Hard Cell is written by a former Big Food marketer turned functional medicine practitioner who knows exactly how ultra-processed food was designed, packaged, and sold to feel normal — and irresistible. Blending insider industry insight with cutting-edge biology, this book reveals how modern food quietly disrupts cellular communication, appetite, and metabolism, while reminding us of the extraordinary intelligence already built into the human body. This is both an exposé of where we went wrong, and a reclamation of health, agency, and trust in our own bodies.
Fran McElwaine spent decades inside the world of persuasion — rising from graduate trainee to C-suite roles across leading global design, advertising, and PR agencies, working at the sharp end of how products, narratives, and habits are shaped at scale. In her early-fifties, personal illness forced a profound reckoning with the very systems she had helped fuel. Her own recovery from metabolic melt-down led her to retrain in Integrative Nutrition and Functional Medicine, where science met truth in ways marketing never had. Now 67, Fran runs a successful functional medicine practice specialising in metabolic health — the very system most undermined by modern ultra-processed food — combining insider industry insight with deep biological understanding to help people restore their health at a cellular level.