The Cause of Health vs The Cause of Disease

Here's a provocative idea: if our societal focus in medicine shifted from the cause of disease to the cause of health, we, as a society, would be way way healthier, something like 80%.

What is "the cause of health"? It's a set of conditions, in no particular order: meaningful social connection, love, family, lots of "light" and clean whole plant foods with high levels of micronutrient density combined with a high level of energy "kept" relative to energy expended in digestive / elimination / detoxification processes, continuous access to low toxicity environments, clean air and water, sunshine, sufficient quality and durations of sleep, challenging levels of physical activity on a regular basis, a sense of purpose.

Energy efficient nutritionally dense foods are a core concept in "cause of health". All of these factors are important, but the point of departure with leverage for most people will be change of diet. There is a saying "you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet". So yes, "diet and exercise" are both important, but as your weight drops rapidly from a correct diet your ability and innate desire for activity will increase. If your weight isn't dropping rapidly toward a lean healthy level, and you've been doing a paleo diet, you might want to consider a whole foods plant based diet with no "empty calorie" substances (sugar, white flour, oils). It's delicious, and once you figure it out, easy to do and maintain.

Here's another idea, instead of lifespan as a measure of health, let's look at quality of life parameters: at what age does a chronic condition set in? At what age do we begin taking meds for them? At what age are we no longer able to run (a very basic indicator of health and quality of life)? Or even walk unassisted?

Life span has been increasing until very recently, but if current trends continue today's children will be the first generation to live shorter lives than their parents. On the other hand "life span with quality" has been dropping for decades, and is now accelerating at an alarming rate, especially in youngest populations.

What went wrong? Well, many things, environmental degradation is high on the list. But I'm going to suggest something else is more directly responsible, with a far greater impact on health. And that something is technology. Or perhaps more accurately, an over reliance on technology, coupled with "wishful thinking" exaggerations and misapprehensions about what technology can do. We may have entered an era where the total impact of modern medicine on health has become counterproductive.

How can that be?

I think of myself as a bit of a technologist, and I love technology. My life long avocations and vocations all have technology at the core. I "grok" technology pretty well, and that gives me a sense of what's possible in the physical universe, and what is not.

Another area of strong interest for me is psychology, and the biological force at the base of psychology, which might be characterized as "animal" instinct. I have come to think of the essence of Freud's work as the attempt to examine and understand the collision of animal instincts with civilization, especially in a post industrial world setting. (Recommended reading: Freud's career summation essay, "Civilization and Its Discontents".)

What are instincts? Everything our brain and autonomic systems do on a "non-thinking" level, from regulating heart beat to the shock of adrenalin that occurs the instant danger appears in our sensory awareness field. It's the aggregate of all autonomic functioning, which has one overarching function: to keep us alive, as an individual, and as a species.

The most basic way to understand instincts that I have come across is put forth in the short book "The Pleasure Trap", where instinct is characterized as "the motivational triad", the three basic forces that function to keep us alive and well, but can backfire on us in the post-industrial technologic world. They are 1) seek pleasure, 2) avoid pain, and 3) conserve energy. Perfect recipe for life as a couch potato right?

And this would be a good place to remember that instinct "drives" our behavior to a significantly greater extent than we are consciously aware of. Hiding in this thicket is the reason addiction can be so difficult to overcome...but that's another topic.

So...getting back to over reliance on technology, and in particular medical/pharmaceutical technology, the motivational triad explains a lot.  Let's call it couch potato medicine. Or maybe medicine intended to manage the ill effects of the couch potato lifestyle.

The technologist in me does not see this as a black and white situation. Broadly speaking there are significant aspects of modern medicine to be greatly appreciated, surgery for example. Even there however are many common conditions that are far better treated with diet/lifestyle modifications, heart disease for example, the leading killer of Americans. But when banged up from a traffic accident we are tremendously grateful for an ambulance ride to the nearest hospital emergency room, and antibiotics when really needed. Modern medicine, perhaps surgery in particular, can be truly miraculous.

