Niklas Gustafson has been a celiac since birth — he nearly did not make it through infancy, and the experience of learning to navigate food before the age of five, experimenting in his grandmothers' kitchens in Sweden because there was nothing safe on the supermarket shelf, gave him an education in real ingredients that most people never receive. Now 56, he has lived in Madrid for over 25 years, completed 13 Ironman triathlons, raised five children with a sixth on the way, and spent the last decade building Natruly — a Spanish food company producing grain-free granolas, sugar-free chocolates, seed-oil-free nut butters, and a 43% hazelnut spread that is categorically not Nutella. He hosts the Hungry for Change podcast and communicates ancestral nutrition principles across his social channels to an international audience. He has not had alcohol in four years. He has never drunk plant milk.
My very first episode of this podcast had a title. Truth Produces Health. I had not shared that with Niklas before we recorded. When I asked him for one word to leave the audience with, he came back with truth — and the explanation that followed was the same one I had landed on when I named the show: there is so much noise, so much money protecting the noise, and so many people who have never been given a clear signal to navigate toward. When you find the truth about food, it changes everything downstream. And when you realize how systematically the truth has been obscured, it changes how you look at everything else.
Niklas is not a researcher or a clinician. He is something more useful for most people: a man who has been living this since infancy by necessity, who has spent 16 years experimenting systematically with his own diet, who has built a company around making real food accessible, and who now communicates what he has learned to an international audience in plain language. This is one of the most naturally aligned conversations I have had on this show — we agreed on almost everything, arrived at the same conclusions from different starting points, and found that the gaps between ancestral nutrition advocates in Sweden, Spain, and South Florida are much smaller than the distances suggest.
Celiac From Birth: How Necessity Became the Best Nutrition Education Available
Being a celiac in Sweden in the 1970s meant there was almost nothing safe on the supermarket shelf. Formula as an infant nearly cost Niklas his life. By five and six years old, he was in his grandmothers' kitchens learning to bake bread, make cookies, and produce pasta from scratch — not because it was a lifestyle choice, but because the alternative was pain. When everything you eat could hurt you, you learn very quickly what food actually contains. You learn to read. You learn to ask questions. You learn that most processed food is not designed with your wellbeing as the primary concern.
That education — forced on him by his biology — is the foundation of everything that followed. The paleo experiment at 40 that started with cutting refined sugar and cascaded into eliminating oats, potatoes, and rice. The keto phase. The carnivore period. A year of vegetarianism at 23 that he counts as one of the experiments rather than a failure. The systematic progression through every major ancestral eating framework until he had a clear personal sense of what worked, what was ideology, and what was marketing.
"When you're allergic to something, you have to make it on your own. You realize what different kinds of food contain. I learned so many lessons when I was a kid."
— Niklas Gustafson · @NiklasGustafsonThe detail that crystallizes this is the birthday party. Five or six years old. Every other child at the table eating birthday cake. Niklas eating something his mother made. In the 1970s in Sweden, that was not a minor social inconvenience — it was isolating in a way that children feel viscerally. And what it produced, rather than resentment of food restrictions, was curiosity about food itself. What is in the cake? Why can I not have it? What can I have that is equally satisfying? That curiosity has not stopped in fifty years.
What Actually Produces Health: The Five Non-Negotiables
I asked Niklas for the foundational beliefs — the things that, if removed from his life, he would feel their absence immediately. He gave five. They are not complicated. They are not proprietary. They are not the output of a research lab. They are the things humans have always needed and that modern life has systematically made harder to access.
Real food, ancestrally appropriate, free from the industrial interventions that have characterized the last seventy years of the Western food supply. Not a diet in the contemporary sense — a way of eating that would have been recognizable to your great-grandparents. Whole foods. Animal products from known sources. No seed oils. No refined sugar. No plant milks. No oxalate-loaded greens marketed as superfoods. The default is: if you cannot trace it back to something a human would have eaten without a factory, it does not belong in the body with any regularity.
