8 produces food and data simultaneously — soil biodiversity, plant nutrient density, microbiome shifts in the cohort that eats from it.
Read next
Three ways to go deeper from here.
The argument
The Evidence Chain
The five-link spine of PHĪME's case — soil biodiversity, dietary diversity, gut microbiome, human health, cultural narrative — with citations to walk at your own pace.
Walk the chain →The architecture
The Fruiting Spine
The canonical structural document. The whole institutional architecture — every layer, every stratum, every operative principle — for the reader who wants to see how it all hangs together.
Read the spine →The conversation
Contact
Four entry points by purpose — research, partnerships, funding, press — or write to the general inbox and we'll route you. Real letters get real answers.
Reach the institute →"Change does not fail because it is wrong. It fails because it is met poorly."