Dr. Anthony Gustin

DC, MS, CSCS, CCSP, CFL1

I'm a former sports medicine turned functional medicine clinician. I built a brand called Perfect Keto (acquired) then became a small farmer. Now I'm actively reading, writing, podcasting, investing, and building a bunch of health businesses (Equip Foods, Lineage Provisions, Ion Layer, Rooted Local, & more).

I'm a former sports medicine turned functional medicine clinician. I built a brand called Perfect Keto (acquired) then became a small farmer. Now I'm actively reading, writing, podcasting, investing, and building a bunch of health businesses (Equip Foods, Lineage Provisions, Ion Layer, Rooted Local, & more).

The Full Back Story

Early Years

Growing up, I was your typical fat, depressed, lonely, acne-ridden corn-fed middle-American kid. My friends were fat and sick, my family was fat and sick, and my extended family was even fatter and sicker. I was told to run (a lot) more and to eat Special K with skim milk and lean turkey sandwiches with Miracle Whip Light. I was given tons of prescription medications for my skin, gut, depression and guess what: they all made me worse.

Every medical doctor made me and my family dumber, sicker, and fatter so I looked for a different route and help people figure out why they are actually sick. (Explains a lot about why I have a penchant for speaking up against Big Food and Big Pharma.) All I knew from those experiences is that I didn’t want to live the rest of my life being lied to, depending on authorities who didn’t know what they were talking about, and wanted to help others escape the zoo as well.

As a Clinician

From when I was a teen until my early 20s I scraped together every bit of knowledge I could on how to get myself healthy, which ended up helping me get other people healthy. I chose to get my Doctorate in Chiropractic (D.C.) and Master’s in Sports Rehab (M.S.) not because I think popping the joints in the spine is particularly effective, rather to own my own business and be able to have the skills to work with the most elite athletes in the world. After all, tweaking performance at the high end edge cases always trickles down to the average person (look at NASCAR & F1 advancements being applied to consumer vehicles as an example).

I opened up a clinic in San Francisco in 2012 that quickly expanded to a team with six different locations to work with your average Joe all the way to All-Pro NFL, NBA, and MLB athletes. I started with fixing their sports injuries and then transitioned to helping them holistically approach their life in order to achieve maximum performance. The playbook was simple: eat real food, get a ton of quality sleep, move like a human, and keep stress low.

I took my learnings back to my clinic and started working with complex functional medicine cases and unsurprisingly found the way to get the most out of elite athletes was also how to help people with autoimmune disease, gut dysfunction, and cancers restore their health.

Treating this wide range of patients taught me the obvious thing: The natural state of an organism is health and that natural state is achieved through a natural environment. No matter what you do for interventions (which is all modern health care is) the individual will always revert to being in pain or being sick again unless the underlying environment is restored and resembles a pro-human habitat.

Think about it like this: A train running on tracks at full speed (health) is when the normal conditions are present. Twist the tracks (broken environment) and the train flies off of them in a fiery blaze (illness). To get the train running smoothly again you need two things: to get the train back on the tracks (intervention) AND to fix the track (restore natural environment).

Most people just keep doing the intervention by taking lifelong prescription meds, dieting over and over, an even going to therapy weekly forever but their train keeps flying off the tracks. The reason why is because they keep reverting back to what made them sick in the first place: their man-made zoo cage.

All you have to do to understand this concept is peer outside the bars and observe any wild animal. Do you see obese giraffes, sharks with diabetes, or eagles dropping like flies with heart disease? Now look at the animals we’ve domesticated, the ones we put in zoos, the ones we poison with manmade environmental disasters, and the others we stuff in research laboratories and poke and prod. They all get fat, sick, and depressed when we change their environment.

It is very simple: The further we get away from our natural environment, the more sick we get.

The questions of “What is/how do you best recreate a pro-human habitat in a modern world?” and “How to show people they are living in a zoo cage?” has been top of my mind and at the core of all my curiosities and work ever since.

Brand Building

Living in San Francisco taught me that this thing called the internet exists, and through that I was able to get some of these ideas out to the masses. I started blogging thoughts here, posting on social media, and launched a business called Equip Foods in 2015 to provide real food supplementation to my elite athletes. Doubling down on this direction, I sold my clinics in 2016 and moved to Austin, then launched Perfect Keto in 2017 to help make the power of ketosis, which I also used with my patients, easy and accessible for everyone. (All while sneaking in the fundamentals of how to live like a human to those interested in a diet trend ๐Ÿ˜‰).

I started podcasting in 2018 and continue today with over 10 million downloads featuring your typical health guests on like Peter Attia, David Goggins, Zach Bush, Mark Hyman, Dave Asprey, Max Lugavere, Josh Axe, Paul Saladino, Mark Sisson, and Robb Wolf to more recently less well-known yet highly in touch with their humanity guests like Jesse Griffiths, Will Harris, Kate Kavanaugh, Jake Muise, Richard Perkins, Ty Beal, Georgie Ryan, and Wendell Berry.

I published a best-selling book in 2019 (Keto Answers) so I could literally close the chapter of keto and put all my knowledge on that topic in one place.

After hundreds of thousands of copies of the book sold, 150 million+ page views on over 1500 educational articles, and tens of millions of products shipped to customers around the world, I sold Perfect Keto in 2021 and bought a small farm outside of Austin, Texas to learn about the ins and outs of regenerative agriculture first hand.

After thinking I had it all figured out, I got absolutely crushed by mold toxicity from a building defect at my house in Austin and was sicker than I had been at any other point in my life by far. From 2020 to 2023, I experienced massive fatigue, joint pain, hair loss, depression, irritability, sinus issues, and headaches — just to a few of my symptoms. I was a walking zombie. Yes, it was that bad. No one had the answers, again. This gave me even more compassion for people who do all the right things but remain hopeless.

After years of ups and downs, seeing countless doctors and experts, obsessing over detox and healing, my wife and I found ourselves in the much drier and less mold ridden high desert of Bend, Oregon where we’re finally able to feel healthy again and I can get back to work.

Now

I still operate Equip Foods and have since launched a bunch of other brands like Lineage Provisions (regenerative meat and organ snacks), Rooted Local (local regen meat delivery in central Texas), Ion Layer (NAD+ patches at-home without the IV), Zero Acre (fermented sugar cane oil to replace seed oils), & more.

I’ve invested and advised 30+ businesses in the health and wellness space, ultimately doing my best to help good people do good things.

I’m also working on some top secret projects to push small scale regenerative and local food adoption forward.

Why so many businesses? I am a believer in brands for this reason: products that solve problems make money that builds teams that create content to educate people who care about being healthier.

As much as I wish we were all living on land in a communal manner, the reality is we exist in an economic world. Other than always trying to be the best husband, son, brother, friend, and community member I can be, building and educating is the best way I’ve found to create the world I want to exist.

Thank you for your support and I truly hope I can provide some sort of value for you in your own journey in this crazy world.

(Last updated in the winter of 2024.)