What’s in store for 2024?

I started this blog because I wanted my family and friends to think about their health differently from me. I learned the hard way that following dietary and exercise guidelines, and my doctor’s advice did not prevent me from getting quite (heart disease) sick.

Before I started, I knew I wanted to write rather than podcast. I chose to write in part because when I force myself to write about something, I tend to make the most effort to understand it. I also hate the sight and sound of myself on video…!

I knew from a career in company management and promotion that content should be visually appealing. For that I teamed up with a long-time friend who has been an invaluable help in designing, building, teaching, and advising.

Apart from that, as with everything else in my life, I didn’t give much thought to what I was about to do. I believed it was the right thing and I knew I’d figure things out along the way.

With time, I’ve been reminded that there are good and bad ways to read and write. The bad way is to dive in and try to write as I read, then get frustrated because it’s taking too long and makes no sense. The good way starts with reading, proceeds with notes and writing, and “ends” with protracted, multi-phase editing.

I’m going to describe two things:

What is my direction for 2024?
What are the big lessons I’ve learned since I started?

What is my direction for 2024?

Design of the blog

I think I have made strides in simplifying what I write and making articles somewhat visually appealing. In 2024, I want to get even better at simplifying complex subjects and hope to do this with shorter posts and more sophisticated visuals.

Evolution as a guide to healing and staying healthy

The more we diverge from the external elements to which we became adapted through natural evolution, the more we have suffered from so-called mis-matches. I’ve discussed these to some extent regarding diet, sunlight and exposure to nature. In the coming year, I want to address more fully those aspects of our external environment to which we are adapted and how we can use them to live a fuller and healthier life well lived.

Natural elements to which we are adapted

I’ve written to some extent about the effects of diet, sunlight, exercise, sleep, and exposure to nature on our health and wellbeing. In the coming year I want to spend some more time explaining especially sunlight, exercise and sleep and add things like grounding, fourth phase water and meditation. Along the way I’ll try to weave in the general principle of hormesis.

Gnarly old Scots Pine in remnant of Caledonian pine forest

Understanding the human holobiont

Much of what I read greatly underestimates the sophistication of our body, it’s associated microbiome and their complex interactions (see below). I want to address this by describing our human metabolism and physiology, our gut microbiome, and their interactions. I’m going to create visuals that aid in this process.

Along the way, I want to highlight what we do know, what we don’t know and how they relate to perceived wisdom.

My early thinking about new content includes:

The human gut – where we absorb food, where our microbiome resides, and their interactions
The interactions between different organs of the human host

More about processed food

Building on what I’ve written about processed seed oils, I’ll delve into the effects of refined grains, and simple sugars and starches. I want to begin to untangle the effects that the three major processed food ingredients (seed oils, refined grains, and simple sugars and starches) have on our metabolism, metabolic flexibility, blood sugar, blood insulin, and chronic inflammation.

Heart disease

I’m going to continue building on what I know about heart disease as a disorder caused by the toxicity of seed oils. I’ll try to demonstrate the complex pathways that lead to the disease by tying in the role of metabolic disorder caused by refined grains, and simple sugars and starches.

I also want to explore the role of so-called fourth phase (structural) water. This is a subject I’ve only recently started to read about.

Other mismatch diseases

From the start, I’ve alluded to my belief that heart disease is one of many so-called chronic diseases that I believe are mostly symptoms of modern malnutrition caused by a diet of processed food.

I’ve also mentioned a bifurcation of symptoms that can be classed as metabolic syndrome (e.g., obesity, type-2 diabetes, poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, hypertension, dementia, cancer, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease) and autoimmune disease (e.g., multiple sclerosis, type-1 diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease). I think to some extent we can categorize the symptoms of metabolic syndrome as having been caused by the direct effects of processed food on our human metabolism and symptoms of autoimmunity by indirect effects on our gut microbiome.

Sources of nutrient-dense bioavailable real food

I want to describe how my wife and I will be growing our own vegetables in a garden that we are managing regeneratively. I also want to describe the regenerative farming movement, how it works and how we try to source plant-and animal-based foods that are raised regeneratively.

I’ll be visiting the topic of wild harvested and caught food such as seaweeds, game and sea food.

Eating locally and seasonally

I have chosen to eat what I believe is traditionally processed real food. This means that I avoid things like seed oils, refined grains, and simple sugars and starches. I don’t eat the vast majority of the products available from most shops. Instead, I shop at traditional butchers and green grocers where I can source real animal- and plant-based ingredients.

Most of my food is home cooked and beginning this year will include many more vegetables that we grow ourselves. Two challenges arise from this lifestyle, namely recipes and dealing with seasonally available produce. This year I’ll describe how we manage these challenges, including recipes we’ve found to be useful.

I am and great believer in the value of fermented food and will share the recipes I use.

What are the big lessons I’ve learned since I started?

