Return to Eden

It's time to Make America Healthy Again

BY KONRAD VERBAARSCHOTT

I make a daily habit of smiling at as many strangers as I can. Looking into another’s eyes and confronting them with the opportunity to receive joy can tell you an awful lot about where their soul is at. The vast majority of souls that I encounter are not in a good place. I see fear. Anger. Pain. But perhaps most frighteningly — and most commonly these days — I see nothing at all.

Why? People know on an instinctual level that something is wrong with the world around them and desperately, subrationally, seek to distance themselves from it. The city air is noxious. Toxic food dulls our senses. Filtered and sanitized tap water does not properly quench our thirst. Everyone is fat, or skinny-fat, and yet everyone is hungry. I do not need to show you a photo of Malibu from the 1960s to explain this. I know you’ve seen it.

And you know that it did not used to be this way. A few lines from this hymn by Andrew Peterson come to mind: 

Do you feel the world is broken? (We do)

Do you feel the shadows deepen? (We do)

Do you wish that you could see it all made new? (We do)

The cure to this mass dissociation and its manifold symptoms — chronic fatigue, brain fog, depression, and hyperactivity — evades the ‘expert,’ who perceives an obesity epidemic as an Ozempic deficiency. He sees the world this way because that is how he was taught, but also because GLP-1 does actually suppress hunger, forcing your body to lose weight by starving it. It does not, however, address the core wound: why are people so hungry to begin with? They crave what they cannot quite put into words. They long for real food.

The government, leading scientists, and other ‘experts’ will tell you that ‘real food’ is an outdated notion. Food is fuel. Calories. Vitamins. It’s math. Put the right chemicals into your body and you solve the math problem. Put less food in, get skinny. Put more in, get fat. One-ingredient steak is indistinguishable, they say, from the 40-ingredient lab experiment Whole Foods is pushing and the bioengineered synthetic stuff that the U.S. government is currently attempting to feed its soldiers. But you, reader, know better. Your gut knows better. Ultrapasteurizing milk, bleaching chicken, and lacing baby formula with engine lubricant will, as time unfolds, be exposed by the scientific literature as practices antithetical to human flourishing. But today, you have your gut. That should be enough.

It’s okay to make a decision because your gut tells you to. Tucker Carlson recently gave a brilliant monologue during his cross-country roadshow to this effect: “Your first line of defense is your instincts… When someone is lying to you, you can feel it.” I used to think that making judgment calls on account of my instincts alone was low. Dangerous. Perhaps even morally wrong. But that, said Tucker, is “our chief weakness as people: we override the truth as delivered by our instincts… we talk ourselves out of what we already know.” 

Not every truth can be quantified by a double-blind study. Ask a centipede which of its hundred legs moves fastest, and it will stop moving; remind yourself that you are breathing, and suddenly the automatic task again becomes manual. In the same manner, we have offshored too much of our intuitive gut-level judgment to our intellect. Deep down (there is some variability here from person to person), we know which foods sustain us and which ones play with our serotonin and cortisol levels like ragdolls. There’s a study for that, too. But do you need it? We trick ourselves into believing that the difference between how we feel directly after downing a bag of chips in a fluorescent cubicle (greasy, lethargic) versus how we feel after sipping on a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice under the gleaming sun (vibrant, clear-eyed) is not valuable information because the orange juice has… let me check my notes here… a lot of sugar in it.

Is intuition everything? Of course not. Men are not beasts. The Bible clearly warns against devolving into creatures of instinct, driven by passion without restraint. But it also tells us that the Law, a series of God-weaved rhythms sewn into the fabric of nature, is written on our hearts. Those rhythms instruct us by bending our sympathies toward things conducive to life: the calming beauty of a sunset; the vibrant tang of sun-kissed citrus; the acuity that only a night of proper sleep and prayer can bring to a weary mind. Our ancestors, through time-honored experience and tradition, accumulated these insights and passed them down. 

Our intuitions used to serve us far better. The modern world is hell-bent on dulling our God-given drives, hollowing them out, and replacing them with an affinity for their opposites. But if you’re anything like me (as I suspect you are, for human nature is ubiquitous by design) you are not satisfied with the bright fluorescent lights, clinical hallways, vacuous black mirrors, and 24/7 news updates. Canola oil, ‘fortified’ grains, and colorful dyes do not fill your stomach. They bloat and sicken you. You grow tired; your brain gets fuzzy. These are features, not bugs, of the current system. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, look at how Kellogg’s got its start. These food-like substances were designed to disrupt your natural rhythms and keep you as short-sighted, depressed, and malleable as possible.

Addiction, chronic disease, and mental illness are not the blessings of civilization but the maladies of an empty and decadent people, deracinated from the Garden they were designed to inherit. You were not made to wallow in the mire, sick and domesticated. You were made to reason with God. The powers that be are using every tool at their disposal to make sure that you not only forget that but lack the strength and discipline to turn back the clock. But you, friend, have the power to draw a line in the sand. Get outside. Bite into something real. Open the Psalms and start reading. If you’re new to the club and don’t know where to begin, this magazine will surely put you on the right track. As Ray Peat famously said, “keeping up the metabolic rate is the main thing. There are lots of ways to do it.” So figure out what works for you. Reactivate your dormant intuition. Reclaim your birthright. Return to Eden.

This article was written by Konrad Verbaarschott. Konrad is a menswear illustrator and character designer based in the United States. Check out his work on Instagram at @kv.schott_art.

Access previous issues and our links here. Godspeed beautiful people 🥂