Today is November 12, 2026. The first article ever posted on this substack was on November 11, 2021. Hence the title.
Where it started
Five years ago, COVID was in full swing. I was working on the front lines in New York City. I watched the whole thing get presented to the world and sold to the public. And I had reached my limit with the fraud.
Since I saw how ridiculous the whole charade was, and how corrupt everyone involved had become, the mandates were the final straw for me.
So when the vaccine mandates rolled around my answer was simple.
No.
Eventually, I was fired.
A week later, my child was born.
A week after that, I started publishing my work online.
What I wrote first
My first articles here were about government. Industry. Corruption. Coercion.
But something else was going on.
I was struggling with my own health. And I was watching how that same corrupt industry was managing it. That gave me a reason to start testing other things. I became more experimental with how I looked at health and disease, in myself and in the people I cared about, at home and at work.
By then, I had lost all faith in the academy, in industry, and in public health.
And with that loss came something I didn’t expect.
Permission.
Permission to explore health from any angle that even slightly interested me. No institution to answer to. No paradigm to protect.
So I followed curiosity. And I learned a lot.
Here are the biggest lessons of those five years.
1. Germ theory is incomplete.
Before we get to anything about metabolism, we need to talk about what COVID taught me about infectious disease.
I’ve written several essays on this. The first came out in 2023: Germ Theory Is Incomplete, Part 1 & 2.
After that, I wrote a lot about virology.
Here’s where I’ve landed.
Virology is mostly a pseudoscience.
To really understand why, you’ll need to read several of those articles. But here’s the short version.
In virology, the thing that supposedly causes the disease can’t be seen directly. You can only confirm it’s there after you’ve handled and changed the biological sample, through several steps.
And since it can’t be seen directly, the field relies on data that has been averaged and transformed. PCR tests. Immunoassays. Radioassays. Tools that show us the thing we’re looking for in a way we believe is accurate.
That doesn’t mean viruses don’t exist. I’ve written about why the virus is real as a unit of information in the field of biology. But, they don’t exist the way they’re claimed to. It doesn’t show up the way people think, and it doesn’t cause what people think it causes.
I’m more of a terrain theorist. I believe the environment decides which life forms can flourish and which can’t. So if you see a problem with the bacteria in someone’s body, the first place to look is the terrain.
There are special cases where germ theory fits inside terrain theory. An “infection.”
Say someone cuts you with a knife and moves bacteria from the surface of your skin deep into your muscle. The muscle gets inflamed, and can be necrotic and die, simply because of the change in fluid and tissue balance.
That happens. And when they do happen, I believe they’re usually caused by medical treatment or by injury, more than anything else.
2. There is NO best diet.
During this rough period of my life, I also had the worst flare of my ulcerative colitis in the four years since my diagnosis.
I’m sure the stress was no coincidence.
So I started experimenting with diet. I tried one I’d been reading about for years.
Carnivore.
I went all meat. Beef, eggs, butter. That’s it. I did that for several months. Cured my ulcerative colitis.
Since then I’ve written about that diet, and about diet in general. And here’s what I’ve come to realize.
Every diet has its place. But that’s not all. What people need from food, and what they want from it, varies a lot. From person to person. And within the same person over time.
Take age.
When you’re young, you probably want a fairly high-protein diet. You’re developing. Growing. Getting stronger. That likely holds well into your 30s, maybe even your 40s.
But once you hit your 50s and 60s, maybe you want to ease off the protein. What you need now is less building, and more maintenance. Adequate clearance. Lubrication. Efficiency.
That is an enormous consideration as it pertains to diet choice.
There’s also your temperament. The time of year. What foods are in season. Where you live on the globe.
The closer you live to the poles, the more fat you want. More fat from your protein, or just more fat in general, even from plants or dairy.
The closer you live to the equator, maybe less fat. More sugar instead. Fruit. Honey. Things like that.
There is no one best diet. There’s only the right diet for this person, in this place, at this time of life.
3. The root cause of illness is refinement.
The next major article I wrote pulled together everything I’d been learning in the years before.
The question was simple.
Why are so many illnesses showing up, and rising together? High blood pressure. Diabetes. Heart attack. Stroke. Bone loss. Soft tissue infections. These are all connected.
So how are they connected?
We can start to understand this by asking questions like: what is chronic disease?
Chronic disease typically manifests when an organ can no longer sustain itself against the stresses of life.
Not the average person’s life. The life of this person, in this environment. Think of it as the total of their life so far. And this is where they’re currently at.
If that’s what chronic disease is, the next question is: what drains our ability to handle the stresses of life?
