Matt Warnock never planned on becoming an herbalist. He was a lawyer. When he stepped in to help with his dad’s herbal company in 2000, he thought it would be part-time and temporary. It was neither.
Matt was born in 1958 in Provo, Utah, while his parents, Paul and Helen, were attending Brigham Young University – the oldest of six kids, four boys, then two girls followed. He was born and reared Mormon. His beliefs came up short for him more than 20 years ago, and he is no longer practicing that particular faith, but he still appreciates the values, work ethic, and commitment to serving others that he learned early in life.
He has lived in Boston, Northern and Southern California, Geneva, Switzerland, the south of France, and now makes his home near Salt Lake City. He has been married to his wife Carol for 47 years and has three daughters and three grandchildren.
Travel and living abroad taught Matt to value differences in people, languages, and cultures. “There’s more than one way to do it” became one of his favorite maxims and, as he would later discover, one of the foundations of eclectic herbalism.
He likes discussing complex issues from all sides and finding solutions that work. Even better, he likes taking something learned in one field and applying it to a completely different kind of problem … and that habit started early.
Matt the Lawyer
Reared on the TV show Perry Mason, Matt wanted to be an attorney and a litigator. After his first year of law school, he decided to get an MBA as well, graduating with both degrees in 1985.
More than ten years of work as a litigator followed in both Utah and Silicon Valley. Eventually, Matt concluded that litigation was “the World’s most expensive and uncertain way to move money from one pocket to another.” He was ready for something else. He just didn’t know it would be herbs!
In 1994, Matt’s dad, Paul Warnock, founded RidgeCrest Herbals with a partner, Clyde St Clair. They bought a professional line of herbal remedies from an existing company, gave them user-friendly labels, and distributed them through health-food stores. Soon, their product ClearLungs was a nationwide best-seller.
Matt was still working in other fields, however. In 1998, he took a job in Utah with his brother Greg, helping with mergers and acquisitions and coaching tech startups on the side.
A New Career
Then, in 2000, his mother Helen was diagnosed with heart problems associated with taking Phen-fen, a combination of two FDA-approved drugs. The drugs were often prescribed together for weight loss before evidence emerged linking the combination to serious heart-valve problems and pulmonary hypertension.
Helen’s doctors gave her 18-24 months to live. Matt’s father Paul wanted to spend as much time with her as possible, so Matt stepped in to help at RidgeCrest. He thought he was solving a short-term family problem. Instead, he found a whole new set of questions and a lifelong mission.
His mother was now facing a terminal prognosis after taking FDA-approved drugs, while Matt was now selling herbal formulas that had never gone through the FDA drug-approval process. The contrast was hard to ignore. So, how could he know whether RidgeCrest’s formulas were safe and effective? What evidence was behind them? Was there real science behind Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)? Matt did what litigators do: he prepared the case.
Years of litigation had taught him to put a critical eye to evidence and arguments, and he applied the same approach to both modern and traditional medicine. What he found surprised him.
There’s More Than One Way
TCM teaches that the safest drugs are best, while the strongest drugs are inferior. All Western prescriptions are ‘inferior’ drugs in the TCM system. Western medicine assumes there is one best “magic bullet” drug for every disease, and it will be a new, patented drug compound; TCM uses small doses of many different ingredients and rarely uses a single herb when a proper formula is available. TCM looks at the patient first and the complaint second; whereas Western medicine treats the pathology first, the patient is almost an afterthought. TCM aims to gently correct chronic issues over time, while Western pharmacology seeks quick fixes through powerful drugs. The differences were striking.
Matt began to see that TCM and other alternative approaches had merit too. “There’s more than one way to do it” suddenly had another meaning. Why couldn’t we use those different approaches more easily and effectively?
His Research Led to Innovation
That question led Matt deeper into U.S. food-and-drug law. Drugs could talk specifically about the diseases and problems they were designed to treat. Dietary supplements could make certain permitted claims about supporting the body’s normal structure or function, but could not legally claim to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease, even if the evidence were clear. He learned more than he ever expected to know about dietary-supplement regulation, current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMPs), labeling, claims, and the other whims and curiosities of U.S. food-and-drug law.
