Health Pillar 1: Food

Food for Health

Why food no longer reliably nourishes us, even when we “eat well”

The idea that “a balanced diet gives you everything you need” assumes a food system that no longer exists. It assumes soil that is biologically alive, food that is eaten close to where it’s grown, and farming that prioritises nourishment over output. None of those assumptions hold true today.

Modern agriculture is not designed to grow nutrition. It is designed to produce volume.

Crops are bred for yield, shelf life, uniform appearance and transport resilience. These traits come at a cost. When a plant is selected to grow faster and bigger, its mineral uptake doesn’t magically increase at the same rate. Minerals come from soil biology, not fertiliser bags. If soil microbes are damaged, compacted or stripped, plants can only access a narrow range of nutrients, even if they look healthy.

This creates food that is visually convincing but biologically thin.

You can eat enough calories, enough protein, even enough vegetables, and still be subtly deficient. Not deficient enough to trigger an acute illness, but deficient enough to affect energy, immunity, hormone balance and repair over decades. This is why so many people feel “not ill but not well”. This creates the perfect condition for the economy and system we created, we don’t die, we live long, but we live ill and permanently dependent on medicine and pharmaceuticals, perfect status quo if you’re on the money-making end of the system. 

The economics that decide what ends up on your plate

Whole food such as a simple apple or orange is a logistical nightmare in modern economics. It spoils. It bruises. It varies. It can’t be standardised easily. It doesn’t scale well. A supermarket cannot guarantee that every apple will taste the same or last the same length of time. It is also not profitable. It’s not easy to justify multiples of profit margins on a simple apple. 

Processed food solves all of these problems.

An apple sold as fruit has a narrow profit margin. An apple turned into concentrate, pulp or flavour base becomes a raw material. That material can be diluted, sweetened, coloured, stabilised and sold as dozens of different products. Waste becomes input. Shelf life extends from days to months. Profit multiplies.

This is not accidental. It’s structural.

Once you understand this, it becomes obvious why food companies invest heavily in processing, branding and reformulation rather than soil health or nutrient density. The system rewards products that can be manipulated, stored and marketed, not foods that nourish quietly and spoil quickly. I understood long ago that being healthy and eating whole foods is NOT profitable for the system. This is why preventing illness and stopping disease in its tracks is never high priority for “the system”, whereas inventing extremely expensive medicine IS. 

“Added vitamins” don’t fix the problem

When food is processed, what’s lost is not just individual nutrients. It’s structure.

Whole foods contain fibre, fats, minerals and plant compounds arranged in ways the body understands. This structure controls digestion speed, blood sugar response and nutrient absorption. Strip that structure away and the body responds very differently, even if calories and vitamins appear similar on paper.

Adding isolated vitamins back into food does not recreate the original system. It creates a nutritional illusion. You may meet a recommended intake number, but absorption, utilisation and biological effect can still be poor.

This is one reason fortified foods coexist with widespread metabolic dysfunction.

We can never really prove that food chemicals cause chronic disease

One of the most frustrating aspects of modern health discussions is the demand for single-cause proof. People want one chemical, one ingredient, one study that definitively explains chronic disease. That standard of proof is impossible in real life. Remember the old saying that you can probably find a scientific research to prove anything. Many clinical studies are sponsored by huge conglomerates who have enormous budgets. So if you’re out to prove that deodorants don’t cause breast cancer, or junk food doesn’t have anything to do with cancer, you definitely will. 

Chronic diseases don’t work like infections. They emerge slowly, through cumulative stress on the system.

Food chemicals are introduced gradually, often at levels deemed “safe” individually. But humans don’t encounter them individually. We encounter them together, alongside stress, poor sleep, blood sugar instability, nutrient depletion and environmental exposure. This is the cocktail effect.

No ethical study can isolate a human for 40 years, control every variable, and expose them to one additive while keeping everything else constant. So the absence of proof becomes framed as proof of absence.

In reality, what we see are patterns. Rising metabolic disease. Rising autoimmune conditions. Rising digestive disorders. Rising cancers in younger populations. These trends mirror changes in food production and processing, even if no single ingredient can be blamed in isolation.