So what about surgery's sibling, pharmacology? Unfortunately progress there is harder to see. In fact, in broad stroke efficacy comparisons of pharmacology to diet/lifestyle modifications, pharmacology has been in a pronounced regression trend for a few decades, which is roughly correspondent to the decrease in "lifespan with quality" mentioned earlier. This is couch potato medicine at it's finest.

How did this unfortunate state of affairs come about? In very simple terms, it comes down to profit, the one area where pharmacology has achieved a progression trend of mind numbing magnitude. And how did it achieve this? The promise of technology, the silver bullet solution to all our problems, magic, in the form of a simple pill.

It may be the most seductive form of marketing there is. To some extent even the purveyors are seduced. But it's not working, the rapid decline of health measured in quality of life tells the real story. Not only is it not working, it is counterproductive. At base it's not all that different than good old snake oil, but it's dressed in (promise of technology magic) super fancy clothes, and it is a (profit) giant.

The MDs who actually do reverse and heal the common chronic conditions, do so by first putting patients on a "cause of health" program, and second by taking them off the medications that have been prescribed. It's not easy, it's more labor intensive than prescription pad medicine, and we've been raised with magic bullet thinking. But the list of docs that practice (let's call it) "whole foods medicine" is getting longer and longer, as we collectively begin to see the emperor is wearing no clothes, and demand for true health increases. And as demand for true health medicine increases it increasingly becomes a social norm, and become easier to do.

To be clear, I am not saying get rid of doctors, or all medications. I am saying begin to demand true health practices and the system will change for the better.

So yes, the consistent application of "cause of health" principles reverses a long list of the common physical malfunctions that are reducing quality of life way too early, and ending life prematurely for the vast majority of us.

But the application of modern pharmacology typically only slows disease progression, is expensive, and has side effects which have further negative impacts on health.

I'm pretty sure modern pharmacology is not the program Hippocrates envisioned when he said "let medicine be thy food".

WHEN VEGAN DIETS DON'T WORK

Dr. Michael Klaper on why some can have issues when adopting a whole foods plant based diet.

I'm not going to say much about this interview of Dr. Klaper except it's excellent, informative, and comprehensive but concise.

And I will also say many (myself included) view Dr. Klaper as one of the heroes of the whole foods disease reversal movement. If you're pressed for time and want to get a sense of why that is so, just watch from 17:33 to 23:35. If you do that I'll bet you'll want to find the time to view the rest of it too.

From 17:33
https://youtu.be/u8YlCOCEUsk?t=1055

From the beginning
https://youtu.be/u8YlCOCEUsk

Study - Decrease your risk of breast cancer

I'm going to link to the blog post that brought this study to my attention, but first I want to say something about all the articles in the media in the past several years that "low fat diets don't work, Americans are eating less fat and gaining more weight than ever", and "butter is back" etc etc. We've been "carpet bombed" with such articles.

All of these articles were (and continue to be) examples of manipulation of science to show a certain result. Real studies have no agenda, and the "models under test" are carefully designed to prevent the influence of agenda.

Journalists are human, and all of us humans have the same problem - we all love to hear good things about our bad habits. That makes all of us easy prey for the "science as marketing" ploy of large vested interest groups. Who doesn't want to hear high fat diets are healthy, eat all the butter you want!

The butter is back study was funded by the dairy industry. The low fat diets don't work was looking at people who went from one junk food diet to a (slightly) different junk food diet.

Here is the truth that real studies show again and again. Eat whole foods as close to their "alive" condition as possible, in simple combinations, without excessive use of sugars, oils, and salt.

They also show, again and again, the greater the ratio of fruits and vegetables to animal foods in your diet the better are health outcomes over both short and long terms.

I used to think nutrition was complicated because of all the marketing propaganda we are bombarded with. It's not, it's simple: eat whole foods, mostly plants.

