Farm grown Recovery for whatever the day took out of you
Farm grown Recovery for whatever the day took out of you
The phrase “food is medicine” has become the wellness world’s version of “thoughts and prayers.” Everyone says it. Everyone feels good saying it. And almost nobody means anything real when they do. That’s the danger—not the phrase itself, but what happens when language gets stretched so far it stops pointing to anything true.
The original use of the phrase belonged to grandmas, gardeners, and people who still know how to cook and where food comes from. In that world, “food is medicine” meant something simple and grounded. A piece of meat and some vegetables—and fruit when it was in season—was just a regular meal. And then there were the special things you made when someone didn’t feel well: mixtures built from botanicals, herbs, fruits, nuts, grasses, roots, seeds, and whatever the land offered that season. Things pulled straight from soil and pantry because they carried function, flavor, and a purpose. That usage was peaceful, instinctive, and honest.
Then came the influencers, using the same phrase while holding something powdered, flavored, and algorithm-optimized. “Food is medicine” became a caption under a neon shake that tastes like peach sorbet and contains a clinically irrelevant amount of plant dust. They didn’t inherit the meaning—they inherited the hashtag. And hashtags don’t carry wisdom; they carry trend cycles.
Then comes the USDA, NIH, and hospital systems, who use both phrases—but in different ways. “Food Is Medicine” is their broad, public-facing concept, the umbrella idea that nutrition is foundational for health. “Food As Medicine”—capital As—is the technical term for the clinical, billing-coded interventions:
produce prescriptions,
medically tailored meals,
medically tailored groceries.
This version has insurance pathways, reimbursement logic, metrics, screenings, and outcome evaluations. It isn’t a belief system. It’s a healthcare program.
So we end up with two phrases—Food Is Medicine and Food As Medicine—that sound almost identical but function in totally different worlds. And both of them, at their best, once pointed to something we still have right now: real plants growing from real soil, carrying real chemistry that does real things in the human body. Not ancient in the sense of “long ago,” but ancient in the sense of continuity—still alive, still growing, still here.
Once a phrase becomes universal, though, it becomes meaningless.
That’s what’s happening now.
A wellness word printed on plastic.
“Natural” stamped on a bag of potato chips.
“Immune-supporting” slapped on anything that wants to look virtuous.
Marketing fog replacing actual meaning.
It’s Peacekeepers in 1984.
It’s “community” in Big Tech.
And on the Idiocracy side, it’s the fictional Electrolyte Drink Brawndo—marketed so aggressively that the entire population believes “it’s got what plants crave.”
In the film, they irrigate crops with the Electrolyte Drink Brawndo instead of water because advertising has replaced knowledge. Marketing departments tell us what truth is. The soil dies. The crops fail. The land collapses into a dust bowl. That’s what linguistic drift does: it hollows meaning until the absurd becomes normal.
“Food is medicine” used to mean:
eat real plants,
respect soil,
trust the chemistry that grows in the field,
trust the phytonutrients that come from this earth,
food keeps you alive and makes you whole.
Now it means turmeric dust on junk food.
Or a wellness word added so a product can sell for $3 more.
This hollowed-out category is not a comfortable place for real food to sit.
The old category, where LionBerry sits—the one before wellness gloss, before powdered fantasy, before language drift washed the meaning out of the words—still exists. But sitting there is not accidental. People tell me all the time to cheapen it, powder it, plastic-bottle it, isolate it, dilute it, lab-flavor it, margin-boost it, and make it “scalable” by stripping out the thing that makes it real.
I don’t do it.
Not because it’s easy.
But because sometimes the right thing to do is always the hardest thing to do.
LionBerry sits in the old category because I fight for it to sit there.
Real plants.
Real chemistry.
Real soil.
Real function.
Zero powdered fantasy.
LionBerry is exactly what it says it is: a farm-crafted drink made out of actual food.
When I say “the phrase doesn’t need to be fixed,” I mean the phrase “food is medicine.”
We don’t need to invent a new set of buzzwords or rescue the old ones from misuse.
We don’t need to rebuild or replace the language itself.
What needs to change is this:
start making products that mean what the words used to mean.
