When Dr. Eric Berg, who is in his early 60s, reflects on the arc of his health journey, he remembers age 28 as a turning point.
“I started getting sicker and sicker and sicker,” he tells me. “I had arthritis in my hands, had a blood sugar problem, but I couldn’t wake up until like 11 a.m. And the inside of my eyelids were completely bloodshot and red and irritated. That was a severe blood sugar problem. I didn’t know it.”
The wildly popular online health doctor, and author of a new book, Change Your Environments: Redesign Your Life to Reclaim Your Health (MAHA Books, Sept. 8), Dr. Berg said he felt old at 28 – and had no idea what to change to reboot his life.
“At 28 years old I had extremely low awareness of nutrition, health, diet,” he says. “They don’t teach you these things in chiropractic. It’s not until you graduate and you study on your own that you start learning these things.”
What followed was years of experimenting through nearly every trend of the era. Colon cleansing, fasting on lemon and maple syrup, carrot juice, veganism, and colon hydrotherapy, which he points out flushes away good bacteria as well as bad. “I was just trying different things,” he said. “Everything I did was just a disaster.”
But the thing that finally moved the needle was rather mundane. “It wasn’t until I stumbled on adding more protein to my [sic] breakfast,” he said, “that it was like someone took a helmet off my head.”
Drawing on his clinical training and years of study, he found his way back to health, and that personal transformation is part of why millions of people trust and follow him. At 61, at once charismatic, articulate, and down to earth, he is by his own measure far healthier now than thirty years ago.
The turnaround drove him to build what would become one of the most-watched health platforms on the planet, with 14.9 million subscribers on his main English-language YouTube channel and 45 million subscribers across all platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Berg, who online goes by the moniker “The Knowledge Doc,” is a chiropractor by training and a health educator to millions, myself included. For years, he was after one thing: a single way to trace health problems back to their cause. The answer he landed on is a framework he calls “ancestral mismatch.”
Compare how our ancestors lived to how we live now, he says, and the contrast jumps out. How much sun did they get? How much time outdoors? Was food available around the clock, and did it look anything like ours? Lay the modern environment over the ancient one, and it’s startling, he says, how far we have drifted.
Every guru in health, Berg said, tells people the same thing: that they need more discipline, a better frame of mind, to try harder, to just stick with it. He lived in that world for years. And then he stopped believing it.
Reading about what had been engineered into the food supply changed his mind.
“It wasn’t until some of the books came out that made me aware of the chemicals in our food and the addictions, until I started saying, ‘you know what, this is probably not just willpower. If I’m having these problems, I bet everyone else is too.’“ Dr. Berg said.
He added, “It’s not that people have low willpower; it’s actually that the environment they live in is stacked against them. Everything is engineered for addictions on all levels.”
Processed food, Berg argues, is designed to addict you the same way alcohol and drugs are, and a body surrounded by it will be driven toward it whether the person wants to be or not.
If the environment is the problem, Berg reasoned, then changing the environment is the answer. [Change Your Environments elaborates.]
Moving to a farm was not part of that plan, at least not at first.
“I really didn’t think about moving to a farm until I was literally like 49 years old,” Berg tells me. “I wanted to maybe do something on the weekends.”
He and his wife looked close to home and came up empty. “So we eventually moved farther and farther out, to the point where we found a farm four and a half hours away,” Berg recalls.
What began as a weekend project turned into an experiment on himself. Berg moved away from the ancestral mismatch of the city to a farm in the mountains of Virginia, where he now raises 70 sheep, three dozen cows — plus pigs, goats, chickens, and ducks. Berg does not hire farmhands. He does the labor himself and he loves it.
His experiment was a resounding success. Berg says he could stay on the farm and never leave, because his body responds to it in a way it never did in the city.
“I do videos half the day, and then I go out there and I work fences—I love it! I just love that type of physical work, and working with the animals. My body just thrives in this environment,” Berg says.
While we don’t all need to move to a farm, the lifestyle is undeniably more healthy – and it helps explain the premise of Berg’s book, Change Your Environments.
In full transparency: I have been a fan of Dr. Berg’s for years – because he understands something simple and true: what you put into your body shapes your health more than almost anything else. His instinct is the same as mine: to look for the deficiency or the diet behind a health problem instead of reaching for a prescription. So, I knew his thinking well before we sat down to talk about his new book.
Just a few minutes into our discussion and he revealed its powerful premise: where you live explains the health of most Americans.
It’s such a simple idea and a good one. Why hadn’t I thought of that?!
Berg’s core idea is fundamental to the MAHA movement– distilled to daily life. Chronic disease is largely environmental, largely reversible, and ordinary people like you and me hold far more power over our health than they we think and have been told.
Changing eating habits is the fight most people enter into first. But, by Berg’s account, this is a struggle you can’t win on willpower alone.
“You are up against food companies that have spent billions to get you to keep eating,” he explains. “You eat one [bite], and you can’t stop.”
But food is only where it starts. Nearly everything about modern American life — the artificial light, the hours of sitting at your desk, or staring at your cellphone or computer – the numbing isolation of it all – steers us away from what our bodies were built for, Dr. Berg explains.
If there’s one thing that the book taught me it’s this: the fix is not more willpower; it’s about finding new ways to rebuild the world around us, one unhealthy environment at a time — until health stops being the fight and becomes the default.
Change Your Environments: Redesign Your Life to Reclaim Your Health, which publishes on Sept. 8 from MAHA Books, an imprint of Skyhorse, is available for pre-order, here.
[A portion of the book’s proceeds goes to MAHA Action, whose staff writes and edits The MAHA Report.]
Related Stories
On the Bookshelf: Dr. Eric Berg’s “Change Your Environments” Superbly Presents an Easy-to-Follow Architecture for Lasting Health
In an era of an endless number of health hacks flashing in front of us on social media, contradictory diet advice, and slick wellness influencers promising transformation, Dr. Eric Berg’s Change Your Environments: Redesign Your Life to Reclaim Your Health
Most Americans don’t have the luxury of packing up, moving to the country, and buying a farm. But we do have the power to make better choices right where we are. I love listening to Dr. Berg, and one message continues to resonate with me: we can start changing our environment by paying attention to where our food comes from and what we put into our bodies. Shop local when you can. Visit farmers markets. Look for organic and minimally processed foods. Read the labels. Yes, healthier choices can sometimes cost a little more—but I believe investing in our health today may save us far more tomorrow. We may not be able to change the entire food system overnight, but we can change what we bring into our own kitchens, one choice at a time.
I have said for years: "Health is the TRUE wealth".
I love Dr. Berg. He has helped me with several issues. Also, so sick of rude people in the comments.