Movement as a daily practice rather than a scheduled intervention. At 56, Niklas plays tennis most days, runs, surfs, windsurfs, kite surfs, skis in winter, and completes Ironman triathlons. Not because he is optimizing. Because being physically capable and engaged is part of what makes a life worth living. The goal is not performance in any narrow athletic sense — it is the capacity to keep moving, keep doing the things that matter, keep being useful to yourself and your family across decades.
The pillar that alcohol compromises most immediately and most measurably. Niklas describes the improvement in sleep quality after eliminating alcohol as one of the most significant and most underappreciated changes of the last four years. Sleep is when the body repairs what the day has cost it. Every lifestyle decision that degrades sleep quality — alcohol, late screens, eating late, artificial light in the evening — is borrowing from tomorrow's restoration budget.
Direct sunlight on skin and eyes, daily, as early in the day as possible. Not through glass. Not through sunscreen in the first exposure of the morning. Vitamin D production, testosterone regulation, and circadian rhythm calibration all depend on the signal the sun provides. The indoor fluorescent existence — nine to five under artificial light, commuting in a sealed car, exercising in a windowless gym — is a novel condition that the human body was not designed for and that correlates directly with the testosterone decline, sleep disruption, and mood dysregulation that have become standard complaints of modern life.
Friends, family, and genuine human contact as a health variable — not a luxury. The Harvard longevity research that identifies connection and happiness as the primary predictors of a long life is not abstract for Niklas. He watched what happened to relationships built around alcohol when the alcohol was removed — many of them did not survive the absence of the shared intoxicant. What replaced them was something less numerous but more real. The dinner table conversation that stays coherent past the first hour. The friendship that does not require a shared altered state to feel close.
What to Eat, What to Avoid, and Why the Industry Doesn't Want You to Know the Difference
The avoid list is the most immediately actionable part of this conversation — and the most commercially hostile. Every item on it represents an industry that profits from your continued consumption of it and that has invested heavily in making you believe it is either neutral or beneficial.
Niklas cut refined sugar at 40 and describes the improvement as immediate enough to make everything that followed feel obvious. The challenge is that refined sugar is not just in desserts. It is the mechanism by which most processed and ultra-processed foods create the palatability that drives repeat consumption. The industry does not add sugar because it makes food better. It adds it because it makes food addictive — and addiction is a business model.
Canola, sunflower, soybean, corn, safflower, rapeseed — the polyunsaturated industrial oils that replaced traditional animal fats in the twentieth century and that the science increasingly implicates in systemic inflammation, lipid oxidation, and the chronic disease epidemic that followed their widespread adoption. They are in almost everything processed. The Nutella Niklas grew up eating had them. His Natruly version does not — and the difference in taste is, by his account, the difference between something engineered to create craving and something that satisfies.
Niklas has never consumed plant milk — the celiac background made his early food education thorough enough that he identified the category as fraudulent from the start. The reality: most commercial plant milks contain emulsifiers, added sugars, and enzymatically processed starches converted into sugars that do not appear as "added sugar" on the label because the conversion happens during processing. The sugar high that makes them palatable is the product. The "milk" is the marketing. The oat milk category specifically — Oatly is Swedish and Niklas calls it a disgrace to that origin — has been one of the most successful nutritional misdirections of the last decade.
Spinach was the paradigmatic health food of the generation Niklas grew up in. It remains widely marketed as such. Oxalates — the antinutrient compounds found in spinach, kale, Swiss chard, almonds, and other plant foods commonly promoted as superfoods — bind to minerals including calcium, iron, and magnesium and prevent their absorption. In high quantities and with consistent consumption, they accumulate in tissues and contribute to kidney stones, joint pain, and a range of inflammatory presentations that are frequently misdiagnosed as something else. One in a hundred people, by Niklas's estimate, knows what an oxalate is. The spinach industry has no incentive to change that.
Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and the category of ultra-processed plant proteins engineered to mimic the texture and appearance of animal products while containing seed oils, emulsifiers, synthetic flavors, and industrial binding agents. Both Niklas and I reached the same observation from different vantage points: these companies are crashing. The consumer market that was promised has not materialized because the products do not satisfy in the way that real food satisfies, and the nutritional case for them has not survived contact with serious scrutiny. The collapse is good news for anyone who cares about what people actually eat.
