Food First. Then Fill the Gaps.

Real food, ferments, organ meats, and why I still keep a couple of supplements on the counter.

Somebody asked me last week why a real food person would talk about supplements at all. Good question! Here's my answer.

The short version

1. Eat real food first. Nothing in a bottle beats a plate.
2. Help your body absorb it. A damaged gut can't take in what you feed it. Ferments and a wide variety of fiber help.
3. Know that food doesn't always close the gap. Especially with celiac. Especially with vitamin D. Especially in winter.
4. Fill the actual gap. Yours, not the one an ad picked for you.
5. Test before you supplement. Test again after. Vitamins A and D can go too high and you will never feel it happening.

Everything below is just me showing my work on those four. Let's start where it all starts.

Real food wins. Every time.

I came to real food through Weston A. Price and Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions. Twenty years later I still haven't found a reason to leave.

Price traveled to isolated communities in the 1930s and found people eating their traditional foods had straight teeth, strong jaws, and healthy babies. Then white flour and sugar showed up. Within one generation, that changed. He took the photographs.

Why does whole food work so well? Three reasons I come back to.

Nutrients come with their helpers. Vitamin D needs fat and magnesium. Calcium needs K2. Iron absorbs better with vitamin C. Food packs them together the way they're supposed to be. A pill usually doesn't.

The dose stays sane. It's really hard to hurt yourself with liver and butter and eggs. It's not hard at all with capsules. More on that in a minute.

You get things nobody has named yet. We're still finding compounds in food. You can't put something in a tablet if nobody knows it's there.

Now, real food isn't only about what's on the plate. It's also about what your body can do with it. Which brings me to the jar in the back of my fridge.

Fermented foods

Just about every traditional culture I've read about or eaten in had a ferment. Sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, yogurt, miso. That's not a coincidence. It's how people kept food before refrigerators, and it turned out to feed us in ways nobody could have explained back then.

Fermentation predigests food. It breaks things down before they ever get to you, which is a gift when your gut isn't at full strength. You also get live bacteria and the compounds they make.

A few notes for our crowd:

• Sauerkraut and kimchi. Cheap, simple, easy at home. Cabbage and salt. That's the whole thing.
• Kefir and yogurt if dairy works for you. Some people who react to milk do fine with kefir, because the fermentation works over the lactose.
• Miso must be certified gluten-free. Plenty of miso is made with barley. Read it EVERY time. Formulas change.
• Soy sauce is wheat. I use coconut aminos and I don't miss it one bit.
• Sourdough is not safe for celiac. I know what you've read. Long fermentation lowers gluten. It does not remove it. Please don't.

Start with a forkful, not a bowl. If your gut has been through it, go slow.

Speaking of fermented dairy, I need to say something about the raw milk question, because I get asked constantly.

Raw milk

Raw milk from a clean, well-run, pasture-based dairy is a real food with a long history. A lot of people in our world feel better on it than on the pasteurized version. I get the appeal.

It also carries real risk. Listeria, salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter. And that risk doesn't land evenly. It's hardest on pregnant women, babies and little ones, older folks, and anyone whose immune system is down.

That last group includes a lot of you. If your celiac is newly diagnosed or untreated, your gut lining is damaged and your defenses aren't at full strength. That's exactly when a foodborne infection does the most damage.

If you do raw milk, know your farmer. See the operation. Ask what they test for. Check your state law, because it varies a lot. And if you're pregnant, feeding a little one, healing a damaged gut, or immune compromised, take this one to your doctor instead of the internet.

Back to safer ground, and to the food I wish more of us would try.

Organ meats

Liver is the most nutrient-dense food most of us will ever eat. And almost nobody eats it!

Beef, lamb, or chicken liver from a pasture-raised animal gives you vitamin A as retinol, which is the form your body uses straight off. B12 in serious amounts. Folate, iron, copper, zinc, choline. Our grandmothers served liver on purpose. They knew.

Bone broth, egg yolks from pastured hens, and butter from grass-fed cows carry fat-soluble nutrients that are hard to find anywhere else in the way most of us eat now.

