Life--or the state of being alive--can be defined by the motion of proteins. When all the proteins in an organism stop moving, the organism is dead. As long as proteins continue to move, the organism is alive.
In light of this motion notion, heart-rate variability and 'physiological headroom' (credit to Dr. Doug McGuff & Art DeVany) rise to the surface as critical concepts.
1) Heart-Rate Variability: I discussed in my previous essay the importance of music to achieving health, especially in our modern environments, and increasing heart-rate variability served as the central concept to this perspective. Viewed from the information point-of-view, heart rhythms with high variability transmit and capture more information than do simplistic, sinusoidal repetitions--this richer information retention and transmission state produces healthier minds and bodies. I then compared this high-variability pattern to good, fractal music that elicits positive responses throughout our physiologies. This set up conditions where music could enhance and maintain heart-rate variability and thus confer profound health benefits for us as a 'cheap health option'. I also mentioned other Ancestral Fitness practices, such as intermittent fasting, non-linear work and living schedules, high-intensity / low-duration exercise, and diversity in activity as more modalities for increasing and supporting healthy high heart-rate variability.
In reflecting on other forms of communication, besides music, I thought of poetry, essay composition, and speech writing as a few more methods for practicing non-linearities and variable patterns. A comma here; a semi-colon there--or, perhaps, you decide to emphasize a point with an afterthought using the fabled em dash. My business partner and longtime friend at Academic Impact, Brian Geremia (*please see his recent exemplary essay on nutrition here), teaches students how to take simple sentences (the numbers 1,2,3,4 in light of my previous essay) and rearrange them in variable ways (the sequence 1,3,2,4 in my previous essay, as one possibility) to produce clear yet sophisticated prose. Grammar can create 'music' in essays, poems, and speeches if employed in the right manner; you just have to be creative and write with some rhythm. Writing an essay, poem, or speech is like writing a song--the words unfold as you write; the ideas and connections mold and meld in the process; and, the final product turns out with sounds, statements, and structures that you could not have predicted nor imagined when you first conceived your composition piece. Therefore, in addition to listening to, playing, and writing music in order to bolster heart-rate variability, I suspect that the act of composing essays, poems, speeches, and other written and spoken forms of communication also serves a 'pacesetting' function for our hearts and brains, increasing heart-rate variability along the way.
Remember: Take steps each day to keep those proteins throughout your body vibrating, moving, swaying, and facilitating in fractal ways.
2) Physiological Headroom: This important, insightful concept is simple yet crucial. In short, physiological headroom is the difference or gap between the most you can do (physical exertion) and the least you can do (resting). Healthy athletes possess hearts that display both high heart-rate variability and low resting heart rates--this demonstrates large physiological headroom in their heart capacities. By interspersing high-intensity, low-duration exercises into your workouts (sprints, power cleans, you pick), you push your physiology far from 'equilibrium' and expand and maintain the top level of your physiological headroom window. Then, by resting, recovering, de-stressing, sleeping, and eating properly, you lower the basal level. Together, when coupled, these two practices expand your physiological headroom, which improves health and prolongs life. Death approaches when your physiological headroom shrinks, narrowing down as the proteins throughout your body reduce their movements.
Conclusion: High heart-rate variability and large physiological headroom appear to be parallel, mutually reinforcing concepts that play central roles in the Ancestral Fitness lifestyle platform. It appears that both are very important to respect: we want to enhance and maintain heart-rate variability and we want to maximize physiological headroom because reduced heart-rate variability and reduced physiological headroom are both associated with disease, aging, and death.
(Above:Dr. Oliver Sacks discusses the powerful therapeutic benefits of music. It's energy medicine, and the rhythms of music free and mobilize our minds, hearts, and bodies--our spirits--as Dr. Sacks has experienced with Parkinson's disease patients.)
Premise:Music is an ancestral, primal tradition; it reverberates deep to our bones (all the way down to the carbon-hydrogen bonds and beyond), in more than one way -- music is a universal language (a method of communication) that changes, among many things, our moods, brain structures, heart beat patterns, and, as a result, ourselves. It appears that the earliest forms of language possessed greater musical characteristics than do our contemporary forms of speech; we seem to have bifurcated linguistics (communication of information) into music and speech along the way, and rarely do we speak in musical fashions nowadays when we converse with each other.
