About
Who am I?
I am Jack Ruston.
I am a certified Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, a graduate of the NTA and a member of The Federation Of Nutritional Therapy Practitioners.
I help people to make the connections between their food and any symptoms they may be experiencing – anything from fatigue, irritability, hunger and cravings, to IBS, heartburn, autoimmunity or an inability to lose fat. I guide my clients through strategies to optimise their eating and lifestyle, sidestepping these issues that so many of us normalise – that we just accept as ‘the way we are’, or as an inevitable part of ageing.
I continued to cook throughout my early teens, often catering for the whole family when my mother suffered a back injury that confined her to bed for many months. Leaving home after school, I travelled in the U.S. and became exposed to mexican cooking, and developed a love of burgers, and big steaks.
My passion for cooking has only increased as I’ve got older. While, for reasons explained below, I’ve been forced onto a more restrictive path in terms of my diet, that has opened my mind to the understanding that simplicity and quality, executed perfectly, wins the day.
Throughout my adult life I have suffered with some significant digestive issues, seemingly endless food intolerances and a sense that the food I loved was out to get me. The health-care system couldn’t help, alternative therapies and strict exclusion diets seemed beneficial at times, but the benefits didn’t last. Most of them made matters worse. I did everything I was supposed to do, eating a diet of whole-grains, high-fibre, fresh vegetables and fruits, organic chicken and fish, fermented foods like kimchi and kefir, and took probiotics and endless other supplements that were supposed to help me.
What’s My Story?
I live by the principles I share with my clients, and in doing so have been able to dramatically change my own health:
Throughout my adult life I have suffered with some significant digestive issues, seemingly endless food intolerances and a sense that my gut was out to get me. These problems became increasingly severe as I moved through my 30’s and into my 40’s. Eventually it got to a point where it severely affected my quality of life. I would sometimes wake up in the night, vomiting, or be unable to leave the house in the morning due to IBS symptoms. I wasn’t easy to live with – it wasn’t just me that was suffering.
I did everything I was supposed to do, eating a diet high in whole-grains and fibre, fresh vegetables and fruits and low in saturated fat. I took probiotics and endless other supplements that were supposed to help me. I was working long, unsocial hours as a recording engineer and training excessively, as if to assert control over a body that just wouldn’t play ball. At that time I didn’t understand the ways in which our stress response affects the digestive process. The health-care system couldn’t help, alternative therapies and strict exclusion diets seemed beneficial at times, but the benefits never seemed to last.
My journey led me deeply into the research of nutritional science. I discovered a vast gap between the conclusions of the best-quality research, and the spurious claims of the food and pharmaceutical industries. I discovered that the panels that devise our ‘food pyramid‘ – the guidelines we’re given on how to eat, are made up of representatives of these industries, and researchers funded by them.
As a passionate, life-long cook I began to create content – videos and recipes for ‘Ruston’s Boneyard, my online cooking channel. I wrote a book – The Ruston’s Boneyard Guide To Steak, exploring every possible facet of steak cookery. The Boneyard was based around the low-carb lifestyle, ketogenic, and paleo ways of eating – all approaches that I had explored in troubleshooting my own issues, with varying degrees of success.
Before long, I began to receive requests for nutrition advice from followers, friends and acquaintances. While I have always been happy to talk about my own approach to food, I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of telling other people what they should eat, with no proper academic grounding in the subject. And so my passion for nutrition led me back to school, to the NTA’s Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP) qualification. Today I focus on nutrient-density and single-ingredient whole foods. I vary my carbohydrate intake according to my goals and activity level.
This journey led me down a path of deeply researching nutritional science. What I discovered was a vast gap between what the proper science was saying, and what the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the studies that they both pay for were saying. I discovered that the panels that devise our ‘food pyramid‘, the guidelines we’re given on how to eat, are made up of representatives of these industries, and researchers funded by them.
I began to write a book about cooking, and about food, the research for which led me through the various ways in which people eat. Eventually, I stumbled across the carnivore and zero-carb movement. To my mind these people were crazy. They were living on animal products only – meat, eggs, dairy and fish.
I was absolutely convinced by this point that the vast majority of us in the developed world needed to urgently reduce our consumption of processed food, and particularly our consumption of carbohydrates. That much was crystal clear, but to eat no carbohydrate whatsoever? What about fibre? What about vitamins? What about fresh vegetables and fruit?
I thought it might make for entertaining material to try this approach for a couple of weeks, and report my findings. I set out on this task, eating only meat and salt, and drinking only water in a ‘pure’ carnivore approach. At that time I was still having significant gut issues, and eating a very strictly restricted low FODMAP diet – a handful of carefully chosen fresh vegetables and fruits, with grass-fed organic meat, chicken and fish. I was grain, dairy and alcohol free, so the change for me wasn’t quite as much of an adjustment as it might be for some.