Think about the refractory period. That’s the recovery time after a signal.
It shows up in your vision, in sexual function, in muscle contraction. It’s the point where your nervous system has used up what it needs to send a signal. Maybe that’s a chemical messenger, like dopamine. Or maybe the nerve has just fired and has to reset its electrical charge before it can fire again. For a little while, it can’t.
In either case, it’s resource depletion. Something got used up.
So what uses up a given resource the fastest?
Take bright light. It uses up a pigment in your eye. When the bright light goes away, you can’t see well for a while. Everything looks washed out.
Every resource is linked to a signal. And for every resource, there’s one signal that drains it the most in its purest form.
Maybe there’s one exact color of light that drains that eye pigment fastest. So if you wanted to drain someone as much as possible, you’d hit them with that one color, as bright as possible.
That is refinement. You’re refining the input. Making it more pure and potent.
And when I realized this, I saw that a vast number of illnesses are tied to refinement in our inputs.
Refined sugar leads to diabetes, because it wears out the body’s ability to respond to insulin.
Artificial blue light is a refined form of light. It drives inflammation and starves tissue of blood flow over time. It tightens blood vessels. It exhausts you. It triggers stress hormones. It drains resources across the whole body.
The coca leaf, refined into cocaine, drains certain brain chemicals and stress hormones. Then comes the crash. You can think of that crash as a refractory period.
Iron ore, in nature, is just a round rock. It can’t end a life quickly or cleanly. Refine it into a steel blade, and it cuts right through you and can end a life in seconds.
Social media
Graphic images
etc
Everywhere you look, you see the same problem. That’s my argument, and the article covers it in full.
4. Cholesterol good, statins bad
The next big realization was about cholesterol and statins. It came at me from two directions.
The first was food.
It was easy for me to believe that it’s silly to call eggs ‘bad for you.’ Or any good animal from God’s earth, raised on untouched land. The idea that these foods narrow your blood vessels and cause heart attacks and strokes always seemed ridiculous to me.
That’s one reason I was so open to trying carnivore. I just didn’t buy that kind of nutrition propaganda.
The second was the drug.
Based on how statins work, I always thought this was probably not a good thing to block.
Statins block an enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase. It’s an early step in how your body makes cholesterol, and about 500 other things too.
If your target is LDL cholesterol, why would you go after that? Why not target something closer to LDL?
Unless you don’t think it’s just LDL. Unless you think it’s all those other things too.
And if that’s the case, how do you know LDL is the real reason? Are you measuring everything else statins do to the body’s metabolism?
5. Circadian alignment is everything
The next big discovery was about circadian rhythm and mitochondria. Your circadian rhythm is your body’s internal clock. Mitochondria are the metabolic masters inside your cells.
One of the first articles I wrote on this was on August 2022. And it’s kept growing ever since.
The more I learn about quantum biology, circadian rhythm and mitochondrial health, the more I see that it isn’t just about sunrise and sunset.
It’s about why those things affect us.
And once you know why, you know what to focus on to get the most out of every part of it.
I cannot give enough credit to someone like Jack Kruse for helping me develop this understanding with his prolific writing.
Light, water and magnetism, he’ll say.
We are the water. Magnetism keeps us coherent, holding us together as one system. Light keeps us on schedule.
Is that a fair summary? We’ll see what Jack thinks.
But, that realization came with a few core lessons.
First: circadian alignment is everything.
If your body clock is off, every part of your body that’s trying to talk to every other part is under stress. You’re cranking incoherence, your body falling out of sync, as high as it can go.
Being aligned means living in step with nature. It means moving away from the artificially lit world.
Second: it isn’t just refinement.
Between this and what I learned about diet, a bigger idea came to me over the years.
Refinement is part of the problem. But the problem is bigger than that.
It’s moving away from nature, which is how we evolved and how our bodies are built. And moving toward an artificial world, which is not how we evolved.
So here’s the rule of thumb: the closer to nature you can get, the better.
Not so close that you’re inside a bear’s mouth. But close enough that you’re not getting metabolic syndrome.
Here’s one example that was huge for me: insulin resistance can be caused by light or circadian misalignment, no matter what you eat.
6. The ancients knew far more than we give them credit for
Early 2023 is when my journey into the classics of medicine began.
The first book I read was about Tibetan medicine. The next was about Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century Abbess and Polymath.
In her writings, I found the use of galangal, a cousin of ginger, for heart disease. More precisely, for when the heart’s nervous system is out of balance. It protects against a fight-or-flight drive that runs too high. That drive keeps the heart from resting and relaxing, and eventually it leads to heart attacks.
