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By Emilie Hagen, Contributor, The MAHA Report
If you were a kid in the ’90s, America ruled the world—one award show, snack, and slogan at a time. We cheered for neon-green slime at the Kids’ Choice Awards, devoured rainbow-frosted Dunkaroos, and collectively shared a love for orange soda with Kel Mitchell.
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If that wasn’t the dream, what was?
But as we’ve gotten older, and more label-literate, we’re starting to see the cracks in the Capri-Sun.
A one-hour conversation with wellness activist, author, and MAHA powerhouse from Down Under, Liana Werner-Gray—creator of The Earth Diet, a guide to eating from the planet instead of the package—might make you question everything your lunchbox ever taught you about life, liberty, and the pursuit of processed sugar.
“I grew up in this crazy place,” Werner-Gray tells me from her new home in Palm Beach, Florida, thousands of miles from where she grew up in Alice Springs, a small country town in the heart of the Australian Outback.
“There’s a rock called Uluru, that’s the Aboriginal name, but the white man’s name is Ayers Rock,” she explains, describing the famous red rock formation the indigenous people call the “heartbeat of Australia,” a spiritual portal so sacred, planes are prohibited from flying over it.
“People travel there from all over the world to seek healing,” she says. “It’s the most grounded place on earth.”
It’s 5:05 p.m. in Attica, New York, and I’m sitting in the town where I grew up—a place known, if at all, for the 1971 prison riot. Our call started five minutes ago, and I’m watching the clock, knowing I have a large pizza and wings to pick up at 6:00 p.m.—greasy comfort food I order every time I’m visiting, that thrusts me back to my childhood.
Werner-Gray, on the other hand, is describing a ritual that reminds her of her childhood: running barefoot through the backyard, licking “fairy floss” off leaves that taste like cotton candy. It’s obvious we’re from different worlds and why we met in this one. I came with questions about how to fix America’s broken food system. She came with a book full of answers.
“We weren’t allowed to eat sugar, so we’d go outside and eat the bush tucker,” she tells me, describing how she learned at an early age how to satisfy her sweet tooth with nature’s own candy. Processed foods were off-limits, and so was Ally McBeal. Television, she was told, was “bad for the brain.” She spent her free time tracking snake, lizard, and kangaroo prints instead, swinging from trees, and exploring damp caves that shimmered with light.
She didn’t need to live vicariously through Calista Flockhart’s sitcom character to feel alive.
Her childhood reads like a fable of its own: a five-year-old girl named Liana, golden-haired and barefoot, wandering the wilderness with her stepbrother—a natural born forager—chewing the backs of honey ants, licking honeysuckle flowers, and eating bush berries whole – a fruit she swears tasted like “a plum and a blueberry that had a baby.”
Meanwhile, my own early education—and diet—came courtesy of American consumerism disguised as primetime entertainment. I learned about the Australian Outback in 2000 from Mark Burnett’s glossy Survivor: The Australian Outback. I watched a young, bronzed, Elisabeth (then Filarski) Hasselbeck compete in grueling immunity challenges, standing still on a narrow totem pole, hoping she wouldn’t fall into the river – and later hear Host Jeff Probst utter: “The tribe has spoken.”
But, listening to Werner-Gray, I realize Burnett didn’t get it entirely wrong. Survival really was part of life in the Outback.
At age five, Liana’s parents enrolled her in an Aboriginal public school—half white, half Indigenous—where teachers took students into the wild to learn how to live off the land.
“My school was very unconventional,” she says. “They would take us out on excursions to the bush and teach us how to survive.”
She remembers asking her mother why her Aboriginal classmates looked different from her. “They’ve been on this earth for a long time,” her mother told her. “You have to respect them—they’re kind of superior, honestly, because they know how to survive off nothing.”
From that moment, Werner-Gray looked up to them—the native Australians inhabiting the land long before British settlers arrived. They taught her to use plants as medicine, to heal pain, and to listen to the land. They taught her that nature could heal anything. “Things that the Great Spirit had created--the healthiest way for us to eat, was to eat from nature...how God intended us to eat.”
