Inflammation

I remember reading a while back about how Omega 6 fatty acids found in seed oils (soybean, sunflower, corn, vegetable, etc.) promote inflammation while Omega 3s like the kind found in wild salmon or grass-fed beef reduce it. Of course, both are essential. If you were unable to produce inflammation, then you might bleed to death from a cut, rather than having it clot into a scab.

The problem was the proportion we consume of each has changed drastically over time. Our ancestors apparently had somewhere between 3:1 and 1:1 Omega 6 to Omega 3, while the standard American diet has between 30:1 and 10:1. That’s a lot of excess inflammation.

And it’s no surprise then that most of our modern diseases are inflammatory in nature — diabetes, cancer, auto-immune disease, heart attacks and strokes are all diseases of a body that’s too inflamed, hyper-responsive, over-sugared, clotting internally. Few people die of too little blood sugar anymore, at least in the calorie-abundant West.

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I listened to a Jocko Willink podcast a few years ago wherein he told the story of a soldier who survived years in a Vietnamese prison camp. The takeaway was that while he was ardently optimistic about his ultimate fate, he remained steadfastly agnostic about the particulars. He said the soldiers who were sure they’d be home for Christmas, for example, were always the first to break when Christmas came and went.

The key was to be generally optimistic only. Think of it as the difference between someone who thinks God will help him pick the right lottery numbers vs one who believes whatever happens to him is in his best interests because God only provides exactly what he needs to learn. The latter is probably going to make it, the former not so much.

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The phenomenon of hyper-inflammation is not restricted only to the alimentary diet and the physical body. We are overstimulated by information too. In particular, the amount of threatening news we consume from all over the world is far in excess of what we’ve evolved to process. As such, despite being physically more secure than ever before, we’re in a state of chronic mental inflammation. There’s a word for chronic mental inflammation: “anxiety.”

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I used to think I could overcome fears and other negative emotions by imagining the undesirable outcomes in detail and allowing myself to become okay with them. For example, if someone said something negative about me, I thought I could go over the slight repeatedly and in detail and have it not bother me one bit.

But I came to realize the thinking of the slight was itself the being bothered by it. I couldn’t both think I had gotten over it and really get over it. I had to choose to think about it and not be over it, or not to think about it and actually get over it. I couldn’t have it both ways.

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Even if you see through the fears endlessly promulgated by legacy institutions: climate change, terrorism, covid, the unvaccinated, Trump, Putin, the insurrectionists!, you are tuned into a new set of anxieties: CBDCs, the WEF, the WHO, GMOs, mRNA mandates, the impending collapse of the financial system. I’ve come to realize lately that even being aware of all the so-called *real* threats is also mentally inflammatory.

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If being agnostic as to specific positive outcomes was the key to survival in the prison camp, perhaps it follows one should be agnostic as to negative ones too. While it’s easy to see the folly in the poor, tortured soldier clinging to the hope of being home for Christmas, it’s harder to see it in the anxious housewife fretting over the lives for her children in the face of near-certain climate doom. But it’s essentially the same error — being overly certain about the future outcome on which the hope or fear rests.

The alternative is to be on guard generally about threats of ruin, but agnostic about the specifics. It could be a car crash, a heart attack, a nuclear war, financial collapse, virus or dystopian new world order. You can read the signs, but you never really know. What makes the future the future is precisely this quality. You can protect yourself generally by taking care of your health to the best of your ability, putting your finances on solid ground to the greatest extent practicable and, it might turn out, decreasing your exposure to an information diet that leads to chronic inflammation of mind.

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In the information age, there is a fine line between head-in-the-sand denial of real threats and inflammatory paranoia, one the new media (social algorithms) are designed to make ever more difficult to walk. You need the capacity to defend yourself against acute threats, to clot the cut so to speak when they arise, and yet chronic inflammation will kill you if you try to stay on high alert for every potential attack vector.

You have to choose, it seems, between being prepared generally, trusting yourself to face unknowable threats with the best acute response you can muster, and being specifically armed in advance, at the cost of making yourself sick.

There is no guarantee you survive, but that was ever the case, no matter your preparations.