1.0   INTRODUCTION – A WHOLE-listic approach

My overall health and wellness philosophy is to focus on the whole person by accessing and accentuating their uniqueness in an individualized approach.  This means addressing the entire body, holistically, as a connected whole–mind, body, and soul–to achieve our most optimal health, vitality performance and ultimately, life!

When I was in college back in early 2000’s, the health and nutrition classes I took there was something just not quite right.  Back then we still had the food guide pyramid telling us what to eat.  Remember that thing?  Processed grains, breads, pastas, etc. should be the bulk of our diet?  And EVERYBODY should eat like this!

Really when it comes down to it, we all need our own food guide pyramid (or what is now called, MyPlate) because we’re all biochemically unique, metabolically individual and each have our own physiological load and needs (or stress sources: mental, physical, chemical, pathological/disease, etc.) that needs to be addressed.  

What’s that mean, Jon?

It means you can’t line up 10 random people along a wall, and hand each of them the exact same diet & lifestyle guidelines if you really want to get each of them dialed in.  Each person will be different.  The diet they each need for their own optimal health, vitality and performance is as unique as their finger prints:  from your “average Joe” to the most elite athlete in the world.

The only thing we ALL have in common when it comes to answering the question “what diet is right for me?” is one thing at the foundation level:  real food.    What types of food, how much food, what foods to avoid (intolerance, allergies, etc.) are all different answers for everyone.

“You are what you eat… but more importantly, you are how it’s raised and grown”.

My approach to diet at the foundation level of health is very simple:  eat real food from a source you know and trust (or an “integrity source”).

If you do just one thing, do this.  If you don’t ever work with me or any other health professional in the world, do this.  

Answering questions like:

• What ratios of real food should I eat?
• Which real food to eat or not eat?
• Should I eat vegan or paleo or keto or carnivore or [insert whatever you like here]?
• What vitamins, minerals and other supplements does my body need?

and so on must be individualized based on many factors, including a person’s physiological load, biochemical individuality, genetics, food intolerance and allergies, do they have a viral, bacterial or fungal infection, plus more that must be assessed first and foremost to answer such questions correctly.

Blanket statements about health do not work.  You’ll never hear me say “all dairy is bad”.  Why?  because it’s simply not true for everyone (more on this below).

We are what we eat, but more importantly in today’s food supply world, we are how it’s grown and we are how it’s raised.

Our food supply has drastically changed in the past 100 years, going all the way back to the beginning of human history.

Mentally rewind for a moment back to the 1800’s or any time before that:  what food was there and how did we obtain it?  We fished, hunted, gathered, farmed, gardened, foraged, etc. for our food sources in our local ecosystem, right?  We would seek out calorie sources for survival using these methods, and the foods obtained from them were our real food.  They were the original “organic” food (we only label it today because we have conventional farming today and need to distinguish the two–more on that below also).

Today we must make the distinction between real food and food-like product disguised as food.

Real food at its core are the whole food calorie sources found in nature that are not the ultra processed, food-like products we see everywhere today.  Simply, these would be our animal and plant foods:  meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, legumes, grains, nuts, seeds and so on.  Think: any food source found in nature that our great great grandparents and any one before them would have eaten.

This is the real food the body is designed to thrive on and has thrived on up to this point in time since the beginning of human history.  It’s literally hardwired in the blueprint that is our DNA as our species-specific diet.  There’s no escaping this.  This is our reality.

However…

These whole food sources found in nature can be food-like product too.

Huh?  Jon, I thought you just got done telling me that’s the real food I should eat!

It most definitely is, let me explain…

“Health starts in the soil”

In my nutrition practice I go one step further with real food and make the distinction that conventionally grown and raised food is what I call C.R.A.P.

Conventionally

Raised or Grown

Agriculture

Product

and that we should eliminate as much C.R.A.P. as we can from our diet if we wish to achieve optimal health, vitality and performance (I have a bunch of tools for your toolbox at the bottom for doing this, including saving money).

Modern conventional agriculture the past 100 years or so uses synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides in dead soils to produce food.  These pesticides are known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors (our hormones), neurotoxins, reproductive & developmental toxins and more.  These pesticide residues then end up in and on the food, and ultimately, on our grocery store shelves.

Modern conventional animal agriculture (also known as husbandry) uses concentrated animal feeding operations (or CAFO) where animals are fed an unnatural diet, live in inhumane conditions, are administered antibiotics and growth hormones and much more.  

and that is why I call our modern animal and plant conventional food sources C.R.A.P.  In my opinion, conventional should really be called “UNconventional”, and REAL conventional food (or “how it’s been done forever”) should be our naturally raised/grown foods Mother Nature has been providing us since the beginning of time.