This leaves responsibility with the individual

This is the uncomfortable part. When systems fail quietly, responsibility shifts downstream. Not because it should, but because it has to.

Regulatory frameworks are slow. Industry incentives are misaligned with health. Scientific certainty lags behind real-world exposure. That leaves individuals making decisions in uncertainty.

This is why people who care about their health start paying attention to soil, sourcing, processing and ingredient lists. Not because they are anxious or extreme, but because they’ve understood that the system optimises for profit, not resilience.

Supplementation becomes rational, not obsessive

In this context, supplements and herbs stop looking like shortcuts and start looking like compensation.

They are not there to replace food. They are there to support a body operating in an environment it was never designed for. When used carefully, they can help address gaps created by depleted soil, limited diversity and metabolic stress.

But they only make sense when the bigger picture is understood. Otherwise they become another layer of noise.

This changed my perspective permanently

Once I stopped thinking in terms of “good food” and “bad food” and started thinking in terms of systems, everything made more sense. Fatigue stopped feeling like personal weakness. Cravings stopped feeling like lack of discipline. Health became less about control and more about creating conditions.

That’s why I don’t write about food as a diet or a plan. I write about it as infrastructure. Because without understanding the infrastructure, individual choices feel confusing, inconsistent and exhausting.

Food alone often isn’t enough anymore

In an ideal world, good food would give us everything we need. For most of human history, that was largely true. Plants grew in mineral-rich soil, animals ate natural diets, and food travelled short distances from field to plate. Today, that system has changed beyond recognition.

Modern intensive farming focuses on yield, shelf life and appearance, not nutrient density. Soil is repeatedly stripped of the same crops, fertilised with synthetic inputs and rarely given time to regenerate. As a result, many fruits and vegetables contain fewer minerals than they did decades ago. An apple may look perfect, but its nutritional content is often a shadow of what it once was. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a well-documented consequence of how we farm at scale.

This doesn’t mean all processed food is evil or that every farmer or manufacturer is acting maliciously. It means the system rewards efficiency, consistency and profit, not long-term human health. Over time, this has shifted our diets away from whole foods and towards products that are calorie dense but nutrient poor.

On top of this, we’re exposed to hundreds of synthetic chemicals through food processing, packaging, pesticides and additives. These chemicals are typically tested in isolation, one at a time. But real life doesn’t work that way. We’re exposed to mixtures, day after day, year after year. This is often referred to as the “cocktail effect”.

Because of this, it’s almost impossible to prove a direct cause and effect relationship between a single chemical and a specific chronic disease or cancer. Diseases develop slowly, over decades. People are exposed to different combinations of chemicals, foods, stress levels and genetic backgrounds. This complexity makes clean scientific proof extremely difficult, even when harm is strongly suspected.

So we’re left in a grey area. Not enough evidence to definitively blame one thing, but enough signals to suggest the system as a whole isn’t working in our favour. This is one of the reasons many people turn to supplements and herbs, not as replacements for food, but as support. Not because food is unimportant, but because the conditions in which our food is produced have changed so dramatically.

For me, this understanding shifted how I think about nourishment. I don’t see supplements as a shortcut or a solution on their own. I see them as a response to a broken food system, used carefully and thoughtfully alongside the best quality food I can access.

What this means in practice

Once you understand that the food system is broken, the question becomes practical. What do you actually eat. What do you avoid. What matters and what doesn’t.

For me, the shift wasn’t about finding the perfect diet. It was about removing what was clearly harming me, then slowly adding back foods that supported stability rather than chaos.

Processed food versus real food

The most important distinction I’ve learned is not calories, fat or carbs. It’s processed versus real.

Processed food disrupts hunger signals. It spikes blood sugar quickly, then drops it just as fast. That drop creates cravings, fatigue and the feeling that something is wrong, when in reality the body is reacting exactly as expected.

Real food behaves differently. It digests slowly, provides nutrients alongside energy, and doesn’t hijack appetite. When I removed ultra processed food, hunger became predictable. Meals started lasting. Snacking lost its grip.

This single change did more for my health than any macro calculation ever did.

