The First Intervention: Eat Differently

A section from our new book: “Homesteading for Health”

From Homesteading for Health

The following is an excerpt from our book, Homesteading for Health. It comes from a section in which we move from diagnosing what has gone wrong with the modern food system to the much more practical question: What can we actually do about it?

The short answer is surprisingly simple. Eat real food. Prioritize protein. Reduce processed carbohydrates and ultra-processed foods. Pay attention to how your food was grown and raised. And, where possible, shorten the distance between yourself and the people, animals, and soil that produce what you eat.

For us, this was not an abstract exercise in nutrition. In 2022, both Robert and I were in poor metabolic health despite believing, as many people do, that we ate reasonably well. Changing what we ate, and eventually producing much more of that food ourselves, changed our health dramatically. We each lost fifty pounds and kept it off. Other chronic problems improved or disappeared.

That experience became one of the central ideas behind Homesteading for Health: you do not have to become a homesteader to take back some control over your food, your health, and your environment. You do not need forty acres, a dairy cow, or a flock of chickens. You can begin with a garden bed, a farmers market, a local farmer, better choices at the grocery store, or simply learning to cook again.

The book goes much further into the science, the food system, regenerative agriculture, environmental exposures, and what we have learned from building our own farm. But this section is where much of it becomes practical.

It begins with the first intervention: eat differently.

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The First Intervention: Eat Differently

We have described, at length, what the modern food system has done to dietary patterns. Now we want to describe, from our own experience, what changing those patterns actually looks like and what it produces.

In 2022, after a decade of chronic stress, significant injuries, and the disruptions of the pandemic years, both of us were in poor metabolic health. We were technically obese. Robert was dealing with cardiac arrhythmia, chronic digestive problems, and the lingering effects of post-COVID illness and vaccine injury. Jill was managing neuropathic damage from a trimalleolar fracture and recovering from facial reconstruction after a horse injury. We had been vegetarians for over thirty years and believed we were eating reasonably well. The blood work told a different story.

When Dr. Brooke Miller, Robert’s physician, reviewed those numbers, his recommendation was blunt: Eat meat, prioritize protein, and eliminate the processed carbohydrates that had quietly colonized our diet over three decades. We spent a month researching before acting. Then we acted.

What followed was not a temporary diet. It was a structural change. We committed to whole foods: our own eggs, grass-fed meat, raw milk from cow shares and then our growing mini Jersey herd, garden vegetables, and organic grains we milled ourselves. We eliminated seed oils, added sugars, refined flour, and processed foods. We adopted intermittent fasting and reduced total caloric intake by 30 to 40 percent. Over the following year, we each lost fifty pounds. Years later, we have not regained them. More significantly, the arthritic symptoms that had plagued both of us largely resolved. Robert’s chronic digestive distress, which had followed him for years, is gone. These were not minor adjustments to a marginal condition. They were meaningful reversals of what had seemed like the inevitable trajectory of aging.

We tell this story not because our experience proves anything at a population level (it does not) but because we want to be concrete about what a dietary transformation looks and feels like when it is grounded in real food you have grown and raised yourself. The farm did not just provide the ingredients; it provided the framework. When you are eating eggs you collected this morning, milk from an animal you milked yesterday, and vegetables you harvested from your own soil, the relationship to food changes. You stop eating passively. You start eating with intention.

That is available to everyone in some form, whether you have forty acres or a balcony.

What to eat: the non-prescription

The science of nutrition is genuinely contested in many of its particulars, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What is not contested, however, is the broad direction. Dietary patterns centered on minimally processed whole foods such as animal protein, vegetables, fruits, intact grains, and healthy fats, consistently outperform dietary patterns built around refined carbohydrates, added sugars, and ultra-processed products. This finding holds across observational studies, feeding trials, and the lived experience of millions of people who have changed how they eat and watched their health improve as a result.

Our own approach, shaped by both the research and by what our farm actually produces, centers on several consistent principles.