The Raw Dairy Black Market — When Food Becomes Contraband
Niklas has suppliers for raw dairy in Spain. He contacts them by WhatsApp and the delivery arrives the next day. This is the current reality of accessing food that humans have consumed safely for thousands of years: you need connections, you need to know the farmer, and you need to operate outside the regulatory framework that allows the sale of unlimited alcohol while prohibiting the sale of unpasteurized milk. The absurdity of that inversion — you can legally buy something that demonstrably destroys health in quantities the regulation imposes no limit on, while the food that requires nothing more than a clean animal and a clean vessel is treated as contraband — is one of the clearest illustrations of who the food regulation system is designed to protect.
"You can sell alcohol. You can kill yourself drinking alcohol. But you're not allowed to buy raw dairy. Isn't that crazy?"
— Niklas Gustafson · @NiklasGustafsonThe movement toward raw dairy access in the United States — where state-by-state legalization has been expanding — is one of the genuine food policy victories of the last decade. Europe has not caught up. The dairy lobby is too powerful and the UHT pasteurization standard in southern Europe is so entrenched that most people do not know what they are missing. Niklas knows his farmers. If you do not yet know yours, finding them is one of the highest-return food decisions available to you.
Building Real Food in a Market That Doesn't Want It to Exist
Natruly started because grain-free granola did not exist in Spain when Niklas needed it — and almost did not exist in Europe. The company now produces grain-free granolas, chocolates, nut butters, and what he describes as the only honest answer to Nutella: 43% hazelnut, no refined sugar, no seed oils, no artificial sweeteners. It is their best-selling product. The comparison he draws — between their version and the original — is the difference between 95% cacao dark chocolate and a bar with 20% cacao and a sugar-first ingredient list. Once you have had the real thing, the manufactured version tastes like what it is.
Everything in the Natruly range is gluten-free, grain-free, sugar-free, seed-oil-free, and free from artificial sweeteners. This is not a niche health food positioning. It is the minimum standard that real food should meet — a standard that the food industry has spent decades training consumers to consider extreme. Niklas built the company because the products he needed did not exist. That is a recurring theme in the ancestral nutrition space: the people building the alternatives are doing it because they could not find what they needed on the existing shelf.
The ice cream example is the simplest version of the philosophy: heavy cream, raw honey, fresh fruit or sugar-free chocolate. No ice cream maker required if you are willing to stir every thirty minutes. Better than anything available commercially. Cheaper per serving than the premium brands that charge for the appearance of quality. The barrier is not skill or cost. It is the habits built by a lifetime of buying convenience and the assumption that making food from scratch requires expertise that it does not actually require.
Borrowing Happiness From Tomorrow — And What the Natural Path Looks Like
Four years without alcohol. Niklas arrived at it accidentally — a month of abstinence before his 13th Ironman, a glass of champagne on New Year's Eve that tasted like poison because his body had recalibrated enough to recognize it as such, and the decision that if it no longer tasted like something he wanted, there was no reason to continue. What followed was the same realization I had nine years ago: not just better sleep and better health markers, but better relationships with the people whose connection survived the removal of the shared altered state.
"Drinking alcohol is borrowing happiness from tomorrow. You get the happiness today. You pay tomorrow. I didn't get it before I stopped. Now it makes complete sense."
— Niklas Gustafson · @NiklasGustafsonThe GLP-1 conversation follows the same logic. The framing Niklas uses is the one that cuts through the marketing most cleanly: this is an industry that makes money from your insecurity, from your desire to look a certain way, from your willingness to outsource to a pharmaceutical what your food and lifestyle should be doing. The question is not whether GLP-1 drugs produce weight loss in the short term. They do. The question is what your body is doing five years from now when the drug has suppressed your natural satiety signaling for long enough that you have no functional version of it left. That question does not have a reassuring answer. The long-term data does not exist because the drugs are not old enough to have long-term data. The industry does not have an incentive to produce it. And the people promoting the drugs for off-label cosmetic use have even less incentive to ask.