But an adjustment it was, because within three days, my gut was almost entirely fixed. It was unrecognisably better. I suddenly became able to function like a normal human being, for the first time in years. I couldn’t believe it.
It was exhilarating to experience this sudden, unexpected relief, but bittersweet in the knowledge that it couldn’t last. I would surely die a horrible, sticky death if I tried to sustain it for more than a few weeks. I had come across a clinic that was using what they termed the ‘Paleolithic Ketogenic Diet’ to treat various disorders and diseases, some extremely serious. The diet was effectively a high-fat, strict carnivore approach. Meat and water, much as I had been eating. I decided to consult them, to get some proper blood work at regular intervals, and to assess my health while continuing the approach, ready to adjust at any time if I felt that it wasn’t wise, or wasn’t working.
But What Do We Feed The Kids?
I believe strongly that we need to tackle the shocking rise in diabetes and its related complications at an early stage. While most children are far more insulin-sensitive, and carbohydrate-tolerant than adults, probably because they have a large energy requirement, and due to the fact that our relatively short evolutionary adjustment post-agriculture would only be necessary up to reproductive age, they often don’t retain this tolerance as they grow older. Thus we need to raise them with a different idea of what makes a meal than our generation.
That said, they should be allowed to enjoy the odd bit of junk, the birthday cakes, the trips out for ice cream and the occasional mountain of pizza. Unfortunately their world is full of this stuff, it’s marketed aggressively towards them, and they see their friends eating it quite happily every day. If we try to exclude it, they’re going to question the validity of our advice, and shovel it in the second our backs are turned. They’re too young to understand the notion that what they eat now, the habits they form, will affect them in three decades time. So I believe that we need to allow a modicum of flexibility, but with the understanding that these things are a problem, and that we need to give our bodies plenty of opportunity to recover from eating them.
What I find with my own daughter is that she doesn’t feel great when she eats those things, and that helps her to understand that they shouldn’t be part of her day-to-day diet. On my Instagram page I have a segment called ‘But What Do We Feed The Kids’, which offers tips on meals we can make for our children to balance out some of the meals we perhaps wish they would not eat. It can be searched at #butwhatdowefeedthekids
About
But What Do We Feed The Kids?
I believe strongly that we need to tackle the shocking rise in diabetes and its related complications at an early stage. While most children are far more insulin-sensitive, and carbohydrate-tolerant than adults, probably because they have a large energy requirement, and due to the fact that our relatively short evolutionary adjustment post-agriculture would only be necessary up to reproductive age, they often don’t retain this tolerance as they grow older. Thus we need to raise them with a different idea of what makes a meal than our generation.
That said, they should be allowed to enjoy the odd bit of junk, the birthday cakes, the trips out for ice cream and the occasional mountain of pizza. Unfortunately their world is full of this stuff, it’s marketed aggressively towards them, and they see their friends eating it quite happily every day. If we try to exclude it, they’re going to question the validity of our advice, and shovel it in the second our backs are turned. They’re too young to understand the notion that what they eat now, the habits they form, will affect them in three decades time. So I believe that we need to allow a modicum of flexibility, but with the understanding that these things are a problem, and that we need to give our bodies plenty of opportunity to recover from eating them.
What I find with my own daughter is that she doesn’t feel great when she eats those things, and that helps her to understand that they shouldn’t be part of her day-to-day diet. On the Boneyard Instagram page I have a segment called ‘But What Do We Feed The Kids’, which offers tips on meals we can make for our children to balance out some of the meals we perhaps wish they would not eat. It can be searched at #butwhatdowefeedthekids
But What Do We Feed The Kids?
I believe strongly that we need to tackle the shocking rise in diabetes and its related complications at an early stage. While most children are far more insulin-sensitive, and carbohydrate-tolerant than adults, probably because they have a large energy requirement, and due to the fact that our relatively short evolutionary adjustment post-agriculture would only be necessary up to reproductive age, they often don’t retain this tolerance as they grow older. Thus we need to raise them with a different idea of what makes a meal than our generation.
That said, they should be allowed to enjoy the odd bit of junk, the birthday cakes, the trips out for ice cream and the occasional mountain of pizza. Unfortunately their world is full of this stuff, it’s marketed aggressively towards them, and they see their friends eating it quite happily every day. If we try to exclude it, they’re going to question the validity of our advice, and shovel it in the second our backs are turned. They’re too young to understand the notion that what they eat now, the habits they form, will affect them in three decades time. So I believe that we need to allow a modicum of flexibility, but with the understanding that these things are a problem, and that we need to give our bodies plenty of opportunity to recover from eating them.
What I find with my own daughter is that she doesn’t feel great when she eats those things, and that helps her to understand that they shouldn’t be part of her day-to-day diet. On the Boneyard Instagram page I have a segment called ‘But What Do We Feed The Kids’, which offers tips on meals we can make for our children to balance out some of the meals we perhaps wish they would not eat. It can be searched at #butwhatdowefeedthekids