If liver makes you gag, join the club. It took me years. Soak it in milk or lemon water first. Or grate it frozen into ground beef where nobody will ever know. Or start with chicken liver, which is much milder. Or take it in capsules. Nobody's handing out medals for this.

One serving a week is plenty. That's not a small dose, which brings me to the part I really want you to read.

So why would anybody need a supplement?

Because food doesn't always get where it's going. Four reasons.

1. Celiac breaks absorption

This is my soapbox and you knew it was coming.

Damaged villi don't absorb. You can eat a beautiful, careful, expensive diet and still come up short on iron, B12, folate, vitamin D, zinc, calcium, and magnesium. That's not a discipline problem. That's plumbing.

Healing takes months to years, not weeks. During that whole stretch, food alone may not close the gap no matter how well you eat.

2. The sun doesn't cooperate up here

Vitamin D is the one nutrient where geography beats groceries. Food only carries you about a fifth of the way, and for a good stretch of the year the sun up here can't make up the difference. I'll explain why further down, because it's not the reason most people think.

3. The soil and the food supply changed

Produce grows in worked soil, gets picked early, ships far, and sits. Animals are raised differently than they were. That doesn't make food worthless. It does mean the carrot on your counter isn't necessarily the carrot in the textbook.

4. Real life

I have five kids, my mom, and my brother in this house. Some weeks my big plans for homemade everything lose to whatever is actually happening on Tuesday. Fill the gap. Don't feel bad about the gap.

So if food doesn't always get there, the next question is what specifically tends to go missing.

What you're most likely short on, and what fixes it

Here's the list I'd want every celiac to have. Food source first, always. Supplement second, if the food isn't getting there.

• Iron. Liver, red meat, dark greens with something acidic. Low iron is the most common deficiency in newly diagnosed celiac. Get it tested, because too much iron is its own problem.
• B12. Liver, red meat, eggs, fish. Low B12 can look a whole lot like depression and like brain fog. Worth checking.
• Folate. Dark leafy greens, liver, beans. Damaged villi absorb it poorly.
• Vitamin D. Fatty fish, egg yolks, butter, sunshine when the sun cooperates. More on this below.
• Zinc. Beef, lamb, pumpkin seeds. Shows up as slow healing, catching everything, and losing taste or smell.
• Magnesium. Greens, nuts, seeds, mineral water. Involved in hundreds of reactions in your body and commonly low.
• Calcium. Dairy if you tolerate it, sardines with the bones, greens. Celiac raises bone density risk, so this one matters.
• Vitamin A. Liver, egg yolks, butter. As retinol, ready to use.
• Iodine. Sea vegetables, fish, eggs. Your thyroid needs it, and thyroid trouble can look like a dozen other things.
• Omega-3 fats. Fatty fish, pastured eggs, grass-fed meat.

Look at how many of those overlap with symptoms people write off as "just how I am." Tired. Foggy. Sad. Catching every bug. Those aren't personality traits. Sometimes they're a number on a lab report.

Before you go filling any of those, though, there's a step that makes everything else work better. Absorption.

Feeding the good bacteria takes more than yogurt

Remember those ferments? They give you the bacteria. Fiber is what FEEDS them once they get there. You need both, and this is the part I didn't understand for years.

Here's what I missed: different fibers feed different bacteria, and they do it in different sections of your colon. Taking one kind of fiber is like feeding one kid at a table of eight. Somebody's going hungry down at the end.

So variety beats amount. A wide range of plants beats a whole lot of one plant. Vegetables, fruit, beans if you tolerate them, nuts, seeds, whole gluten-free grains.

Most Americans get about half the fiber they need. Half! Year after year. And for our crowd it's often worse, because taking gluten out usually takes a lot of fiber with it, and the gluten-free replacements at the store are mostly white starch.

Where a fiber blend comes in

This is one of the two supplements I actually use, so let me tell you what's in it and why.

ZinoBiotic+ is a powdered blend of eight different fibers instead of one or two. Resistant starch from corn, potatoes, and green bananas. Beta-glucans from oats. Inulin. Fructo-oligosaccharides. Psyllium husk. Guar gum.

The variety is the whole design. Eight different fibers ferment in different stretches of the colon, so you're feeding the whole length of the table instead of one end.

