Ancestral Health presuppositions

Primo: Michael Allen, Grumpy Old Bookman, composed his 40-year m=1/n=1 nutritional bricolage journey as an essay, "Is it Safe to Eat Breakfast? One man's search for a healthy diet" (thanks to Dave Lull). Several fascinating themes emerged in this essay: (1) human fallibility in nutrition science; (2) self-experimentation as a necessary process for stumbling upon a pretty decent diet; (3) meta-rule formation, without too much rigidity, as a deductive tool for developing healthy lifestyle habits; (4) respect for ancestral wisdom and our diverse multi-cultural heritages as human beings; and, (5) awareness of the age-old Problem of Induction. Also, in this essay, Mr. Allen discusses the contemporary work of Art DeVany, Doug McGuff, Nassim Taleb, and Barry Groves, while paying homage to several other scholars from decades ago. For me, I suspect that Mr. Allen's excellent essay is a compilation of grace nudges; it's full of conjectures that emerged following hard knocks; it's a tale in health that many people might be able to relate to and subsequently operationalize to avert similar missteps.

Segundo: While riding my bike today (in the Keith Norris spirit, of course), I naturally started to write.

Ancestral Health is an open-source approach to thinkering (thinking + tinkering) about health built on a balance between Science and Philosophy of Science; that is, it's a bottom-up, iterative process with several presuppositions:

Science says: Each person possesses a distinct genomic and microbiomic makeup.

Philosophy of Science says: Each person must test health conjectures on his/her own body cautiously to deduce what works (yet-to-be-falsified) and what doesn't work (falsified) in his/her own specific case. This is the land of epigenetics, nutrigenomics, and epimicrobiomics, et al.


Science says: Each person descends from a distinct ancestral lineage and cultural tradition.

Philosophy of Science says: Each person must respect his/her ancestry to integrate its practices, wisdom, and history into his/her modern-day living in order to approximate health sustainably.


Science says: Each person possesses sensory systems shaped by evolutionary processes capable of providing real-world feedback about some underlying physiological 'truth'.

Philosophy of Science says: Each person has unique access to information about his/her body that no one else will ever experience; thus, each person should respect his/her intuitions, gut feelings, and mind-body experiences, and should not sweep this information under the rug, in order to learn by grace rather than by hard knocks.


Science says: Human beings think and reason heuristically, non-rationally, and emotionally.

Philosophy of Science says: Self-experimentation with Meta-Rule formation is a process that anyone can engage to create simple yet valuable heuristics for making decisions about health and well-being. Herbert Simon conceptualized this notion as Bounded Rationality, and since then, Michael Pollan and many others have implemented concepts from this philosophical perspective by collecting 'Rules to Eat By' from various cultural traditions to nudge folks gracefully.


Tercero: At some point, I suspect, we have to be aware of what we presuppose when it comes to thinkering. I've learned from my own health struggles with migraines and sinus infections that I should listen to my body closely because it knows more than me in most cases and is often trying to tell me something important via negative feedback information cycling. Personally, from what I have observed in the clinical setting, seasoned healthcare professionals know to respect patients' complaints, feelings, and inklings, at least by practicing epoche, even when they don't understand or agree with what the patient is saying currently, because it could turn out in the end that the patient was onto something revealing about his/her body but might not have been able to communicate this information properly.

The Patient of One archetype has infinite, ever-changing faces.

One-size-fits-all is a size that fits no One, I suppose.

To good health,

Brent