Experiment: Read the following two lines to yourself, either out loud or internally . . .
a) 1, 2, 3, 4
b) 1, 3, 2, 4
Now, reflect on the tone/pitch/rhythm/sound of how you pronounced these two sequences of numbers. What differences did you discern in how you said "One. Two. Three. Four." versus "One. Three. Two. Four."?
After conducting this experiment (that I invented) on a small sample size, the common responses tend to be of the following nature:
1) "... the same level of intonation with 1,2,3,4 and with 1,3,2,4 I go up and then down in intonation."
2) "... 1,2,3,4 was said in a sorta flat tone. 1,3,2,4 was said in a slight low (1), high (3), low (2), lower (4) pattern."
When devising this experiment in hopes of eliciting insights on language, music, and communication of information, I kept raising the pitch of my voice on the 3 in the sequence 1,3,2,4 -- my results were replicated by others as well. Of course, these distinctions are small, but, if these divergent patterns were to repeat hundreds of times, those differences would accumulate quickly, leading to large deviations in communication.
Why deviations in communication?
First, let's examine the information content of these two sequences of numbers. The 1,2,3,4 sequence contains less information--it's pattern is predictable, repetitive, and simple--than does the 1,3,2,4 sequence--it's pattern is less predictable and more sophisticated. Algebraically, the 1,2,3,4 sequence finds the next number in the series by simply adding one to the previous integer, progressing linearly from low to high. In effect, this sequence communicates minimal information. On the other hand, the mathematical interpretation of 1,3,2,4 could be jump ahead two integers (1 --> 3), move back one integer (3 --> 2), and then jump ahead two integers (2 --> 4). This pattern is more involved and more musical in nature. When language first emerged many years ago, incorporating musical components into verbal communication helped people capture and share increased amounts of information more efficiently and effectively. A complex pattern can be transmitted, remembered, and replicated quite well when it is encoded in a musical message (just consider how well you remember the lyrics to songs once you hear these songs' beats).
Clearly, these two sequences of numbers, despite both containing the same digits, deviate in the information messages that they capture and communicate, and this relates closely to healthy heart beats.
So, then, what does this have to do with health?
Math matters. Patterns matter.
When Stephen Colbert asked Steven Pinker to explain how the brain works in five words or less, Pinker responded, "Brain cells fire in patterns."
A musical song that followed a mathematical pattern of 1,2,3,4 would bore us--our sensory systems would not respond with 'musicophilia' because, as the research subjects commented above, this low-information, linear sequence leads us to experience a repetitive and flat (monotonous or metronomic) rhythm.
Conversely, music, at a foundational / basic level, better resembles the 1,3,2,4 number sequence. In creating music, composers / song writers take sets of segments--words (like the chorus, etc.) accompanying different melodies and instrumentals--and arrange them to create harmonic, resonating patterns that elicit positive, uplifting responses from our sensory systems: 'musicophilia'. As an arrangement, the sequence 1,3,2,4 is one such pattern, and these patterns combine and evolve into non-linear, multifractal structures in the final musical products.
Our physiologies like non-linearity; we thrive on multifractal complexity ... except, under certain conditions. What conditions are these? Many of the chronic stressor conditions of our modern environments (unfortunately). The human condition in the information age involves tremendous exposure to 'linearizing forces'. Rigid, routinized work (9-5 jobs), education, and life schedules impose linearity on our energy expenditure and activity patterns. In response to these chronic, linear, and constant stressors, our bodies respond and adapt by adopting linear, sinusoidal, and metronomic heart rates to match the demands of our environments. In this manner, we live like combatants bombarded by rote negative stimuli (full email boxes at 9:00 AM each morning, project deadlines every Friday at 3:00 PM, etc.). Research on military soldiers exposed to chronic stressors determined the following:
It turns out that the best survivors don't have a lot of heart-rate variability. Instead, they've got "metronomic heartbeats"—their hearts thump steadily like metronomes—with almost no variability between beats. That is, the intervals between the beats are evenly spaced. Morgan believes that a metronomic heartbeat is an easy way to detect good survivors and high neuropeptide Y releasers. It makes sense biologically because your brainstem, which controls your heartbeat, has a high density of neuropeptide Y.
