Leisha I have never been one for protocols, which is a little ironic because protocols are part of my work. I understand why people need them. I create recommendations, work with herbs, tinctures, minerals and food, and spend a lot of time looking at the terrain of the body. Personally, though, I have always resisted the idea that health should become a long list of things we have to take every single day.
I believe deeply in food as medicine, and I am fortunate to live on land where much of my food and medicine grows around me. Food has always been my medicine. Not as a slogan or a trend, but because that is actually how I live.
I grow many of the plants people overlook or call weeds: purslane, chickweed, dandelion, plantain, chicory, nettles, wild greens, herbs and medicinal plants. They make sense to me because they are food and medicine at once, and they are part of what I eat all the time.
In the evenings, when I do my chores feeding the animals and collecting eggs, I have pathways I walk through the gardens. Along the way I pick at things. A few lettuce leaves here, dandelion leaves there, some chickweed, a little motherwort, parsley, green onions, moringa leaves or sweet potato leaves. I am not standing in the kitchen trying to calculate nutrients. I am eating from the land as I move through it, and that feels normal to me.
What interests me is not simply the nutrient contained in a plant. I want to know the entire path that nutrient travelled before it ever reached my body. A plant grows through soil, minerals, microbes, fungi, water, carbon, sunlight and atmosphere, all interacting through a living system.
My work with the soil food web changed the way I understand nutrition because it made that pathway very clear to me. A plant is part of an ecosystem before it ever becomes food. Its roots interact with microorganisms in the rhizosphere. Microbes cycle nutrients, fungi move resources through the soil, organic matter is transformed, and minerals become biologically available.
Then we eat the plant.
That connection continues to amaze me. Something that moved through soil, microbes and roots can later become involved in an enzyme inside my body, a nerve impulse, a cell membrane, blood production or cellular energy. We separate soil health, plant health and human health into different subjects, but biologically they belong to the same continuum.
Soil biology becomes plant biology, and plant biology becomes part of human biology. Once I understood that, it became impossible for me to think about nutrition only in terms of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals listed on a label.
When I think about medicine from that perspective, I keep coming back to something very basic. The body needs materials to do its work. It cannot create magnesium out of nothing, build proteins without amino acids, maintain cell membranes without fatty acids, or manufacture hormones and enzymes without the raw materials involved.
Magnesium is a good example for me because I use it externally quite a lot. It participates in hundreds of enzymatic reactions and is involved in energy production, nerve signaling, muscle function and mineral balance. Yet by using magnesium externally, I am also admitting something to myself. I know my body needs it and, for whatever reason, I may not be getting enough through food alone.
That has made me question something I have believed for a very long time. If I grow good food, eat wild plants, eat a diverse diet and pay attention to the quality of what I put into my body, why would I still need to supplement something?
I do not think the answer necessarily begins with the supplement. It begins much earlier in the chain.
How much magnesium was actually present in the soil? Was it accessible to the plant? Was the soil biology functioning well enough to cycle it? Could the plant take it up? Then, once I ate it, could I digest and absorb it properly? What was happening in my microbiome? Could my cells use it? Was my demand higher than usual?
Suddenly, “I need more magnesium” is not simply a nutritional problem. It becomes a soil-to-cell question. Needing additional support does not automatically mean the diet is poor. It may mean there is a weak place somewhere along the chain from soil biology to plant biology, digestion, microbial transformation, absorption and cellular use.
This is also changing the way I think about supplements. Magnesium, amino acids, fatty acids and other nutrients are not foreign instructions imposed on the body. They are materials the body uses to build and maintain itself.
That distinction matters to me because I have never liked chasing symptoms without asking what is happening underneath them. I want to know what is missing, what is not being absorbed, where there is strain, what systems are compensating and what the terrain needs.
Lately I have had to apply that same thinking to myself, and it has been humbling and confusing. I have found myself taking supplements and using more concentrated forms of things I have always preferred to obtain through food. For someone who has spent much of her life believing that good soil, good food and diversity should provide what the body needs, that has required some mental rearranging.
I still trust food deeply, but I have had to become less rigid about where food stops and medicine begins. A tincture is still a plant. An infusion is still a plant. A fermented food is still food, yet microbial metabolism has changed it. Sprouting changes a seed. Drying concentrates plant material. Cooking, soaking and grinding all change how food is accessed and digested.
