About Dr. Arland Hill

Throughout my formative years, I can remember turning onto the dirt road where our farm was located. Summers were rich. They were a time of prosperity. Not financially, but with a bounty of produce. Every year there was between 4-6 acres of garden with vegetables plentiful enough to keep you gathering all day. When I wanted fruit, all I had to do was walk out behind my grandparents’ house and pick apples, pears, peaches and figs or stroll along the muscadine grape vines gathering handfuls. There was literally a farmer’s market all around us on the farm.

There is a saying that I think is relevant to me. “You can take the boy out of the country, but you cannot take the country out of the boy.” That adage resonated with me without my acknowledgment of it. During my college years, I always yearned to be on the farm on the weekends. As I spent time in graduate school in Texas, I would take every opportunity to visit the farm. Breaks were for 3 weeks and I used every last day of them to reconnect myself to my beginnings. But along the way, my education had played a key role and allowed me to develop an appreciation for those crops we called food on a whole new level.

As I worked through college and early in my career, I started to identify patterns between a person’s physical, mental and emotional pain and stress and the connection that they had with food. The relationship between food, mood, demeanor and brain health were obvious. I started to see how the use of chemicals and genetically modified foods contributed to chronic diseases I was seeing in my family and my patients.