THE ENDLESS SEARCH FOR THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

The Search for the Fountain of Youth continues, only, instead of an elixir, it will take the form of a pill, (better shelf-life, lower shipping costs, better profits, etc.) People expect pills will be found to make them well. This is ingrained, and is indeed the case for antibiotics.

However, a lot of modern disease does not involve a bacterial or viral infection. Most, perhaps as much as 90%, is the result of a biological system that is overloaded to such an extent that its natural response is as if there were an invading pathogen. Here I am talking about cancer, heart disease, and adult onset diabetes. All of these diseases are either caused directly, or strongly promoted by, a lifestyle that floods cells with excess sugar, excess insulin, excess fat, excess cortisol, and many other hormones. A sedentary and stressful lifestyle exacerbates the problem. Nobody  acts as if they believe lifestyle can make you sick, but that is the reality, and the driving cause of 80-90% of western disease.  Our civilization is rampantly causing disease.

The cell has no use for all this excess. The high levels of imbalanced nutrients- read: supplements- and hormones, coupled with inactivity, are very stressful at the cellular level. This stress tends to weaken the cell, causing cellular malfunctions and breakdowns of various sorts, and leading to problems with cell wall integrity and cellular function. Inflammation typically arises as the body responds to dead or defective cells. This is obviously not a healthy environment, and a variety of problems at the cellular level are all but inevitable.

But this doesn’t stop the pharmaceutical industry from trying to find a loophole! Perhaps inflammation is the cause. Perhaps blood glucose could be lowered. Perhaps cholesterol could be lowered. Perhaps something can be found that will clean up the mess.

If the cells are knee deep in garbage, no fiddling around with the body’s attempts to make the best of all this are ever going to work. Normally they will not help overall and will usually make things worse; at least, specific other things worse.

But it’s quite easy to clean up the mess: remove the cause. Remove the nutrient overload. Give the cells the activity level they expect, de-stress. This can be very precisely measured and almost as precisely reversed. This is what Quantitative Medicine is all about. Stressed cells are literally screaming for help. Numerous blood test markers indicate overloaded nutrients, high and dangerous hormone levels, inactivity, and inflammation. If the markers are known, the cure is too. Potentially anyone with the willpower- an all too rare commodity- can make the lifestyle changes necessary to bring the markers in-line, and once that is done, health returns. It returns automatically – no pills needed. If not overloaded and overstressed, the body is more than capable of preventing all disease like cancer, heart disease, and adult onset diabetes.

Big pharma would rather you leave it up to them. A day doesn’t pass without a new treatment or pill that ‘beats the system’.  Here is today’s drug du jour.

We have in Nature Medicine, “Inhibiting peripheral serotonin synthesis reduces obesity and metabolic dysfunction by promoting brown adipose tissue thermogenesis.” The loophole here is that adult onset diabetics are storing excess fat as normal white fat, whereas, by meddling with the seratonin level, presumably by taking a highly profitable pill, that fat could be stored as brown fat and metabolized (burnt) instead.

There are several things wrong with this picture. First and foremost, the body’s seratonin level is what it is for some very good reasons. Meddling with it is going to cause problems somewhere, possibly serious ones. You just cannot change how the body regulates hormones and expect no negative consequences. Second, this does nothing for cellular stress. The fat overload is still there and still causing problems, it is simply ending up in a different place.

In future posts we will cover exactly how cellular stress causes cancer, heart disease, and adult onset diabetes, and how Quantitative Medicine can predict and reverse this.