But, this survival advantage in a chronic, repetitive stress environment is detrimental to health by increasing the chance of Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD):
Unfortunately, this metronomic effect is usually associated with early heart disease and even sudden death. Morgan wonders whether the same thing that makes you really good at surviving under high stress may not translate into excellent heart health when you're 50. Without it, though, these elite forces might never even make it that far.
Mathematically, these soldiers' metronomic heart beats resemble the 1,2,3,4 sequence of numbers from above that features evenly spaced beats. Their bodies developed these heart rhythms in response to repetitive stressors. Although most of us are not living in these same conditions, our modern ecologies bombard us with regular stress each day. The major implication for achieving health is that we must be aware that our physiological response to this stress pattern is increased linearity and simplicity in our heart rates; we lose heart-rate variability as a result.
Remember, a Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patient's heart beat pattern looks like this when graphed:
This is a metronomic heart; this is the heart beat pattern that may confer survival advantage in a repetitive, chronic and linear stress environment--that is, it may be an adaptation to our modern environments (cubicles, freeway traffic, classrooms)--but it is a dangerously unhealthy evolution that increases risk of heart problems, including sudden cardiac death, and is also linked to mental health challenges (see below).
Remember, a healthy person's heart rate appears like this when graphed:
This is a fractal heart; a flourishing heart. This rhythm is non-linear, displaying power-law long range correlations and multifractal complexity on many levels (despite its messy appearance on the surface). The math of this healthy, non-linear heart rhythm resembles the 1,3,2,4 sequence of numbers; the same sequence that reflects musical constructions. The mathematics of this healthy, high variability heart rate pattern express and represent much more information content--an important physiological dimension--than metronomic hearts do.
However, it appears that this type of high heart-rate variability--though coherent, sophisticated, and 'information rich'--could be less adaptive under chronic, repetitive stress conditions than a metronomic heart would be. Why is this? Well, in our ancestral environments, we encountered and coped with dramatically different stressors and in varied orders and presentations than we do today. Life, for most of human history, featured much more patchiness and non-linearity in terms of lifestyle dynamics--just imagine what your life would be like if you were living as a hunter-gatherer dependent upon nature (nature abounds with fractals, by the way). Thus, our physiologies thrive on the non-linearities of our ancestral conditions, but, at the same time, readily adapt--we are quite plastic and flexible--by imposing linearity on our body systems in response to the linearizing, chronic stressors and forces of our modern, contemporary environments. The direct result for our health states is that we hurt our heart health, we increase our obesity rates--Neuropeptide Y, as mentioned above, is associated with fat deposits in our body cores, especially in the stomach--and, as I recently learned, we dramatically inhibit our mental health experiences as well.
"A rather common finding in the literature on anxiety and autonomic control is diminished heart rate variability in anxiety disorders ... A similar diminished lability has been reported even for trauma-related material in post-traumatic stress disorder. ... Depression has often ... been reported to be associated with an overall reduction in total heart rate variability."
As these statements reveal, when our bodies cope with chronic, repetitive stressors, we lose heart rate variability (linearization of our physiologies occurs), and this degradation is associated with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorders. The epigenetic (our body responding to our environmental stimuli) outcomes are dramatic: in our modern environments, we continue to adapt to our world--it confers a survival advantage in the short-term--but these performance adaptations continually result in more and more overweight people with poor mental health states.
Music is one way to save the day; it can be a piece of the solution when engaged in the right way.
We need to combat the linearization imposed by our modern ecologies and take back control of our lifestyle patterns and heart rates.