This C.R.A.P. is food created as commodity, or a “product”, in the cheapest way possible, for the highest profit margins.  It is not food created out of nourishment or with your best health in mind.

The food industry is just that, an industry.  A highly lucrative industry.  And Big Food and Big AgChem make billions every year in profit on this cheaply produced C.R.A.P.

C.R.A.P. is not the source of food Mother Nature intended the body to thrive, nor has it thrived on through it’s evolution.

The body has thrived on REAL FOOD throughout time.

Food by definition is:  any nutritious substance that an animal eats or drinks, or plants absorb, to maintain life and growth

So does that C.R.A.P. food source with pesticide residues designed to kill sound like that definition of food to you?

Homicide, genocide, suicide, pesticide… the very nature of the word means one thing:  death 

So “death by food” is not something I’m down with, and eliminating as much C.R.A.P. from your diet as you can is an important part of achieving optimal health, vitality and performance.

We can begin eliminating the toxicity build up in the cells of your body starting here

As Hippocrates once said:  Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.

Although let’s think:  if he was alive today do you think he’d be saying that exact same quote about the C.R.A.P. in our food supply?

Somehow I have my doubts.

And I haven’t even touched on the inferior nutrition/nutrients our soil provides us yet.

Let’s keep going…

Most of us need to supplement for two reasons:

1. Our soils are inferior and thus the nutrition (nutrients) in our food is inferior
2. We live in a very toxic world today compared to how the body has evolved over human history

And these two things, inferior soil/nutrition an excess toxicity, effectively give us a “double edge sword” effect:

More toxicity in our food & environment + less nutrients in our food supply to help support our body combat the toxicity.

Does that make sense?

100+ years ago our food supply was very different and if you would have asked me during that time “Jon do I need supplements”, I probably would have told you “no”.  But the fact of the matter is, our soils are depleted as a whole (even the organic ones!) and it shows in the nutritional quality of the food through the entire food chain.  

Healthy soil = Healthy plant >> Healthy plant = healthy animal (us + herbivores) >>  healthy herbivore = healthy animals at the top of the food chain (us + carnivores) >> everything then dies, decomposes and gets reincorporated back into the soil by the microorganisms.  It’s a self sustaining, closed loop cycle Mother Nature created brilliantly.

So that is why I say “health starts in the soil” because our malnutrition literally starts at the genesis of this overall wheel of life.

Poor soil quality, like our conventionally farmed soils, yield poor quality foods… and follow it all the way up the chain.  You can’t get optimal health from sub-optimal soil.  It doesn’t work.

Our conventional, mono-crop farming methods have destroyed the nutrients in our soil, not to mention we’re being bombarded on a daily basis with chemical warfare on our internal biology.  This is what I call the “double edge” state of our health.

1. Our food has less nutrition in it
2. Our body is constantly under stress of excess toxicity

If we don’t have the nutrients in food to support the internal defenses (and fortify our immune system) for excess toxicity, our liver gets over worked, toxins can get past our liver defenses, make it to the blood stream and then finally get into our cells and store in our adipose tissue (our fat!) as a last resort defense mechanism.  The body inherently will do this to protect our vital organs… toxins get identified in the bloodstream and if they’re not eliminated properly through the different “defensive” steps, they’ll get stored in our fat as a last resort.

This toxicity that can get stored in our fat is why we do a ReBoot Protocol

You wonder why we’re so obese today as a population, just look at the correlation between the 70,000+ chemicals our great grandparents didn’t have in their environment and their blood stream, compared to the epidemic rate of obesity (among other chronic disease) we find today.  And yes I understand correlation doesn’t always equal causation but it is something we need to look at it, and in my experience, at the top of the “to-do” list.

Think: How many obese great grandparents did we have?  Pull out a picture of them, or if you don’t have one, search the internet for a picture of anyone pre-1900.

Of course we had some, but the overwhelming answer is:  the mass majority of us did not have obese great grandparents, right?

In fact in 1900, obesity-related disease wasn’t even on the leading causes of death list.

Yet 70% of us are overweight or obese today and obesity is the #1 cause of death.

What happen in 100 years?

There are many factors, including an abundance and availability of food/calorie sources now, ultra-processed foods, fast food, sugar-laden foods/insulin resistance, other poor lifestyle habits, just to name a few… but in my humble opinion one of the top causes of this that’s not talked about enough is the double edge sword I speak of poor food quality + higher/excess toxicity.  We aren’t getting the nutrition from our C.R.A.P. food supply to support our body, and our body can’t defend itself against the massive amount of toxicity that is now in our food supply and surrounding environment the last century or so.

Result:  many of us are “dead man/woman walking”.

What I mean is, we’re walking around in chronic pain, sick, fatigued and functional pathology on a collision course with full blown disease.

