From Campfire to Corn Syrup: How Suppressed Emotions Turn Toxic in the Body
- Lauren Dyer
- Jul 15
- 2 min read
(A Functional Medicine Reflection Inspired by Zach Bush, MD)
We used to sit around fires and eat corn.
Whole. Unprocessed. Sacred. Nourishing.
That corn fuelled life. It grounded us in seasonality, community, digestion and emotional presence. We felt grief. We metabolised sadness. We danced joy. We let things move through us.
Today, we don’t eat corn like that.
We eat high-fructose corn syrup - an enzymatically twisted, unnatural isomer the liver cannot metabolise. And what we’ve done to corn… we’ve done to emotions.
We don’t grieve. We suppress.
We don’t feel anger. We pathologise it.
We don’t process fear. We bypass or medicate it.
We’ve made our emotional states invisible, fragmented, and unprocessable - just like modern corn.
And just like our livers can’t detox that syrup, our nervous systems can’t alchemise these inverted emotional residues. So we store them.
In the fascia. In the gut. In the thyroid. In the nervous system. In the unexhaled breath.
From a functional medicine perspective, this matters.
Unprocessed emotional states drive:
• HPA axis dysregulation
• Hormonal imbalance
• Detoxification backlogs
• Gut–brain axis disruption
• Autoimmune activation
• Chronic fatigue, burnout, apathy
And spiritually? We become estranged from joy.
Emotionally? We become flatlined, resentful, dysregulated.
So what can we do?
We return to wholeness.
We feel the emotion without the story.
We honour the sadness without shame.
We breathe into the anger without fear.
We come back to the body - to the parasympathetic, to presence, to our own firelight.
This isn’t just poetic. It’s clinical.
It’s a functional strategy for emotional metabolism.
“Grieve it fully. Without narrative. Without moral judgement. That’s what alchemises the emotion.”
— Dr. Zach Bush
If we want to heal at a systems level, we must restore the sacredness of feeling - not as weakness, but as biology in motion.
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