As the videos above show, music has the ability to reverse and counter linearizing forces by pacing our hearts and brains in non-linear, fractal ways. When we recognize the mathematical underpinnings of our depressed health realities, we can respond proactively by embracing non-linear, fractal, power-law living patterns each and every day. We need patchiness; the goal is to mimic our ancestral lifestyle patterns as much as possible in order to support the development of healthy heart rates. From intermittent fasting (a 'patchy' nutrition intake practice; see Mark's Daily Apple) to high-intensity, low-duration power-law exercises (a 'patchy' energy expenditure method; see Body by Science or Theory to Practice), we can take transformative steps to enhance, maintain, and resurrect healthy multifractal complexity and high heart-rate variability in all of our body rhythms. These rhythms cascade down and around throughout our bodies, descending from our hearts and brains, influencing the rates at which we release hormones, reconstruct bone tissues, and perform growth and repair operations. So, don't despair, modalities exist to reprime our 'pumps' and achieve health in the information age.
And, of course, music is a 'cheap health option' / 'pacesetting' pump primer, so tinker (iTunes) away. We are, after all, here to stay. Whether it is acetylcholine or dopamine release patterns in synaptic clefts or cardiac muscle cells cascading firing messages and electrical impulses from the SA node via Purkinje Fibers, our open-loop nervous systems are so intimately connected with our external environments that we must take perceptive roles in monitoring and shaping how energy, stimuli, and stress influence our bodies mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Listen to your body. Engage your body's positive--musicophillic--responses to music and know that your brain cells and other neurons are firing in fractal patterns in response to sound energy from songs; as you listen to the music play, these fractal patterns permeate your entire physiology, creating healthy heart beats as well as improved moods and mental outlooks. Instead of turning to drugs and addictions as cheap 'pick me ups', turn to music to punctuate your mood for the day.
The best way to deal with the chronic, repetitive, and linear stresses of Junior Year in High School may be to enact a rigid, routinized modus operandi, moving from class to class in a highly ordered, predictable, and repeatable manner, but just remember that this type of response pattern has consequential negative health effects (hence the need to de-linearize the education system for the sake of people's health and development). Ultimately, linearity does not support personal (human) development because our thoughts, perspectives, skills, and abilities to make and find our ways in this world, in reality, develop and evolve in highly non-linear ways.
Note: This post does not discuss the 'genetic' risk factors for sudden cardiac death and reduced heart-rate variability. I respect the genetics perspective, but we really know so little about genetics, epigenetics, and the inseparable interactions of genes and environment that I prefer to hold off on this domain until more research is done. We are living in the 'postgenomic era'.
Two 'Fiesta Days' tennis tournament championships, powered by Ancestral Fitness:
Above: Singles champion
Above: Doubles champions (Brian Geremia, my tennis and business partner, is sporting an Academic Impact shirt)
Now only if I could improve my first serve ... (serving in tennis is too asymmetric for me to actually practice it; I don't want to injure my shoulder from over repetition, so I will just be patient and let the service game evolve along the way).
''Nutrition is one of those things you're supposed to pick up by osmosis,'' said Dr. Clair M. Callan of Libertyville, Ill., president of the medical group. ''It is just one of those things you're supposed to know.'' As Dr. Lila A. Wallis, an associate clinical professor of medicine at Cornell University Medical College and one of the meeting's organizers, put it, ''What we have had in the past was the arrogant failure of physicians to admit they don't know.'' . . .
Discussing what a professional meeting devoted to nutrition would accomplish, several doctors said they thought that many of their colleagues would try to fill in the nutrition gap in their medical education, that they would take patients' questions about nutrition more seriously and that they would urge medical schools to add courses to their curriculums. Others said they thought the medical students who grew up in the 1970's, when more attention was being paid to nutrition and exercise, would demand the courses.
''The future physicians have to look at things more preventively, instead of always relying on drugs,'' said Allison Batchelor, a senior at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. ''That's where I think I'll make my greatest impact - through prevention of disease. And good nutrition and prevention go hand in hand.''
