Imagine compressing the entire span of human evolution into a single 24-hour day. For 23 hours and 55 minutes, we lived as hunter-gatherers—roaming forests, jungles, deserts, and prairies, hunting animals and foraging for edible plants. It’s only in the last five minutes of this “day” that we transitioned to agriculture. And in the final milliseconds, we completely lost the plot—introducing industrial seed oils, refined sugars, and lab-engineered foods that our ancestors wouldn’t even recognize.

The Hunter-Gatherer Legacy

Our bodies are designed for endurance, long-distance movement, and a diet of whole, natural foods—fatty meats, and when available, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Our DNA hasn’t changed much in ten thousand years. Evolution moves at a crawl, while food technology has sprinted ahead at breakneck speed.

If you took a wild deer and started feeding it taco chips and dip instead of grass and leaves, you wouldn’t be shocked when it grew sick, overweight, and sluggish. A deer’s digestive system isn’t built for artificial foods. Neither is ours.

Yet, in the past 70 years, our food landscape has been completely hijacked. Industrialized food companies have flooded the market with ultra-processed, chemical-laden products so far removed from real food that even nutrition experts struggle to explain what’s in them.

Take milk, for example. Once a simple, nourishing liquid, it’s now pasteurized—blasted with heat that kills bacteria, but also destroys natural enzymes and nutrients. What was once a wholesome food is now a shadow of itself, a factory-altered version designed for shelf life, not health.

I remember my father, milking one of the beautiful Jerseys, spinning the cream in the separator, and grabbing a bowl of just-picked strawberries from the garden. He poured the still-warm cream on top and sat there eating it with the biggest, most satisfied grin. It was food in its purest form—unprocessed, untouched, alive. That moment is burned in my memory because it was so simple, so perfect. Now, that same milk is boiled, homogenized, and stripped of what made it real. The dream remains of a healthy liquid from cows, but what’s left in the lovely, comforting carton barely resembles it.

And as the animal at the top of the food chain, it’s now our task to break down the chain of what exactly is in the food we eat today. We almost need a chemistry degree just to decipher ingredient labels—or, we simply give up and push it away. It’s a sobering moment when you walk into a supermarket and realize there’s precious little left that you’d actually put in your basket.

These artificial foods now dominate grocery stores, restaurants, and social gatherings. And they’ve reshaped our collective health—for the worse.

Health Isn’t About What You Eat—It’s About What You Don’t Eat

The key to health isn’t adding more “superfoods” to your plate—it’s avoiding the things actively working against you. Most weight gain and metabolic issues don’t come from eating too little of the right foods; they come from consuming too much of the wrong ones.

We don’t suffer from a lack of vitamins or miracle berries. We suffer from an overload of sugar, seed oils, and ultra-processed garbage that disrupts our metabolism, hijacks our hunger signals, and keeps us in a cycle of cravings and crashes.

Reclaiming Your Health: Realigning With What You’ve Always Been

The solution isn’t complicated. It’s not about extreme diets, calorie counting, or obsessively tracking macros. It’s about getting back to basics—eating real food, moving naturally, and rejecting the modern habits that have thrown us so far out of balance.

This isn’t a fad. It’s not a trend. It’s simply how we were built to live.

When you start eating and moving in alignment with your biology, you stop fighting an uphill battle. Cravings, energy crashes, and stubborn weight gain stop feeling inevitable. Your body recalibrates, and you feel good—not just for a moment, but as a natural state of being.

And speaking of feeling good—my favorite treat isn’t cake, beer, or anything wrapped in bright packaging. My favorite indulgence is feeling strong, clear-headed, and at home in my body. And I’d trade an entire table of desserts for that feeling, every single time.