Why We Avoid Corn on Our Farm

Why We Don’t Do Corn (Food + Skincare)

I get this question a lot:

“I understand avoiding soy… but why no corn?”

For me, I started down this rabbit hole when I shifted to a more holistic lifestyle and completed some food sensitivity testing with my naturopath. I found that my biggest triggers were corn and soy. This led me to research the history of the corn industry, how they convinced us it was ok for us (and animals) to consume and what it actually does to us.

As for the direct connections to gut and digestion issues, here are a few things to know.

Corn has a tough outer shell made of cellulose, and we don’t produce the enzyme needed to fully break that down, which is why it often passes through undigested.

It’s also high in insoluble fiber, which can be hard on some people and show up as bloating, gas, or irritation.

On top of that, corn contains fermentable carbohydrates that gut bacteria break down, which can create even more digestive discomfort in sensitive individuals. It’s actually recognized as a fairly common food sensitivity, which is why it shows up so often in elimination diets.

And then when you look at how much of our food system is built around processed corn, corn oils, syrups, starches, it becomes something people are consuming constantly, often without realizing it.

On the animal side, it matters too.

Cattle are designed to digest forage, not high-starch grains like corn, and heavy corn feeding can disrupt rumen function and lead to digestive stress like acidosis.

What an animal eats directly impacts its fat composition, and that’s where the skincare side comes in. Tallow is fat, and fat reflects what the animal was fed and exposed to. When you’re concentrating that fat into a product and putting it on your skin, the source matters.

So for us, between personal experience, how it affects digestion, and how it carries through into both the meat and the fat we use for skincare, avoiding corn just made sense.