What I like about it:

• No excipients. No fillers, no binders, no anti-caking anything. Just the active ingredients. If you've been reading labels as long as I have, you know how rare that is!
• The oat beta-glucans are specified gluten-free and free from contamination by other grains. I'll say more about that in a second, because of course I will.
• Vegan, GMO-free, and Informed Sport certified, which means it's been tested and cleared for banned substances. That's an athlete standard and I trust companies that submit to it.

Two things before you start. Drink extra water. Fiber without enough fluid leaves you constipated and miserable, which is the opposite of the point. And start low. If you're not used to this much fiber, half a dose for a while. There's usually an adjustment stretch while the bacteria population shifts. It passes. Don't take a full scoop on day one, feel bloated, and decide fiber isn't for you!

On the oats. The company specifies those beta-glucans as gluten-free and free from cross-grain contamination, and that's more than most companies bother to do. Even so, oats are oats. If you're highly sensitive, ask them directly for the current documentation on that ingredient before you order. Verify instead of assuming. I've been burned by assuming.

Get absorption working and everything else you eat goes further. Which brings me back to the one I promised to explain.

Vitamin D, and the winters we live through

Vitamin D isn't really a vitamin. Your body makes it when sunlight hits your skin and it acts more like a hormone. It supports normal immune function, helps you absorb calcium, and supports bone, muscle, teeth, and cell division.

Your skin makes it from a certain kind of sunlight called UVB, and UVB doesn't reach us year round. The further you live from the equator, the more months the sun sits too low for enough of it to get through.

So a blinding January afternoon feels like plenty of sun and gives your skin almost nothing to work with. You're not doing anything wrong! The light just isn't the right kind yet.

Food only carries you about a fifth of the way. Fatty fish, egg yolks, butter, liver. Good foods, not enough on their own in February.

And low vitamin D is quiet. It doesn't announce itself. People walk around low for years without knowing.

The test

There's an at-home dried blood spot test for this. Finger prick, few drops on a card, ten minutes to dry, into the mail. It measures 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is the standard and most accurate way to check your status, and it catches all three sources at once. What you ate, what you supplemented, and what your skin made.

No fasting. Results come back in plain graphs with recommendations for your number.

Rebuilding your stores takes three to four months, so retest every four months. If you only ever do it once, do it at the end of winter. That's when you'll see the truth about yourself.

If your number comes back low, Zinzino's vitamin D product is ZinoShine+, which pairs vitamin D with broad-spectrum magnesium. That pairing makes sense, because magnesium is part of converting vitamin D into the form your body actually uses.

That's one gap food can't always close. Here's the other, and it's where buying carefully matters more than anywhere else on this page.

Not all omega-3 supplements are the same

If you're going to buy one thing carefully, make it this one. The quality range is enormous and a bad one can work against you.

Rancidity is the big problem

Omega-3 fats are fragile. Heat, light, and air oxidize them. Oxidized fish oil isn't just useless, it hands your body oxidative stress, which is the opposite of why you bought it!

Studies that pulled fish oil off store shelves have found products already oxidized past accepted limits before anybody opened the bottle.

What to look for:

• A TOTOX value. That's total oxidation. If a company won't give you one, that tells you plenty.
• Antioxidant protection in the bottle. This is why I use a blend with high-polyphenol olive oil in it. Those polyphenols protect the fragile fats.
• Bite a capsule. Rancid is unmistakable. Trust your nose.
• Store it right. Cool, dark, sealed. Refrigerate after opening.

The rest of what separates them

• How much EPA and DHA is actually in a dose. Not "fish oil 1000mg" on the front. Flip it over and read the EPA and DHA numbers. Sometimes there's shockingly little in there.
• Which fish. Small short-lived fish like sardines and anchovies sit low on the food chain. Less accumulated junk than the big predator fish.
• Third-party testing for heavy metals and contaminants.
• Gluten-free status. Ask about the whole facility, not just the ingredient list.

The number nobody knows: your ratio

So that's how to pick a good one. But underneath all of that sits a bigger question, and I had it backwards for years.