He also began to innovate. In 2006, Matt developed a new approach to combining homeopathic medicines with herbals, designed to maximize the potency of both. A patent application was published in 2008, and the resulting patent was later issued in 2013. A few years later, in 2017, the FDA told RidgeCrest that herbs and homeopathics could not be combined in the same product because the agency had no way to regulate the combination. That meant RidgeCrest could no longer use the patented approach, effectively making the patent worthless. To Matt, it was a perfect example of what happens when an approach doesn’t fit neatly into a regulatory system built around predetermined categories.
Concurrently, Matt continued to look for new ways to approach health by thinking outside the conventional pharmaceutical box. One area that caught his attention was bioavailability and how well the body absorbs and uses what it is given. Silica, for example, is important for hair, bone, connective tissue, and other tissues, but can be difficult for the body to absorb depending on its form. Matt developed formula with a blend of four herbs designed to increase digestive blood flow and improve bioavailability. The formulation was even granted a U.S. patent in 2014 (US 8,840,938).
By the end of 2014, both of Matt’s parents had passed away, and Matt bought Paul’s remaining interest in RidgeCrest from the estate. Paul and Matt had bought the original partner Clyde out years earlier.
Matt’s mother, Helen, lived far longer than the originally predicted 18 months, although her health problems continued. Two brain-stem strokes eventually left her bedridden for 14 years. Nevertheless, she retained her grace and sense of humor. Watching his mother’s experience made medicine personal for Matt in a way no textbook or clinical trial ever could. That learning would continue when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, bringing with it a whole new set of concerns.
Matt’s Considerations Grow
Matt had spent years looking at how medicines were researched, approved, regulated, marketed, and paid for. He increasingly came to believe the system’s incentives did not always (or even usually) align with the simple goal of keeping people healthy. Whether others agreed with all of his conclusions or not, Matt knew one thing: he was no longer willing to sit on the sidelines. He wanted to become a much stronger activist for health freedom.
In 2023, Matt was elected to the Board of the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA). In 2024, AHPA made a documentary to celebrate 30 years of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). Through that project, Matt first learned about the roles the National Health Federation and Citizens for Health had played in the long fight over dietary-supplement regulation and DSHEA. After almost 25 years in the natural-products industry, he had barely been aware of either organization.
He reached out and joined both immediately, becoming a lifetime member of NHF. He was appointed first to NHF’s Advisory Board and then, a year later, won a seat on the full Board of Governors.
For someone who had only just discovered NHF, it all seemed to happen quickly. But in many ways, Matt had been heading in this direction for years. The questions at the heart of NHF were already ones he had been asking for a long time: Who gets to decide which health options people have? How much regulation actually protects consumers, and when does protection become restriction? Why should one system have a monopoly on acceptable thinking, or useful approaches be pushed aside simply because they don’t fit the existing model?
The “Magic Bullet for Everyone” Myth
In 2024, he wrote Rethinking Medicine with Benton Bramwell, ND. The book challenges what Matt and Ben see as false assumptions that too often pass for medical science: “one disease, one target, one drug”; the “magic bullet” model; assumptions built into the pharmacological dose-response curve; and problems with clinical trials, blinding, randomization, and statistical interpretation.
Matt argues that traditional herbal medicines should not automatically be treated like newly invented chemical compounds. Humans have documented extensive histories of use for many traditional herbs, including information about which are generally well tolerated and others that require considerable caution. That history is evidence too, even if it isn’t the same kind of evidence generated by a modern randomized controlled trial.
He also questions the way efficacy is reduced to statistical averages. A clinical trial can tell us what happened, on average, to a group of people, but no patient is an average. Some respond, some don’t, and some respond in ways the average can hide altogether. No amount of statistical sophistication can change the fact that the numbers describe other people. For Matt, they can never fully answer the question that actually matters to the individual patient: “Will it be safe and effective for ME?”
That question sits at the heart of Matt’s thinking about medicine. He doesn’t reject modern medicine. Far from it. There are times when it is clearly the best or only tool for the job. He rejects the idea that it should be the only toolbox.
