Hiteshi Dhami Shah

Hiteshi Dhami Shah has spent her career on the liver's worst days — cirrhosis, transplant, end-stage disease, the point at which nutrition stops being lifestyle advice and starts being a survival variable. She is founder of Nutrition Vitals, HPB Nutritionist at Max Nanavati Super Speciality Hospital's Centre of Liver, Intestine and Pancreas Science, and Assistant Professor at NMIMS School of Science, Mumbai.

For six years, as Liver Nutritionist at Gleneagles Hospitals' Department of Hepatology, she managed the nutrition side of transplant cases — patients whose muscle was quietly wasting away even while their weight held steady, a warning sign no scale would catch. That observation sent her into research: during a postdoctoral fellowship at IIT Bombay, she grew liver tissue in the lab to study how fatty liver disease actually develops, and helped establish simple benchmarks doctors could use to catch muscle loss in transplant patients before it turned fatal. Her PhD work, years earlier, traced how a plant-derived compound could block fat from building up in liver cells — research she carried through stints at two of India's top medical research institutes.

She has published in leading hepatology journals and won awards from liver-disease associations in India and Europe, including one in 2023 for work identifying which patients face the highest risk of dying within a year of a liver transplant. Alongside the research, she has written more than 70 articles for Mid-day, Men's Health and Times Wellness, taking the same questions and answering them in plain language