About Us

Hi, I’m Stuart — the founder of Healthy Gut Foods, based in Christchurch.

This started over a decade ago, from something personal. After the Christchurch earthquakes, watching someone close to me struggle with their health, I began paying real attention to how food affects the way we feel. The more I looked, the more it came back to the gut — and the less the usual advice seemed to reach the root of it.

I’ve spent years working with land — in agricultural development and regenerative growing, building complex, living polycultures and learning first-hand how soil, plants, and health connect. What I found changed how I think about food entirely. It isn’t only what you eat. It’s how it was grown, and the microbial life it carries. The soil our food grows in is the original source of the diversity our gut evolved with — and modern, industrial growing has quietly stripped most of it away.

Healthy Gut Foods exists to help people put that back. Not through supplements or quick fixes, but through how food is grown, sourced, and eaten — reconnecting to the living systems our health was built on.

What guides the work:

Living soil first. Everything starts in the ground. Food grown in biologically-rich, living soil carries what depleted, industrial food can’t. Get the soil right, and the food follows — and much of your health with it.

Real science, honestly used. This isn’t wellness marketing. The approach is grounded in independent soil and microbiome research — including recent work proving that the microbes in the food we eat contribute to the diversity of our gut. I point to the studies; you can read them yourself.

Reconnection, not just nutrition. We spent generations disconnecting from the living world — the soil, the food, the seasons, each other. This is one thread of the way back: growing and eating food that reconnects us to the microbial richness we’ve lost.

I’m not selling a miracle. I’m sharing what years of working with land — and the science catching up to it — have taught me, and helping people apply it wherever they live.

Whatever space you have, there’s a place to start — with a possibility study, a garden design, or simply the research that shows why this matters. [Start with a possibility study →]