Declared Interests and How to Use This Book

Declared Interests — Ours

You’re about to read a book that spends a great deal of its length asking who’s paid for what, the research that became regulations and mandates that rule the food industry, the medical establishment, and profoundly impact your life. We’re going to show you much of it, but we’re also asking you to check for yourself. Your life is too important to just trust others who claim to be experts. The unhealthy result of following them is all around us.

This book comes from Bar Anchor M Ranch, in Alberta, where we raise cattle and sell beef — some of it to people eating the way this book describes. That’s a real commercial interest, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. If a chapter of this book happened to argue you should eat more beef for reasons that only benefited us, you’d be right to be suspicious of it.

So here’s the line we’ve held to everywhere in this book, stated plainly: no product in this book is recommended because we profit from it, and nothing here is an advertisement for our own operation. Where the book mentions buying a quarter or a half of beef from a local source, that advice applies to any honest rancher near you — not specifically to us.

And a second commitment, just as firm: no affiliate marketing, anywhere, ever. Not in this book, not on the ranch’s website, not in any resource this book points you toward. When a brand or a product is named, it’s because it’s genuinely the thing we’d hand to our own family — not because a link pays anyone a percentage. Most books being sold in this health and wellness space run on affiliate income. This one doesn’t, and it never will.

A word on the “we.” It’s not a figure of speech. Family read every draft of this book. A retired physician reviewed the chapter on your lab results and made it better. A physiotherapist checked every exercise for exactly the kind of mistake that could hurt someone. That’s the crew this byline is naming, and it’s the same crew you’ll hear from in every chapter that follows.

Why say all this up front, before you’ve even started? Because the whole argument of this book is that you should ask this exact question of every claim you’re handed — who benefits, and would they tell you if they didn’t. We’d be hypocrites to ask that of your doctor, your government, and every guideline committee in this book, and then quietly exempt ourselves from it.

You don’t have to take our word for any of this. You just have to keep asking the question. That’s the whole point.

How to Use This Book

If you're reading this book because you know your health is going down hill, because you're already in pain, because you've been told this is just what getting older feels like, because you're not sure there's anything left worth trying — we want to say this plainly, before anything else in this book: there is genuine hope. You are not too old, and you are not too far gone. If you're still alive, you still have time to make a real difference in how you feel, how you move, and how long you get to feel like yourself.

Maybe you're reading this for yourself. Maybe you're reading it because someone you love is already living this, and you want to understand it well enough to actually help them.

That's not a promise we make lightly, and it's not a slogan. It's the whole reason this book exists, and it's exactly what the next ninety days are built to give you.

We get there through three things, working together: what you eat, what you understand, and when you do each. Deliberate, scheduled choices about food, about the medications you're already taking, and about a plan that unfolds in a specific order — not because the order is arbitrary, but because a body in pain needs a different first step than a body that's ready to learn why any of this works.

By the end of this book, you'll be better educated and able to educate yourself — to read a claim, check it, understand your own lab results, ask better questions of your health care providers, make informed decisions about your own health for the rest of your life, and you'll also be able to defend those decisions intelligently.

Plainly, then: you will understand. You will be capable. You will not be at the mercy of a system that hasn't served you.

The ninety days of very specific foods, daily stretching, and movement is how you get there. The method is the thing you keep.

This book has a shape, and it’s worth knowing it before you start.

The first fortnight asks nothing of you but the doing. No decisions, no research, no judgment calls — just fourteen days, laid out day by day, meal by meal, built for a body that’s tired and in pain and doesn’t have room left over to think hard about food. If you’re feeling rough right now, this is exactly where you should be. Don’t skip ahead looking for the reasons behind it yet. The reasons are coming, once you're steady enough to actually take them in.

Once the rest of Month 1 is behind you, Month 2 is where you learn why it works. Cholesterol, your labs, the guidelines that shaped what your doctor told you, the science behind the food itself. This is the part of the book that turns you from someone following instructions into someone who understands their own body well enough to keep going without this book in your hand.

Month 3 brings it together. What safely comes back into the pantry, what stays gone, how to gauge where you are ninety days in, and where you go from here.

