The team behind the substrate
Clinicians, engineers, and a creative director who live with the work and its consequences.
Six people you can name and find on the public record. The substrate is built by people who turn round and apply it in their day jobs.
Read the team, then read what we are not, then read why we work the way we do.
Who we are
A single company, two surfaces
Via Negativa Health is the consultancy arm of The Glucose Never Lies Ltd. Same people, same registered company, same single inbox. The split exists because the work splits cleanly: GNL is a free clinical educational engine for people living with diabetes (educational tool, not a medical device); Via Negativa Health is the paid industry work.
Founding team
The three who run the company
John Pemberton
Founder. Paediatric Diabetes Dietitian at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust by day, working on T1D evidence and tooling by night. Co-author on ISPAD exercise guidance. Twenty-five years of skin in the game; longer if you count being born with it.
Phillip Hayes
Technical director, part-time. He built the GNL API and the explorer suite, the agent infrastructure behind GNL Grace, and the database-style content architecture that the rest of the team learned to think in. The shape of every piece of clinical tooling we ship runs through him first.
Anjanee Kohli
Holds the creative line. Co-Director Creative. She is the reason a clinical platform reads like something a person would actually read. Brand, voice, visual register; she runs the work the audience sees.
Scientific advisers
The three who sit alongside the substrate
Three named scientific advisers who review evidence packs, ladder positions, and clinical claims. Independent academic appointments; reviewed-by is never endorsed-by.
Professor Dessi P. Zaharieva
Certified Exercise Physiologist at Stanford University. Scientific Adviser to The Glucose Never Lies. Reviews exercise and AID-with-exercise positions on the Grace evidence base.
Professor Othmar Moser
Professor of Exercise Physiology at the Medical University of Graz. Scientific Adviser to The Glucose Never Lies. Co-author on ISPAD exercise guidance.
Dr Adrian Brown
Associate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics at University College London. Scientific Adviser to The Glucose Never Lies. Reviews nutrition-side positions on the Grace evidence base.
The refusals
What we are not
We are not a marketing agency. We do not write copy on subjects we do not understand at the substrate level.
We are not a regulatory consultancy in the FDA-route sense. We work CE and UKCA. We refer FDA out to specialists.
We are not a body-positive wellness brand. If you are a CGM manufacturer looking to enter the non-diabetes wellness market, we are not the team for you. Our internal filter will not let us support a signal we do not believe is good enough for the people you would be selling it to.
We are not endorsed by manufacturers whose tools we review. The work is independent, the review is paid for by the work itself. We review; we do not endorse.
How we operate
One company, one inbox
One company. One bank account. One VAT number. One inbox. Three working surfaces (consultancy, agent builds, clinical tooling) and one creative one. We do not run separate brand identities; the consultancy is named Via Negativa because the work is named for the way it is done, not for who is doing it.
Why the name
Via Negativa, the four-part anchor
The name is Taleb’s. Build by subtraction: remove what does not serve the central argument until only the argument is left. Most consultancy adds. We mostly cut. That is Via Negativa.
The same anchor carries three more parts the work runs on. Antifragility: the stack is built to benefit from refusal volume, not to fear it; every “no” we say makes the next “yes” sharper. The agent stack refuses fragile claims as a feature, names tail risks rather than averaging them out, routes real clinical decisions back to the diabetes care team. Skin in the game: the founding team lives with the substrate (John has T1D and works as a paediatric Diabetes Dietitian; Phillip carries the technical liability for every line that ships under GNL or Grace; the company’s livelihood and clinical standing are bound to the work). Black-swan handling: Type 1 diabetes is a tail-risk condition; severe hypoglycaemia, DKA, the once-in-a-decade bad night sit in the tail. Every artefact we ship surfaces the tail risk in the same paragraph it surfaces the average, and routes meaningful individual decisions out to the person’s diabetes care team. We do not average tails away, and we do not pretend the average is the whole story.
Company information
The Glucose Never Lies Ltd
The Glucose Never Lies Ltd, registered in the United Kingdom. Company No. 16733595. UK VAT No. GB 516 3272 08. Via Negativa Health is a trading name; there is no separate legal entity. Media and Professional Indemnity Insurance via CFC Underwriting Ltd through JM Glendinning; full policy details on request.
Trademarks: The Glucose Never Lies (UK00004267795), GNL Educational Explorer (UK00004360249), GNL GRACE (UK00004370619).
Operational rule
The win-win-or-pull-out test
Every engagement is tested at every stage against one binary: does the end user win.
By end user we mean the person living with diabetes, the carer, the supporter, the clinician at the bedside, downstream of the work we ship to a client.
If the answer is yes and the client also wins, that is a win-win and we ship. If the answer is no, we are not interested, and we pull out at any point in the engagement.
The rule sits in plain English in our contract template at docs/agent-stack/CLIENT_CONTRACT_TEMPLATE.md §6 as a written get-out clause; that means the engagement can be exited mid-flight, by either side, without recrimination, when the substrate stops serving the end user.
We have used it. It is not a slogan.
One inbox, one route
john@theglucoseneverlies.com. We reply inside two working days.
Tag your subject line with VN so it routes correctly. Tell us the shape of the engagement and the question you want answered.
Read what we will not do before you write. It saves both of us a call.
Brief shape
What to send
- The shortest accurate sentence about your company.
- The problem you want help with.
- The constraint that is fixed.
- The walk-away. What would make this a no for you.
Routing
How to send
The fastest route is the brief form: tell us the shape of the engagement and the question you want answered, and we reply within 48 hours. Start a brief →
If the form does not fit your enquiry, direct email is always open: john@theglucoseneverlies.com. Tag your subject line with VN so it routes correctly.
The refusals
What we will not do
Sit through a procurement chase that we know we cannot win.
Sign on to engagements we do not think will work; we will tell you why and move on.
Take CGM-for-non-diabetes-wellness positioning work, as a worked example of where our internal substrate test refuses. The verbatim refusal sits on /home/, /services/, and /for-blue-chip-companies/:
If you are a CGM manufacturer looking to enter the non-diabetes wellness market, we are not the team for you. Our internal filter will not let us support a signal we do not believe is good enough for the people you would be selling it to.
Close
Write when you are ready
If the brief above fits, send it. If it does not, send the closest version. We will reply with what would help us either way.
One inbox: john@theglucoseneverlies.com