My name is Silas. For eighteen years I designed the food in your cupboard.

The bread that never goes stale, the sauce that never separates, the snack you cannot stop eating. Every long list on the back of a bag — I have written lists like it. I know what each of those things does and why it is in there, because I put them in myself.

At forty-one my body gave out. That is when I stopped eating what I used to make and went back to the source: real food, from a kitchen, that you can name every part of. I was born in Scotland; I have been farming here in the United States since 2013. It is how I got my health back, and it is the only thing I eat now.

Silas burning supermarket packaging in a steel barrel, his old lab coat on top

The last of the samples, and the coat I wore while I made them.

This is what this page is for. I show you what is really in your food, and what to eat instead — one simple thing at a time. No supplements, no pills, nothing you cannot buy at an ordinary supermarket. For every complaint I had after fifty there turned out to be a natural answer, and I wrote every one of them down. Two of those pages are below, in full. Read them and decide for yourself.

Read this list slowly. See how much of it is yours.

Getting out of a low chair takes a moment now. You have started using the arms, and you did not decide to.
By the middle of the afternoon there is nothing left in the tank. You have built your day around knowing that.
The face in the photograph is not the one you carry in your head. Duller, heavier, tireder — and nothing you have bought in a bottle has moved it.
Your knees have something to say about the stairs. Your hands have something to say about a cold morning. Neither of them used to.
Your hair is thinner than it was and your skin has lost something you cannot name. So you have been buying it back, a jar at a time.
You are up at three. Not because of anything — just up, and then lying there.
You are foggier than you were. Slower to the word, less sharp, less bothered — and you have quietly decided that this is simply what happens.

Not one of those turned up on a particular day. That is exactly what makes them so easy to file under getting older and never look at again. I filed every one of them, and I was wrong about every one.

And one thing for everyone who writes to me about their skin. Health and beauty are the same thing. There is no cream that does what a year of eating properly does — the only way I know to look better for longer is to live better, and everything on this site works on both at once.

One glass, one complaint

The notebook open on the page for glass five: a drawn glass with beetroot, lemon, ginger and rocket labelled, a sketch of a blood vessel widening, and a boxed note, two hours before walking

One complaint, one glass, four things in it, and the hour it works. This is number five, as I wrote it down.

5 Cold feet in a warm room

250 ml beetroot juice
juice of half a lemon
a thumb-sized piece of ginger
a good handful of rocket, blitzed through it

When two hours before you walk.

Beetroot and rocket are full of nitrate, and your body turns that into the gas that tells your arteries to let go. Lemon protects that nitrate on the way in. Ginger pushes blood out to your hands and feet — the places furthest from your heart, and therefore the first you lose.

Avoid antiseptic mouthwash. The bacteria on your tongue perform that conversion. Without them, all those leaves come to nothing.

Four things from an ordinary supermarket, the hour it works, and why. I have fifty of these — one for every complaint after fifty — and ten of them are free. Five are on the next page → Stiff neck, the three o'clock slump, knees on the stairs, awake at three, ankles thick by evening.

What I send you

The ten glasses. One for every complaint: what goes in, and the hour it works.
The recipes. Bread, cookies, ice cream, jam. No flour, no refined sugar, nothing off a long list.
The supermarket list. What to leave on the shelf, what to take home instead, and how to read a label in the two seconds you actually spend looking.
The day each book is finished. You hear it here first, and pay less for it than anyone who comes after.

1,357 people are on the list.

One email now to check the address is really yours. Click the link in it and the glasses open straight away. After that, nothing until there is something worth telling you.

From the kitchen: easy, natural, no long list

The notebook open on a recipe page headed potato bread: a drawn bowl with a potato and an egg, four bread rolls on a tray, and a boxed note, no flour, no yeast

Bread from one potato and one egg. The page, and the roll it makes.