It isn't "am I getting enough omega-3." It's what's my omega-6 to omega-3 ratio.

You need both. They're both essential. But they compete for the same enzymes and the same room in your cell membranes, so it's about proportion, not amount.

And our proportion has gone sideways in about three generations. Seed oils in everything, packaged food, grain-fed meat instead of pasture-raised. Omega-6 is everywhere now and omega-3 mostly disappeared off the plate.

Zinzino has run this test on over a million and a half samples. For people not supplementing, the average ratio is around 12:1 in Northern Europe, 15:1 across Europe, and about 25 to 1 in the United States. The target in the research is 3:1 or lower.

Twenty-five to one! Sit with that for a second, because I had to.

There's a dried blood spot test for this too. It reads eleven fatty acids and gives you your ratio. Red blood cells live about 120 days, so the number reflects months of eating, not last night's dinner. That's why the protocol is test, take the oil for 120 days, test again. You get a before and an after in writing.

Eat your way at it too. Fatty fish, pastured eggs, grass-fed meat, flax, walnuts, greens. Shop the perimeter of the store. The middle aisles are where the ratio gets wrecked.

Now, there's one omega-3 source our real food world loves dearly, and I have to talk about it separately because it comes with a catch.

Cod liver oil, and the part nobody mentions

Cod liver oil is beloved in the real food world and I understand exactly why. Traditional food. Omega-3s plus vitamins A and D in their natural forms. Generations of people have used it.

It's also where I see people get into trouble.

Vitamins A and D are fat soluble. Water-soluble vitamins wash out when you take too much. These don't. They pile up in your liver and your fat, quietly, for a long time before anything shows.

Cod liver oil is concentrated in both. One teaspoon can carry somewhere around 4,500 IU of preformed vitamin A, and amounts swing a lot between brands and even between batches.

The conventional upper limits for adults are about 3,000 mcg a day of preformed vitamin A and 4,000 IU a day of vitamin D, counting everything you take. Too much vitamin A over time is linked to liver trouble, hair loss, headaches, and lower bone density. It's one of the few nutrients shown to raise fracture risk at high intake.

Now, the Weston A. Price Foundation makes a case that natural food-form vitamin A is much better tolerated than the synthetic and water-miscible kinds, and that having enough vitamin D protects you against vitamin A toxicity. There's something to that and I don't wave it off. But it's an active disagreement in the field, not a settled question, and I'm not going to hand you one side and call it done.

Three things nobody argues about:

• Pregnant women should skip cod liver oil. Too much preformed vitamin A is linked to birth defects. This one isn't controversial and it isn't worth the risk.
• Stacking is what gets people. Cod liver oil, plus a multivitamin, plus a separate vitamin D, plus liver on Sunday. Each one is reasonable! Added up they can push past the line, and nobody is keeping the total.
• You can't feel it happening. Early symptoms are vague. Tired, headachy, queasy, no appetite. Looks like a hundred other things.

Which is the whole reason to test.

Everything so far has been about the body. But these same nutrients show up in one more place, and it's the one that surprises people most.

Food, mood, and the gut-brain connection

I wrote a whole book about this one so I'll try to keep it short here!

Your gut and your brain talk to each other constantly. Through the vagus nerve, through immune signaling, through compounds your gut bacteria make. If your digestion has been a mess for years, that isn't unrelated to how you feel. It isn't the whole story either. But it's not unrelated.

And your brain is mostly fat. DHA, one of the omega-3s, is structural. It's part of the membrane of your brain cells. If you're building brain tissue out of whatever's on hand, it's worth knowing what's on hand.

The nutrients your brain runs on are the same ones celiac steals. B6, B12, folate for building neurotransmitters. Magnesium. Iron. Iodine for your thyroid. Vitamin D. Look at that list again and then think about how many people get told their fog and their flatness is just stress.

Blood sugar plays here too. That crash after something sugary isn't only physical. Irritability, fog, that hollow three o'clock feeling. Protein at breakfast instead of something sweet changes some people's whole afternoon.