I saw how close her remedy was to other successful ways of treating the same problem. Many doctors and cardiologists I know of, including a couple I know personally, prevent heart attacks from exactly this angle. And if you take their word for it, they’re very successful.
That led me from Tibetan medicine to early medieval medicine. And finally to Islamic medicine, which is where I started learning, and writing, about Avicenna.
So why did I start exploring these older forms of medicine? Why commit to reading the Canon, Avicenna’s five-volume encyclopedia of medicine?
Because as I read the introductory books, I realized we had taken their teachings for granted. We assumed what they said came from ignorance or naiveté.
But coming back to them now, after training in science, medicine and surgery, I started to see a lot of our modern understanding written in an older language.
Clearly they knew far more than we give them credit for. Maybe this was worth exploring.
So as I read, I tried some of their ideas. And I got good results.
And I thought: you know what? Why should I take the establishment’s word for what these old traditions were? They weren’t even honest about themselves. How are they going to be honest about what some other practice was doing hundreds or thousands of years ago?
7. Birth belongs at home
About a year passed before the next big event. I was developing a lot of ideas in that time. But you already have the gist of the core lessons above.
Then we had our first home birth.
In the water. No medication. On our own.
There was a snowstorm, and our midwife didn’t make it on time.
I wrote about it, and it changed a lot for us. It’s one of the most important moments in our early journey as parents.
This was our second child, born about two years after our first. We were still young, still learning as parents. So it had a huge impact on us. That’s why it’s here. But also, because it solidifies the idea that nature is inherently good and generally knows what its doing. Of course, there are such things as emergencies.
This is why I still serve the Emergency Department.
8. Hahnemann brought it home
Another big realization was about homeopathy. I’ve talked about it in recent Q&As, so I’ll keep this short.
I believe Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, is the natural heir to the Western medical tradition.
You could say that tradition began with Hippocrates. Galen built on it. Others carried it forward. Avicenna organized it and contributed.
But Hahnemann ran the last stretch. With homeopathy, he brought it home.
I’ve talked about this a lot, and I’ll be writing more about it.
9. Cures come with side benefits
By early 2024, I was writing more from my own point of view: how I see illness, and how I deal with it.
What I was doing for myself. With my family. Practices, habits, lifestyle changes. Specific run-ins with disease, what I tried, and how it turned out. Experiments.
This is when I realized you could use red light to treat almost any kind of stomach trouble. Reflux. Heartburn. Indigestion. Inflammation.
Along with that, I started using everything else I’d learned. From Avicenna. From Galen. From Ayurveda. From homeopathy. Chromotherapy.
And I started to see there’s more to light than avoiding blue and getting red or infrared. The whole spectrum of sunlight became something that can heal or harm, depending on how it’s used, and when.
10. Know thyself.
From mid-2024 to mid-2025, the articles were about real disease examples, my approach, and new ideas. I was reading and building new ideas about light, quantum physiology, and more.
We look at health through a hierarchy of health needs. Then through the pillars of health, and where being out of line with them leads to disease.
Building Foundational Health
By early 2026, we started building Foundational Health beyond a blog.
We redesigned the logo. Launched the first podcast episode on March 21, 2026.
After that, I started hiring. We kept building the business. We put out more episodes.
And then, about twelve episodes in, the most recent one took off on YouTube.
As I write this, it has about 27K views. That’s by far the most we’ve ever had.
We’ve got exciting new guests coming.
What’s next?
For those of you who want a consultation: very soon, I’ll send out an e-mail with the services I’ll be offering. Paid subscribers get priority. You’ll hear about it first, and you’ll get the first chance to apply.
I’ll keep focusing on the podcast. We’ve been making it better, too. If you haven’t seen the latest episode, the editing is way better than the first one. I hired an editor, and he’s doing great.
Tested the latest web release of the new Temperament Self-Assessment this past month. Which means next is the public release!
If you have ideas for us, leave them in the comments.
So stay tuned. Subscribe if you haven’t.
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A return to nature/ the wilderness- all the great prophets went into the wilderness where God revealed himself. I believe that crosses all religions from Christ to Buddha to Mohammed. Interesting that if we follow their lead we might regain health in this toxic modern world
Delightful. Just came in from 2 1/2 hours of clearing brush--on this penultimate day of being able to get Vit. D at my latitude, and 4 hours yesterday doing the same.. Also I took your temperament "quiz" last month--ended with sanguine. But, I wondered, how much of that rests upon my being a believing Christian?