Field Notes — About
Independent. Inquisitive. Uncompromising.
I dig into the science, question the narratives, and share what actually works.
Think Ancestral. Live Primal.
Who's behind this?
My name is Sam. I'm not a dietitian, not a fitness influencer, and I have no supplement brand to protect. What I am is someone who spent years eating what the guidelines recommended — and feeling progressively worse — until I started asking the obvious questions nobody in mainstream nutrition was allowed to ask.
The questions weren't radical. They were just inconvenient: Why does the advice keep changing? Who funds the studies? What did humans actually eat before industrialised food systems rewrote the narrative? What happens metabolically when you stop eating processed carbohydrates?
Paleo Coder is where I put the answers — or at least the honest working-through of them. It's a field journal, not a prescription.
And like any field journal, it has a first page. This one was written in 2011 — one year and one hundred pounds into a journey that started at 390 pounds, with a list of health problems to match. If you want to know where all of this actually began —the original entry is still here: How did I get here?
"Prioritise foods that existed before branding departments did."
What Paleo Coder is — and isn't
This site sits at the intersection of ancestral health, metabolic science, and a firm scepticism about the food-industrial complex. That's a mouthful. In practice it means:
This site is
- An independent read of the evidence, including evidence that threatens profitable narratives
- A record of personal experiments — what moved the markers, what didn't
- Grounded in evolutionary biology and human metabolic physiology
- Honest about uncertainty: when I don't know, I say so
- Critical of corporate-funded "nutrition science" without sliding into conspiratorial thinking
This site is not
- A keto influencer account or strict ideology
- Medical advice — take every post as a starting point for your own research
- Sponsored by supplement companies, food brands, or anyone else
- Anti-science — it's anti-corrupted-science, which is different
- A diet plan. It's a framework for thinking about food.
The approach
Ancestral first
The baseline question is always: did humans evolve eating this? Evolutionary mismatch is a more reliable guide than the last decade's meta-analysis.
Evidence over dogma
I follow the data, not the tribe. If a study challenges my priors and has solid methodology, I'll engage with it honestly rather than dismiss it.
Signal vs noise
Most nutrition discourse is noise — conflicting headlines, sponsor-shaped conclusions, and influencer incentives. I try to find the signal underneath.
Self-experiment
n=1 data is real data. I track markers, test protocols, and report results — including the failures. Your mileage will vary, and that's worth knowing too.
Ready to start?
Read the field notes
The best entry point is the blog — articles are tagged by topic so you can go deep on whatever's most relevant to where you are right now.