Now, twenty minutes into our call, I regret ordering pizza.
I think back to my own kindergarten days, when someone’s Mom treated the class to a Burger King meal. The only thing more thrilling was lice checks in the nurse’s office, hoping to be one of the lucky kids with lice, sent home early to watch Nickelodeon reruns. That or the chicken pox outbreaks that always happened around Thanksgiving.
Meanwhile, Liana was growing up near a sacred spiritual vortex—untouched by Western media, fast-food chains, and lice scares—learning valuable skills that would teach her not just how to survive in the wild, but how to live in harmony with it.
But, like all fables, Werner-Gray’s story comes with a hard lesson.
When she left home for university in Brisbane, she moved across the street from a 7-Eleven and was exposed to junk food for the first time. “I was on my own, and that’s when I started to dive into 7-Eleven foods and fast foods,” she says.
The girl who once foraged for honeysuckle and honey ants was now eating Doritos and Tim Tams for breakfast. Having been sheltered from processed sugars her whole life, she quickly became addicted to the five-minute high it gave her.
“I knew it was so wrong. Like it was so emotional and so spiritual,” she confesses. “Because of my upbringing, I was like, this food is so far removed from its natural state. I know I shouldn’t be having it.”
Food became her drug of choice. She’d binge all week and promise herself, The diet starts Monday—only to end up right back under the neon buzz of the 7-Eleven, reaching for a bar of Cadbury milk chocolate.
Then, one morning in 2009, when Werner-Gray was 21-years-old, she woke up with a tumor “the size of a golf ball,” she recalls, bulging out of her neck. A biopsy confirmed it was early-stage cancer of the lymphatic system.
Terrified, she put her head down and prayed for the first time in her life.
“God, if you are real, I really need you. I need help. I need a sign”
Instead of getting surgery or chemotherapy, she turned inward—back to nature. Convinced her junk-food addiction had poisoned her body, she made radical changes to her diet. Around the same time, doctors diagnosed her with chronic fatigue and parasites.
“Anyone who eats junk food, their lymphatic system gets completely blocked,” she explains. “It’s the body’s sewage system—it’s meant to flush out toxins. But when we overload it with refined sugars, seed oils, and chemicals, it can’t do its job. It thickens, like syrup, and that’s when things start to show up—tumors, chronic fatigue, depression, brain fog. The good news is – there are so many ways to heal it, to drain it. That’s what I learned when I was so sick.”
After three months of cleaning up her diet, her tumor dissolved completely.
Shortly after, inspiration struck “from the supernatural,” she says. She launched a blog called The Earth Diet—a public experiment in returning to her roots. For 365 days, she vowed to eat only foods that came from nature. She documented every craving she had and turned each craving into a personal challenge: a chance to reinvent junk food with natural ingredients. If she wanted chicken nuggets, she’d find a way to make them, The Earth Diet way, with ingredients like almond flour and turmeric.
It was still 2009—long before Instagram stories, TikTok trends and Substack subscriptions. She published her first post on a friend’s Facebook page, and somehow, even though the account only had a few hundred friends, the blog went viral.
“There were so many people, especially women, who were like, ‘I do the same thing,’” she remembers. “We were all keeping it secret, like no one was talking about it.”
Her simple challenge—real food for every meal, every day—struck a chord. “The Earth Diet is all about going back to nature, which has everything you need,” she claims.
What began as a cry for healing became her life’s purpose “A health wake-up call like this can be the biggest blessing,” she tells me.
Eventually, she moved to the United States, where 70% of her readers were based—a country she said was “way sicker” than Australia, and far more open to healing.
Today, Werner-Gray runs programs at theearthdiet.com [ [link removed] ], offering recipes, detox protocols, and online courses in natural healing. Her landing page shows three essentials she swears by: liquid chlorophyll, B17 apricot seeds, and sulforaphane from broccoli sprouts. She’s gotten glowing reviews from MAHA voices like M.D. Mark Hyman. A documentary about her journey called Healing Country is in the works.
If you tell Liana there’s a certain food you can’t give up, she swears she can make a natural version that tastes just as good, if not better.