Viva+

Since people ask me about this one: Viva+ is in Zinzino's Restore line, which is the group aimed at brain fog, fatigue, and mood. What's in it:

• Affron, a standardized saffron extract from Spanish saffron stigmas. This is the active piece, standardized to at least 3.5% of its bioactive compounds. That standardization matters, because saffron extracts vary wildly.
• Magnesium from seawater
• B vitamins, including B6 and B12, from buckwheat sprouts
• Vitamin C from acerola
• Iodine

The claims allowed are about supporting normal psychological function, normal nervous system function, and reducing tiredness and fatigue. That's the framing they're permitted to use and I'm staying inside it.

The saffron research is more interesting than most botanicals and also more limited than the marketing suggests. Some trials compared it head to head with standard antidepressants for mild to moderate symptoms and didn't find a significant difference. Others looked at adding it on top of medication. But a lot of those trials are small, a lot are short, four to eight weeks, and some are industry funded. Small study, short window, not the same as proven.

Please read this if you take an antidepressant

Talk to your prescriber before you add Viva+ or any saffron supplement.

Saffron appears to work on serotonin pathways. So do SSRIs and SNRIs. When two things push on the same system there's a theoretical risk of too much serotonin activity, called serotonin syndrome, and it's serious.

Fair reading of the evidence: trials that combined saffron with antidepressants have generally reported good tolerability, and I'm not aware of reported cases of serotonin syndrome from that combination. The risk looks low. But low isn't zero, the studies are short, and your prescriber knows your dose and your history in a way no blog post ever will.

Five minute phone call. Take the ingredient list with you. Same goes if you're pregnant or nursing, on blood thinners, or managing a thyroid condition, since there's iodine in it.

And if you're struggling right now, please don't wait on a supplement. Depression is a real medical condition and it deserves real care. If you're in crisis, call or text 988 in the United States, any hour.

You've probably noticed the same phrase keeps turning up on this page. Get the number. Here's why I've gotten so stubborn about it.

Test, don't guess

I used to take things because they made sense. A book said so, or a friend did great on it, or the label was convincing. And I could not have told you whether a single one of them was doing anything. Neither could the people I recommended them to! That started to bother me more and more.

Testing answers three questions guessing never will.

1. Am I actually low? Maybe your diet already has it covered and you can keep your money.
2. Is this working? Test, wait a few months, test again. The comparison is the whole point.
3. Am I going too high? This is the one that matters with A and D.

Ask your doctor for the ordinary panel. Iron and ferritin, B12, folate, vitamin D. Anyone with celiac should have these checked regularly anyway. If your doctor isn't running them, ask why.

There are also at-home dried blood spot tests for vitamin D and for your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, which is a number hardly anybody knows and which surprises most people. I use them and I'm a Zinzino partner, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. Either road works. Getting the number is what matters, not where you got it.

So here's the whole thing, boiled down to what I'd tell you across my kitchen table.

Where this lands

1. Eat real food first

Pastured meat and eggs, butter, broth, vegetables, fruit, liver when you can manage it. Nothing in a bottle beats this and nothing ever will.

2. Help your body absorb it

Ferments, and variety in your fiber. Different plants feed different bacteria in different parts of your gut, so a wide range beats a lot of one thing. Heal the gut and everything else works better.

3. Fill the gaps food can't reach

Damaged villi, long winters, tired soil, and real life. For me that's a fiber blend, vitamin D in the dark months, and an omega oil I trust. Yours may be a completely different list. There's no shame in a supplement. The only shame is pretending you don't need one when you do.

4. Test, don't guess

Before, and again after. Especially with A and D, where more is not better and you won't feel it going wrong.

Faith over fear, friends. Fear says the food is out to get you and you need forty capsules to survive it. That's no way to live and it isn't true.

Eat well. Check your numbers. Fill what's actually empty. Then go enjoy your dinner!

With much love,
Steffi

I'm an independent Zinzino partner and an independent doTERRA Wellness Advocate, and I earn a commission on some products I mention. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, and none of it is medical advice. I'm a Nutritional Herbalist, not a physician. Please work with your own qualified healthcare provider, especially before starting any supplement, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you're managing a diagnosed condition, or before making decisions about raw milk. Product formulations and allergen information change, so verify current details before you buy.