Diet is known to play a critical role in the pathogenesis of major age-related chronic diseases, which are rapidly becoming more common in Japan and other industrialized countries. However, traditional medical education has not provided adequate knowledge of nutrition. To understand the current status of nutrition education in Japan, we sent a questionnaire to all Japanese medical schools to survey their nutrition curricula. The questionnaire was sent to 79 medical schools in Japan, which includes all medical schools except for that of the authors. We also used a questionnaire to survey second year medical students just after they received a short nutrition course at Nippon Medical School. Fifty-seven medical schools (72.2%) responded to the questionnaire: 12 (21.1% of the responding schools) offered a " nutrition" course and 3 (5.4%) offered a "clinical nutrition" course. Including "nutrition" and "clinical nutrition" courses, 14 of the responding medical schools (24. 6 %) offered stand-alone nutrition courses in their undergraduate education. Although a total of 48 of the responding medical schools (84.2%) offered some nutrition topics, only 8 of the responding schools (14.0%) may have offered substantial nutrition education. No special postgraduate course in medical or clinical nutrition was offered by any of the schools. Despite this, more than 80% of the students that appeared to be interested in a nutrition course recognized the importance of nutrition education in medical school. This survey showed that nutrition education in Japanese medical schools remains inadequate and changes are necessary (emphasis mine).
Asia Pacific journal of clinical nutrition. 01/02/2006; 15(3):323-8.
Authors: Kelly M Adams, Karen C Lindell, Martin Kohlmeier, Steven H Zeisel
BACKGROUND: Numerous entreaties have been made over the past 2 decades to improve the nutrition knowledge and skills of medical students and physicians. However, most graduating medical students continue to rate their nutrition preparation as inadequate.
OBJECTIVE: The objective was to determine the amount and type of nutrition instruction at US medical schools, especially including the instruction that occurs outside designated nutrition courses.
DESIGN: A 12-item survey asked nutrition educators to characterize nutrition instruction at their medical schools (required, optional, or not offered) and to quantify nutrition contact hours occurring both inside and outside designated nutrition courses. During 2004, we surveyed all 126 US medical schools accredited at that time.
RESULTS: A total of 106 surveys were returned for a response rate of 84%. Ninety-nine of the 106 schools responding required some form of nutrition education; however, only 32 schools (30%) required a separate nutrition course. On average, students received 23.9 contact hours of nutrition instruction during medical school (range: 2-70 h). Only 40 schools required the minimum 25 h recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. Most instructors (88%) expressed the need for additional nutrition instruction at their institutions (emphasis mine).
CONCLUSION: With the move to a more integrated curriculum and problem-based learning at many medical schools, a substantial portion of the total nutrition instruction is occurring outside courses specifically dedicated to nutrition. The amount of nutrition education in medical schools remains inadequate (emphasis mine).
The American journal of clinical nutrition. 01/05/2006; 83(4):941S-944S.
Clearly, there is a missing link. If Dr. Price and Dr. Pottenger are right, and I (and many others) suspect they are, most of our health maladies result from our improper nutritional practices. If physicians are entrusted with protecting, preserving, and restoring our health states, then why does nutrition education in medical schools remain so sparse (and most likely built on the dangerous and platonic Food Pyramid in the first place)? Perplexing, indeed.
At Academic Impact, we are trying to do things differently. In fact, here is our nutrition philosophy statement that we will send out to families in our 'welcome packets' when school starts back up in August:
Academic Impact's Nutrition Philosophy
You are what you eat.
It's a fact.
Just ask some middle- or high-school students what they are made of (I do it regularly), and, their responses will likely be congruent: atoms!
The fact that our bodies are built from atoms, molecules, and other subatomic components does not lead to a strictly materialistic perspective; but, what it does suggest is clear: we are what we eat and drink, on some foundational level. What we choose to consume in our diets--our nutrition--plays an extremely important role in building and shaping our minds and bodies. The basic building blocks that comprise our physiological structures do not materialize magically; instead, our bodies extract, retain, and modify them from the foods that we eat and the beverages that we drink.
For instance, a soda contains excessive amounts of high-fructose corn-syrup (a harmful sweetener), so if I drink a soda, then my body has to figure out how to produce vibrant tissues, organs, and other things like skin cells from this ineffective, toxic fuel source. If I drink sodas regularly, the chances increase exponentially that my body will fail while trying to fuel my physiology and day-to-day activities using such a poor nutrition source.
