Why The Simple Ways To Be Healthy Are Invariably The Best
Every year, major corporations around the world invest billions of dollars into new drugs and medications designed to keep us alive. But isn’t it interesting that, despite all that energy, we still don’t have a wonder pill? No company in the world has come up with a drug that will cure the major illnesses we face or dramatically extend our lives. All that effort and “nada” – nothing!
At the same time, public health authorities tell us that we should do the basics: eat healthily, take plenty of exercise, and look after our mental wellbeing. These are all things that humanity has known how to do for millennia. In fact, for most of recorded history, they were all the default.
For thousands of years, for instance, the majority of the world’s population lived on a diet of whole grains, beans, and vegetables. They also spend most of their time in the open air, getting physical activity. And they had a bunch of religious practices that helped to keep their minds peaceful. It is only in the modern era that we’ve seen a marked reversal in these trends. Today, people eat a poor diet of processed food, get relatively little exercise, and lead stressed-out lives.
What is it, though, that makes these traditional ways of staying healthy the best? And why is that conventional medicine seems impotent in comparison?
It All Comes Down To A Concept Called Reductionism
If you haven’t heard the term reductionism before, don’t worry. It’s nothing complicated. It’s just the way that researchers do modern science.
Reductionism is the idea that you can obtain the truth about something by splitting it up into its essential components. Physicists, for instance, believe that they can uncover the nature of the universe by probing the contents of the atom. Chemists think that they can do something similar by isolating specific chemical elements and then reacting them with each other to see what they produce. The list goes on and on.
Reductionism has served the scientific community well for a long time – especially in the basic sciences. But when things get more complicated – say the level of human biology – the reductionism method starts to feel a little unwieldy. There are so many interacting factors that you can never quite know for sure what will happen to one part of the system if you poke another. You can play around with one chemical pathway, but then it will have unforeseen effects on another.
Modern medicine, however, hasn’t had this insight. Scientists still go about their business using reductionist techniques, trying to isolate specific variables. Their intentions are noble – that’s how science has always been done. But it is also hopeless in complex biological systems where there are so many interactions. It prevents them from developing drugs that work in symbiosis to interact with multiple targets. They look for a single magic bullet, but no such thing exists.
Exercise and nutrition are fundamentally different animals. Whenever you eat a meal, you’re not swallowing something homogenous, like a pharmaceutical chemical. Instead, you’re consuming thousands of different compounds, all produced by the plant.
The Simple Ways To Be Healthy Aren’t Actually Simple
Every plant, even hemp, contains hundreds of compounds. And these all have different effects on the body. This fact is why it is so vital to get CBD information. You want to make sure that you get the real deal.
Hemp isn’t the only plant either. Turmeric, for instance, contains hundreds of active chemicals. Scientists once believed that the curcumin that it contains is what delivers the benefit to our bodies. But when you isolate this nutrient from the rest of the root, suddenly it doesn’t work so well in the body.
The same goes for vitamin C. You can give people high-dose vitamin C pills all day long, and they’ll avoid scurvy. But their health won’t improve like it does when you provide them with vitamin C in the form of kale. When you do that, you suddenly see massive improvements in their wellbeing.
So why are the old-fashioned methods the best? The main reason has to do with the fact that we live in a holistic universe. Our bodies fundamentally don’t care about notions like reductionism. What matters to them is how their metabolism and cellular processes play out. And that’s a highly complex process.
Fortunately, we evolved alongside the food that we eat, so it too is just as complicated. When you bring the two systems together, you wind up with positive health outcomes that you can’t get through isolated pills alone. Remarkable.