Guest speakers at The Dandelion Project's event at the Digital Greenhouse included Dr Rangan Chatterjee who is best known for his work with functional medicine on BBC One's, Doctor in the House.
He said lifestyle and nutrition were an underutilised tool in medicine, and society relied too much on pharmaceuticals.
'The majority of chronic diseases which are crippling economies around the world could be helped through lifestyle and nutritional changes,' he said.
'We are very good at dealing with acute problems such as heart attacks, chest infections, and people being knocked down in the street.
'But chronic conditions such as diabetes, strokes, obesity and dementia, which are putting our health systems under strain, can be helped by these changes.
'I believe you can reverse the Type 2 diabetes diagnosis and though that tends not to be the conventional thinking, I think it should be.'
Nearly four million people in the UK suffered from Type 2 diabetes and one in three adults was pre-diabetic.
'The figures are alarming and there are financial and moral imperatives for dealing with it,' said Dr Chatterjee.
'People don't want to be ill and while it's easy to say they don't listen, maybe it's because we are not getting our message across in the right way.'