Matt’s Stalwart Support for NHF
During his first term on the NHF Board, Matt helped bring in new corporate sponsors to finance NHF’s 70th and 71st anniversary meetings. Twenty-five years in the natural-products industry had given him a lot of contacts, and he has used those relationships to help NHF build alliances around health-freedom issues and campaigns. He kept writing too.
For the Fall 2025 issue of Health Freedom News, Matt wrote the cover article “Health Freedom: Deposing Three Monarchs.” In it, he argues that monotherapy, mono-thinking, and monopoly are three of the biggest problems in medicine today. His answer is equally direct: allow many different approaches and let innovation and competition do what they are supposed to do in a free market.
For the Spring 2026 issue of Health Freedom News, he wrote another cover article, “Why I Support the NHF,” and arranged for the issue to be co-distributed with WholeFoods Magazine at Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, California. The Expo edition put NHF’s message in front of people from across the natural-products industry.
A Codex Meeting
Then, in July 2026, Matt got to see another side of health-freedom advocacy firsthand when he attended the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC49) meeting in Geneva with NHF President and General Counsel Scott Tips and RidgeCrest’s administrative assistants Amanda Dubaić and Nina Matijašević. Having lived in Geneva years earlier, Matt was now back to watch international food policy being made. It was enlightening.
Codex brings governments together to develop international food standards, and the process gave Matt a close-up view of how competing scientific, regulatory, trade, industry, and consumer interests play out in the same room. He also saw Scott representing NHF and arguing for its health-freedom positions in that process.
For Matt, it reinforced something he had come to believe more strongly over the years: corporations, governments, agencies, and institutions are ultimately just groups of people. So why should the ethical standards we expect from individuals disappear the moment those individuals act as an organization? Matt said, “The Golden Rule is universal and belongs in the boardroom, parliament, regulatory agency, and executive office just as much as anywhere else, even more so, in fact, because with great power comes great responsibility. Anything less is just an excuse for bad behavior.” That belief increasingly shows up in his advocacy.
Matt’s Most Recent Advocacy
In 2024-2025, Matt helped NHF and Citizens for Health file a joint amicus brief in the FTC v. Xlear case, challenging the FTC’s action over claims that Xlear had made about xylitol and COVID-19. The case was subsequently dismissed. With no financial connection to Xlear, his involvement came down to something much more fundamental: he doesn’t like seeing scientific information restricted simply because it challenges the conventional pharmaceutical approach. For Matt, whether the fight is about supplements, homeopathy, health claims, or something else, the question remains the same: who controls the information, and who gets to make the choice?
Matt is currently excited about HB7050, legislation intended to protect access to homeopathic products in the United States. The FDA has taken the position that homeopathic products are unapproved new drugs, while largely focusing its own enforcement efforts elsewhere. But that position still has consequences: insurers, distributors, and major retailers such as Amazon and Whole Foods can restrict access even without direct FDA enforcement. Americans for Homeopathy Choice has led the charge on HB7050, with RidgeCrest, NHF, Citizens for Health, and many other organizations adding their support.
These days, Matt spends much of his time thinking and writing about health freedom and how to get it. He is involved with several nonprofits that share that passion, and one of the things he most enjoys is helping them work together for greater impact. Looking back, this path makes sense. The kid who learned to value faith and service grew into the lawyer who learned to examine both sides of an argument. Living around the World taught him that different cultures solve problems differently. His mother’s experience made questions about medicine deeply personal. RidgeCrest introduced him to herbal medicine. TCM showed him a completely different way of thinking about health. Regulation taught him how quickly choices can be limited. And NHF gave him a broader platform and international voice to impact change.
The “accidental herbalist” has evolved into an intentional health-freedom advocate who hopes that his grandkids, and their grandkids, will grow up with more health freedom and better choices than he had. That means being free to ask questions, having access to good information, and being able to decide what is right for themselves. It is what he believes his own family, and everyone should have. After all, “There’s more than one way to do it.”
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Matt has most recently written an article “Health Freedom: a Manifesto,” which can be found at www.rcherbals.com/advocacy.