I’ve learned four big things since I started this blog in 2022:

We’re all different
We are adapted after millions of years of evolution to eat animal- and plant-based food
We are surrounded by popular nutritional myths
Nutritional science is surprisingly under developed

We’re all different

This is the biggest surprise for me. I’ve spent most of my life and my entire professional life involved in environmental and human health risk assessment. There are certainly basic guiding principles that apply but beyond those, each of us has a body and a microbiome that are built and respond quite differently to external stimuli such as nutrition, sunlight, and nature.

Adaptation to eat animal- and plant-based food

I enjoy understanding basic principles and applying them to every-day experiences. When I started to understand the importance of macro- and micro-nutrients and especially the bioavailability and nutritional density of animal-based food, I became motivated to understand their evolutionary importance. This led to understanding how we are structurally adapted to eat complex mixtures of mostly animal-based food and some from plants. Deviation from such a diet has led to mis-match conditions that have affected human physical stature, brain size for thousands of years and is most recently created so-called chronic diseases, such as heart disease.

The reasons that a few of us apparently need wholly carnivore or plant-based diets escape me, but as stated above, we are all different. This is something I hope to understand better with time.

Popular nutritional myths

There are so many popular myths surrounding what we eat, it’s nothing short of astonishing.

Sunlight is bad – sunlight is something that we evolved with and need. Having skin cells suffused with seed oils and slathering ourselves with lotions and creams renders our skin sensitive to the sun and contaminated with chemicals, respectively
Seed oils are heart-healthy – seed oils contain unnaturally high levels of linoleic acid which is chemically unstable. Seed oils used for cooking and in most processed food ends up in our cells where they make us sick
Animal fat is bad – we are adapted to eat animal-based food including fat
Red meat is bad – same as animal fat plus it is a rich source of bioavailable nutrient-dense nutrition

Obesity is driven by calories – calories at some point are important but they are not driving the current obesity epidemic. More central to that problem is a diet dominated by processed carbohydrates (e.g., sugars, starches, and refined grains) which are converted into fat by our liver
Fibre is necessary for gut health – not for everyone and in some it causes gut ill-health to the extent that complete elimination of plant fibre has been shown to help the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease
Cholesterol causes heart disease – this is demonstrably untrue. 80% of the cholesterol in our body is produced in the liver. Cholesterol is a necessary component of every cell in our body and is a precursor necessary for the production of vitamin D from sunlight interacting with our skin

Plant- and animal-based foods are equally nutritious – Most plants don’t contain as many micronutrients as meat, and soy is the only plant product containing a full complement of essential amino acids. Many plants may contain the same concentration of certain micronutrients as meat, but those plant-based micronutrients are not bioavailable to us because our gut is not evolved to break down the complex plant matrix containing the micronutrients. Our gut is highly adapted to extracting the dense nutrition found in meat
Single nutritional components (e.g., fibre, TMAO, etc.) can be relied upon solely to explain a state of health – our bodies and associated microbiome are too complex and sophisticated to ever be damaged or fixed by any one thing encountered at natural levels in or from real food
Our gut microbiome communicates with our bodily organs along specific axes (e.g., gut-brain axis, gut-liver axis) – our gut microbiota react to the components (diet, water, dust, etc.) of our external environment which reaches them. Those microbial reactions may be chemical or electrical and are released along our GI tract and into our blood stream through a process called orchestral signaling. Organs respond to orchestral symphony as necessary

Nutritional science is surprisingly underdeveloped

I’ve found that much of what I read greatly underestimates the sophistication of our body, it’s associated microbiome and their complex interactions with the food we eat. I think this has arisen for the following reasons:

The practice of nutrition often conflicts with reliable published nutritional science
Scientific research is often conducted in context of conventional, and often erroneous, assumptions about diet and lifestyle
The study of the human microbiome is still in its early days
The commercial sector is motivated to commercialise things that can be legally protected and sold irrespective of their nutritional value

Additionally, the practice of nutritional science is structurally challenged:

Complexity tends to be simplified in an attempt to understand the component parts, thereby losing sight of synergistic value beyond those individual parts
Research is conducted within delineated scientific fields that preclude collaboration that would aid in understanding complexity
Scientists are loathe to contemplate that which they might not understand – they don’t know what they don’t know
Analytical and diagnostic tools with adequate specificity and sensitivity do not exist to identify large swathes of the microbiota (e.g., fungi) and metabolites (e.g., complex glycans) involved

All of this means that I am very careful about the types of information sources I rely on. I think of four basic sources of information and the extent to which I tend to trust their content. The best sources are to be found in academic literature. Much of the information published is biased one way or another but at least it is possible to check things like methodologies and references used.

My second-best source of information is books, or at least well-referenced books. If I find a book full of unreferenced conclusions, I just ignore it or at least don’t believe it until I find another source of the same information. Very often I follow up on the references in a book before I fully trust what I’m reading.

Close to but slightly less useful than books are podcasts and certain social media outlets. I listen to and read many of these but return routinely to just a handful. I use these outlets as a source of information about a subject and to discover new nutrition and lifestyle practitioners. As with books, I follow up on referenced material to check what I hear and read.

The least useful source of information for me are the popular outlets, including, TV, newspapers, magazines, trade journals, and social media influencers. I very rarely find anything useful here.