Humans have always done this. We have steeped, fermented, dried, ground, cooked, pressed and extracted plants for thousands of years. We learned how to preserve them, make them more digestible and sometimes make them more concentrated.
So I have had to ask myself why I created such a strong line between eating a plant and taking something made from that plant. I think a large part of it comes down to relationship.
There is something completely different about walking into a garden and harvesting something I am going to eat. I know the soil it grew in. I know what went into the compost. I know what flowers were blooming beside it, which insects were visiting and whether the rains came.
That kind of food carries context. It belongs to a place, and I am part of that place too.
A bottle does not give me the same feeling, but that does not make the bottle meaningless. If I harvest a plant and capture part of its chemistry in a tincture, I am still working with that plant. If I prepare an infusion from a mineral-rich herb, I am still drawing from something that grew through soil, microbes, water and light.
The form changes, but the relationship is still there. I know nature’s medicine. I think what I have had to loosen is my idea of what form that medicine is allowed to take.
I also have to acknowledge that not every plant contains everything we assume it does. A nettle leaf grown in one place is not automatically nutritionally identical to a nettle leaf grown somewhere else. A carrot grown in biologically depleted soil is not the same as a carrot grown in living soil with good mineral cycling.
The nutrient content of plants depends on the soil, geology, biology, plant species, stage of growth, climate and water. Then the human body brings its own variables. Digestion, absorption, stress, age, metabolic demand and the condition of the microbiome all influence what happens after food is eaten.
The human microbiome is a huge part of this story and, gosh, we still have so much to learn here. Food does not simply enter us and mechanically become nutrients. It enters an ecosystem.
Fibers, resistant starches and plant compounds interact with microorganisms that transform them and create new compounds. Those compounds then become part of the conversation between the gut environment and the rest of the body.
The soil has a microbiome and so do we. In both environments, organisms participate in nutrient cycling, transformation and communication. Diversity affects function, and the surrounding environment influences which organisms thrive and what they are able to do.
A plant growing in biologically active soil is participating in one living network. We harvest it, prepare it and eat it, and then parts of that plant enter another living network inside us.
I find that extraordinary because it has changed how I see the garden. I do not look at a bed and see separate lettuces, herbs, beans or tomatoes. I know there is a system beneath them. Roots are interacting with microorganisms, fungi are moving through the soil, organic matter is being transformed and nutrients are cycling.
Then I eat from that system and bring part of it into another living system inside me. Soil, plant and human are not separate worlds.
That understanding shapes the way I think about medicine. I do not believe useful medicine always has to dominate biology. Sometimes the deepest support we can give the body is much more fundamental: supply the materials it needs and improve the conditions in which biology can use them.
That does not mean everything natural is automatically helpful or that more is always better. Plants contain powerful chemistry. Minerals have concentrations. Biology responds to dose, timing and context.
I am not interested in replacing one rigid system with another. I am interested in understanding what the body is asking for. What materials are needed? What is not reaching the cells? Where has the chain broken down? What is happening in the gut ecology? What can be supplied through meals, herbs, ferments, infusions, minerals or concentrated plant preparations?
My plate is still where I begin because food carries far more than isolated nutrients. It carries fiber, minerals, fats, amino acids, plant chemistry, microbial relationships and a biological history shaped by the environment in which it grew. I still want my meals filled with greens, wild plants, herbs, sprouts, mushrooms, fermented foods, roots, seeds and plants that came from living soil.
I just no longer feel that using a tincture or a carefully chosen nutrient somehow contradicts that. Sometimes concentrating something is simply another way of working with nature. It does not need to become an endless protocol, and it does not mean food has failed. It may simply mean I have recognized a need and chosen a form that helps supply it.
Nature is stupendous. I can walk outside and find plants growing through the combined work of soil, microbes, minerals, water, atmosphere and sunlight. I can eat them while I am doing my evening chores, carry some back to the kitchen, steep them, ferment them, dry them, tincture them, cook them, save their seeds and grow them again.
For me, medicine still begins with the terrain. It begins with soil, food, microbes, minerals, water, light and the relationships that allow living systems to function. Human health is not separate from any of it because we are literally built from it.
That is still where I place my trust. I want to understand what supports life, pay attention to the terrain and give the body the materials and conditions it needs to do the work living systems already know how to do.
