When food becomes the treatment. And when it doesn't.
I want to talk to you about something the internet gets wrong most of the time.
There's a version of the health story out there that goes like this. Somebody eliminates a food group. Their chronic condition disappears. They post about it. Thousands of people copy them. And within a few months, "just remove X from your diet" becomes the answer to every ailment nobody can explain.
I understand the appeal. I lived it in reverse. I removed sugar and processed food from my life, my labs changed, my body changed, and it was a genuine before-and-after. So I'm not the guy who's going to tell you food doesn't matter. Food matters enormously.
But over the years I've had to make peace with a harder truth. There are some conditions where changing what you eat is a real medical treatment, backed by decades of clinical trials. And there are many others where the "just cut this out" advice is a story that sounds good and doesn't hold up. Being honest about the difference is what separates a serious conversation about food from another wellness pitch.
Here's what I've come to understand.
Where the science is solid.
There are cases where eliminating a specific food group from the diet is not a fad or a personal experiment. It is genuine medicine, prescribed by doctors, studied for decades, and supported by good clinical trials.
Celiac disease. If you have celiac disease, gluten damages your small intestine. Removing gluten completely is not optional and it is not a lifestyle choice. It is the entire treatment. There is no drug that replaces it. The diet is the medicine. This is settled science. If you have celiac disease and you eat gluten, your gut heals more slowly and your risk of long-term complications rises.
Drug-resistant epilepsy, especially in children. A ketogenic diet, meaning very low carbohydrate and high fat, has been used to treat childhood epilepsy since the 1920s. Modern meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials, including a Cochrane review, show that children on the ketogenic diet are several times more likely to achieve a significant reduction in seizures compared to standard care. A 2025 meta-analysis found the odds of achieving at least a 50 percent reduction in seizures were more than seven times higher on the diet than off it. For a subset of children whose seizures don't respond to medication, this is not a diet. It is a therapy prescribed by neurologists, monitored in hospitals, and continued for years.
Irritable bowel syndrome, treated with a low FODMAP diet. FODMAPs are a group of fermentable carbohydrates found in a wide range of foods, from onions to wheat to apples. Multiple systematic reviews and network meta-analyses have shown that a properly executed low FODMAP diet reduces global IBS symptoms and improves quality of life more than a habitual diet. The American College of Gastroenterology recommends it as a first-line intervention. This is not a fad. This is medicine that arrives through your grocery bag.
Three real cases. Three real bodies of evidence. Three examples of food as treatment.
Where the science is much thinner.
Now here's the part that gets uncomfortable.
Once the public sees that eliminating one food can help one condition, the pattern gets applied to everything. And in most of those extensions, the evidence gets a lot weaker.
The most obvious example is going gluten-free without having celiac disease. Harvard's nutrition experts, Mayo Clinic, and multiple published reviews have looked at this carefully and reached the same conclusion. For people who do not have celiac disease or a documented gluten sensitivity, there is no good evidence that a gluten-free diet produces weight loss, better athletic performance, better gut health, or general wellbeing. In fact, some studies suggest gluten-free diets can be lower in fiber, iron, and B vitamins, and that highly processed gluten-free products may actually promote weight gain. The gluten-free aisle is one of the most successful marketing operations in modern grocery retail. The science behind it, for most of the people buying it, is not there.
The same pattern shows up with dairy-free elimination for people who aren't lactose intolerant, "toxin cleanses," elaborate autoimmune elimination protocols, and any diet that promises to "reset" your body. Some of these might help specific individuals, and the placebo effect from taking careful control of what you eat is real and valuable. But the specific claims, that eliminating this exact food heals this exact condition, usually don't survive rigorous testing.
What I actually believe about this.
Food is powerful. What you put in your body every day, three times a day, over decades, shapes your health more than almost anything else short of your genes. That's not controversial. It's the reason my own bloodwork changed when I changed how I ate.
But powerful is not the same as magic.
The diseases with genuine dietary treatments are diseases where the mechanism is understood. Gluten damages the intestine of a person with celiac disease. FODMAPs ferment in the gut and cause symptoms in IBS. Ketones alter brain chemistry in a way that reduces seizure activity. In each case, there's a specific biological process, a specific food that triggers it, and a specific removal that helps.
When someone tells you that removing one thing from your diet cured a chronic condition that doctors couldn't explain, be curious, not evangelical. Sometimes it's real. Sometimes it's the placebo of finally paying attention. Sometimes it's the fact that removing ultra-processed food from any diet tends to make people feel better, regardless of the specific ingredient blamed. And sometimes the person who felt better six months in doesn't feel as good two years later, and they quietly stop posting about it.
The people I trust most on this topic are the ones who tell you what the science says with honest uncertainty. Not the ones who promise a cure.
What I do, and what I don't claim.
I eat the way I eat because it worked for me and because I can explain, mostly, why it worked. My body doesn't process sugar and refined carbohydrates well. When I removed them, my triglycerides dropped, my energy came back, and my brain got clearer. I've told you that story before, and I've been careful not to sell it as a cure for anything I don't understand.
What I built at Fatly Good is not medicine. It's food. Grass-fed ghee, beef tallow, peanut butter, almond butter. One ingredient each. Zero seed oils, zero added sugar, zero hidden anything. The point of these products is not to fix a disease. The point is that when you decide to eat real food, whether for reasons of curiosity, weight, or a diagnosis your doctor gave you, you should be able to trust what's in the jar.
If a doctor has put you on an elimination diet for a real medical reason, I hope our products make it easier to eat well on that diet. If you're just trying to eat cleaner because it feels better, same. The food is the food. The claims we make about it end at the label.
That distinction, between food and medicine, is one of the most important lines in this whole conversation. The people worth listening to are the ones who respect it.
Fat never felt so right.
Gustavo Rodriguez, Founder