Does this sound like you?

Solution:  in order to combat these problems (besides the #1 foundation principle of integrity source real food I spoke of in section 1 above) we need to do two things in terms of supplementing to support our body:

1. We must properly detoxify the toxins already in our body tissues from years & decades of systemic cellular bioaccumulation.
2. Once we’ve done that, we must supplement with the nutrition our body needs in order to regain and then maintain an optimal state of health, vitality and performance.

Example:  these are internal charts below of a client showing all the organ, gland and body systems at a high priority (red), moderate priority (yellow) and a low priority (green).  This is putting #1 above, detoxification, and #2 above, proper nutrition, at work in a systematic protocol way.  This was a toxic, nutrient-starved body (on a cellular level) and we fixed it with one of my protocols.

Want to get your internal charts done too?  Find out how here

But just like finding and maintaining a trusted source for our food, it is imperative that we find an equally trusted source for our supplements.

Most supplements today are synthetic garbage made as cheaply as possible, assembled in mass with fillers, excipients and toxic tagalongs.

If we do choose to take supplements, then we want to take the closest thing the body recognizes from nature: a whole food, raw material source, that is excipient-free without any toxic tagalongs. Toxins like excess heavy metals, pesticide residues, mycotoxins, prescription drug residues and more that are in the raw materials of the ingredients that make up any given supplement that gets encapsulated or “fused” together as a pill.  The supplement you take is only as good as the raw material source it came from.  They are not all created equal… not even close.

What I personally use and give to clients are the clinical nutraceuticals you can find in the online store here

And if I ever work with you in person, we can test you for the exact dose of any given vitamin, mineral, herb or other supplement your body needs.  Just like “what diet is right for me” we discussed above, the same applies with the supplements we take and specific dosage each unique body needs.  Example:  one person may need 200mg of magnesium another may need 800mg.  Everyone is different, and we can test dosage in each person.

“What is food to one man is bitter poison to others”

If you follow me on social media or have followed along on the blog, you know that I never make blanket statements about health.  Why?  Because they don’t work is the simple answer.  What is right for one person might be completely different for another person.  One man/woman’s food can quite literally be detrimental to the health of another man/woman.

The only blanket statement I will ever make is the one common denominator we all share:  Eat real food.  And eat it from an integrity source as much as possible to avoid the toxic tagalongs we find in the C.R.A.P.

Real food is the foundation of any healthy lifestyle and diet.  It’s like this for ALL of us as our “species-specific” human diet.

That being said, I cover all real food/diet lifestyles, whether that is vegetarian, paleo, keto, vegan, etc.

I’m non-dogmatic when it comes to a food lifestyle, or in other words, I’m not “attached” to any one food lifestyle.  I’m a champion for REAL FOOD and I have friends, followers, clients and colleagues that span the full diet/food spectrum from paleo meat lovers to plant eating vegans.  Too each their own.  I support free thinking, not creating mindless drones that follow the crowd of endless echo chambers.

You won’t hear me make a blanket statement that “all meat is bad” or “all milk is bad” or “all bread is bad”

Why?  Because this simply is not true.

Let’s use milk for example.  In order to truly answer the question “is milk bad?”, we must first complete that thought like this:  “is milk bad for me?”

Then we must know:

1. What’s the source of the milk? Is it raw, organic dairy from grass grazing animals (the animal’s natural, species-specific diet)?  The kind of dairy that people like the Hunza consume in northern Pakistan and thrive on as a culture?  Or is it pasteurized feedlot dairy from inhumanely-raised cows fed an unnatural diet of GMO grains, industrial waste, dead animal parts (cows aren’t carnivores), plastic chips, saw dust and more?

2. Do you have a dairy allergy or intolerance and the overall digestive mechanics for properly assimilating dairy?

Once we know the answers to these two questions, THEN we can determine the answer to “is milk bad”?

Does that make sense?

And that goes for just about any food these days…

Along the same lines, you won’t ever hear me say “GO VEGAN” or “GO PALEO” or even “GO ORGANIC” for that matter, even though I’m team organically produced food.  Why?  Who the hell am I to tell you what to do if I don’t know you?  If I’ve never personally assessed you in my nutrition practice, then I have no way of making a professional assertion to what your body needs.

And that goes for anyone who is a health professional.

So in my opinion, it would be malpractice for me to tell you to “GO”-anything unless I have a complete case history on you.  The same goes for anyone else that tells you to GO- anything.  If they haven’t properly assessed YOU and what YOUR body needs, then they’re not doing what’s best for you and your body, they’re simply projecting their own dogma and worldview onto you.

I’ve worked with countless individuals who ate a vegan diet and they were sick.  We rehabilitated them by eating integrity-sourced animal foods.

