What Food Was Always Supposed to Do

I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms with people who can’t remember what they had for breakfast. And I’ve watched what happens when you put a meal in front of them — a real one, made with care, presented with attention. Something shifts. Not always dramatically. Not in a way you could easily measure. But it’s there.

That observation is what started all of this for me.

Food has two jobs. It’s supposed to give us pleasure and it’s supposed to fuel us. We’ve done reasonably well at the first one. The second one we’ve quietly dismantled, and most of us haven’t noticed.

Walk through a grocery store and really look at what’s there. Not the produce section — the rest of it. Aisle after aisle of packaged goods full of ingredients we can’t pronounce on the back of a package. Food deserts in low-income neighbourhoods where the closest thing to a vegetable is a french fry. Obesity rates that we’ve somehow collectively decided are just the way things are now. We didn’t arrive here by accident. We arrived here because somewhere along the way, the fuel function of food got quietly traded away — for shelf life, for profit margins, for convenience — and we normalized it so gradually that most people can’t see it anymore.

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a story about poor choices or personal responsibility. The blindness is widespread. It cuts across income, education, health status. Most people — genuinely healthy people living genuinely ordinary lives — don’t actually know what the body needs to function at its best. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a gap. A gap that got carved out slowly, and that we’ve all inherited.

The mission I keep coming back to is this: how do you fuse nutritional density into everyday life in a way that actually sticks? Not as a trend. Not as a supplement stack or a superfood of the month. As a baseline. As what eating is supposed to be in the first place.

The brain is where this gets urgent for me. My mental model isn’t clinical — it’s mechanical. Think of your brain as an engine. Omega fatty acids, amino acids, the full density of what real food provides — that’s the motor oil. The evidence around dietary patterns like the Mediterranean diet points consistently in this direction. If you want peak performance, you use the best motor oil. Your brain is no different. Run it on the cheap stuff and it degrades. Give it what it actually needs and you’re not performing miracles — you’re just doing basic maintenance. The exact dose, the timing, the how much and for whom — that’s still being worked out. But potentially buying time, slowing the rate of decline — that’s the claim I’m willing to make. And it’s the claim we’re building a trial to test.

What I don’t know yet — and I’ll say this plainly — is exactly how much of that decline can be slowed, and for how long, and for whom. That’s the question Captain’s Chair is built to answer. The science is suggestive. The direction is clear. But the precise shape of it, the dose, the duration, the differential effects across stages of decline — that’s still being worked out, including by us.

What I do know is what I’ve seen. In late-stage dementia, a lot is gone. Language goes. Recognition goes. Much of what we think of as personality becomes hard to reach. But if food is presented properly and is prepared with care, there is a lot of enjoyment for those with even advanced dementia. I’ve watched it. It’s not a small thing. It’s not a footnote. If something still reaches people at that stage — genuinely reaches them — then why wouldn’t you make it count? Why would you put anything less than the best motor oil into an engine that’s already working so hard just to keep running?

That’s the question I can’t get past.

Because here’s what I actually believe, underneath all of it: what we need to thrive is not in a lab somewhere waiting to be discovered. It’s not in the next pharmaceutical trial. It’s already here. It’s already around us. The food, the nutrients, the compounds that the human body evolved over millennia to run on — they exist. We’ve just systematically moved away from them, and built an entire industry on top of that distance.

If we can connect with that in its entirety it may be the key to helping us live life to the maximum.

That’s not a conclusion. That’s the question I keep sitting with. And it’s why we’re running the trials.

Approximately 4 minutes reading time.