Eczema pushed me to rebuild my health through food. My kitchen became my pharmacy, and that experience is the reason Food Web exists — real healing starts with what we cook and eat.
Written by
Keegan Francis
Keegan Francis is the Chief Technology Officer of Food Web. He brings 10+ years of experience building and leading technical teams in FinTech startups. From Halifax, Nova Scotia, to internationally operating companies, Keegan has brought and scaled several applications making him an ideal candidate to lead the Technology of Food Web.
Where meals are made.
The kitchen has always been more than a place to cook for me — it was the place I rebuilt my health from the ground up. This is the story of how eczema pushed me into the world of elimination diets, herbs, gut health, and kitchen-based medicine. And it’s also a story about why Food Web exists today.
One of the reasons that I was compelled to cofound Food Web with Justin is because of my own personal experience with the healing properties of food. When I graduated from high school and left my home town of Truro to attend Acadia University, my skin began deteriorating immediately. My ailment is eczema, and it has affected me my entire life. My triggers are fundamentally environmental and stress-related. What I didn’t know at the time was that food and diet were about to save my life. For this reason, I began thinking about the Kitchen as my Pharmacy.
I threw everything and the kitchen sink at my skin issue to try to solve the problem. Within the first month of attending Acadia, I was attending my classes with a swollen face, a bleeding scalp, and an intense feeling of alienation. The alienation I felt was extremely stressful, which only fed into the vicious cycle of creating more eczema. I noticed very early into this saga that the food I was eating at the meal hall was part of the problem.
Steroid cream had been a part of my treatment plan since I was a baby. I improperly used it by regularly exceeding the recommended dose and prolonging the recommended treatment period. After leaving home, I continued to use steroid cream to treat my eczema with less and less effectiveness over time. I later learned that steroid cream resistance and reciprocal inflammation are symptoms of steroid cream abuse. That's my bad.
As the effectiveness decreased, and I dove headfirst into researching and understanding my condition, I discovered the notion of an elimination diet.
A cursory analysis of the causes of eczema and inflammation may tell you that foods like dairy and gluten tend to make eczema worse. The logic behind eliminating these foods from the diet makes sense. So, in the spirit of understanding myself, I decided to do the hard thing and cut these from my diet.
“Know Thyself” - Delphic Oracle
I immediately discovered that nearly everything served at the Acadia Meal Hall contained gluten or dairy. I just paid some amount of money to Acadia for my “All You Can Eat” meal plan. In reality, after beginning my elimination diet, it became my “All You Can’t Eat” meal plan. My mind began to be regularly blown by how many “regular” food items were packed full of wheat or dairy products. This significantly limited my options at the meal hall and my ability to provide myself with basic nourishment.
To their credit, the administrators of the meal hall had a solution for people like me. A small fridge in the staff area was kept for gluten-intolerant individuals such as myself. It was filled with cardboard bread and “vegan mayonnaise”, a part of my staple diet for the next 6 months. This was in 2012, long before the gluten-free and health food industry matured into the state it is in today. Nowadays, people like me have an amazing selection of foods to choose from, and restaurants are generally accommodating.
Stir-fry days were the days that I ate the best. The chefs behind the counter facilitated a “make your own” stir-fry station. I got to select from a range of plain vegetables and unseasoned meat, topped off with a choice of my sauce, none of which I was able to eat (because of gluten). I managed to get my money’s worth from the meal hall by stuffing my backpack full of apples, bananas, and oranges to keep in my dorm and get me through the days.
Every weekend, my mom would drive 2 hours from Truro to deliver me Sesame Snaps and Fruit to Go Bars from Costco. So, more so out of necessity than my own will, I ended up eliminating the majority of processed foods from my diet. It was not surprising that my health embarked on a long trajectory towards meaningful improvement.
After my first year, it became my priority to move out of on-campus living as soon as possible. I found an apartment with 2 of my friends and began cooking every meal in my second year. My research into health foods continued, and continues to this day. Growing up in the West in the 90s and 2000s, it felt like my dietary choices and selections were guided by societal conditioning. Kraft dinner was a staple, greasy pizza was a weekly choice, and fast food was only “sort of bad”.