Start making food products that are just food
We make two products with elderberry: LionBerry Regenerative Hydration and Elderberry Sips. Neither one is a syrup.
Syrup is fine for pancakes. Thicker is not better.
For elderberry — as food, as medicine, for maximum benefit — drop the pH, pasteurize fast, protect plant properties, no powders.
Long, slow steeping in heat — like simmering elderberry with spices for hours — is not better. Powder is fine for powdered sugar, powdered snow, and baby powder — but not elderberry. There is no place for powder in food. Dehydrating and powdering food changes cell structure, uses too much heat, and burns off delicate plant properties.
We never use dehydrated powder. Most powdered elderberry comes from overseas. About 95% of drugstore elderberry products rely on powdered European elderberry.
We use the native American elderberry — Sambucus canadensis, fresh-pressed. American elderberry contains dramatically higher levels of anthocyanins — the purple antioxidants — roughly 10× the antioxidant activity of blueberries, for perspective. It’s beyond a superfruit. It also has antiviral activity and supports gut health and immune modulation.
LionBerry Regenerative Hydration is more than a sports drink. It’s a recovery drink — for after you got your butt kicked, or for whatever it is that life did to you.
It’s strange what we give athletes and kids: sports drinks and energy drinks loaded with artificial colors, sweeteners, powdered isolates, and caffeine. LionBerry is the opposite. Not an energy drink. No isolates. No powders. Whole plants, intact, grown out of the ground by farmers.
Plants work through synergy. Their compounds evolved to function together. Isolating one molecule misses the point.
For LionBerry Regenerative Hydration, we start with a clear, light base of elderflower tea — easily drinkable — and add it to our elderberry. The anthocyanins in elderberry are delicate. Long heat destroys them. Repeated freezing and thawing destroys them. Powdering destroys them.
Mass spectrometry consistently shows that whole-food preparations retain broader nutritional complexity than powders or isolates. Dehydration and reduction require too much heat — the plant properties burn off.
We engineer pH first — not reduction, not boiling, not cooking it down into a syrup.
Elderberry starts around pH 5.1. That’s too high for safe bottling.
People brag about odd things. I have heard competitors advertise that they never add water to their elderberry syrup. Good. I should hope not.
Making an elderberry syrup is about as medicinal as making pancake syrup. Making syrup is traditionally done by cooking elderberry down with honey and spices. That’s worse than adding water. The plant properties are all gone.
To preserve plant properties, you need to drop the pH to prevent botulism, preserve anthocyanins, and proceed with a hot fill, hold, and then hermetically seal — without boiling the plant into oblivion.
We don’t make syrup.
Our second product is Elderberry Sips — that’s the name. Capital E. Capital S. Plural.
Elderberry Sips uses fresh-pressed elderberry — never powder, never concentrate. We add Concord grape ( RESERVITOL-heart support) and tart cherry (melatonin & magnesium). Together they naturally drop the pH to ~3.7, allowing fast pasteurization without heat that causes degradation of purple elderberry anthocyanins The lower pH protects the delicate plant properties. Elderberry Sips is ~15% tart cherry and Concord Grape added to fresh pressed American Elderberry — without gallons of honey and without turning it into a syrup sugar bomb.
A syrup is defined as ~60% solids. To get there, you must boil and reduce. That process destroys anthocyanins.
Cinnamon is great — but it needs long, hot steeping. Elderberry needs fast, controlled heat. They are biologically opposite processes.
And yes, we use glass. We hate hauling it. We are beasts of burden. It’s heavy. It breaks. It’s fragile. It’s expensive to ship. Less-than-truckload shipping is brutal. There are glass tariffs.
But plastic leaches. Aluminum has plastic liners. And healthy bodies deserve better.
We don’t water down syrup. We don’t confuse chemistry with marketing.
We don’t want anyone out of business. We want elderberry done right.
When elderberry “doesn’t work,” it’s usually not the plant’s fault — it’s been overheated in dehydration, over-reduced in making a syrup, powdered and shipped from overseas, repeatedly frozen and thawed, or cooked into oblivion.
Quality matters. Results matter. Temperature, water activity, and pH matter.
We want elderberry’s reputation to be higher. We want better results. We want people impressed because it actually works.
Do elderberry right.