“Every time I would crave something, I would think, okay, how can I make this in the most natural way?” Her non-negotiable? “Do not have refined sugar at all costs… but you can have as much as you want of maple syrup, fruits, dates, coconut sugar. That is called replacement therapy.”
Over time, she truly believes, the mind is rewired. “After a year, you’re not going back. Your cellular memory will want natural things only,” she says.
When I ask how she sticks to the diet 365 days a year, even while traveling, she doesn’t hesitate. “I don’t go anywhere on a trip without a ton of snacks… Nick sticks… grass-fed, grass-finished… organic chocolate… dried fruit… nuts, seeds.”
I joke that it sounds a little extreme. She challenges me. “But, see, that should be more normalized than the junk food being normalized.”
She’s right.
Werner-Gray then tells me that humans should reconnect with their food on an emotional and spiritual level—taking the time to touch it, feel it, bless it, the way ancient tribes once did, instead of scarfing down drive-through burritos in under 60 seconds. “When I had the tumor and I was so sick, I wasn’t cooking at all,” she reflects, “And the naturopath I worked with said, ‘You need to start cooking and touching your food.’”
Continues Werner-Gray, “When we touch our food—like, you know, back with the Indigenous people—if we study them, they have no traces of cancer or any health issues, no diabetes, no obesity, nothing, because they’re in harmony with nature,” she explains. “The women would feel the food and touch the food. And when we touch it, it activates our digestive system. It’s really loving ourselves, nurturing ourselves, taking care of ourselves.”
That lesson changed everything for her. “I was like, oh, okay, I have to start cooking,” she says. “And so I started making my own food—and that’s a big part of healing, too.”
Listening to her speak, I realized her version of “the dream” was never about chasing more—it was about slowing down and chasing less. Less noise, less processing, less interference between what the Earth gives and what we consume.
For anyone struggling with illness—or disillusioned by the version of the American Dream that came sugar-coated with corn syrup—Liana offers her first natural prescription: liquid chlorophyll.
“Drink liquid chlorophyll every single day,” she recommends.
Chlorophyll, she claims, “could heal the nation.”
She quotes Revelation 22:2: “The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations.” Then Ezekiel 47:12: “Every month it will bear early fruit, for its waters are going out from the sanctuary, and its fruit will be as food, and its leaf for healing.”
“Hello! It’s right there!” Her voice rises with conviction.
In a country that rewards convenience, Liana’s philosophy feels almost radical—the idea that healing might begin not in a lab, but in a leaf. That the truest luxury is living close to the source.
I thank Werner-Gray for reminding me what nourishment really means. For the first time in a long time, I feel hopeful about health. I’m ready to turn over a new leaf (especially if it tastes like cotton candy).
Before we hang up, I ask her one more question: “Did you ever watch Ally McBeal?”
“I did! I did! I loved it,” she laughs. “I always thought America was so cool. I loved that she was an attorney and a boss babe!”
It’s 5:55. Too late to cancel the pizza. I grab my parents’ Chrysler keys and head out. The smell of dough and pepperoni, thick with nostalgia, hits me as I walk into the same old joint—only now there are two vending machines crammed in the corner, stocked with Cherry Cola, Mountain Dew, and Orange Crush, like shrines to the childhood vices some of us never outgrew.
“Emilie for pickup?” the guy at the counter calls out. Audioslave’s “Like a Stone” blares from the kitchen speakers. The perfect funeral song for the kind of food that’s slowly killing everyone in this town and many towns like it across the nation.
My problem now is proximity: I temporarily live too close to the source—the oven that bakes the greasy comfort food married to the memories of my youth.
Luckily, I’ll be back in Los Angeles soon, closer to a far better source—Erewhon—the place from which I’ve been buying liquid chlorophyll drops for a year without realizing why.
Maybe that’s what healing is: remembering what the body already knew, instinctually. The answers are never hidden, just forgotten, always living quietly inside us.
Werner-Gray’s story reminds us that home isn’t about geography. It’s about alignment. It doesn’t matter where we grew up; the path home is the same for everyone. The way forward has always been back-to nature.
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