Loma Linda Protocol

 

Rebounding Is WAY More Powerful Than You Think

Rebounding is really quite an interesting health intervention, particularly as we age. Dr Yonatan Whitten does an excellent job at explaning why this is the case:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9_xuadwB9Y

The secrets to healthy eating

Eating healthfully is one of the "secrets" of health and vitality. There are others, good sleep, loving relationships, balanced and dynamic movement of the body. I don't know if any of the "secrets" to health and vitality are more important than the others, but I do know eating healthfully is, let's say, a bit more of a mystery or point of contention than some of the others. Good quality of sleep for example...most will agree that good sleep is one of the more important aspects of health and vitality. The various aspects that induce the best health may all be equal, but even if so many of us will be less informed on one in particular.

Meanwhile, the foods we eat have become a huge point of contention for those of us who are interested in optimal health, vitality, and longevity. It is fair to say however, the "diet war" group is for the most part considerably healthier than those who pay little to no attention to quality of food and diet. The obesity rate in the US is the clear marker of this unfortunate state of affairs.

So then, what are these "secrets" of healthy eating? I may not know them all myself, but I will do my best to identify them.

One of them is "easy to digest". This may not sound like a big deal, but in fact is huge. Now, ice cream is easy to digest, but is also lacking in nutrients, so another qualifier of healthy eating is "high in nutrition". Easy to digest and high in nutrition means we are using less energy to aquire our nutrition. More "miles per gallon", we might say. On some level it's all about efficiency.

Let's also say if we tried to live on a diet of pills we wouldn't get very far, so then it becomes obvious that "real food" is the critically important element. 

Then let's also separate the junk from the real, the primary distinction being non-fractionated "whole" foods that arrive to our tables and bodies in as close to their natural state as possible. 

One problem however is whole foods may not taste as good when they are not "seasoned" with highly palatable substances that create a dopamine cascade in the brain. It's not unusual to hear some people refer to destructive and addictive drugs as "dope", a slang term for toxins that make us feel better in the short term, and worse over the long term.

So then one of the conditions that reduces optimal health is "over seasoning" our food, which then creates a pleasurable dopamine cascade in our brain, which reduces the power and efficacy of whole foods. It's a bit odd that we post industrial humans have come to the point we do not necessarily realize the whole fresh unprocessed foods we are biologically adapted to are those that are maximally effective in creating health.

"Frankenfoods", even over seasoned foods, are a mostly unrecognized problem that is highly profitable, for pretty much the same reason drugs are highly profitable...the dopamine cascade in the brain. Restaurants that serve up overly stimulating calories, which is most of them, are to some significant degree responsible for the health destructive obesity problem in the post industrial world.

Food as a drug? Sure, it can be. It's probably safe to say most of obesity is down to this problem because food as a drug is a mostly invisible problem. The profiteers go unperturbed because they are not responsible for the paucity of reliable information on nutrition. 

Table salt is toxic, a primary contributor to the various cardiovascular diseases that kill most of us prematurely.

Another drug masquerading as food is table sugar...100% calories, zero nutrition. (Eat whole fruits, they are real food, and are nutritious, delicious, and quell the refined sugar addiction.)

Another problem hiding in plain sight is refined fats, which we know as vegetable oils, and 100% calories but zero nutrition, and a major contributor to obesity. We don't even know these empty calories are in most foods, and dangerous. After all, they are tasteless. They are also the other major contributor to premature death in the US. 

If refined oils in foods are so destructive to health why are they there to begin with? They make cooking highly palatable substances easier.

So the primary secret to healthful eating is to know the overstimulation of our brain and body with toxic substances is a template unique to post-industrial humans. And then endeavor to adapt to real foods that are non-fractionated and whole. They may not stimulate the taste buds quite as much at first, but as we adapt we will recognize that we feel better, and healthier.

As I've done many times in this blog on health, I will recommend a book that has helped many understand the "food as a drug" problem:

The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness.

What's all the fuss about whole food plant based?

A physician I just learned about will explain it better than I can. Hint: it's multifaceted, perhaps infinately so. 

Meet Dr Rubin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vvPnOpKBg

The AI Potential for Malevolence....Really?

AI is an interesting technology, and like all technologies will be a double edged sword with unintended consequences difficult to predict.

But I'm having difficulty imagining how a non biological structure can be malevolent. Perhaps the word is being misused?

Malevolence belongs to biology, and mostly to human biology. We don't think of natural disasters as malevolence. We don't think of a cheetah killing and eating a gazelle as malevolent. Malevolence is a deliberate evil rising from a lust for power or hatred. It has an emotional origin.

An AI could be programmed to be destructive, but the malevolence would come from the programmer, not the software. It could happen accidently as an unintended consequence where the human creators had no malevolence. But just as hurricanes are not malevolent because hurricanes do not have feelings, an AI could be programmed to be destructive, deliberately or accidentally, but it would not be malevolent because AI cannot have feelings, it/they are not biological.

Malevolence is very simply an expression of the human capacity for evil. Deliberately teaching an AI to be destructive is malevolent, but the machine itself (with no feelings and no hatred) is not malevolent, the human is.

We won't be able to teach an AI to love either. We will be able to teach it to look and sound like love, but real emotion will not be there.

Think for a moment of some of the emotions an AI cannot possess: Regret, anguish, grief, anger, joy love benevolence.

In fact malevolence and benevolence are opposite emotions, but a computer cannot experience either of them, because machines do not have emotions.

An AI enabled human can have emotions because the human continues to be biological.

Certain science fictions can become reality, but others cannot, and we can have difficulty discerning which is which because of the human tendency toward hubris. Hubris, like its opposite, modesty, arise from the capacity for emotion. Pride is an emotion.

Emotions are the most complex aspect of being human, and for that reason we can both value them and despise them. When we despise them we may try to push them into our unconscious to the extent possible in order to function. Hubris exists mostly on the unconscious level, and it is moderated only by becoming conscious of it.

Think of a current figure on the world stage whose name begins with a T and who appears to have little to no capacity for the moderation of his own hubris. Where there is little capacity for the moderation of hubris there is pathological narcissism, a dangerous psychological disorder.

If we humans ultimately become the authors of our own species destruction, that malevolence resides within us. Nukes and computer technology are not malevolent, using them to kill humans is.

Why do we persist in attributing malevolence to software/hardware? The answer is found in psychology, it's the denial mechanism, a way of not facing and taking responsibility for our own destructivity.

The history of all technological progress may be leading to our own species self destruction, it does sometimes appear to be the case. If so we cannot attribute the fault to technology, which has no conscience, no emotion, no blood, no veins. We would only accurately attribute the self destruction of our own species to our own inability to recognize the hubris in our belief we are the masters of the laws of nature and biology.

Fuhrman - How to Stay Fit and Strong at Any Age: Fitness Tips for Longevity

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SLos6olvQc

Longer, healthier, disease free life span

I'm going to reintroduce Dr Joel Fuhrman in this post for a couple of reasons. One, he now has a podcast with his daughter that I have found to be quite informative over time. And two, he has the most science based approach to healthy eating, disease reversal, and longevity of any other expert health advocate I am aware of.

Two of his recent conversations form a solid introduction, or reintroduction, to his perspective and expertise. 

The first of these deals with a significant problem we face as we age, osteoporosis. In this conversation he speaks mostly to the nutrition issue (but he is also a strong advocate of the importance of resistance training in aging):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjetyNW4ybs

The second conversation is more free ranging, covering a broad range of information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pogyaBqGX64