Learn how to do this! It is not that difficult, and your body and mind will both thank you. If you are a great cook, get a cookbook that will help you see how to make healthy whole foods tasty. I think this one may be a good start:
Straight-Up-Food-Delicious-Plant-based

If you are into simple food preparation (that would be me:) eat a lot of fruits and have big salads at dinner, couldn't be easier (and yet delicious).

Here is the blog where I learned about this study:
A Low-Fat Diet Increases Breast Cancer Survival

and a direct link to the study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28654363/

the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets

An important study was just published in The Lancet, titled "Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems". It's available for no cost on The Lancet website:
Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems

I learned about it from an eight minute vlog by Garth Davis MD posted earlier today:

Am I falling for an alarmist perspective, or is this really happening?

Zack Bush again, the succinct version.

I (and many others) have been concerned with the national debt, the aggregate total leverage in the global financial system which has only increased since global central banks linked arms and "fixed" the problem. It's a growing problem that is easy to see.

I've been concerned with the collapse of health we see all around us, but I was not aware of the dire acceleration of the statistics Zack Bush shows us in his standard (?) presentation (link below). Or maybe we don't see this all around us, and have come to accept the present state of health as simply a function of getting older..."here you are, you'll need to take these meds the rest of your life, you have bad genes".

The state of inadequate nutrition combined with over in-toxic-ation can only lead to disaster. And we are seeing?

Bush is talking not just about financial collapse, or health collapse, or population collapse, or global collapse, but an everything collapse. The most constructive frame for this POV is nature "correcting" over-industrialization, over reliance on technology to "fix everything" (when it is the very thing that has distanced us from nature), scientific myopia, and human tendency toward hubris (man above nature).

And that POV, if it comes to pass, would be a "natural correction" we simply have not seen heading our way...yet. Nature (including human nature) goes to extremes, then swings in the other direction at some point.

Nature is bipolar? It goes through "happy medians", but it does not stay there? If so, that is an uncomfortable perspective, one we can happily ignore and forget during periods of "happy median".

Nature (everything) occurs as fractals, in the longer fractal durations some of those happy medians will last for generations.

If Bush is  correct this particular fractal (the one he's helping us see) is occurring on a scale just slightly beyond the frame of human apprehension (longer than a single generation). And if so most will not begin to "see it" until it's fairly progressed (not quite there yet, getting closer?), and if/when it does become apparent to all many will not understand the simple corrective nature of it.

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And if this does come to pass we (as always) will need our clued in young people to understand and not freak out by what they are seeing, so that they may collectively manage "the big correction" as constructively as possible.

Zack Bush covers a lot of ground in a short space here.

https://youtu.be/HL6OPzQe9Is

Food Independence & Planetary Evolution: Zach Bush, MD

Zack Bush, MD, connects the dots as coherently as anyone I've seen. He is, among other things, a triple board certified MD, founder and director of M Clinic, an integrative medicine center in Charlottesville, Virginia, scientist, enlightened philosopher, agricultural activist, educator, film maker. All in all, a very busy human.

Here he is in conversation with Rich Roll, published Jan 8, 2019.

https://youtu.be/X3aOQ0N74PI

Monsanto (the name) Is No More

The name Monsanto was killed with its acquisition by the German chemical giant Bayer. A smart move considering Monsanto is one of the most hated names in corporate history (and for good reason IMHO).

The article linked below "Five things to know about Bayer and Monsanto" begins with the sentence "A cancer victim's surprise court victory over US pesticide maker Monsanto". Huh? Surprise? What fumes was this author inhaling? The musky scent of cranial insertion rectus abdominis?

Who did not see this coming was not paying attention (juries being comprised of actual citizens...still). The proximity of the sale with the impending court decision may be pure coincidence, but is at the very least, curious.

The article
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-bayer-monsanto.html

And finally, a price chart of Bayer marked with the relevant points in time (click to enlarge).