Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Articles about digestion, the gut environment, nutrient absorption, stomach function, bile, intestinal ecology and the relationship between digestion and whole-body health. These pieces focus on supporting a healthy digestive terrain and the microbial communities that depend on it.
Fat is an organ! Surprise! Working with people has a wonderful way of sending me back into research. Someone comes along with an interesting health question, we start looking at what is happening inside their body, and I find myself learning something new. Our bodies are quite remarkable in the …
September 23, 2026 | Living Ground Project, Ecuador Whew! What a marathon. My Plant & Kitchen Alchemy book is finally finished, uploaded to Amazon and waiting to be published. After months of writing, experimenting, editing, illustrating and wrestling with page numbers, indexes, formatting and Amazon’s publishing requirements, I can hardly …
I am finishing Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, a book that has grown to more than 550 pages of personal experience, practical knowledge and over 80 kitchen alchemy recipes centered on food as medicine. As I moved through the final edits, I realized I had spent a great deal of time …
I was reading about the latest dietary trend called “fiber maxxing,” where people deliberately try to push their fiber intake higher and higher, sometimes to 50 or 60 grams a day. I am certainly in favor of eating more fiber, especially when modern diets contain so little of it, but …
Every meal sets in motion a carefully coordinated process involving the liver, gallbladder, pancreas, intestines, microbiome, and the production, storage, release, and transformation of bile. The liver produces much of the cholesterol the body needs by assembling it from nutrients and smaller compounds created during the metabolism of fats, carbohydrates, …
What if I told you that your brain isn’t the only brain making decisions inside your body? It sounds impossible, yet hidden within the walls of your digestive tract is an intricate nervous system that is constantly gathering information, making adjustments, and communicating with your brain. Add trillions of microorganisms, …
One of the things I enjoy most about working with clients is that every person teaches me something new. Each case encourages me to ask more questions, read more research, and continue learning. I have never believed that we know everything there is to know about the human body. In …
Many systems in modern society are no longer built around creating healthy, independent, resilient human beings because independent people eventually stop feeding the system financially. Over time, systems drift toward dependency because dependency becomes extraordinarily profitable. What happens when entire industries quietly profit from keeping people stressed, searching, consuming, medicated, …
What I keep coming back to lately is how much modern medicine resembles industrial agriculture. The parallels are becoming difficult for me to ignore. In both systems, something unwanted appears, spreads, or becomes destructive, and the response involves increasingly aggressive intervention. Companies develop stronger chemicals. Doctors prescribe more suppressive therapies. …
Understanding Leptin Resistance and Restoring the Metabolic Conversation For many people, losing weight feels like an endless battle. They eat less, exercise more, and try one diet after another, only to find themselves constantly hungry, craving food, and eventually gaining the weight back. After enough failed attempts, it becomes easy …