Disease by Design: The Cost of an Engineered Life.

Exploring the state of health, and how we get sick.

Photo by Kouji Tsuru on Unsplash

The current conversation around health is littered with people who have found the one thing which they believe is the sole cause of illness.

• Sugar

• Seed oils

• Toxic injections

• Sedentary lifestyle

• Metabolic Syndrome

…and, so on.

My goal is to find the common denominator. To identify the phenomenon in our lives which promote the tendency toward disease.

Medicine is the art whereby health is conserved, and when lost…is restored. The “practice” of medicine is not defined as the work conducted by a doctor.

Instead, the practice of medicine is the use of knowledge to form an opinion, with which you can generate a plan to restore or conserve health.

— Ibn Sina (Avicenna) on the Medical Arts

Most of our medical education concerns itself with describing diseases and their treatments. But, to truly understand disease we must first be able to articulate the state of health and healthy living.

We cannot know what is “lost” and led to disease, unless we know what was there to begin with. The foundation for health.

This may seem rather obvious, and most people would assume that modern medicine understands what it means to be healthy. But, I’m not so sure.

In addition to the increasingly lost art of bedside manner, there has been a parallel rise in doctors’ dependence on tests to inform clinical decisions. So, the natural tendency is to start defining health by the parameters of these tests.

A fatal error, in my opinion.

The goal of this article is to articulate what is “health,” and use it as the basis to understanding the root cause of disease. Really, the basis of all disease.

What Is Health?

To begin exploring these questions, we must first address the elephant in the room.

If we have any hope of understanding disease, we must first be able to describe health. Which is easier said than done.

There are a couple of aspects of health that are worth considering:

1. Optimal function of the members of our body.

   1. This includes organs, specific tissues, cell populations, and even sub-cellular organisms like mitochondria.

   2. From the more holistic perspective, this also includes interactions with the psyche, cognition, and the social environment of the organism.

   3. Here, we must also distinguish individuals based on their temperaments.

2. The relationship of the body with its surroundings.

   1. Includes things like the living arrangement, local climate, and quality of food, water, air, and light.

   2. What are the inputs the body needs, and how does the environment of the organism provide these inputs.

3. Capacity to tolerate and recover from destabilizing events.

   1. At the most fundamental level, this is captured by the term homeostasis.

   2. This can also be related to social environment and the psyche.

The Fatal Flaw of "Autoimmune" Disease

Consider the following question: can nature cause disease?

It may seem easy at first, but the more I consider this question the more I am inclined to believe that disease is man-made. Other than environmental catastrophes which can cause trauma, it becomes difficult to find examples of nature causing disease all by itself. Often, what we may think as nature causing disease, is actually the result of an interaction between man and nature. For instance, pollution (caused by man) creates a toxic environment which then makes us ill.

The concept of homeostasis is important to keep in mind as we continue this discussion. The homeostatic capacity is what determines if we can conserve a state of health, or if we fall into a state of dis-ease.

What do I mean by this?

Let’s take a simple example.

• The environment around you gets hotter

• Your body detects this heat, and initiates changes to different tissues

• These changes maintain your core temperature to minimize the negative impact of rising ambient temperature

In this example we have a simple homeostatic circuit.

Stimulus → Imbalance → Receptor → Control mechanism → Return to balance.

You can think of a cold as a similar phenomenon, and the symptoms of the cold (including fever) as manifestations of the body’s attempt to return to balance.

However, if your body’s capacity to return to a state of balance is compromised, then these stimuli can lead to disease. It does not necessarily mean that these stimuli are the cause of disease. Because, we also have to consider why we no longer have the capacity to deal with these stimuli.

As we continue this discussion, I want you to think of homeostasis as the capacity to withstand and recover from stress. Stress in the broadest sense.

If our capacity is robust, then temporary stresses on our body/mind are met with the appropriate corrective mechanisms to return to a state of well-being.

If our capacity is depleted, then these temporary stresses can (and often do) result in enduring dis-ease.

Then, we may ask…how does our capacity get depleted?

The Root Cause of Disease

Assuming that the body is in a steady state of health, there are two crucial things we need to consider when assessing our homeostatic capacity to maintain our health.

1. Resource availability.

2. Capacity for action.

Homeostasis is an energy and resource-intensive process. It takes a lot to combat stressors, and then to return the stressed body to its original healthy state.

For all bodily functions, including homeostasis, we need adequate nutrition, hydration, and time-keeping (facilitated by light signaling). These three factors provide both the building-blocks needed to maintain life, as well as the energy used in the process.

Many modern diseases are related to inadequate resource availability resulting in a reduced homeostatic capacity. The simplest example is nutritionally empty foods. These foods act as stressors (inflammatory foods derived from poor ingredients) without providing the adequate nutrition needed to deal with the stress.

For many health gurus, this is where the buck tends to stop. They think food (or nutrition) is where all the problems lie. Hence, the rising focus on elimination diets and treatments (like Ozempic) targeted at modulating food intake.

However, I believe that the biggest contributor to disease is that which directly depletes our homeostatic capacity. You can think of food as one factor in a list of things which deplete this capacity.