Learning how to cook for myself and enjoy simple foods was one of the best things I ever did for myself. A surprising outcome of my new diet was that my taste buds began to change, allowing me to explore a depth to food that I didn’t know existed.
My childhood diet was supercharged with insanely potent flavours. Massive amounts of sugar both changed my taste buds and my gut flora. This influenced my taste buds and thus my food choices for years, even after I started eating healthily. It took years to decondition my taste buds away from my childhood preferences. Gradually, I began to notice flavours within broccoli that I didn’t know existed.
Broccoli became my favourite ingredient in my nightly stir-fry. My sodium intake dropped dramatically, allowing me to enjoy the subtleties of peas and carrots. My sauces consisted of Liquid Gold Olive Oil and balsamic vinegars; Unadulterated, high-quality, nutrient-dense, high-polyphenol olive oil and naturally sweet, probiotic, and mind-blowingly flavorful balsamic vinegar. I replaced sodas with tea, and began my mornings with water and a shot of apple cider vinegar. After months of this regime, my entire body responded positively.
An intensely deep subject that the world is only beginning to understand is the role of gut bacteria in our overall health. Probiotics were recommended to me by my nutritionist as “essential” to my recovery. I began taking 40 billion cultures daily, and after an uncomfortable month-long adjustment period, I started noticing massive improvements in my digestion and health more holistically.
I was unaware of this at the time, but I probably owe at least in part my positive mental attitude to probiotics. A recent 2025 meta-analysis found that probiotics provided measurable improvements in depressive symptoms. My subjective experience certainly echoed this finding.
The best way to see inside your body, short of cutting yourself open, is to pay attention when you use the bathroom. Sparing you the details, trimming down processed sugar, eating on schedule (and not in the evening), getting my daily dose of fibre, and supplementing with pre-/probiotics completely changed my gut flora for the better.
Feed your body the right things, and your body will crave the right things. Crave the right things, and you’ll eat the right things. Once the momentum of your positive choices takes hold, I’d be shocked if you didn’t notice complete improvements and changes within your body.
A belief that I’ve come to know as truth is that the body must be thought of holistically. There is a formula for stripping down your bad habits and systematically replacing them with better ones. Eating poorly distorted my natural flavour preferences. After a couple of years into my elimination diet, I started to notice my natural preferences for foods and tastes manifest in my daily desires. The results were slow, but consistent and incremental – e.g. I craved basic herbed salt instead of dill pickle MSG seasoning.
I’ve included a list of foods, herbs, and supplements here for you to have a direct line of sight into what I used to heal my body. Keep in mind that this is what worked for me and my body. I implore you to follow a similar approach without directly copying the foods and supplements that worked for me. We’re all different, and there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to each of our respective ailments; it’s your job to “Know Thyself”.
It would be impossible to include them all, but here are the foods that I lived on during university and the years that followed.
I really do think of herbs as strategic inputs to turning things around. If food is daily upkeep, then herbs are targeted support. If food is the body’s fuel, herbs are its tuning tools.
Just a secondary reminder. This is what worked for me. Ask your health care provider and/or nutritionist to discover what is right for you.
At peak extremity in my elimination diet, here is a list of everything that I cut out in order to better understand what worked for me.
I maintained this elimination diet for 6-12 months, gradually reintroducing everything except for gluten and dairy back into my diet.
I want to be clear. This article is a subjective recounting of how I systematically repaired my skin condition. I’ve used pharmaceuticals along this journey in times of crisis. Things like prednisone, selective & proper use of steroid creams, antihistamines, antibiotics, and other creams are part of my story and recovery journey as well. I’ve been on IV drips of antibiotics and antihistamines, as well as several rounds of prednisone for difficult situations.
I believe there is a time and place to visit the actual pharmacy. I aim to have the kitchen be my first line of defence, so I never create the conditions to visit the hospital ever again. At Food Web, the Kitchen is at the centre of our business. By opening up fewer kitchens and cooking with high-quality ingredients, a downstream effect may, in fact, be fewer visits to the hospital. Health care starts in your kitchen.
