I was a little sick this week with a sore throat, thinking about how the irritation was my immune response to a virus. But what is a virus exactly?
It’s a malign bit of information (DNA or RNA code) telling my body to react. I envisioned it like a computer virus, hijacking my cellular machinery to give it instructions not in alignment with its usual purpose.
One can view the body as mediating intra cellular communication toward wholesome and seamless function and also interacting with the external environment to acquire necessary nutrients while avoiding toxins.
In order to do this, it needs accurate information, signal, so to speak, rather than noise. It needs to know, among other things, when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, when to sleep, when to exert itself and when to relax.
For example, when it’s light out, you want cortisol to wake you up, and when it’s dark you want melatonin to help you sleep. It’s no surprise then recent studies have shown the importance of circadian rhythms for health, the implications of getting too much blue light from your phone screen (which stimulates cortisol) at night and the problems with eating calorie-dense, but nutrient deficient processed foods (stimulates more hunger as the body isn’t getting what it needs.)
Those are examples of biological misinformation — the food tastes good due to its calories (and purposely addictive Big-Food engineering), but ultimately your metabolism is being deceived into perceiving it as the nourishment it can’t deliver. Consequently, you eat too many calories, put on weight and increase inflammation.
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There’s been a push of late to control our online information diet too. Government officials have advocated for regulation regarding what the public can be exposed to, that there needs to be an official source of truth to combat “disinformation.” They envision a top-down information ecosystem wherein people would be exposed only to certain permissible viewpoints and facts. Instead of each person sense-making for himself, the centralized authority would assume this role, ensuring incorrect perspectives don’t make it into the minds of citizens.
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When you go down the rabbit hole of health and nutrition, you’ll often find influencers peddling various diets and protocols. Carnivore, veganism, Paleo, intermittent fasting, low-carb, etc. If you experiment with some of them, you’ll sometimes find ailments and symptoms disappear, you drop weight, and your energy increases. You notice the benefits, you try to stick to them, thinking “these foods (steak, wild seafood, organic vegetables) are good,” and other foods (mass produced fortified cereal grains in a box, artificially-sweetened soft drinks, high-sugar snacks) are “bad.” You aim to stick to the “good” and avoid the “bad”. You have improved your habits, figured something out.
This good/bad paradigm gets extended into other behaviors like getting more natural sunlight, exercising regularly. Of course, you could get cancer or have a heart attack, but you are no longer entirely at the mercy of fate — you have instead taken, to some extent, fate into your own hands.
But at a certain point you begin to plateau. You feel better, but new ailments crop up, and a new search begins for the next frontier of good habits and the elimination of bad ones. Is it the Wifi with which we’re now blanketed, the EMF, the vaccines you took with their heavy-metal “adjuvants”, the chem trails they are so obviously spraying in the sky? What can be done about this?
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I am not arguing changing one’s habits is a bad thing — swapping nutrient dense whole foods for junk and ditching the phone at night are likely healthy and adaptive behaviors. What I’m getting at is we see health via a good/bad paradigm wherein the righteous (health-wise) are rewarded for their good deeds (heaven) and the degenerate (smokers, junk-food eaters, late-night social media junkies) are punished for their sins.
When the plateau, mentioned above, happens as it often does, we look inside ourselves to discover what’s wanting. What more can we do to please the health gods? What more can we give up? Please, show me the newest and most effective protocols, the best hacks so I can be “good” to my body, avoid the degradation of aging for as long as humanly possible, die peacefully in my sleep at 100 after a day spent with my great grandchildren.
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What if instead of good/bad we viewed our behaviors as true/false? In other words, rather than decreeing that we *should* eat this, avoid that, seek this, avoid that, we look at steak, a food from which we’ve evolved to derive nutrients over untold millennia, as something that provides signal instead of noise? When you are hungry, you can eat 16 ounces of steak, but you probably won’t eat 48. It’s hard to overeat steak because its nutrients signal satiety to the body. It’s not that steak or sardines are “good” for you, so much as that they send a clear signal, one your body and its cells can interpret accurately.
