PART 2 OF 3

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In Part 1, I argued that the ancestral diet was not one universal diet.

It was not carnivore, vegan, frugivore, keto, omnivore, raw milk, Mediterranean, or paleo as identity.

It was survival, terrain, tools, fire, microbes, season, culture, and intelligence.

Traditional humans did not merely eat food. They ate from a world. Their microbiomes matched their environment. Their cuisines matched their climate. Their bodies matched their light. Their communities gave food meaning.

Modern people have largely lost that match.

And once that match was lost, food gradually became something else.

It became feed.

When food became feed

The great dietary catastrophe was not simply that humans ate plants.

It was not simply that humans stopped eating meat.

It was that food was removed from ecology and converted into production.

Slow food became fast feed. Local became global. Seasonal became permanent. Fermented became sterile. Whole became fractionated. Animal became feedlot. Milk became pooled, pasteurised, homogenised, transported, fortified, and standardised. Fat became extracted oil. Grain became flour. Corn became syrup. Soy became isolate. Fruit became juice. Milk became formula. Food became a shelf-stable product.

This matters because much of what modern people call plant-based is not ancestral plant food.

Even where the name is familiar — apple, tomato, carrot, wheat, lettuce, banana, potato — the modern commercial version is often not the same biological event our ancestors would have known. Over time, plants have been selected, hybridised, standardised, sweetened, enlarged, made more uniform, bred for shelf life, bred for transport, bred for appearance, chemically protected, stored out of season, shipped across continents, and marketed for commercial yield rather than human terrain.

That does not mean every modern fruit or vegetable is automatically poisonous. It means we should stop pretending that supermarket produce, year-round fruit, sprayed salad leaves, seedless varieties, commercial grains, hydroponic greens, protein isolates, and fake-meat products are the same thing as wild, local, seasonal, traditionally prepared plant foods eaten by a people whose microbiome, climate, light exposure, and food culture matched their environment.

And much of what is now sold as “plant-based” is not recognisable plant food at all. It is industrial plant material: flours, syrups, isolates, seed oils, fortified cereals, fake meats, powders, gums, emulsifiers, stabilisers, sweeteners, flavourings, colourings, and ultra-processed substitutes dressed up as health.

Much of what modern people call dairy is not ancestral milk.

It is pooled, pasteurised, homogenised, standardised commodity milk, stripped from the individual animal, the herd, the season, the pasture, the farm, the microbial culture, and the traditional methods that once made milk more biologically intelligible. Farm milk from a known animal, fermented milk from a traditional culture, raw milk consumed in a pastoral context, aged cheese, kefir, yoghurt, butter, ghee, and pooled industrial milk are not the same biological message.

Much of what modern people call meat is not ancestral animal food either.

It is not wild, hunted, trapped, fished, pastured, or nose-to-tail nourishment eaten with fat, organs, marrow, bones, skin, broth, blood, and seasonal context. It is often grain-fed, confined, processed, preserved, packaged muscle meat, separated from the animal, the land, the hunt, the herd, the fisherman, the farmer, the season, and the ecology that produced it.

So the real problem is not simply plants, dairy, or meat.

The problem is that the category names have survived while the biological meaning has been altered.

“Plant-based” can mean a cooked tuber eaten in season by an outdoor people with a matching microbiome, or it can mean seed oils, oat milk, fake burgers, fortified cereal, and industrial sludge.

“Dairy” can mean human milk, raw farm milk, fermented goat kefir, aged cheese, or pooled, pasteurised, homogenised commodity milk from thousands of animals.

“Meat” can mean wild game, ruminant fat, organs, marrow, fish, shellfish, blood, broth, and whole-animal nutrition, or it can mean processed, preserved, feedlot muscle meat eaten under artificial light by a stressed, sedentary, metabolically damaged modern human.

The body does not respond to labels.

It responds to biological events and signals.

And the biological event is shaped by source, season, preparation, terrain, timing, microbial capacity, nervous-system state, and the life of the person eating it.

We are arguing over diet labels while consuming substances whose source, structure, preparation, and biological message our ancestors would scarcely recognise.

Industrialisation was not just food

The collapse of the human terrain did not come from diet alone.

Food changed.

But so did everything else.

We moved indoors and lost sunlight. We replaced darkness with artificial light and seasonal rhythm with clock time. We replaced local community with displacement, cities, commuting, screens, wars, famine, economic fear, and chronic stress. We replaced soil contact with chemical hygiene. We replaced birth ecology with increasingly medicalised birth. We replaced breast milk with formula in many cases. We replaced traditional medicine with pharmaceuticals for every discomfort. We replaced infection resilience with sterile fragility. We replaced purpose with productivity.

This is not an argument against emergency intervention when it is truly needed. Modern tools can save lives. A C-section can save a mother or baby. Antibiotics can save a life. Formula can keep an infant alive when no human or mammalian milk is available. Pharmaceuticals can sometimes hold a collapsing system together.

The problem begins when tools designed for emergency rescue become the default ecology of everyday life, and when the long-term biological costs of living inside that artificial ecology are ignored. Rescue is not the same as design. Survival is not the same as health. A substitute that saves life in crisis should not automatically become the model for how life is meant to be lived.

Artificial light at night, sleep disruption, environmental chemicals, pharmaceutical load, indoor living, chronic fear, trauma, displacement, and relentless stress all belong in the terrain history.

Stress is not a metaphor.

Chronic stress changes digestion, secretion, motility, inflammation, gut permeability, immune regulation, blood sugar, sleep architecture, and microbiome patterns.

A body under threat does not break down food, absorb nutrients, repair tissue, regulate immunity, or rebuild microbial balance in the same way as a body that feels safe.

This is why a dietary protocol sometimes has to become extreme.

Not because the human being was designed to live forever on what may appear to be a narrow and restrictive emergency diet.

But because the modern terrain is often so overloaded that the first step in healing is radical subtraction.

What I mean by terrain

The word terrain can become vague if it is not defined.

So here is my understanding:

Terrain is the biological context a body has inherited, accumulated, and currently lives within.

It is where the body has come from, what has happened to it, and the condition into which every food, ‘medicine’, stressor, signal, and intervention enters.

It includes gut barrier integrity, metabolic state, immune activation, microbial history, birth history, early feeding, medication exposure, toxicant load, light environment, sleep rhythm, nervous-system state, stress physiology, trauma, dental and infection burden, and the person’s current capacity to digest, absorb, detoxify, repair, and regulate inflammation.

Terrain is why the same food is not the same event in two different people.

A food does not enter an abstract human body.

It enters a terrain created by a history — positive, negative, or both.

It enters a gut lining shaped by birth, feeding, antibiotics, vaccinations, infections, stress, sleep, light, medications, trauma, and years of food or feed exposure. It enters an immune system that may be calm or hypervigilant. It enters a nervous system that may feel safe or threatened. It enters a liver already processing chemicals, alcohol, drugs, mould toxins, hormones, and inflammatory signals. It enters a microbiome that may match the person’s world, or may be profoundly mismatched to it.

This is why diet debates become simplistic.

They argue over foods while ignoring the body those foods enter, and the environment they occupy.

One person drinks raw kefir and feels alive.

Another drinks the same kefir and wakes with sinus congestion, itching, panic, insomnia, migraine, eczema, diarrhoea, or joint pain.

One person eats eggs and thrives.

Another eats eggs and flares.

One person uses fermented vegetables as a bridge back to microbial life.

Another is thrown into histamine hell.

That is not contradiction.

That is terrain.

And this begins to explain why people have reported healing on almost every diet ever named: vegan, vegetarian, keto, carnivore, fasting, paleo, low-FODMAP, fruit-based, raw food, GAPS, Mediterranean, and more.

It is not because every diet is equally true.

It is because every diet changes the terrain.

Each one removes something, adds something, starves something, feeds something, calms something, or provokes something.

A vegan may heal because they removed processed food, dairy, alcohol, and industrial meat.

A carnivore may heal because they removed grains, seed oils, sugar, fibre, lectins, oxalates, ferments, and plant irritants, while finally giving the body dense, bioavailable animal nutrition.

A person fasting may improve because food input stops altogether. Digestion is allowed to rest. The body is no longer forced to process, interpret, defend, ferment, react, or detoxify the next meal. The incoming burden pauses, and the body may redirect energy toward cleansing, repair, and restoring order.

A vegetarian may improve because they stopped living on takeaways, alcohol, processed meats, fried foods, and supermarket feed, and began cooking real meals again. The improvement may come from subtraction, simplicity, rhythm, and attention — not from the absence of meat. And if vegetarianism becomes grains, pulses, seed oils, pasteurised dairy, fake meats, sugar, and moral ideology, it can become just another beautifully branded form of biological confusion.

The diet gets the credit.

But in my experience, the real healing response is usually explained by two things: what burden was removed, and how the terrain responded once that burden was gone.

Enter Dr Zsófia Clemens and Paleo Medicina

This is where Dr Zsófia Clemens’ work becomes important.

Not because it answers everything.

Because it shows what can happen when almost everything is removed.

I lectured some years ago alongside Dr Clemens at a carnivore conference in Spain. I have a great deal of respect for her and her husband’s work, even where I think the wider terrain must also be considered.

Dr Clemens and the Paleo Medicina group in Hungary have spent years working clinically with difficult diseases, including diabetes, autoimmune conditions, cancer, neurological disorders, and medically complex disease states, using what they call the Paleolithic Ketogenic Diet.

This is not generic internet carnivore.

It is a strict, medically applied animal-based ketogenic diet centred on meat, animal fat, and organs, with careful attention to fat-to-protein balance, food exclusion, and clinical monitoring in serious disease.

In a medical world that often manages symptoms while ignoring diet, permeability, food antigens, and metabolic terrain, Paleo Medicina has had the courage to do something radical:

Remove the biological noise and measure what happens.

That is no small thing.

Dr Clemens’ central claim is that autoimmune disease is deeply linked to intestinal permeability — the loss of selective barrier function in the gut.

In the interview I reviewed after some of my members asked me to look at it, she argues that in serious disease, foods outside meat, animal fat, and organs can disturb the intestinal barrier. She specifically identifies cereals and milk or dairy as major problems, and names psoriasis, type 1 diabetes development, and Crohn’s disease as especially sensitive to milk proteins.

That frequently makes the carnivore world uncomfortable.

Because many carnivore diets are not truly carnivore diets.

They are meat-plus-dairy diets.

Steak and butter.

Beef and cream sauces.

Burgers and cheese.

Raw milk and honey.

Kefir and eggs.

Even the sacred egg.

But Dr Clemens’ point is simple.

Milk is not meat.

Milk is a mammalian growth fluid.

Milk is for infants.

Human milk is for human infants.

Cow milk is for calves.

And if you think about it, most people (except possibly deviants) would not consume human breast milk if it were bottled and sold instead of cow’s milk. Most would find the thought naturally abhorrent. Just imagining a latte made with breast milk is probably enough to bankrupt Starbucks overnight.

That does not mean every adult must avoid every form of dairy forever. Humans have had a long history drinking and consuming mammalian dairy.

But it does mean dairy should not be smuggled into carnivore as if it were liquid beef.

This is where Dr Clemens’ work is most valuable.

It reminds us that clinical subtraction must be honest.

If the therapeutic claim is “meat, fat, organs, salt, and water,” then butter, cream, yoghurt, kefir, cheese, eggs, coffee, sweeteners, spices, processed meats, and supplements do not belong inside that experiment.

A strict protocol has to be strict enough to teach us something.

Otherwise, when the person fails, we do not know whether carnivore failed, dairy failed, eggs failed, histamine failed, coffee failed, additives failed, or the person never actually removed the noise.

Raw milk is not one question

The raw milk debate is usually framed badly.

It becomes either:

Raw milk is poison.

Or:

Raw milk is medicine.

Both are too simple.

The better question is:

Whose milk, from what animal, raised how, processed how, consumed by whom, in what terrain, and at what stage of healing?

Human colostrum is not the same as human milk.

Human milk is not the same as formula.

Cow milk is not the same as goat or sheep milk.

A1 milk is not the same as A2 milk.

Raw farm milk is not the same as pooled industrial milk.

Pasteurised milk is not the same as homogenised milk.

Kefir is not the same as yoghurt.

Aged cheese is not the same as fresh milk.

Butter is not the same as ghee.

Colostrum is not the same as ordinary dairy.

These are not interchangeable substances.

And the person receiving them is not interchangeable either.

Questions need to be asked.

Were they breastfed?

Did they receive colostrum?

Were they born vaginally or by C-section?

Was the cord clamped immediately?

Were they given antibiotics early?

Were they formula-fed?

Were they vaccinated?

Did they have eczema, colic, reflux, asthma, ear infections, hay fever, tonsillitis, allergies, or migraines? Frequently found in the vaccinated and usually absent in unvaccinated children.

Were they raised on industrial milk, cereal, seed oils, sugar, and processed food?

Are they now living in trauma, grief, fear, mould exposure, chemical exposure, sympathetic dominance, or chronic fight-or-flight?

Do they live and work predominantly inside, under artificial light and surrounded by EMF fields, disconnected from sunlight, soil, movement, and seasonal rhythm?

These questions matter because context changes the signal. The same food enters a different body when that body is under threat, chemically burdened, light-disrupted, microbially depleted, or cut off from the rhythms that make digestion safe. Context changes the stress load, and the stress load changes the biology.

Raw milk may belong late in the discussion, not early.

It should not be used as a foundational healing food in a damaged gut simply because it is raw, traditional, or nutrient-dense.

Milk is a growth fluid. It contains proteins, sugars, immune signals, hormones, and microbial variables that make it biologically different from meat.

In a robust person, from a clean source, with the right microbial history and genetic context, it may be tolerated and even beneficial.

In a permeable, autoimmune, histamine-reactive, neurologically inflamed, or metabolically unstable person, it can be too much, too soon, or wrong altogether.

Raw does not automatically mean ancestral.

Raw milk from a modern dairy system, even a small farm, is still not the same thing as species-specific human milk. It is not the same thing as milk consumed by a calf. It is not the same thing as fermented milk consumed by a genetically and microbially adapted pastoralist population. And it is certainly not the same thing as meat.

A teaspoon of raw kefir may be tolerated by one person.

In another, it may mean histamine, immune provocation, sinus congestion, itching, panic, insomnia, migraine, eczema, or relapse.

That is not contradiction.

That is terrain.

The lost first foods

The modern conversation about milk is upside down.

We argue about raw cow milk while ignoring the fact that many humans missed human milk.

We argue about kefir while ignoring colostrum.

We argue about A2 milk while ignoring formula.

We argue about pasteurisation while ignoring birth.

C-section rates, early cord clamping, missing colostrum, formula feeding, antibiotic exposure, vaccination and reaction history, pharmaceutical use, fever suppression, immune challenges, early-life medical interventions, and the timing of all of these relative to the child’s overall terrain all belong in the terrain history.

This is not about blame.

Formula may be necessary in current modern life, when access to mammalian milk or a wet nurse is not possible.

Formula can save lives.

No parent should be shamed for using it when needed.

But biologically, formula is not human milk.

In fact, it is not milk at all.

The first food is supposed to be biological instruction.

Colostrum and breast milk are immune education, microbial seeding, hormonal messaging, oligosaccharide feeding, specifically to grow a robust microbiome, maternal signalling, and species-specific development. They are not static products. They are dynamic communication between mother and infant.

In fact, the biofeedback between the baby and nursing mother can alter the milk quality and components quite dramatically.

Formula can never replicate that.

So when I see an adult who was C-sectioned, formula-fed, antibiotic-exposed, vaccinated, industrial-milk-fed, cereal-fed, medicated early, raised under artificial light, pushed through stress, and traumatised — and that person now reacts badly to dairy — I do not see a mystery.

I see a terrain history.

Milk did not enter a blank body.

It entered a body with a story.

Why subtraction sometimes has to become extreme

This is where the 3·6·9 Master Metabolic Protocol that I have written begins.

When the terrain is overloaded, the first healing move is not addition.

It is subtraction.

Not more supplements.

Not more medications.

Not more superfoods.

Not more powders.

Not more green juice.

First, we begin to remove the noise.

The sicker the terrain, the more extreme the subtraction may need to be.

This is what Dr Clemens’ work shows so clearly.

A person with severe autoimmunity, Crohn’s, psoriasis, neurological inflammation, metabolic disease, cancer terrain, histamine chaos, or deep gut permeability may not be ready for raw milk, kefir, eggs, sauerkraut, fruit, honey, herbs, or ancestral plants.

They may need the cleanest biological silence they have ever experienced:

Fresh ruminant meat.

Animal fat.

Salt.

Water.

Measured organs, where tolerated.

Not necessarily forever.

But long enough to hear the body again.

This is why I am not critical of Dr Clemens’ subtraction method.

I think it is one of the most important modern clinical demonstrations of what happens when the input is radically simplified.

But no protocol should become a closed theology.

If a patient genuinely follows a strict protocol and the tests do not come back positively, or they fail to heal, the answer cannot always be:

“You cheated.”

Sometimes they may have. That is human nature in my experience.

But some did not.

Perhaps many did not.

We are working with complex Human BEINGS, not lab-rat Human Doings.

Sometimes the diet and protocol remove one layer, and the changed terrain reveals another layer — and frequently layers.

Trauma, which can lead to self-sabotage loops.

Sympathetic dominance.

Mould.

Chemical exposure.

Artificial light.

Medication effects.

Dental infection.

Birth history.

Formula history.

Vaccination damage.

Pharmaceutical load.

Sleep disruption.

Fear.

Grief.

Loss of purpose.

A body in fight-or-flight does not digest the same way.

A body in terror does not repair the same way.

A body that does not feel safe does not receive nourishment the same way.

This is why subtraction must go beyond food, and why we must better understand the dis-ease.

Work with me

This is the kind of terrain history we work through inside the 3·6·9 Master Metabolic Protocol / Live Clinic — not as a diet religion, but as a method for understanding why the body lost tolerance, what needs to be removed first, and what must be stabilised before anything is added back.

Join the 3·6·9 Master Metabolic Protocol / Live Clinic Membership.

For more complex cases or one-to-one support, start here: https://consultations.jeremyayres.com/Initial

JeremyAyres.com

Coming in Part 3

In Part 3, I’ll address one of the most viral claims in modern carnivore — “plants are trying to kill you” — and explain where Dr Anthony Chaffee may be right, where I believe the argument goes too far, and why carnivore, PKD, fasting, vegan, vegetarian, and even fruitarian diets can all appear to heal.

The deeper answer is not diet identity.

It is subtraction, stabilisation, rebuilding — and the terrain that receives the food.

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The 3-6-9 Master Metabolic Protocol

Subtract the Noise. Restore the Signal. Rebuild the Human.

PART 1 OF 3

Why Don’t We Know What To Eat?

The ancestral diet was not a diet — it was survival, terrain, fire, tools, microbes, and intelligence.

Humans are often mocked as the only animal confused about what to eat.

The lion does not wonder whether it should become plant-based. The wolf does not question the morality of killing food. The cow does not count calories. The deer does not debate if it is getting enough protein. The scavenger does not worry about food poisoning or unsanitary food preparation.

And yet modern humans apparently require governments, corporations, doctors, apps, influencers, public-health campaigns, food labels, diet books, podcasts, studies, food gurus, and algorithmic arguments to explain to us what food is and what we should eat.

That should make us suspicious.

But it should also make us careful.

Probably the best current advice is, “Just eat what humans evolved to eat.”

It sounds obvious. It sounds clean. It sounds like the answer.

But it is not nearly as simple as it sounds.

Because if we take the ancestral argument literally — really literally — then the original human diet was not ribeye steak, butter, bacon, coffee, raw milk, kefir, sourdough, sauerkraut, supplements, green smoothies, olive oil, salads, protein powder, TRT, or neatly packaged organic produce.

Before farming, before herding, before milking animals, before grinding grains, before supermarkets, before refrigeration, before supplements, before vegan, frugivore, carnivore, or keto, and even before reliable fire, what did the human animal actually eat?

First, we ate (well, suckled) human milk.

That is the one universal ancestral food made specifically for human babies.

Human milk is not merely calories. It is a species-specific developmental fluid designed by God, nature, or both, to build a human baby whose gut, brain, immune system, nervous system, metabolism, and microbiome are still under construction.

And when the time came — usually as teeth began to emerge — we did not transition from breast milk to breakfast cereal.

We moved from suckling milk to mouth.

The young human began meeting the world through teeth, hands, texture, touch, smell, taste, hunger, curiosity, tribal ways, season, and terrain. Often the mother would chew first, beginning digestion before feeding the child. All the senses were involved. The child was not learning from an app, a label, or a government guideline. The child was learning through experience, sensation, observation, and the most basic biological feedback: does this nourish me, harm me, satisfy me, or make me sick?

Food was not an abstract category.

It was not a macro split.

It was not an ideology.

It was what the ancestral human could find, catch, crack, dig, gather, share, chew, swallow, and survive upon.

That may have included raw animal foods, marrow, insects, eggs, small animals, fish, shellfish, seasonal fruit, honey, roots, tubers, berries, and scavenged carcasses left behind by predators.

It would not have looked like a modern carnivore Instagram page.

It would not have looked like a vegan bowl.

It would not have looked like a Mediterranean cookbook.

It would have looked like opportunistic survival.

And that is the first problem with oversimplistic ancestral diet claims.

When someone says, “Humans should eat what we evolved to eat,” we have to ask:

Which humans?

At which stage of human history?

In which geographical terrain?

In which season?

With which tools?

With which microbes?

With which culture?

With fire, or without it?

The answer changes everything.

Before cuisine, there was survival.

A human without tools, fire, language, storage, salt, fermentation vessels, fishing nets, bows, spears, pottery, domesticated animals, and cultural memory was not eating a modern ruminant-based carnivore diet.

That human was eating whatever could be caught, cracked, dug, stolen, scavenged, chewed, sucked, swallowed, shared, or survived on.

That does not mean humans were plant-based.

It also does not mean humans were strict carnivores in the modern ideological sense.

It means humans were instinctual and ecological opportunists becoming increasingly intelligent.

But this point needs precision.

Availability is not the same as optimality.

Survival is not the same as design.

A food that keeps a starving human alive is not automatically the food that produces the highest level of health. Fallback foods, famine foods, seasonal foods, medicinal foods, staple foods, and optimal foods are not the same category.

So when I say humans were ecological opportunists, I am not saying every ancestral food was equally nourishing. I am saying humans used intelligence to survive in different terrains, and that clinical healing must still ask harder questions.

Which foods build the body?

Which foods merely spare starvation?

Which foods provoke a damaged system?

Which foods are therapeutic because they remove everything else?

Those questions should never be collapsed into one.

Our stomach acid gives us an important clue. Humans have unusually acidic stomachs, which fits a history involving animal foods, protein denaturing, scavenging, microbial exposure, and the need to neutralise potentially dangerous organisms before they passed deeper into the gut.

That matters.

It suggests humans were not fragile fruit nibblers or salad munchers afraid of animal foods.

But it also does not prove that steak-and-butter carnivore is the literal original human diet.

It points to something more interesting: a creature increasingly adapted to animal foods, microbial challenge, acidity, risk, survival, and eventually cooking.

Then fire changed everything.

Fire made meat safer, if you believe the germ theory model(which I don’t for good, factual reasons). It softened connective tissue, made marrow and fat more accessible, reduced the toxicity of certain plants, made tubers more palatable and digestible, extended the human day, and created the hearth of the gathering.

Fire changed food from something merely consumed into something transformed, shared, and social.

Tools changed the relationship even further.

A sharp stone, a spear, a fishing hook, a digging stick, a basket, a clay pot, a hide bag, a drying rack, a smoking hut, a salt pit, and a fermentation vessel were not just objects.

They were extensions of digestion.

They allowed humans to do outside the body what the body could not always do inside the gut.

Humans learned to cut, crack, pound, soak, leach, cook, smoke, dry, salt, ferment, and store.

Every one of those practices was intelligence applied to food.

Meat could be dried for winter. Fish could be smoked near rivers and coasts. Milk could be fermented into something more tolerable. Roots could be roasted until edible. Grains and seeds, where they were used, had to be soaked, ground, soured, cooked, or fermented.

Plants were not simply eaten because they existed. They were made edible through necessity, trial, error, and evolving knowledge.

Animal foods were not merely consumed as muscle meat. They were eaten nose to tail, with fat, organs, marrow, blood, broth, skin, connective tissue, and seasonal context. And every part of the animal that could not be eaten was still used for something useful.

This is why the human diet exploded into diversity.

Not because humans were confused.

Because humans were intelligent.

And starvation was not an option.

Different environments demanded different answers. Ice, desert, coast, jungle, mountain, grassland, river, forest, and island could not produce the same diet. A people surrounded by reindeer did not eat like a people surrounded by coconuts, shellfish, tubers, honey, or tropical fish.

Cuisine was not decoration.

Cuisine was survival evolving as culture.

It was memory passed through grandmothers, hunters, mothers, gatherers, healers, cooks, and tribes. It taught people which foods to eat, which foods to avoid, which foods needed fire, which needed fermentation, which needed soaking, which were medicine, which were poison, which belonged to summer, which belonged to winter, and which could save a starving village.

Cuisine was environmental intelligence.

It was the human animal learning how to turn terrain into nourishment, nourishment into social connection, and social connection into culture.

No tribe or emerging culture sat around pontificating whether they were carnivore, omnivore, frugivore, vegan, keto, or any other modern nonsense.

They simply lived within, and connected to, whatever region and environment they were born into.

This is not plant-based ideology.

It is not frugivore ideology.

It is not keto ideology.

It is not carnivore ideology.

It is ancestral survival and emerging food technology.

Humans were not stupid. They were masters of adaptation and survival with spirit.

But cuisine proves intelligence. It does not prove that every traditional food is therapeutic in every modern body.

A food can be ancestral and still be wrong for a damaged gut.

A food can be natural and still be provocative.

A food can be traditional and still require the right genetics, microbes, preparation, dose, season, and intestinal barrier.

That distinction matters.

Because healing is not nostalgia.

And it is far more than just biology.

Four questions diet culture keeps confusing

Modern diet arguments usually fail because they collapse four separate questions into one.

The first question is: what did humans eat to survive?

The answer is broad. Humans survived on different foods in different terrains. They adapted, improvised, hunted, gathered, cooked, fermented, stored, and endured.

The second question is: what foods are humans best adapted to?

That answer is narrower. The evidence points strongly towards a deep human dependence on animal-source nutrition, fat, organs, hunting, scavenging, cooking, and nutrient density. Humans are not grazing animals. We are not seed-eating birds. We are not fruit bats. We are not ruminants with fermentation vats. We are a high-energy, large-brained, acid-stomached, tool-using species with a long relationship to animal foods.

The third question is: what foods are therapeutic in serious disease?

That answer may be narrower still. In autoimmunity, inflammatory bowel disease, neurological inflammation, severe metabolic dysfunction, histamine chaos, and deep gut permeability, the most therapeutic diet may not be the most diverse ancestral diet. It may be the strictest one. It may be meat, fat, organs, salt, and water — not because all other foods are morally bad, but because the damaged body may need biological silence before it can repair.

The fourth question is: what can a restored or robust person tolerate long term?

That answer depends on the person. Some people may remain best on strict carnivore or a strict paleolithic ketogenic approach. Others may tolerate selected traditional foods once the terrain has changed. Some may use dairy. Some may not. Some may tolerate eggs. Some may relapse from them. Some may handle fermented foods beautifully. Others may experience histamine, insomnia, anxiety, migraines, skin flares, or gut pain.

These four questions must never be confused.

A food can be ancestral and still be inappropriate for disease.

A food can be tolerated and still not be therapeutic.

A food can be useful in famine and still be inferior in abundance.

A food can be traditional and still fail in the wrong terrain.

This is the foundation of the 3·6·9 Master Metabolic Protocol.

The microbiome matched the terrain

Traditional humans did not simply eat their environment. Their environment entered them.

From birth, the body was seeded by the world around it: through the birth canal, breast milk, skin contact, soil, animals, water, smoke, hands, seasonal foods, fermented foods, cooked foods, raw foods, animal fats, fibres, tribe, and outdoor life.

The microbiome was not something added later from a capsule.

It was built through contact.

It was shaped by place.

It was ecological memory living inside the body.

That is profound, because it means there was never supposed to be one universal human microbiome. A person living in a cold coastal environment, eating fish, organs, fat, marrow, shellfish, and berries, should not necessarily carry the same inner ecology as someone living in a tropical environment, eating tubers, honey, fruit, insects, and wild game.

Different terrains created different foods.

Different foods created different microbes.

Different microbes helped those people digest, adapt, and belong to the world they lived in.

The microbiome was supposed to match the terrain.

But the microbiome should not be romanticised either. The goal is not simply “more microbes,” “more diversity,” or “more fermented foods,” though all those things can help some people begin to heal.

A diverse microbial ecosystem is not automatically healthy if the gut barrier is damaged. In a damaged terrain, adding more fibres, more ferments, more probiotics, more raw foods, or more microbial stimulation can make one person better and another worse.

The first priority is not microbial entertainment.

The first priority is coherence: barrier integrity and microbial diversity learning again to co-exist.

The body must be able to distinguish nourishment from invasion. The gut lining must regain selective intelligence. The immune system must stop treating ordinary inputs as emergencies. Only then does the microbiome become a partner in rebuilding rather than another source of noise.

This is why gut health cannot be reduced to probiotics and fibre.

A healthy microbiome is not a supplement label.

It is a relationship between food, barrier, immune system, nervous system, microbes, light, sleep, soil, animals, season, and place.

Modern people have largely lost that match.

We now live under artificial light, eat sterile packaged food, drink treated water, avoid soil, fear microbes, and spray chemicals over the very environments that once educated our immune systems. We pasteurise, homogenise, refine, isolate, bleach, extract, fortify, preserve, flavour, stabilise, and standardise.

Milk becomes a processed commodity.

Fat becomes industrial oil.

Grain becomes flour.

Fruit becomes juice.

Protein becomes powder.

Sugar becomes hidden in everything.

And then we call the result nutrition.

But this is not the same thing as food.

Food carries memory.

Food carries terrain.

Food carries microbes, season, light, soil, animal health, preparation, culture, and context.

Modern feed carries shelf life, convenience, chemistry, scale, transport, palatability, profit, and control. Human biology is considered later, if at all.

That is the difference.

Traditional food connected the body to its world.

Modern feed disconnects the body from it.

Work with me

This series introduces the terrain lens behind my 3·6·9 Master Metabolic Protocol — the framework I use to help people subtract the noise, restore the signal, and rebuild the human.

For deeper teaching, live interpretation, and guided application, join my membership where I teach this and more, as well as help people heal. https://sales.jeremyayres.com/live-clinic

For more complex cases or one-to-one support, start here: JeremyAyres.com.

Work with me 1:1:Book a Consultation→https://consultations.jeremyayres.com/Initial

Coming in Part 2

In Part 2, I’ll explain how food became feed — and why the same food can heal one person and harm another depending on the terrain it enters.

The aim is not purity.
The aim is signal.
Subtract the noise. Restore the terrain. Rebuild the human.

www.JeremyAyres.com

In loving memory of a fallen warrior, Graham Atkinson – The Red Pill Pharmacist

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Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones… But Words Can Wound the Body

When words become wounds, labels become identities, and laughter becomes medicine.

In loving memory of a fallen warrior, Graham Atkinson – The Red Pill Pharmacist

Prefer to listen? Audio version read by Dr Jeremy Ayres above.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

Most of us heard that phrase as children.

It was meant to make us strong. It was meant to help us rise above teasing, criticism, cruelty, and careless speech. It was meant to protect us from letting every outside voice become an inner wound.

And on one level, there is wisdom in that.

Not every opinion deserves entry into the soul. Not every insult should become a story. Not every careless word spoken by someone else should be allowed to define who we are.

But I have come to believe that old saying also taught us something dangerous.

It taught us to underestimate words.

It taught us to act as though language does not enter the body. It taught us to pretend the nervous system does not hear, the immune system does not respond, the breath does not change, the stomach does not tighten, and the heart does not remember.

Words are not “just words.”

Words are patterns. Words are instructions. Words are agreements we repeat often enough that the body begins to organize around them.

A word spoken once may pass through us. A word repeated becomes a thought. A thought repeated becomes a belief. A belief repeated becomes an identity.

And identity may be one of the most powerful biological instructions a human being can carry.

This is why I pay very close attention to the words people use when they speak about their bodies.

When I say words can become spells, I do not mean magic in the childish, cartoon sense. I do not mean that we can chant our way out of illness, deny suffering, or tape a few positive phrases to the bathroom mirror and call it healing.

I mean something much older, deeper, and more practical than that.

Words are spells because words shape reality.

Why else are we taught to spell?

To spell is to arrange letters into meaning. To speak is to send that meaning into the world. And when meaning is charged with emotion, repetition, authority, fear, love, shame, faith, or belief, it does not remain neutral.

It moves something.

A spell is not only something whispered over a candle in an ancient ritual. A spell is a sequence of words carrying intention, energy, and authority. It can alter perception. It can create agreement. It can bind or release. It can wound or heal. It can name, frame, define, command, condemn, bless, and transform.

Every culture has understood this, including our so-called modern one.

We still say, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” because we know words can move armies, shape nations, create laws, bind contracts, destroy reputations, and decide the fate of human lives. What are legal statutes, contracts, verdicts, judgments, and decrees but words placed on paper and backed by collective belief, authority, and enforcement?

A few words from a judge can change the course of a person’s life.

Once judged, a person is sentenced.

That is not a small thing.

A sentence can be grammatically correct.

A sentence can be punishment.

A sentence can be something spoken over a person that they carry for the rest of their life.

So, when a doctor, parent, teacher, priest, partner, coach, boss, friend, bully, or authority figure speaks words over someone, especially in a vulnerable moment, those words do not simply disappear into the air. They enter the person’s energetic field. They enter the imagination. They enter the very fiber of the human being. They can grow to become inner law.

This is why I do not dismiss language as “just words.”

Words are incantations in the most practical sense: repeated sound, meaning, and intention.

Speak fear often enough, and the body begins to brace.

Speak shame often enough, and the soul begins to shrink.

Speak hopelessness often enough, and the future begins to seem darker.

But speak truth with love, speak possibility with conviction, speak healing with humility, speak life with humor and faith — and something else can begin to happen.

The body hears that, too.

And by words, I do not only mean the words spoken by a doctor in an exam room.

I mean the words spoken over us when we were children, and the words that kept coming as we grew older. The words of parents, teachers, coaches, priests, relatives, partners, friends, bullies, bosses, institutions, and the larger culture. I mean the things said directly to our faces, and the things we overheard from the next room when adults thought we were too young, too distracted, or too asleep to understand. I mean the sentences delivered in anger, fear, shame, disappointment, sarcasm, ridicule, and control. And I also mean the potentially quieter scripts we absorbed from movies, television, music, podcasts, YouTube, social media, and every voice we repeatedly invited into our minds. All of it becomes part of the language field we live inside. All of it teaches the body what to expect, what to fear, what to believe, and who we think we are allowed to become.

And perhaps just as importantly, I mean the words we speak silently to ourselves.

The private sentences that run behind the eyes.

“I am not good enough.”

“I will never get better.”

“There is something wrong with me.”

“My body is broken.”

“I am weak.”

“I am too far gone.”

“Nobody understands.”

“This is just who I am.”

These unspoken thoughts may never leave the mouth, but the body still hears them. The nervous system still responds. The breath still changes. The belly still tightens. The heart still carries the weight. In fact, my experience is that most people’s thoughts are repetitive and mostly negative—a constant noise.

Some words land like a heavyweight punch, what I call the Mike Tyson effect.

Others arrive like a thousand little jabs, what I call The Muhammad Ali effect.

One sentence can shock the system. But a lifetime of repeated words — from others or from within — can slowly wear a person down until one more word, one more diagnosis, one more judgment, one more humiliation, one more “you’ll never get better” becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Words carry energy. Not as a vague slogan, but as a felt charge. Some words contract the body. Some words open it. Some words carry fear. Some carry faith. Some carry shame. Some carry life.

The old proverb says, “The tongue has the power of life and death.”

I believe that is far more than poetry.

The old traditions knew this. Blessings mattered. Curses mattered. Names mattered. Prayers mattered. Songs mattered. The words spoken over a child mattered. The words spoken over the sick mattered. The words spoken in fear, anger, grief, hope, and love all carried weight.

Masaru Emoto’s work with water crystals, controversial though it remains in scientific circles, offered a striking image of what many traditions have always understood: words carry a vibrational charge. Emoto demonstrated that water exposed to words such as love, gratitude, and beauty formed more harmonious crystalline patterns. In contrast, water exposed to words such as hatred, ridicule, or neglect formed distorted patterns. The rice experiments associated with his work told a similar story: jars from the same batch, spoken to differently over time, seemed to decay differently — one receiving words of love, the other receiving harshness or neglect. Whether one views this as rigorous science, symbolic demonstration, or something in between, the message is worth considering. If words can imprint water, even as a possibility, how much more carefully should we speak to a human body made largely of water, memory, emotion, and listening?

I have seen this in practice.

I see it in the way a person’s body changes when they are spoken to with fear versus hope, contempt versus compassion, finality versus possibility. I see it in the way a child becomes the name they are repeatedly called. I see it in how a client shrinks under a forbidding label. I see it in the way people carry words in their tissues for decades, frequently long after the person who spoke to them has forgotten they ever said them.

Modern medicine often forgets this, and perhaps never even considers it.

It has become very good at naming conditions, measuring markers, coding symptoms, and categorizing people.

But naming something is not the same as understanding it.

And this is where so many people begin to get lost.

The Moment the Label Lands

A doctor says a word.

Cancer.

Diabetes.

Autoimmune.

Depression.

Hypertension.

Degenerative.

Chronic.

Disorder.

In that moment, the room changes.

The person may still be sitting in the same chair, but something inside them has shifted. Time slows down. The ears may keep hearing, but the heart has already left the conversation. The mind starts racing into possible futures. A person who walked into the appointment as themselves may walk out carrying a new identity they did not ask for.

This is not a small thing.

A label can land like a stone thrown into still water. It ripples outward into the body, the family, the imagination, the future, the marriage, the dinner table, the bank account, the mirror, the way a person wakes up in the morning, and the way they fall asleep at night.

One word can begin to reorganize a life.

That word may come with information. It may come with test results. It may come with a prescription, referral, protocol, or plan. But it also comes with meaning. And meaning is never neutral to the body.

The body does not simply hear the sound of the word.

It hears the fear behind it.

It hears the finality.

It hears the tone.

It hears the authority.

It hears the unspoken implication: this is what you are now.

And too often, once that label lands, the deeper, causational questions stop being asked.

Di-ag-nosed and Dis-ease

This is where I have become deeply cautious.

Outside of obvious physical trauma — a broken bone, a ruptured structure, a herniated disc, an acute injury where the body needs mechanical clarity — I have found that diagnoses are often far less helpful than people imagine.

A clear injury may need a clear name. If a bone is broken, name it and set it. If a structure is torn, understand it and respond appropriately.

But much of modern man’s dis-ease is not that simple.

Most chronic conditions do not appear from nowhere. They are usually the final expression of many causes accumulating over time: poor food, toxic exposure, chronic stress, unresolved grief, infection, mineral depletion, lack of sunlight, disrupted sleep, emotional suppression, overmedication, isolation, sedentary living, family patterns, and years of living out of rhythm with nature.

Yet too often, once the label lands, the inquiry stops.

The diagnosis becomes the explanation.

The word becomes the story.

The label becomes the lens through which the person now sees everything.

And in the age of Google, this can become a disaster.

A person goes home, searches the word, and within minutes is flooded with worst-case stories, frightening statistics, drug warnings, message boards, symptom lists, and predictions that may have very little to do with the individual human being sitting at their kitchen table at midnight, scared and alone.

Now they are not only dealing with the original imbalance.

They are dealing with escalating fear.

And fear is not neutral.

Fear changes physiology, fear changes breath. Fear changes sleep. Fear changes digestion. Fear changes hormones. Fear changes circulation. Fear changes immune response. Fear changes metabolism.

A body living in fear is not in its deepest state of healing.

This is why I sometimes write the word as di-ag-nosis. Where Di=two, ag=not, and nosis = to know, meaning two people NOT knowing what is truly going on.

But, like a dark spell cast, the label too often divides the person from their own body and escalates words and thoughts, almost all of them negative and dark. Their ability to think critically becomes subdued, while their need to seek authority and help heightens to ‘help me’!

Here, they often run, fueled by others’ fears, into arguably the wrong arms and path.

It can make them feel as though something foreign, hostile, and permanent has taken them over. It can make them believe their body has betrayed them. It can turn a living process into a fixed, unalterable identity and outcome.

But the diagnosis is not the person.

The label is not the cause.

The name is not the terrain.

And the body is not the enemy.

Your Body Is Not Your Enemy

This may be one of the most important truths in natural medicine:

The body does not know how to work against you.

It only knows how to respond.

Even when its responses are uncomfortable, frightening, excessive, or damaging, the body is not acting with malice. It is not trying to ruin your life. It is not stupid. It is not confused for no reason.

It is responding to conditions.

It responds to food. It responds to stress. It responds to toxins. It responds to infections. It responds to sleep. It responds to grief. It responds to fear. It responds to light, movement, minerals, breath, relationships, environment, and meaning.

What we call disease – especially most man-made disease of preindustrial times - is often the body’s best attempt to survive under conditions it was never designed to endure.

The fever is not usually the enemy. It may be part of the immune response.

The fatigue is not always laziness. It may be a demand for restoration.

The anxiety is not a character flaw. It may be a nervous system that has been living too long in survival mode.

The inflammation is not merely an inconvenience. It may be a signal that the body is responding to injury, irritation, infection, toxicity, trauma, or imbalance.

This does not mean we ignore symptoms. It does not mean we avoid necessary medical care. It does not mean we pretend serious conditions are not serious.

It means we stop cursing the body for trying to survive.

There is a kind of ignorant violence in constantly speaking about the body as though it is broken, defective, crazy, weak, or hostile.

“My immune system is attacking me.”

“My body betrayed me.”

“My thyroid is broken.”

“My gut hates me.”

“My hormones are crazy.”

“My brain doesn’t work.”

“My body is falling apart.”

I understand why people speak this way. Pain is exhausting. Chronic symptoms can wear down even the strongest person. When the body will not do what we want it to do, it is easy to feel betrayed by it.

But what if the body is not betraying us?

What if it is communicating?

What if symptoms are not the body’s attack against us, but the body’s attempt to get our attention?

What if the real question is not, “What is wrong with me?”

What if the better question is, “What is my body trying to tell me?”

Those two questions lead to very different places.

One creates shame, negativity, and hopelessness.

The other creates curiosity, possibility, and hope.

One narrows the path.

The other opens it.

The Hidden Power of Medical Language

Somewhere along the way, medicine became more interested in naming the condition than understanding the person.

A person is told they have a “degenerative” condition, and all they hear is decline.

A mother is told her child has a “disorder,” and suddenly the child is viewed through the lens of what is wrong instead of what is asking to be understood, or what caused it.

A patient is told their condition is “chronic,” and some part of them quietly stops expecting change and begins to think about how they will manage this.

Someone is told they have an “autoimmune disease,” and they begin to believe their body has turned against them, and why them.

Someone is told their labs are “normal,” even though they feel terrible, and now they are not only suffering — they feel invisible and frequently begin to question their own sanity.

This is where medicine must become more human, and WILL in the Medical Renaissance.

The words spoken in an exam room matter.

The tone matters.

The timing matters.

The eyes of the practitioner matter.

The presence or absence of hope matters.

A label should never be handed to a person like a sentence from a judge.

At best, a diagnosis should be a temporary piece of information, with context.

It should say, “Here is what we are seeing.”

It should not say, “Here is all you are.”

The deeper question is not simply, “What do we call this?”

The deeper question is, “What created the conditions for this to appear, and why is your body responding this way?”

What has been missing?

What has been excessive?

What has been suppressed?

What has been ignored?

What has been carried for too long?

What has the body been trying to say?

When those questions are never asked, the diagnosis becomes a dead end.

But when we begin to hear the body, everything changes.

We stop asking the body to be quiet and start asking what it needs.

We stop fighting symptoms and start restoring function.

We stop worshiping the label and start correcting the terrain.

And when the causes are found — not just one cause, but the many layers that brought the person to this place — tremendous healing can become possible.

I have seen this too many times to believe otherwise.

The body wants to heal.

The body is always moving toward balance when given the right conditions.

Our job is not to frighten it, suppress it, curse it, or reduce it to a label.

Our job is to listen, remove what is harmful, restore what is missing, and remember that the person in front of us is not a diagnosis.

They are a living, breathing, self-healing human being waiting to be understood.

The Nocebo We Never Talk About

Most people have heard of the placebo effect, where belief, expectation, and context can influence a person’s response to treatment.

But fewer people talk about the nocebo effect.

Nocebo is what happens when negative expectations contribute to negative experiences. In simple terms, if a person is repeatedly told that something will hurt, decline, fail, or never improve, the body may begin to organize around that expectation.

This is not weakness.

It is the biology of belief.

The nervous system is designed to anticipate danger. If the mind believes the future is hopeless, the body may begin living as if the threat is constant. Breath changes. Muscle tone changes. Digestion changes. Sleep changes. Hormones change. Inflammatory patterns can shift. Behavior changes, too.

This is where I see the effects of negative words and thoughts manifest in two very distinct ways.

The first is what I call the Mike Tyson effect.

A single sentence lands like a heavyweight punch.

“You will never get better.”

“It is all in your head.”

“This is degenerative.”

“You just have to live with it.”

“There is nothing else we can do.”

“You are weak.”

“You are broken.”

“This is your diagnosis.”

“This is your destiny.”

Sometimes one sentence, spoken with authority or cruelty or certainty, can hit the body like trauma. The person may not fall to the ground, but something inside them collapses. The breath shortens. The stomach drops—the heart races. The future narrows.

A word becomes a wound.

A label becomes a spell.

A human being becomes trapped inside a sentence.

And when that sentence comes from someone the person trusts — a doctor, parent, partner, teacher, pastor, coach, or authority figure — the impact can be enormous. It can move the body into a state of fear, and fear is a metabolic disadvantage. Fear pulls energy away from repair. Fear tells the body to brace, defend, contract, and survive.

The second pattern is what I think of as the Muhammad Ali effect — not as a comment on the man himself, but as the image of repeated jabs.

Not one devastating blow.

A thousand little ones.

The daily jab of “you are not enough.”

The morning jab of “you look terrible.”

The mirror jab of “you are getting old.”

The family jab of “we all get sick.”

The medical jab of “this is chronic.”

The internet is full of worst-case stories.

The private jab of “I will never heal.”

The cultural jab of “your body cannot be trusted.”

Each one may seem small. Each one may be survivable. But over time, the body begins to brace for impact. The nervous system starts living as if another blow is always coming. The person becomes guarded, contracted, exhausted, and metabolically depleted.

Then one day, a bigger word lands.

Cancer.

Autoimmune.

Degenerative.

Disorder.

Chronic.

And everyone thinks that word broke the person.

But often, that word was only the final punch after years of jabs.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was not always the heaviest burden. Sometimes it was simply the last one the system could carry.

This is why we must be careful with the words we speak to others.

And it is why we must become equally careful with the words we speak within ourselves.

Because the body does not distinguish as cleanly as we imagine between a word spoken out loud and a word believed in silence.

The body hears both.

A person who believes they are broken often stops doing the small things that help them heal. They stop moving. They stop asking questions. They stop imagining a better outcome. They stop participating in their own restoration.

They also begin – or continue – to ‘self medicate’, and this is frequently not the true medicine they need.

Again, this does not mean language alone causes disease or that positive thinking cures everything. That kind of thinking can become cruel because it blames sick people for being sick.

But it does mean we must be careful.

Words can either widen or narrow the path toward healing.

They can either empower a person or quietly drain them.

Words do not only come from doctors.

They come from families.

Every family has stories.

“We all get heart disease.”

“The women in our family are anxious.”

“The men in our family die young.”

“I was never the healthy one.”

“I have always had a weak stomach.”

“My body has always been broken.”

Some of these stories may contain real patterns. Family history matters. Ancestral trauma matters. Genetics, environment, food, stress, and lifestyle all matter.

But a pattern is not a prison.

A tendency is not a destiny.

A family story is not a life sentence.

Traditional healing systems understood this. They looked at the whole person. They asked about food, sleep, grief, work, spirit, family, season, land, constitution, and the rhythms of life.

They did not treat the human being as a disconnected collection of parts.

They understood that a person is shaped by everything they live inside of.

Modern medicine too often asks, “What disease do you have?”

Traditional wisdom asks, “What kind of life has your body been trying to survive?”

That is a much deeper question.

And it is often where healing begins.

A Better Way to Speak About the Body

One of the first medicines we can offer ourselves is better language.

Not fake language.

Not sugary, unfocused affirmations, repeated again and again, as if repetition, like lines on the school detention blackboard, has more power if repeated.

Not pretending everything is fine when it is not.

I mean language that is consciously honest without being hopeless. Language that tells the truth without turning pain into identity. Language that leaves room for the body to change.

Instead of saying, “My body is broken,” we might say, “My body is overwhelmed and asking for support.”

Instead of saying, “I am diseased,” we might say, “My body is showing me where attention is needed.”

Instead of saying, “My immune system is attacking me,” we might say, “My immune system is helping me rid my body of ingested toxins.”

Instead of saying, “I will always be this way,” we might say, “This is where I am today, but it can change and move forward.”

That is not denial.

That is positive dignity and integrity.

It is the difference between naming reality and surrendering identity.

The same is true of thought.

We may not be able to control every thought that enters the mind, but we can become conscious of the thoughts we feed, repeat, rehearse, and eventually believe.

A thought repeated long enough becomes familiar. Familiar becomes normal. Normal becomes identity. And identity becomes instruction.

So, part of healing is learning to hear and interrupt the inner language of defeat before it becomes the body’s operating system – if it hasn’t already.

This is not about pretending. It is not about standing in front of the mirror saying things we do not believe. It is about speaking to the body with respect, truth, and possibility.

“My body is listening.”

“My body is responding.”

“My body is asking for support.”

“My body is not my enemy.”

“I am learning what I need.”

“I am not a label.”

“I am not a statistic.”

