About dr. hodson

I began my journey into healthy living as a young mother in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, pregnant with my first child and searching for answers to raising healthy infants and children.

While reading about the founding of Ohio, I stumbled across a history of the Indian populations who, during the centuries before Columbus’ arrival, inhabited the “frontier” near the Ohio River. This book contained a remarkable glossary of fauna and flora that had been used by the American Indians for generations. These indigenous natives had exploited vast numbers of natural herbs, barks, trees, shrubs, fruits and plants as part of a healthy diet and used many to effectively heal their wounds and cure their illnesses.

An environmental scientist who was a neighbor of mine graciously spent many weekends over the following months tramping through the backwoods of Ohio with me, together discovering and collecting these natural herbal wonders of Mother Earth. Upon discovering the vast bounty of our precious earth that has sustained all life for millions of years. I was hooked!

One consequence of this data collection was the publication of my doctoral dissertation (Adaptive Responses  to Scarcity Among Lactating Desert Women, Gabrielle Hodson, Ph.D., University of Utah doctoral dissertation, 2011) providing statistically-significant evidence for the natural ability of desert women to conserve their physical energy, even while sleeping, enhancing their ability to breastfeed their infants, despite having access to scarce water and minimal food, and retaining sufficient energy for the efficient production of this miraculous food for their babies – human breast milk!

These strong mothers fed their babies with confidence and raised beautiful healthy children living on foods provided naturally by the earth, including beans, maize tortillas, verdolagas [purslane] and quelites [pigweed]. Most importantly, I was curious to know what I could learn from these ancient peoples. What lessons could they teach us on how to survive the coming decades of global warming and climate change?

As I watched these humble women waking early each morning before dawn, trotting with their buckets of masa from the grain mill along the narrow dirt paths to their homes, arranging and stoking the morning fire, and preparing and cooking the tortillas and beans to sustain their families for the day, I began to understand this time-honored rhythm of life, a harmonious and balanced existence of humans in nature bringing peace into their hearts and a contentment to their family hearth and homes.

As a young girl, I read ancient scriptural advice concerning healthy dietary choices and wondered why the modern human diet has changed so dramatically over the last two hundred years. How did we evolve from a simple gatherer of the earth’s natural nutritional offerings to people who now rely almost exclusively on artificial, laboratory-created, unnatural products of modern mass food production?

After teaching for more than 25 years, many of my students encouraged me to share my knowledge of healthy living. A lifetime of eating an organic whole food diet and raising an organic garden with fruit trees, leafy greens, lacinato kale, collards, turnip greens, mustard greens, squashes, heirloom tomatoes, and green beans in a century pioneer home has sustained my continuing good health, allowing me to pursue a successful career in education and business and raise a healthy family.

Throughout my adult career, I have founded businesses in computerized medical transcription and maxillofacial replacement services. I was the administrator of three different medical orthopedic practices and managed a crippled children clinic. I was a national museum laboratory director, and recently had the energy and passion to run for political office in my home state of Utah. But, most importantly, I am a devoted mother of four beautiful and healthy children.

After 35 years of nutritional research and experience, I established Hodson Custom Health, LLC, to meet the needs of people who earnestly want to know what to eat to obtain optimum health, have healthy babies, raise happy thriving children and live a long and healthy life. A whole food organic diet is one aspect to an alternative therapeutic lifestyle medical approach that eliminates and prevents chronic disease through healthy lifestyle changes.