You put down the phone at night not because posting on social media at midnight is “bad” but because exposure to darkness signals to your brain to produce melatonin that allows for restful sleep.
You are not rewarded then for being a “good” person, doing everything “correctly” per the latest “science,” but allowing yourself to respond naturally to your environment. The body doesn’t need you to micromanage its every input, while stimulating maladaptive stress responses in the process. It can manage perfectly well so long as it’s not being deceived.
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There is no supreme bible of health. There is no manual for being a connected and thriving person. Most people agree Doritos and Pop Tarts are not in your best interest, nor is doom-scrolling social media at 2 am, but there is as wide a disagreement about what is “healthy” as there are religions purporting the one and only path to God.
The reason for this, in my opinion, is the hacks that purport to fix your health only work under certain conditions, both internal and external, and those conditions change all the time, notably as you modify your diet with those very hacks. In other words, the hacks themselves are self-limiting — they work to fix one problem, only to fail to address — and often create — new ones.
You are on an endless chase from protocol to protocol, like someone who tries meditation, yoga, ayahuasca trips and various other esoteric “spiritual” modalities that never quite result in lasting peace and enlightenment. You don’t actually arrive because you are flooding your mind with more noise rather than giving yourself space to parse what you have.
When your body is exposed to sun in the morning, it receives a signal it’s time to be active, and it responds with the requisite biochemistry toward that end. When your body receives sufficient nutrients it responds with a feeling of satiety, and you stop ingesting more food. You are acting out of clarity, not moral compulsion.
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The problem with regulating information top down — “eat this, not that,” “do this, not that,” “believe this, not that” — is you are disabling the very mechanism you’ve evolved for discovering truth, and by extension, health. Finding out what’s true is not about dutifully adopting the “correct” beliefs via government or scientific authorities, and it follows maintaining one’s health cannot be about robotically adhering to the “correct” dietary and behavioral protocols.
A person learns by experience and observation, and having done so no longer needs to control behavior via internal or external edict. You do not have to tell yourself not to touch the proverbial hot stove, you know not to touch it. Similarly, you don’t need to tell yourself to eat carnivore, your body knows what foods provide you with energy and satiety and which merely create a temporary dopamine spike.
This idea might be unappealing — you’d prefer some easy to follow rulebook to tell you precisely what to eat and how to “optimize” your health. But what if what we really need is to expose the body (and mind) to signal and trust the internal processes to work their magic?
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But back to my original thoughts about the cold I caught. The virus is a form of misinformation, instigating a “belief” of sorts in my body that it should react in a particular way. A strong immune system then might not resist and kill the virus so much as flag it as bullshit and ignore it. (This might be different in the case of certain viruses like ebola or rabies and also for bacterial infections, but that is beyond the scope of this essay.)
The problem then with interventions like the mRNA platform is instead of treating the covid virus as misinformation to be ignored, it introduces counter-instructions with more information. It’s the analogue of the government providing you with the “correct” beliefs in the face of online “disinformation.” The mRNA injection itself is providing yet more instructions to your body rather than letting it observe the actual state of the environment and mount its own response.
It’s no surprise then many who get severe reactions to viral illnesses do so either via their own excessive immune response (inflammation) or instead via opportunistic bacterial infections in the aftermath. You are either attacking yourself due to bad information, or losing sight of the actual threats with your attention diverted. That’s why antibiotics (which only address bacteria) were so often part of the successful treatment for covid — they compensated for the immune system taking its eye off the ball, so to speak.
Good health then is a body that responds adaptively to its actual environment and isn’t diverted by phantom threats. Illness occurs when the body is deceived into attacking itself and/or letting its guard down, poisoned by the breakdown of its ability to parse reality.
Biological truth is the path to health, and truth depends not on behavioral compliance with what is “correct” but good information reaching the body directly. The paradigm shift from good/bad to true/false removes the reliance on the limited intelligence of the logical mind and turns it back over to the profound intelligence of nature itself, without which your ancestors would never have survived to make possible your existence in the first place.