Why I Take So Many Supplements

I take a lot of supplements, more of them than most people would think is reasonable. People bring it up to me. They see the pile, or they hear what I spend on it, and you can watch the question form before they even ask it. Did God not give us everything we need in our food? Why would someone who believes that be swallowing all of this? And I understand why it looks the way it looks. From the outside it does not read as health, it reads as a man who is afraid of dying and trying to supplement his way out of it.

But I have come to realize the issue is not that they disagree with me, it is that the knowledge is simply not out there. Most people have never been shown what has actually happened to our food, so of course the supplements look like fear instead of wisdom.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and once I saw it, I could not stay quiet about it.

This is the first post in a long series, and it is really the whole reason I am writing. This blog is about faith-based medicine. By that I mean taking the functional and ancestral approach to caring for the body and grounding it in the conviction that the body is a gift from God to be stewarded, neither neglected nor idolized. A big part of it is calling out the dangers the modern world has quietly buried in our everyday lives, in our food, our water, our air, and the products we never think twice about, and then showing how to see them clearly and reclaim our health in spite of them.

Our food is not what it used to be

The food sitting in the grocery store today is not the same food our grandparents ate, even when it carries the same name on the label. A carrot is not the carrot it was, and beef is not the beef it was. Over the last several decades almost everything about how our food is grown, raised, and processed has changed, and almost none of it changed in the direction of making us healthier. It changed to make food cheaper, bigger, faster to produce, and longer lasting on a shelf.

What we are left with is a food supply that looks abundant and is, in a real sense, hollow. More calories than ever, and fewer of the things our bodies are actually built from. You can eat a full plate three times a day and still be quietly starved of the nutrients that plate used to carry.

I want to walk through how that happened, because once you see the specifics it becomes obvious why food alone no longer does the job it once did.

What we have done to the meat

The vast majority of our meat comes from animals that never lived the way they were designed to live. Cattle were built to eat grass, and instead we finish them on corn and soy, much of it heavily sprayed, inside feedlots where the animals are packed into conditions no honest person would call good. It is bad for the animal and it is genuinely sad. These are creatures God made, and we have turned them into units of production.

Beef cattle are given hormone implants to grow bigger and fattier, faster, and across the board animals are given antibiotics, where the real danger is not so much what ends up in the meat as what the overuse is doing to antibiotic resistance in all of us. The meat that comes out the other end is a nutritional shadow of what it should be, low in the nutrients it used to carry and badly skewed toward the inflammatory side of the fat scale, with an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio that is nothing like what grass-fed animals produce. That ratio matters far more than most people realize, and inflammation itself runs just as deep, so both are getting full posts of their own down the line. For now, just hold onto the idea that there is a kind of fat that calms the body and a kind that inflames it, and our food has been tilted hard toward the wrong one.

What we have done to the crops

For generations now our produce has been bred and selected to be perfect on the shelf, the right shape and size and sweetness with a long shelf life. What it has not been selected for is nutrition. Put a handful of wild blueberries next to the big watery ones in the grocery store, and the wild ones are smaller, sharper, and far denser in the very antioxidants that make a blueberry worth eating. We have spent decades trading that density away for size and sweetness and durability in shipping, and most of our fruit and vegetables are now nutritional shadows of what they came from.

The biggest driver of that lost nutrition is simple. We have bred our crops for size, looks, and sweetness rather than for what they do inside the body, and that is true whether or not a crop has been genetically modified. I am wary of GMO crops, and I do not believe their long-term safety is as settled as we are told, especially given who pays for the research that says so. But the clearest danger is not the modification itself. It is glyphosate.

Glyphosate, the weedkiller sold as Roundup, is sprayed across enormous portions of our food supply, and an entire category of crops was genetically engineered for the specific purpose of surviving heavier and heavier doses of it. The World Health Organization’s cancer agency has classified it as probably carcinogenic to humans, and it has been the subject of some of the largest legal settlements in recent memory. There is far more here than I can fit in one post, so I will come back to glyphosate in full, along with a practical walk-through of how I actually steer around it day to day.

And it is worth asking who owns all of this. The seed supply has been consolidated under a handful of corporations, chief among them Bayer, the company that bought Monsanto, and farmers cannot even save and replant their own seed, because it is patented and does not breed true, so they are locked into rebuying every season. Here is the part that should sit uneasily with you: Bayer is not only an agrochemical company, it is also one of the largest pharmaceutical companies on earth. The same kind of corporation that profits from what we spray on our food also profits from the drugs we are sold once we are sick. Court documents from the Roundup litigation even raised serious questions about how the research on glyphosate was shaped and how closely regulators were involved. There is a whole tangled story in that conflict of interest, and it is worth telling carefully rather than in passing, so I am setting it aside for later.

And then there is ultra-processed food, a monster large enough that I am saving it for a post all its own. The short version is that we are being steered, deliberately, away from real food and toward synthetic, engineered, hyper-palatable products that are terrible for us.

Why I think this happened

I believe God gave us everything we need to live and thrive. The food He made was perfect, pre-loaded with everything a body requires, straight from good ground and healthy animals, exactly as designed. So the real question is not whether our food was good. It is how something God made perfect ended up this broken.

Here is how I understand it. Evil cannot create. Satan has never had the power to make a single thing, only to take what God made good and slowly twist it into something else. That is the pattern everywhere you look in Scripture, and it is exactly the pattern here. If you wanted to do real damage to a whole world of people, you could hardly choose a better target than the food every one of them eats every day. Get to the food, and you get to everyone.

And it never happens all at once. It happens gradually, one greedy decision at a time, each one defensible on its own, until the whole system has drifted into something no one would have built on purpose. Greed is the lever, and greed is one of the oldest tools the enemy has. There is more money in cheap food that makes people sick, and in the lifelong medications that follow, than there is in real food that keeps them well. Nobody had to plan it. Follow the money, and you can watch our food get stripped down, year after year, into the hollow version we eat today.

So when I look at our food, I do not just see bad business or bad policy. I see something God made good that has been quietly corrupted, and I think it is worth naming that for exactly what it is.

So why I supplement, and why you probably should

God gave us everything we need, and He gave it to us in the world He made. We are the ones who have spent generations corrupting the very source it was supposed to come from, so the food on the shelf today no longer carries what God originally packed into it. The gap is real, and naming it is not a lack of faith. Insisting the food is still the way God made it, after everything we have done to it, is not faith at all. It is denial wearing faith as a costume.

Supplementing is how I fill that gap. Some of what I take replaces vitamins and minerals our food no longer reliably provides, and some of it supports processes in the body that a clean, ancestral food supply would have supported on its own. I will lay out everything I take and why later on, so I am not going to unload the whole list here. The principle underneath it is what matters. I was given one body to keep, and keeping it in health is part of the job, not an afterthought. I cannot fix the food system. I cannot un-corrupt the soil, empty the feedlots, or pull the glyphosate back out of the supply. What I can do is learn exactly what has been stripped out, and put it back, on purpose, into the one body I am responsible for. That is not distrust. That is stewardship with the only tools I actually have.

So here is my takeaway, the thing I would say to anyone who is reading. Almost all of us should be supplementing in some form. For most people the floor is a good multivitamin, just to begin covering what the food no longer does, and from there it goes much deeper, which is what this whole series is going to be about.

God gave us everything we needed. We let it be corrupted, slowly and for profit. Learning what was taken and deliberately putting it back is not a failure of faith. It is the most faithful thing I know to do with the body He gave me.