In light of this reality, Academic Impact feels that healthy nutritional choices empower students to perform academically and achieve their educational and life goals. When students eat right, their minds feel right, and they perform well in and out of the classroom as a result. Conversely, when students eat and drink poorly, their minds and bodies lag and grow tired, resulting in decreased productivity and energy and inhibited development and growth.
With this said, then, what should people eat? Well, for many years, mainstream health has communicated the value and importance of following the Food Pyramid and its associated low-fat, high-carbohydrate paradigm. What if, however, this model were wrong? It turns out that it is. Unfortunately, diabetes, obesity, and chronic illnesses abound in our modern societies because people consume diets that differ greatly from those that our ancestors ate. On a larger time-scale, our metabolisms evolved over millions of years in environments that are nothing like the ones that we inhabit today. Consequently, our physiologies are well-adapted to consuming pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer type paleolithic foods--we did, after all, lead lives in vastly different ways for most of human history. What types of foods and drinks are these? Nuts. Berries (and other fruits). Meats. Fats. I repeat: Yes, fats (Omega-3's, to be exact)! Vegetables. Roots. Water (and other non-sugary, non-artificially-sweetened beverages, such as tea). Stated another way, avoid bad carbohydrates like the plague; do not consume (or strongly limit consumption of) breads, pastas, corn-syrup, sugars (except from fruits), chips, crackers, tortillas, rice, etc. And, to top it all off, it may be wise to incorporate 'healthy bacteria' into this nutrition schedule to counteract the anti-bacterial culture that modern society has embraced. Antibiotic-resistance challenges modern medicine tremendously, but eating foods with healthy bacteria goes a long way toward preventing antibiotic-resistant infections, improving immune system strength, and supporting general health conditions. What foods contain these nutritious organisms? Fermented foods. Foods like yogurt, kombucha, unpasteurized cheese, and probiotic supplements are some of the items that can provide our bodies with the bacteria we need to operate properly and protect us from infectious agents and disease.
2) Serendipitously, I opened my NLT Study Bibletonight, with thoughts of 'bridges' flowing through my head, to read the following passage in an introduction to the book of Psalms:
... The psalms provide a bridge to cross between the Old and New Testaments (emphasis mine), and the themes addressed in the psalms find further development in the NT. Jesus connects with the dynasty of David in its mission, its disappointments, and its failures. Where David's dynasty has failed, Jesus gives hope. His sinlessness, his identification with the suffering of the members of David's dynasty, his perfect obedience, and his exaltation open up new perspectives on the many questions raised in the Psalter. Yet we are still living by faith, the hope of the book of Psalms, that God's people will completely fulfill his purposes and that all nations will submit to the Messiah, still remains for the future.
3) Since I find value in analogies and parallels, I will spend some time and thought reflecting as I read through Psalms in search for concepts, ideas, and frameworks that could help sketch out 'the bridge' to health.
What's 'the bridge' to get US out of our parallel healthcare mess?
(Thanks to Dave Lull for this video link)
The health insurance industry is very fragile; it's going to crash.
So, how do we convert healthcare debt into equity? The debt is unfunded health benefits liabilities; people accessing health services now and in the future that must be paid for in some way.
I have some ideas, but I would be curious to hear what thoughts are floating out there ...
On the aggregate, our bodies are far too broken (leveraged) to be serviced (debt repaid).
Dr. Weston A. Price, a Cleveland dentist, has been called the "Charles Darwin of Nutrition". In his search for the causes of dental decay and physical degeneration that he observed in his dental practice, he turned from test tubes and microscopes to unstudied evidence among human beings. Dr. Price sought the factors responsible for fine teeth among the people who had them - the isolated "primitives". The world became his laboratory. As he traveled, his findings led him to the belief that dental caries and deformed dental arches resulting in crowded, crooked teeth, and unattractive appearance were merely a sign of physical degeneration, resulting from what he had suspected - nutritional deficiencies.
