Debt Management: Sugars, Livers, & Cash Flows

(Above: My version of Nassim Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant)

There are Four Quadrants for Health--the Fourth Quadrant marks the limits of physiology.

Your liver is like your physiological bank account. It's a good thing to keep healthy.

You want to keep some residual cash on hand at all times; some savings for rainy days and unexpected catastrophes--those things you seem to never anticipate appropriately.

You don't want to bankrupt your liver; you want to maintain a manageable and a conservative cash flow cycle to cover your debts smoothly as you go.

Since sugar is like debt, it creates obligations that your physiological bank account must service in the future.

It's all about leveraging and maintaing manageable debt levels; at some point, our physiologies crumble under excessive debt/sugar loads.

If fructose (as an example sugar) were a credit card (as one common form of short-term debt), then using it is just fine as long as your liver can service, manage, process, and dispose of this potentially toxic intake effectively. In light of these toxicity spikes, noting that alcohol acts in parallel ways as well, at the end of the month, you better have the cash in your bank account to pay your monthly credit card bill (and enjoy the bonus points you accumulate freely from your credit card company; 'frequent-flyer miles', perhaps). Otherwise, if you lose the handle on your cash flow cycles, you are well on your way to liver toxicity and physiological bankruptcy--the time-value of compounding interest on debt is quite taxing, in multiple ways, they say.

A good credit rating makes physiological sense. It's physiological economics for health.

Within a given cash flow cycle, some folks may leverage up a bit--their sugar intake levels will rise for various reasons (maybe it's the holidays)--but what's good for your bank account is good for your liver: we must keep debt and sugar levels at bay so that we never spread ourselves too thin and expose ourselves too broadly and deeply to negative Black Swan hits for prolonged periods of time.

It's wise to be hyper-conservative in this regard.

Out of respect for your amazing physiology, stay clear of the Fourth Quadrant as much as possible (and barefoot cautiously when you do draw near); negative Black Swans like diabetes, cancers, arthritis, sudden cardiac death, and the entire gamut of metabolic syndrome maladies lurk in the dark shadows out there.

We need physiological economics robustness in health affairs.

We need to get back to square-one; land in Quadrant One.

That's where those positive Black Swans like to play.

They seem to swoop in and save the day.

But we have to go out and play.

Find our ancestral lifeways.

Today; I say.