Prioritize protein from quality sources. Eggs from pastured hens, meat from animals raised on grass or hay, fish, dairy from animals on pasture . . . these are among the most nutrient-dense foods available and were central to human diets long before industrial agriculture created the alternatives. If you raise your own livestock, you know exactly what went into them. If you do not, buy as close to the source as you can and ask questions.

Eliminate or sharply reduce ultra-processed foods. This category covers most of what fills the interior aisles of a modern grocery store: packaged snacks, breakfast cereals, commercial bread, processed meats, most fast food, sweetened beverages, and any product whose ingredient list reads like a chemistry text. These foods are engineered for palatability and shelf life, not for nutrition. They deliver calories efficiently and nutrients poorly. They are also, as we have discussed, the primary vehicle by which glyphosate and other agricultural chemical residues reach the human body.

Reduce refined grains and added sugars. White flour, white rice, corn syrup, and the dozens of sweetener variants that appear on ingredient labels under different names all share the same metabolic effect: rapid glucose delivery, insulin response, and, over time, the progressive impairment of insulin sensitivity. This is not about eliminating all carbohydrates. It is about recognizing that the structure of a food, whether whole grain or refined, intact starch or extruded powder, matters as much as its macronutrient composition.

Use fats that humans have actually eaten for most of their history. Butter, lard, tallow, olive oil. These are the fats that appeared on traditional tables before industrial seed oil extraction became economically viable. The evidence that saturated fat causes cardiovascular disease, which drove the low-fat era and the substitution of seed oils for animal fats, has not held up.

The evidence is accumulating that excess seed oil consumption, particularly the omega-6-rich linoleic acid found in canola, soybean, corn, and sunflower oils, promotes inflammation. We are not claiming certainty here. We are suggesting that when in doubt, the food your great-grandmother would recognize as food is a reasonable heuristic.

Source food grown in living soil. The regenerative farming evidence reviewed earlier in this section makes clear that how food is grown matters to its nutritional content. Organic certification does not guarantee regenerative management, but it does prohibit synthetic herbicide and pesticide use and is therefore a reasonable proxy for lower chemical exposure. Local food, when you can know something about its production, is often preferable to certified organic from a distant source. Grown yourself is best of all.

Reduce glyphosate exposure where practical. Given the accumulating evidence reviewed in Chapter 4, a precautionary approach is warranted. Buy and grow organic grains, legumes, and oilseeds when possible. If you bake, use organic flour or mill your own from organic berries. Be attentive to conventionally grown oats, wheat, and chickpeas, which are among the crops most commonly treated with preharvest desiccants. Jill regularly sources Italian durum or einkorn wheat pasta and flour, which are subject to different regulatory requirements than their American equivalents. These are not guarantees. They are reductions in a cumulative exposure whose long-term consequences we do not yet fully understand, and where the asymmetry of risk clearly favors caution.

The next section of the book is titled “practical starting points,” and for that, we direct you to the book itself, and now the audiobook version (personally recorded by Robert) which is sold from many bookstores and digital distributors listed below, for those who want to listen instead of reading.

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Homesteading for Health is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Target, Walmart, independent booksellers, and other retailers in the U.S. and internationally.

• Amazon - hardcover, Kindle and Audio currently listed at $29.99. The shopping listing shows it as in stock.

• Barnes & Noble — hardcover, currently listed at $29.99. The shopping listing shows it as in stock.

• Target — hardcover, currently $22.99, discounted from $29.99.

• Walmart — hardcover, listed at $22.99, sold and shipped by Walmart.

• Books-A-Million — hardcover, listed at $22.99.

• BookPal — hardcover, particularly interesting for bulk purchases. They advertise quantity discounts beginning at 25 copies and going up through 1,000+.

• Skyhorse Publishing — the publisher’s page has direct purchasing plus links to several retailers.

There are also digital editions through Apple Books, as well as Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo