Diet And Health – A Personal Journey

People that know me have asked me to write about my personal health journey, in light of the fact that I am over 60, am happy, healthy and live without the need for any pharmaceutical products at all.

So here is my story and in it you will see that it links in to my passionate belief that the earth is abundant with the nutrition required by humans to thrive and that we do not need either government health authorities, or any pharmaceutical companies to dictate what is “safe” or “in the interests of public health”.

I was born in Australia and grew up in a household where my parents worked diligently to show me how to live off the land. Even though we lived in a small suburban home, my father made trips every week to the “country” to go hunting, fishing and foraging. We at freshly caught rabbits, fish, eels and occasionally wild boars. We also ate many vegetables that were grown in our back garden in addition to a wide variety of mushrooms that we found in our neighbourhood paddocks and bushland. I have fond memories of coming home with buckets of blackberries and mushrooms.

As a child I absolutely loved the food we ate. At school, when I told the other kids about what I ate, they were quick to turn up their noses. I had different things in my lunchbox to the other kids and this promoted a feeling of isolation, as there was nothing I could “share” with the other kids.

We had very little spare money in our household and so the food we ate was all home cooked and made from very cheap market produce. We ate the hearts, liver and kidneys from animals as these were available for next to nothing at the butcher. Even the minced beef we bought had a very high percentage of fat. We also ate abundant quantities of seasonal vegetables with every main meal. Seasonal vegetables are always the cheapest ones you can buy.

On reflection today, with what I know today, I can see why I had an exceptionally healthy foundation to my body’s development as the child.

When I left home an went to university, I had to look after my own diet. I partially continued to do what my parents had done but I took note of what the health authorities were saying and the modified my diet as follows:

The first “fad” was the amount of salt in my diet. The messaging was salt leads to heart attack.

I completely eliminated salt out of the food that I ate for over 10 years until I found through research on the topic that salt is an essential requirement for our body to function at full potential and that the correlation of salt intake and heart disease was not conclusive.

During that time, “low fat” diet “fad” was introduced, again as recommended by government health authorities and I too changed my diet to reduce nearly all fats from what I ate. Since this messaging was so strong, I did this for over 20 years.

Over this period, I still remained reasonably healthy, but I would not say that I was flourishing. I had weekly migraines which I just put down to bad genetics, as my dad had them too. I also had fluctuations in energy levels over the day which I put down to everything else, other than my diet. I did however, find that pain killers did nothing for my migraines and chose therefore to simply live with the pain.

I then developed a close relationship with a lovely chiropractor, who educated me on the biochemistry of our bodies. This was a life changing experience. I drank water every day. I learned that salt is an essential component to many of our internal body chemistry and therefore I added small amounts of salt to all of my meals and explored alternative health resources, worldwide.

As a maturing adult I had some ailments that didn’t go away, including my weekly migraines, so I went to see a naturopath who diagnosed that I may have a very adverse reaction to wheat products. It was then that I had to look at my very high consumption of Wheat Bix breakfast and my intake of processed bread with every meal.

Here came my next shock. I stopped eating wheat completely and within 2 days, almost all of my ailments disappeared. But we were told by health authorities that it was “healthy” to have breakfast and best breakfast to have was the multitude of wheat-based products on the market.

If the health authorities have been so wrong about so many things, perhaps there was better information out there, so I again researched and explored the possibility that eating meat was not good for me. I did this for 15 years. Needless to say, my overall health did not get better and over the 15 years I had acquired other ailments that could only be addressed by consuming supplements (many of which occur naturally in animal products).

I then decided that humans were never meant to be vegetarians, even though they could survive for very long periods without eating animals. I had read that the structure of our teeth would suggest that we were omnivores. So I decided to eat animal products again.

Then in the quest to find the perfect diet for me, I then tried both Paleo and Keto for many months at time as I felt that the logic behind the nutrition regimes seems to be heading in the direction for better health. The extra fats in the diets improved my energy levels and the reduction of sugars greatly moderated peaks in hunger and mental function.

I felt much better on both diets and could see myself doing this for rest of my life.

Then about 3 years ago, I was directed to this video: Fasting For Survival Lecture by Dr Pradip Jamnadas.

What Dr Jamnadas proposed made sense to me at the time. Then, since I had nothing to lose, as fasting costs nothing and I could stop it whenever I wanted, I tried it. This turned out to be a new awakening. The following happened for me after I followed the fasting guidelines for 6 months:

• I lost 8 Kg of body weight – permanently
• my migraines completely disappeared – permanently
• my daily energy levels remained consistently high for a whole day
• my brain exploded with new ideas
• I lost my middle-age spread!

I am now truly thriving, rather than just surviving. I now eat in restricted time windows in each day and miss a day here and there. When I eat, I eat food that I cook myself using the prolific recipes found on Keto and Paleo websites and books, using locally sourced fresh meats and vegetables.

Since this was such a significant change in my life, I have continued to research the whole medical/health/food domain to help me understand where humans have gone wrong and hopefully help others to understand that good health is a lifestyle choice.

I now have breakfast after midday (usually around 2:30pm) and follow that up with an evening meal when the family comes home. I then stop all eating by around 9:00pm. I have been doing this for the last 12 months and feel amazing. These times are completely arbitrary and work well with my daily activities, but they are also not set in stone. However, what I do very strictly is, make sure that the two meals each day are of the highest quality natural local foods that I can get, based on where I live and the time of year.

So based on my observations in my own life, on my own health and lifestyle, I have come the following conclusions:

• All humans are omnivores
• Different humans in different climates need different foods to thrive
• Survival is not thriving
• The biggest threat to humanity is misinformation from government health authorities.
• The quantity of food for thriving is not as important as the quality of food that we eat. I spend so much less on food now, enjoy the food I eat more and feel healthier than ever before. Our ancestors got this right!
• Time restricted eating is beneficial to most humans, but the actual regiment that will work for any individual will depend heavily on their lifestyle and current health disposition.
• Exercise, diet and fasting is not a one size fits all. This is opposite to the health message of “exercise and eat less calories”.
• The messaging that says “you can eat anything in moderation” is completely wrong. This attitude promotes either bad health, bad habits and at best, only allows you to survive. You will never thrive, by doing this.
• Pharmaceuticals should be only be considered to solve your health/dietary problems, as a last resort. Always consult your history books first to see if our ancestors had your problem prior to the industrial revolution. If they didn’t then question the medical narrative.
• Sugar, or any supplementary glucose products, should be the first item removed from the diet of anybody considering making a changes in their life. There are countless studies done on the negative effects of sugar in our diet and yet, it is still such a dominant ingredient in all manufactured products in 2024.
• The World Health Organisation and the World Economic Forum do not have our healthy happy and thriving existence at heart.
• Everybody should explore how abundant nature is and read about how our ancestors lived, as this will help to put things in perspective, question narratives and then navigate the future.

Both of my parents have passed away, but I consider myself so lucky that they had the wisdom and understanding to teach me fundamentals which will live with me forever.

-Brian Yetman