326. Gut Healing Without Extremes: Ancestral Nutrition and Simple, Whole Foods | Heather Woodruff

Simple Farmhouse Life

Lisa Bass

Home & Garden, Leisure

4.9 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Modern nutrition advice often makes gut health feel complicated and discouraging. In this conversation, Heather shares a simple, ancestral approach to digestion that brings the focus back to whole foods, sustainable kitchen rhythms, and listening to the body’s cues. We talk through why the environment we cook in matters, how modern food processing has disrupted digestion, and why adding nourishing, traditionally prepared foods can be more effective than cutting everything out. This episode offers a realistic perspective on healing the gut in a way that supports the whole family and fits your real life!

In this episode, we cover:

- Heather’s approach to healing chronic digestive issues through ancestral eating and kitchen-centered rhythms

- Why the kitchen environment (lighting, clutter, etc.) plays a role in digestion more than we realize

- Shifting our mindset from cutting foods out to intentionally adding nourishing, traditional foods back in

- A simple ancestral filter for choosing foods without getting overwhelmed by competing nutrition noise

- Gentle first steps for gut healing using soups, cooked foods, and simple meals

- The most common gut symptoms women experience and how digestion affects hormones and nutrients

- Why bloating happens, including microbiome imbalance and poor food breakdown

- Thoughts on gluten pauses, sourdough, and traditionally prepared grains

- When restrictive protocols like GAPS or carnivore may be useful and when they’re not necessary

- Why animal-based protein is often easier to digest than plant-based sources, especially during gut healing

- Observing food rhythms that support digestion while honoring different seasons of life– postpartum, pregnancy, breastfeeding

- The difference between meat stock and bone broth and when each is most supportive

View full show notes on the blog + watch this episode on YouTube.

Thank you for supporting the sponsors that make this show possible!

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Check out Heather’s Workshop: Meat Stock & Soup Making for Deep Digestive Healing

Master the rhythm of sourdough with confidence in my Simple Sourdough course

Gain the sewing knowledge and skills every homemaker needs in my Simple Sewing series

Keep all my favorite sourdough recipes at your fingertips in my Daily Sourdough cookbook

CONNECT

Heather Woodruff | Website | Instagram | Facebook

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When there's a health thing coming out where they're like, eggs are terrible for you. It's like, you can pause with all that noise and be like, could I grow, raise, harvester hunt? Yes, I'm going to keep eating eggs. Those work for me. They're great. So I'm going to carry on. I'm not going to listen to the noise or the drama that's going on in the health world because there's a lot of it and it's loud. And so grounding into that, can I grow, raise, harvest, or hunt is kind of the
0:26.1	foundation when it comes to ancestral eating. My name is Lisa, mother of nine and creator of the
0:32.1	blog and YouTube channel Farmhouse on Boone. On this podcast, I like to talk about simplifying your
0:37.0	life so you can live
0:37.9	out your priorities. I help you learn how to cook from scratch and decorate on a budget through this
0:42.5	podcast and my courses simple sourdough in the Simple Sewing series. I will leave links to these
0:47.5	resources in the show notes and description box below. Now let's get into the show.
0:59.3	Welcome back to the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast.
1:06.4	Today we are going to talk about gut health and practices we can do in our kitchen to help our guts and to heal.
1:09.3	We're going to be chatting with Heather Woodruff.
1:18.4	Now Heather Woodruff is a gut health educator and ancestral nutrition practitioner who helps families nourish their homes with simple, time-tested foods and practices.
1:23.4	She teaches families how to support digestion through slow cooking, fermentation, and whole-food meals.
1:28.2	Drawing on both professional training and personal experience, Heather's passion about helping people reconnect with food as medicine and build sustainable rhythms that support long-term health.
1:33.8	Her work empowers families to step away from modern diet confusion and embrace nourishing
1:37.9	practices that honor the body's natural design.
1:40.8	I think this is an important distinction because sometimes this world of health can be really
1:45.9	confusing. We hear a lot of conflicting information, different opinions. And I think just going back to
1:51.5	the basics is refreshing. So let's dive into this conversation. Well, Heather, welcome on. I am so
1:57.9	looking forward to talking with you about gut health through ancestral eating, simple
2:03.7	kitchen practices, inflammation, digestion, all of that kind of stuff. I think a lot of that
2:08.9	is on our minds for so many reasons. So let's start with introductions. Tell us about yourself
2:13.8	and your mission and what you do online. Yeah, what I do, and I've been doing this work for,
	...

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