Price traveled all over the world in order to study isolated human groups, including sequestered villages in Switzerland, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, Eskimos and Indians of North America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori and the Indians of South America. Wherever he went, Dr. Price found that beautiful, straight teeth, freedom from decay, stalwart bodies, resistance to disease and fine characters were typical of primitives on their traditional diets, rich in essential food factors.
When Dr. Price analyzed the foods used by isolated primitive peoples, he found that they provided at least four times the water-soluble vitamins, calcium and other minerals, and at least ten times the fat soluble vitamins from animal foods such as butter, fish, eggs, shellfish and organ meats.
The importance of good nutrition for mothers during pregnancy has long been recognized, but Dr. Price's investigation showed that primitives understood and practiced preconception nutritional programs for both parents. Many tribes required a period of premarital nutrition, and children were spaced to permit the mother to maintain her full health and strength, thus assuring subsequent offspring of physical excellence. Special foods were often given to pregnant and lactating women, as well as to the maturing boys and girls in preparation for future parenthood. Dr. Price found these foods to be very rich in fat soluble vitamins A and D - nutrients found only in animal fats.
These primitives with their fine bodies, homogeneous reproduction, emotional stability and freedom from degenerative ills stand forth in sharp contrast to those subsisting on the impoverished foods of civilization - sugar, white flour, pasteurized milk and convenience foods filled with extenders and additives.
It's not a right on the right, nor heft on the left: it's humble freedom that you hope to bring to sight. Freedom to search, freedom to fail, freedom to prevail.
Freedom from chronic illness, freedom from obesity. Freedom from diabetes, freedom from drug-dependence, and all else that derails.
It's a challenging search on all levels, bottom to top; it taxes you physically, mentally, and emotionally. You don't really understand it fully but you cannot stop.
It's a desperate search, a demanding search.
It's freedom you seek, you repeat, not simply illusion, a 'better' nation state, or a transient stake. You're convinced, deep down, that far too many people simply respond to all this messiness and complexity by outsourcing their local social responsibilities--their duties to their families and neighbors--to the nation state. It's government-driven globalization of accountability, and it's causing the demise of social capital, you reiterate.
You squirm. You grind your teeth. You pace. You reflect. But nothing emerges. You write. You read. You converse. You question. You sleep (remember, you're an ancestral fitness practitioner). Of course, there are some flickers of hope; some glimmers of glee; some moments of insight and possibilities--"the pieces could fall into place," you say. "You just never know because it has never been tried before," you tell yourself.
Your networked neurons fire on all cylinders (in a fractal pattern, since you have music playing in the background), attempting to squeeze solutions out of those intricate and cascading nonlinear connections; you're on the boundary of chaos (thanks to Dave Lull for the link). But, alas, it's a futile attempt. You cannot win; winning is not a possible outcome anyways. You're attempting to be a social engineer. Your job is impossible; the world and its inhabitants interact so rapidly--information swirls like tornados; nation state borders carry no weight--so the best thing you can do is get out of the way and go do things better in your own way. That's the conclusion you reach, mired in frustration: the best thing an anti-'social engineer' can do is get out of the way and get back to living, to leading; get back to innovating, experimenting, tinkering, thinkering, and solution-searching in practice, with both feet on the ground, immersed in your trade, staring it straight in the face: that's grace, not a disgrace.
My ideas sure are many miles away for any sort of health system that’s 100% regulated and controlled by the government. The best way to kill innovation in anything is to have the government run and pay for an industry. Bureaucrats and pilot projects will stifle freedom to experiment and freedom to fail.
You go back to point A: the most humble search for freedom is a local one; and, it's one that emphasizes individuality; one that operates this way:
Loss of individuality leads to loss of spirituality. Loss of spirituality leads to loss of accountability. Ergo, loss of individuality leads to loss of accountability. Spirituality is the bridge between individuality and accountability. The nation state cannot enforce spirituality; therefore, the nation state cannot achieve accountability. State intervention degrades individuality, further exacerbating the illusion of individual accountability.
You remind yourself of the dangers of the police state; it's certainly more than a gate.