The back of the book is a toolkit, not a chapter you read straight through. The appendices — sugar’s other names, additives worth knowing, your medication watch list, the restock list, your ship’s log — are built to be used, not read once and forgotten. Several are designed specifically to be photographed on your phone and taken to the store. Use them that way.

One more thing about the shape of this book, and it matters: every claim worth making is a claim worth checking, so we’ve sourced this book the way a researcher would — not just by naming a study in passing, but by giving you the exact address of it.

Why bother with the formal citation style rather than just telling you the study’s name in the sentence? Because if you ever hand this book to a doctor, or a dietitian, or a sceptical son-in-law with a science degree, we want the first thing they notice to be that this isn’t another pulp wellness book riding a trend. It's built the way an academic paper they'd actually respect is built using the APA citation format — and that matters, because the people most likely to dismiss this book on sight are exactly the people your health depends on taking you seriously.

Here and there through these pages, you’ll see something like this: chronic inflammation plays a measurable role in disease across the lifespan (Furman et al., 2019). That bit in parentheses — a name, a year — isn’t decoration. It’s an address. Turn to the bibliography at the back of the book, find the chapter you’re reading, and that name and year lead you straight to the full study: who wrote it, where it was published, and how you can go find it and read it yourself.

The bibliography is sorted by chapter, not as one long alphabetical list. A strict academic reference list would put every source together, A to Z, which is useless to flip through unless you already know exactly what you’re looking for. Ours is grouped the way you’re actually reading the book, so if you want to check something in the cholesterol chapter, you turn to the cholesterol chapter’s list in the back — not hunt through three hundred sources for one name.

You don’t have to look anything up to follow this book. But the option is always there, on every claim that matters.

And since the option is there, here's how to actually use it — not just for this book, but for anything you read afterwards. You don't need a medical background or a university library. You need a cell phone, a browser, and a few minutes. If you only remember six questions, remember these:

1. Is this a study, or somebody talking about a study? Find the original.

2. Who was studied — and are they anything like you? Findings in young athletes may not transfer to a woman of seventy. Findings in mice transfer to nobody.

3. Was it randomised? Was it blinded? Was it epidemiological — often nothing more than an online survey asking people to recall a years worth of information — hardly scientific. Only a true clinical trial can show a cause.

4. Did they find what they said in advance they'd look for? You can check this. Most people never do.

5. Who paid for it? It's usually printed at the end, in small type.

6. Retractions — some papers get retracted by the medical journals for very dubious reasons. Others for very legitimate reasons and still get quoted for decades. Learn the difference.

That's the whole method, and it's the most useful thing in this book. The full version — with the actual tools to use and a worked example — is in Appendix E at the back, and we'd rather you read it than most of the chapters.

Start with us. Take one claim from the chapters ahead — ideally one you didn't like — and run it through those six questions. If it holds, you'll trust the next one for better reasons than our tone of voice. If it doesn't, you'll have caught something we got wrong, which is exactly the skill we're trying to hand you.

Nobody is checking on your behalf. Learning to do it yourself is the point of the whole thing.

A few conventions you’ll see throughout, so they’re not a surprise the first time:

ACCEPTABLE LEVELS boxes cover regulatory gaps — what a number actually means, and what it doesn’t.

DECLARED INTERESTS boxes disclose who funded what, every time it’s relevant — including, right up front, our own.

Take This With You points you to a specific appendix page, built for exactly the moment you’re in.

One last thing. You don’t have to read this book in order if you don’t want to. If you’re in pain right now and you just need to know what to eat tonight, turn straight to the First Fortnight and start there. The rest of it will still be here when you’re ready for it.

Followed properly, what’s in here can make a significant difference. And the earlier you start, the sooner your body can shed the unnecessary fat it’s carrying — along with the real persistent pollutants stored in that fat — and get on with rebuilding you from the inside out.

And perhaps the greatest difference won’t be in your body at all. It’ll be in how you think and how you feel. There’s good reason to believe that even the act of looking for something better begins to turn things around.

That’s not nothing.