Brigid TitgemeierBeingBrigid Functional Nutrition · Transforming Women's Health Using Food as Medicine

Food Is Not Just Fuel — It’s Cellular Medicine

11 Sept 2025 · 2 min

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1:30

In this talk, Brigid Titgemeier challenges the prevailing diet culture that reduces nutrition to calorie counting and weight monitoring. She argues that such a restrictive, fear‑based approach ignores the true role of food as a source of biochemical information that can influence cellular function and gene expression. Titgemeier explains that nutrients send chemical signals to cells, affecting epigenetics and potentially lowering the risk of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. She emphasizes that lifestyle, especially dietary choices, can modify how genes are expressed, making food a form of medicine rather than merely fuel. The speaker laments the societal focus on limiting calories, avoiding desserts, and obsessively weighing food, calling it a superficial view that fails to address the body's actual nutritional needs.

Chapters

For far too long, the narrative around nutrition was let me count calories and weigh myself to look at the outcomes and the results, and then I'll assess my entire worth based on the number of calories that I have eaten today and the number that I'm looking at on the scale. And that is not nutrition, that is not using food as medicine. That is a very restrictive way of living your life. So when I say food is information for your cells, it means we need to be using food as a powerful leverage in our overall health p picture because of its ability to send different chemical messages to our cells that improve the functionality of those cells that actually change our gene expression. So that if you are predisposed to Things like type 2 diabetes or heart disease, that your epigenetics will impact in a positive way, reducing that risk of disease. Because it's not just about your genes, it's about your lifestyle, specifically food that has the ability to change the way that our genes express themselves. They change our cellular function. So it is beyond sad to me that for so long, diet culture and the pervasive messages in society were just count food, restrict food, fear food. In such a surface level approach that's like the littlest amount possible, calories in versus calories out, weighing every meal on the scale, never having dessert, snacking on a hundred cow packs. And it just could not be further from like, what is actually healthy and what our bodies actually need.