Conversely, I’ve worked with people that were meat eating machines and we had to dial back the animal foods and introduce more plant foods into the diet.

The body is always trying to balance, or be at homeostasis.  One extreme can eventually turn the body out of balance, especially if it’s food our genetics and individual biochemistry do not thrive on.

Think:  a pendulum.

Imagine a pendulum and on the far left extreme we have chronic problems or disease, in the middle we’re at homeostasis (or a stable, balanced body), and on the far right we’ve got chronic problems and disease again.

Got the visual?  Ok, let’s do an example…

Someone with cancer needs to take extreme diet & lifestyle measures to bring the body back into balance.  Their pendulum is all the way to the left side.  So for example with the Gerson Therapy, high concentrations of freshly juiced organic produce are given to a patient.  If that patient succeeds rehabilitating their cancer on the specific protocol of juices (among other things Gerson does), then they have effectively swung that pendulum back to a center balance from it being far to the left with the cancer.  Does that make sense?

In other words, the body was so out of balance, drastic measures needed to be taken to bring it back into balance.

However, once that balance is back, it doesn’t always mean we KEEP DOING THE JUICING PROTOCOL… then that pendulum, now in the balanced area, can start to creep to the right more and more and get out of balance again!  Does that make sense?

So figuring out what diet lifestyle is right for you, and the proper balance of it, is what is key at a foundation level if we want to thrive with optimal health, vitality and performance.

“You can’t feed a lion leaves and you can’t feed a giraffe meat” ­

The diets of the Inuit consists mostly of animals foods.

The diets of the Hunza consists of a mix of animal and plant foods.

The diets of inland aboriginals consists of mostly plant foods.

A wide range from mostly animal foods, to a happy medium of animal & plant foods, to mostly plants… and they all thrive.

Why?  because the common denominator of these people’s diets from all over the world is integrity sourced real food, minimally processed, and with little to no C.R.A.P.

and that’s just diet.. we’re not even talking about any physiological load, nutritional deficiencies, environmental influences, etc that need to be addressed with each individual person in today’s world.

If I never personally work with you one on one, or if you never work with ANY health professional one on one for that matter, then my recommendation is use this basic approach I’ve outlined above and get this one thing right:  Integrity sourced real food and minimize as much C.R.A.P. as you can.

This is foundation principle #1 of any healthy lifestyle:  get the food right.

Of course a healthy WHOLE-listic lifestyle also includes principles about water intake and source, exercise/proper movement, stress, electromagnetic radiation, cookware, cosmetics, personal care & hygiene products plus understanding and knowing “self” and what our legacy and core values are.  That’s all stuff I get into 1-on-1 with clients, but for the sake of this post, when it comes to foundation principle #1, you can do this on your own and could see your body drastically change!  A lot of times when we get our food right (especially from a previously poor diet & lifestyle), the body responds for the positive!

That said, people do need help when it comes to dialing in their diet and lifestyle…

If I do ever work with you one on one, then that’s where the fun begins and we can really start dialing in your potential.

I created DialIN as the full assessment system one needs to “dial in” their most optimal health, vitality and performance.

When we dial in, we assess the entire body for:

• Fungal infections
• Parasite infections
• Viral infections
• Food intolerances & allergies
• Pesticide tissue load
• Heavy metal toxicity
• Posture/core function
• Inflammation
• Nutritional deficiencies
• Metabolic type
• And much more

This is the individual, WHOLE-listic systematic approach to achieving your most optimal health, vitality and performance.  Assessing the WHOLE body and putting a complete action plan together that will yield optimal results, customized to your specific needs.

If you have any chronic problems, pain, fatigue, dis-ease or more and you want to take action in assessing and achieving your most optimal health, vitality and performance, you can:

1. Start a ReBoot. This is my bread & butter protocol that I designed over a decade ago to “jump start” (or reboot) a body that’s in a tired, sick or dis-eased state.  It’s three weeks long and I provide you with a Post-ReBoot Success Plan that includes a general guideline of everything you need after the three weeks for continued success on your health journey.
2. Schedule a free consultation for our individualized approach services. I always guarantee my work when I work with you 1-on-1.  The reason I do this is I’m very upfront with you and will tell you if I believe I can help you, and if I don’t think I can, I’ll refer you to someone I think is better suited to helping you than I can.  So I will always give a money-back guarantee if I work with you personally.
3. If you have any general diet & health-related questions, you may always use the Ask Jon page for free and I’ll be happy to answer these questions.
4. If you’re not subscribed to the free email newsletter already, you can sign up here where I’m always talking about the latest on diet, health, science-related and food FYI.  I also do exclusive stuff for the email tribe like grocery giveaways, kitchen and food product giveaways, plus more.

Yours in health,

Jon