1 Potato bread

one boiled potato, cooled and mashed dry
one egg
half a cup of thick Greek yogurt
a teaspoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt, sesame seeds on top

How mix, shape five small buns on baking paper, sesame on top, twenty minutes in a hot oven until the tops are golden.

No flour, no yeast, nothing off the long list on the back of a bag. Protein from the egg and the yogurt, so it holds you longer than a white roll. And a potato that has been cooked and cooled turns part of its starch into resistant starch, which is food for the bacteria in your gut. That is the whole point of eating the potato this way instead of a bag of bread.

If the dough is too wet to shape, let it stand five minutes. A floury potato works best.

Three things from the kitchen, and you can say the name of every one of them. Three more like it are on the next page → Cookies without flour, chocolate ice cream without sugar, and a jam that sets in the fridge.

What I send you

The ten glasses. One for every complaint: what goes in, and the hour it works.
The recipes. Bread, cookies, ice cream, jam. No flour, no refined sugar, nothing off a long list.
The supermarket list. What to leave on the shelf, what to take home instead, and how to read a label in the two seconds you actually spend looking.
The day each book is finished. You hear it here first, and pay less for it than anyone who comes after.

1,357 people are on the list.

One email now to check the address is really yours. Click the link in it and the glasses open straight away. After that, nothing until there is something worth telling you.

The guide

Silas Kerr holding a worn black notebook stuffed with loose pages

Eighteen years of making the food. Fourteen years of undoing it. One notebook.

Everything I know about living naturally is in this notebook, and I am writing it out as a book — for somebody who does not work in a laboratory.

The notebook open on a page headed never again: a drawn molecule, a graph that peaks and crashes at three in the afternoon, and a sketched food packet with three lines of its label circled in red

The list I would have paid to see twenty years earlier.

What to leave on the supermarket shelf — by name, and how to see it on a label in the two seconds you actually spend looking. Three tests you can do tonight →
What to take home instead. Same shop, same money, a different basket.
What eighteen years on the inside taught me — what those things do, why they are in there, and what twenty years of eating them does to a body.
The notes. What I changed, in what order, what made the biggest difference, and what turned out to be a waste of time.

Three books, one notebook

The guide is the first. Two more come out of the same notebook: Fifty Glasses — one for every complaint, with what goes in and the hour it works — and The Recipes, everything I bake and cook without flour, refined sugar or a long list. The people on this list hear the day each one is ready, and pay less for it than anyone who comes after.

My book, and the other kind

	My book	The others
Where it comes from	Eighteen years inside the industry that makes the food. I wrote the labels.	A marketing department that has never seen a label from the inside.
What it asks of you	The supermarket you already go to, and your own kitchen.	A monthly payment, and faith.
Can you check it	Tonight. Pour boiling water over your chicken and watch.	No. That is why it comes with testimonials.
What it wants	To make you need it less every month.	To make you need it more every month.
A year on	You read every label you pick up, without thinking about it.	Twelve jars further, and no wiser.

Silas writing in a notepad at a wooden table on the farm porch

This table, most mornings, before there is anything else to do.

What I send you

The ten glasses. One for every complaint: what goes in, and the hour it works.
The recipes. Bread, cookies, ice cream, jam. No flour, no refined sugar, nothing off a long list.
The supermarket list. What to leave on the shelf, what to take home instead, and how to read a label in the two seconds you actually spend looking.
The day each book is finished. You hear it here first, and pay less for it than anyone who comes after.

1,357 people are on the list.

One email now to check the address is really yours. Click the link in it and the glasses open straight away. After that, nothing until there is something worth telling you.

I use your address for two things: to send you the ten glasses and the recipes, and to tell you about the books — plus the occasional letter about what I am growing, eating and reading. Never sold, never passed on. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and you can ask me to delete your address at any time. The details are in the privacy notice.

Nothing on this page is medical advice, and I am not your doctor. If you take medication, talk to whoever prescribed it before you change anything.