Additives and why I avoid them

I don’t avoid additives because I’m afraid of individual chemicals. I avoid them because they add complexity to an already overloaded system.

Every additive is another job for the liver, another signal for the gut, another variable in blood sugar regulation. When these inputs are constant, the system never rests.

I don’t memorise E numbers. I read ingredient lists. If I wouldn’t recognise the ingredient as food, I don’t eat it. That rule has never failed me.

Vegetables, fibre and the microbiome

Vegetables are not side dishes. They’re infrastructure.

Fibre feeds gut bacteria. Gut bacteria regulate digestion, immunity, inflammation and even blood sugar. When fibre intake is low, the microbiome shrinks and becomes less diverse. That makes everything downstream harder.

This is why I stopped thinking in terms of “eat your greens” and started thinking in terms of feeding an ecosystem.

Blood sugar stability over calorie counting

Calories are a blunt tool. Blood sugar is a precise one.

I ate calorie-restricted diets for years and stayed hungry, tired and metabolically unwell. When I focused instead on keeping blood sugar stable, everything changed. Hunger reduced naturally. Energy evened out. Cravings lost their urgency.

Foods that spike blood sugar quickly create a cycle of eating, crashing and eating again. Foods that keep blood sugar steady allow the body to access stored energy.

This is why metabolic health matters. It’s not about weight. It’s about how well your body handles fuel.

Low fat diets and why they didn’t work for me

Low fat eating never made sense in my body. Removing fat removed satiety. What replaced it was sugar and refined carbohydrates. Hunger increased, not decreased.

Fat slows digestion, supports hormones and signals fullness. When fat is removed and replaced with starch and sugar, blood sugar rises faster and crashes harder.

I don’t fear fat. I fear instability.

Keto as a metabolic tool, not an identity

I follow a low carb ketogenic way of eating, but I don’t treat it as a belief system.

Keto helped me stabilise blood sugar, reduce inflammation and access fat for fuel. It quietened constant hunger. It gave my metabolism a break.

That doesn’t mean carbs are evil. It means context matters. Whole vegetables, legumes and some fruits behave very differently from refined carbs and sugar. Keto, for me, is a tool. Not a rule.

Veganism, vegetarianism nearly broke my metabolism

I spent years eating a mostly vegetarian diet built around carbs, sugar and “healthy” processed foods. My blood sugar climbed. My weight crept up. My energy collapsed.

This wasn’t because vegetarianism is wrong. It was because my diet lacked protein density, fat and blood sugar stability.

Labels don’t guarantee health. Metabolic response does.

Fasting and why it’s different from restriction

Fasting isn’t about eating less. It’s about eating less often.

When food is constant, insulin stays high. When insulin stays high, fat storage stays locked. Fasting creates space for repair.

At around 16 hours, insulin drops and fat burning increases. At 24 hours, inflammation reduces further and cellular clean-up processes begin. Longer fasts should be approached carefully, but they can trigger deeper metabolic reset.

I don’t fast to punish my body. I fast to give it time to work without interruption.

Why five a day is not enough

Five a day was never meant to be optimal. It was meant to be better than nothing.

What matters more is diversity. Different plants feed different gut bacteria. A diverse microbiome is more resilient, more adaptable and better at protecting health.

That’s why I aim for around 30 different plant foods per week. This includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, pulses and legumes. It’s not about volume. It’s about variety.

Calories are not the whole story

Two meals with the same calories can have completely different effects on the body.

One may spike blood sugar, drive hunger and increase fat storage. The other may keep energy steady and support repair. The body doesn’t experience calories in isolation. It experiences hormones, digestion speed and nutrient signalling.

This is why I stopped obsessing over numbers and started paying attention to how food made me feel hours later, not minutes.

Food as a long-term strategy

Nothing here is a quick fix. Food changes don’t work like medication. They work like infrastructure improvements. Slowly. Quietly. Cumulatively.

When food supports metabolism instead of fighting it, everything else becomes easier. Sleep improves. Movement feels possible. Stress becomes more manageable.

That’s why this pillar matters. Not because food is everything, but because without stable nourishment, every other health pillar is fighting uphill.