What If Wellness Is What’s Making You Sick?
Pick Your Poison · Episode 1
It’s starting to feel like sickness is the new normal—like everyone we know is quietly falling apart, one unexplained symptom at a time. Fatigue. Bloating. Joint pain. Brain fog. It’s all so common that we’ve started calling it normal.
But this isn’t normal. And it’s not living.
Six in ten Americans now live with at least one chronic illness. It’s happening slowly, quietly, almost politely. But something is deeply wrong. And I’ve spent the last ten years trying to understand why.
What I’ve found is unsettling. The breakdown doesn’t start with something obvious. It doesn’t begin with a diagnosis. It begins with trust.
With a habit. A pill. A bottle. A bagel.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s not a scare tactic. It’s a story. A pattern. One we’re only beginning to see.
💌 Note for Readers from The Northwoods Guide
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This new series, Pick Your Poison, is part of my investigative health project, Untreated — where I dig deeper into the root causes of chronic illness through storytelling, science, and everything the mainstream tends to ignore.
Think of this as the sharper, investigative side of my work — same voice, same heart, just asking harder questions.
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Otherwise — buckle up. Because we’re about to follow Emily into the quiet collapse of her health.
Meet Emily
Emily is 28. Her fridge is filled with probiotic yogurt and oat milk. She orders her groceries online. Her Apple Watch buzzes twice a day, reminding her to move. She's on birth control. She keeps Miralax in her bathroom drawer for the weeks when her digestion stalls out.
And most mornings, she starts her day with a sprouted grain bagel, a podcast, and a 40 oz Stanley of lemon water.
By most definitions, she’s doing everything right.
But lately, things feel... off.
Her wrists ache after long hours on her laptop. She blames it on scrolling.
Her stomach feels puffy more days than not. Hormones, she figures.
And no matter how many hours she sleeps, she wakes up tired.
She dismisses these things as part of modern life. Nothing serious. Nothing urgent. But something inside her is shifting.
The First Cracks
She starts tracking her period and notices it's all over the place. She gets a weird rash after her last round of antibiotics. She catches herself Googling things like "why am I so tired after I eat" and "is bloat normal every day."
Then one day, after eating her usual lunch—the whole grain bagel, the spinach, the hummus—she reads an article.
It’s about glyphosate.
A chemical sprayed on grains, even organic ones. A known disruptor of gut bacteria. Something that mimics healthy food but breaks the system down, slowly. Quietly.
And for the first time, she wonders if the very things she thought were keeping her healthy are actually wearing her down.
The Butterfly Effect
What Emily doesn’t know yet is that her choices—each one seemingly healthy or harmless—are not isolated.
Her birth control is depleting key nutrients her gut needs to repair itself. Her ibuprofen is damaging her intestinal lining. Her sprouted bagels are carrying a chemical that interferes with digestion, hormones, and immune balance. Her Miralax is numbing the signals her body uses to eliminate naturally.
Each one, on its own, seems small. Safe. Approved.
But together?
They’re setting off a chain reaction that her body can’t keep up with.
And that’s where our story begins.
Because Emily is not alone.
Why This Series Exists
This is the story of chronic illness told differently—not as a diagnosis, but as a domino effect. One that begins in the pantry, the medicine cabinet, the doctor’s office, and unfolds over years.
We’ll follow Emily’s breakdown—and her awakening.
We’ll trace the science of what’s happening inside her body. We’ll ask the hard questions about birth control, NSAIDs, glyphosate, gut health, and the "healthy" foods we’ve been sold. And we’ll watch how one woman’s journey mirrors millions of others.
This isn’t about blame. It’s about seeing clearly.
Because the things making us sick don’t always look like poison.
Sometimes they look like wellness.
And Emily is about to find out the difference.
Episodes drop every Tuesday & Thursday. Each one peels back another layer of the story you thought you knew.