The testosterone conversation runs parallel. Natural testosterone support — morning sun, heavy compound lifts, cold exposure, sleep quality, removing alcohol, eliminating seed oils, eating adequate dietary cholesterol — is free, produces no dependency, and leaves the body's own production mechanism intact. Exogenous testosterone, even prescribed, carries the documented risk of suppressing endogenous production to the point where the body stops producing its own. Once that happens, the pharmaceutical has created the dependency it was supposed to resolve. The natural path is available before anyone considers the pharmaceutical one. Most people never try it because nobody is paid to tell them about it.
Let the Kid Choose From Whole Foods — And Trust What They Choose
Five children, a sixth expected in November. The youngest is two. None of them are receiving vaccines. The most recent birth was in Spain's only natural birthing clinic. The next will be at home. The dietary principle is the one that Niklas articulates most simply: put whole foods in front of the child and let them choose. A child left to their instinct will choose meat over green leaves — not because they are being difficult, but because their body knows something about bioavailability and nutrient density that no amount of parental instruction about vegetables has ever successfully overridden by force.
The objection he anticipates and answers directly: if you put processed food on the plate alongside whole foods, the child will choose the processed food. That is not the child's instinct selecting. That is the food engineering working exactly as designed — processed food is manufactured to override the satiety signals and the preference hierarchies that whole foods engage. The comparison is only valid when both options are whole foods. At that point, the child's choice is informative rather than alarming.
"If you put meat and green leaves in front of a kid, they will never eat the green leaves. By intuition, they know that is not for them. Why should you force it?"
— Niklas Gustafson · @NiklasGustafsonBaby formula is the entry point where most of this goes wrong. The nutritional framework established in the first months of life — what the gut microbiome is colonized with, what palatability signals are set, what the immune system is calibrated around — is shaped by what formula contains. What formula contains, in most commercial cases, is refined sugar and seed oils. This is where the conversation about ancestral nutrition has to begin if it is going to be fully effective: not at 40, when the decades of industrial food have already done their work, but at birth, when the architecture is still being established.
Truth
He thought for a moment. Then: truth.
Because there is so much noise. Because the people who benefit from the noise have the resources to amplify it and the institutional relationships to give it credibility. Because the truth about food — that real food, ancestrally appropriate and minimally processed, is what the body is designed for — is not complicated, but it has been successfully obscured for decades by the financial interests of industries that profit from the alternative.
My first episode of this podcast had a title. Truth Produces Health. I did not tell Niklas that before we recorded. He arrived at the same word from a completely different starting point — from a life of forced dietary attention since infancy, from sixteen years of systematic self-experimentation, from building a company in a market that resists what he is trying to make, from communicating with an international audience about food policy and agricultural practice and pharmaceutical influence. Same word. Same reason.
The reason it matters enough to be the word — rather than health, or food, or nature — is that truth is the precondition for all of them. You cannot make good decisions about food without accurate information about food. You cannot make good decisions about your body without accurate information about what is being sold to it and why. The truth is available. It has always been available. The work is finding it through the noise, and then refusing to let go of it when the noise gets louder.
Which it always does. But it has never been harder to manufacture permanently. And that is the actual silver lining of the last five years: more people are skeptical, more people are asking questions, and the questions, once asked with genuine seriousness, tend to lead to the same places. Toward real food. Toward sunlight. Toward the people you actually want to be with. Toward the body that works the way it was designed to work, without borrowing from tomorrow to feel functional today.
Real Ingredients. No Shortcuts.
Everything Niklas and I are talking about in this episode — real food, no seed oils, no refined sugar, no industrial processing — is exactly the standard Lineage Provisions holds for everything they make. If you are building the kind of dietary foundation this conversation is about, what you put in your body between meals matters as much as the meals themselves. Use code JOSHBUTTON for 15% off at Lineage Provisions, or grab the link in bio.
Natruly · Madrid, Spain · Grain-Free · Sugar-Free · Seed-Oil-Free
Niklas communicates ancestral nutrition principles daily on Instagram and produces the Hungry for Change podcast. Natruly ships across Europe — the 43% hazelnut spread, the grain-free granolas, and the sugar-free chocolates are the entry points. Follow both accounts and check the website. If you are in the US, the website is worth following even if the shipping logistics are not yet there — the category will continue to develop.
Stay Dangerous. Stay on the Mats. Hard to Kill in Midlife.