“I am not the worst-case story I found online at midnight.”

“I am a living being, and healing is possible.”

These words may seem simple, but simple is not the same as weak.

Spoken often enough, with sincerity, they can begin to change the inner environment in which healing happens.

And this is where the other side of language becomes so important.

If negative words can wound the body, positive words can help restore it.

Kindness carries energy.

Truth carries energy.

Love carries energy.

Hope carries energy.

Faith carries energy.

Gratitude carries energy.

Encouragement carries energy.

Humor carries energy.

And when these words are spoken frequently — not mechanically, not as empty slogans, but with warmth, presence, and belief — they can create a very different internal state.

A person who has been living under the weight of fear may begin to breathe again. A child who has been carrying shame may begin to soften and open. A patient who has been reduced to a diagnosis may begin to remember they are still a whole human being with potential. A family living in dread may begin to laugh at the dinner table again.

This is not insignificant platitudes.

Sometimes the miracle begins before the lab changes.

Sometimes the miracle begins when the person’s eyes come back to life.

Sometimes the miracle begins when they laugh for the first time in months or even years.

Sometimes the miracle begins when they stop speaking death over their own body and begin, even cautiously, to speak life and living.

And Then There Is Laughter

And then there is laughter.

Laughter may be one of the most underestimated medicines left to us.

Not because it replaces nutrition, herbs, minerals, sleep, sunlight, movement, prayer, detoxification, or appropriate care.

It does not.

But laughter does something profound that we too often overlook: it changes the body’s state.

It interrupts fear. It softens the jaw. It opens the breath. It loosens the belly. It changes the room.

It signals to the autonomic nervous system, even for a moment, “We are alive. We are here. We are safe enough to breathe. We are together. There is still life to be lived.”

That may sound simple, but it is not!

A body trapped in fear is not in its deepest state of healing. Fear tightens. Fear contracts. Fear narrows the future down to the diagnosis, the symptom, the prognosis, the worst-case scenario. Fear can make a person feel as though their life has been reduced to one word spoken in an exam room.

Laughter breaks that spell.

Even briefly, laughter reminds the body that it is more than the label. More than the pain. More than the fear. More than the chart. More than the story it has been told.

Humor may be one of the most powerful forms of healing language because it bypasses the defenses.

It does not lecture the nervous system.

It does not argue with fear.

It slips past the guard and reminds the body, “There is still joy here.”

That is why laughter can feel like oxygen.

That is why it can change a room.

That is why it can bring a person back from the edge of despair.

And yes, I have seen positive words, hopeful thoughts, and real laughter participate in what any honest person in the room would call miraculous.

Not because words replace food, rest, minerals, sunlight, detoxification, prayer, love, or necessary care, but because they change the energetic field in which all healing takes place.

The body heals best where there is safety.

The body heals best where there is hope.

The body heals best where there is love.

And very often, the body heals best where there is laughter.

Norman Cousins and Patch Adams

Norman Cousins understood something about this.

In Anatomy of an Illness, Cousins famously wrote about using laughter, hope, and a change in emotional state as part of his own healing journey. Whether one reads his story as science, testimony, or simply the lived experience of a man refusing to be swallowed by his diagnosis, the wisdom remains powerful: the inner life of the patient matters. The emotional environment matters. The state of the nervous system matters. The will to live, laugh, connect, and hope matters.

Patch Adams understood something similar.

Patch Adams understood that healing is not merely the removal of disease. Even though he practiced traditional modern medicine, his results were significant. He recognized the importance of restoring humanity. His work with humor, clowning, play, presence, and human connection was never just about making people laugh for entertainment. It was about bringing life back into places that had become sterile, frightened, and mechanical.

It was about remembering that the person in the bed is not a diagnosis.

They are human beings who still need joy, dignity, tenderness, absurdity, touch, eye contact, and laughter.

This does not mean laughter cures everything – though who knows?

That would probably be too simplistic.

But it does mean laughter belongs in the conversation.

It belongs in the home.

It belongs around the dinner table.

It belongs in the healing room.

It belongs at the bedside.

And it most certainly belongs in the clinic or hospital.

It belongs wherever fear has become too heavy, and the human spirit needs to remember that it has not disappeared.

I have always used humor to help my clients. Though I have, on occasion, missed the mark, I have witnessed that timely humor can lower walls, release trauma, and reveal deeper truths. I have seen it animate the spirit and help heal the flesh. Clinically applied humor is no joke!

Traditional cultures knew this, too.

Healing was rarely separated from story, song, prayer, ceremony, humor, community, and shared meals. The grandmother’s joke, the ridiculous story told at exactly the right moment, the teasing around the table, the laughter that breaks through tears — these were not distractions from healing.

They were part of healing.

Sometimes laughter is the first sign that the soul has not given up.

Sometimes it is the first breath after a long season of holding everything in.

Sometimes it is the body remembering that it was not made only to survive.

And sometimes, yes, it may be the best medicine.

Making Health Human Again

If we are serious about making people healthy again, we have to talk about more than food, toxins, medications, policies, and protocols.

We have to talk about language.

We have to talk about the words spoken over children.

The labels placed on patients.

The stories families pass down as fate.

The way people speak to themselves in the mirror.

The way fear becomes identity.

And the way identity becomes biology.

A healthier culture will not be built only by changing what is on our plates, although that matters deeply.

It will not be built only by cleaning up our soil, water, air, and food supply, although those are essential.

It will also require cleaning up the words we use.

Because the body is always listening.

Children are listening.

Patients are listening.

Families are listening.

The nervous system is listening.

The immune system is listening.

The soul is listening.

Every word we speak carries something.

Kindness creates healing.

Truth brings freedom.

Love restores the soul.

Hope opens the heart.

Faith builds strength.

Compassion soothes the nervous system.

Gratitude changes the atmosphere.

Healing words renew the body.

Strength carries us forward.

Life flows through words.

So perhaps the old saying needs to be rewritten.

Sticks and stones may break our bones.

But words can wound us.

Words can shape us.

Words can trap us.

Words can free us.

And when used with wisdom, humility, truth, humor, and love, words can be powerful medicine that helps heal us.

Closing Invitation

This first post is an invitation.

Do not believe every word I say.

Not to abandon discernment.

Not to pretend pain is not real.

Not to ignore the seriousness of illness.

But to begin listening differently.

To listen to the words spoken over you.

To listen to the words you speak over yourself.

To listen to the labels you may have accepted as destiny.

To listen to the body, not as an enemy, but as a messenger.

Your body is not trying to betray you.

Your body is trying to be heard.

And once we hear it — once we begin to correct the many causes that have created so much of modern man’s dis-ease — tremendous healing becomes possible.

So I will leave you with this:

Choose your words.

Choose them with care.

Choose them with courage.

Choose them with humor.

Choose them with love.

Speak life.

Speak healing.

Speak truth.

Your body is listening!!!

This is the kind of conversation I want to keep having here: honest, rooted, curious, and willing to look beneath the label.

If this spoke to you, subscribe, share it with someone who has been carrying a diagnosis too heavily, and leave a comment with one phrase you are ready to stop speaking over your body.

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Dr Jeremy & Naturally Betters Mission

Restoring health. Rebuilding humanity.
Truth-first, soul-inclusive health education that puts people before profit, knowledge before dogma, and healing back where it belongs with the individual.

Main Website www.JeremyAyres.com

Podcast www.DoctorsNOmore.com