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In the spirit of full disclosure, I should tell you that my somewhat dramatic title is a mild but actual example of an important and persistent health obstacle I want to discuss with you. This obstacle is a class of evolving, recurring, and sometimes quite powerful natural phenomena known by scientists as supernormal stimuli.
As their name implies, supernormal stimuli are exaggerated variations of normal environmental cues or instinct triggers, and can be found throughout wild nature. An example is the especially bold colors or markings found in certain plants and animals, each specifically evolved to produce strong responses in other animals. But this simple example hardly exhausts the wide range and enormous potential power of behavior-altering influences from supernormal stimuli.
The existence of supernormal stimuli and their powerful behavioral effects in animals has been known scientifically since at least the 1930s. More recently, a similar natural susceptibility of humans to these special triggering stimuli has been hypothesized, investigated, and confirmed.
Newer research on supernormal stimuli effects in humans offers two critical insights related to modern health and quality of life, with implications for both individuals and public policy. The first insight is that humans, when living in wild nature, are at least as vulnerable to unconscious and health-limiting supernormal stimulation as other animal species. More importantly, the second insight is that supernormal stimuli are now likely far more pervasive in the modern world, taking on new and potentially far more powerful forms, than was ever the case for our human ancestors living in our original state in nature.
Why are supernormal stimuli affecting humans increasing in scope and scale? Unlike the more constrained and only slowly-changing state of human life in nature, our modern environment is far less fettered and rapidly and widely evolving. Our dynamic new world of advanced science and technology, combined with reasonably unconstrained industrial markets and information flows, enable entirely new supernormal triggers to introduce themselves (or to be created, as with the simple example of my title) and then spread and evolve quickly in our global society. At the same time, our modern human environment has become significantly insulated from ancient natural forces that shaped us as a species, forces now absent that would naturally limit supernormally-led behaviors and perceptual changes in us.
For these important reasons, it is not an exaggeration to caution that powerful new supernormal stimuli are now swiftly emerging amidst modern life, and these generally unseen and greatly underappreciated influences and motivators increasingly surround us each day. The full result of this trend is still unclear, but there is reason for concern that a modern web of new, industrial-strength supernormal stimuli may be at least partially enveloping us in an instinctively-appealing – but controlling and health and freedom-reducing – virtual reality of sorts. If this idea seems fantastic, it perhaps underscores the special power and essentially counterintuitive nature of supernormal stimulation itself.
Understanding that these initial ideas may strike you as either alarming or incredulous, let me propose that we are all now well-advised at least to better understand what I have provocatively called the new supernormal reality around us all (though perhaps more precisely, it should be called “hypernatural reality”). And let me further propose that salient examples of behavior and perceptual-altering supernormal stimuli are as close as the content of your nearest television screen. In fact, as I will explain, they may even be contained in the screen itself.
In the discussion that follows, I will help you to better understand supernormal stimuli in principle and practice, and to perceive and examine them concretely in your life and the world around you. Then, we will consider specific strategies to promote individual and collective mitigation of supernormal influences – whenever these evolved or crafted triggers are found to have negative consequences and limit our potential for healthier, fuller, and freer life.
Beginning Our Escape
An excellent first summary of recent and still emerging research into the presence and effects of supernormal stimuli in humans, and the starting point for our discussion, is a new book, Supernormal Stimuli, by Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett. In it, she catalogs a wide array of modern supernormal stimuli, ranging from sex and cuteness cues to drama and electronica.
If you are familiar with evolutionary psychology, Barrett’s book will build on what you know to explore one of the most important health-related findings so far in this still developing field. If you are new to evolutionary psychology, Barrett offers a pointed introduction to the study of our evolved psyche, its natural biases and susceptibilities, and our human opportunities to use evolutionary science to create more conscious, informed, and optimal life today.
From whatever starting point you begin your investigation of the health-effects of supernormal stimulation, one important point I would make up-front is that these phenomena are definitely not “supernatural” stimuli. Whether they are episodic or ubiquitous, evolved or intentionally created, and mild or powerful, these proven influences on animals and humans are tangible natural phenomena that occur in the physical world. Supernormal stimuli are real and substantial, can be observed and examined, and involve decipherable and recognizable processes. Supernormal stimuli are not the stuff of science-fiction, even as they initially seem strange and extraordinary, but they can influence us in ways that are potent, counterintuitive, and almost surreal.
On this point, scholars in past decades struggled for a compelling theory or model to explain how humans of the future could be unwittingly pulled into technologically-based virtual realities, and progressively distorted and then dominated by tem. But research into supernormal stimuli offers a compelling mechanism for just this possibility, and provides an understanding of how such co-option might reliably operate in practice. Already, early research suggests that powerful new supernormal stimuli strongly limit healthy balance and progression in specific areas of modern life and society today, and that these stimuli are be self-evolving in ways that could further limit our ability to optimally perceive and act in the world.
Fortunately, and as we will discuss, mitigation of this trend and reversal of current supernormal influences is possible as well. The same research that has uncovered supernormal threats and trends in modern society also suggests that we have the ability, individually or collectively, to overcome or circumvent supernormal stimuli when they appear. As suggested, this counterbalancing is accomplished through new and deliberate effort to observe and understand the manifestations and effects of supernormal stimuli. Since all supernormal stimuli, whether old or new, involve observable processes, with new awareness and care we can mitigate the immediate risks they pose and take care to forestall their seeming long-term natural trend – toward modern, technologically-based life increasingly immersed in unhealthy and externally-created sensations, perceptions, and behaviors.
These new efforts at optimizing our individual and collective health and quality of life require us to use the modern science and technology that have helped to create new supernormal influences around us. To begin this important task, for both our individual lives and global society, let’s consider Barrett’s summary of emerging research into supernormal stimuli in humans and then the opportunities she highlights to use specific research-based techniques to expose and defuse unintended supernormal influences on us.
Discovery of Supernormal Stimuli
Early in Supernormal Stimuli, Barrett reminds us of the psychologist William James’ suggestion that, at least in some respects, the task of psychology and work of progressive self-awareness is a process of making “the ordinary seem strange.”
In saying this, James underscored the need for psychologists, and people working at self-development, to overcome the force of habituation in daily life and thereby to create new capacity to see our world and psyche in more objective and insightful ways. In the case of supernormal stimuli – which are generally unseen even as they reach deep into our natural psyche to influence us – this advice proves indispensable.
By opening ourselves to the idea that the ordinary around us may in truth be strange and original, we begin to reframe our surroundings for the needed work of uncovering, examining, and responding to hidden features and unappreciated influences. This reframing specifically encourages us to consider the possibility of harmful effects from powerful supernormal stimuli known already to exist in the natural world. It permits us to look for unseen limitations on our perspective and behavior, limitations old and new that may be subtly woven into the fabric of traditional and modern life. And it helps us better examine and feel our oldest and strongest natural instincts, and to consider that they may serve as a back-door of sorts for unexpected biases to enter our lives and society– as today’s relatively free conditions and rapidly-evolving knowledge and technology foster new pathways for undesirable and unconscious effects on us all.
Many elements of modern human life are truly new and even astonishing from a natural or historical perspective (as examples, air travel and airwave communication), but most find rapid and fairly ubiquitous acceptance soon after they emerge. Wholly novel developments in our surroundings, in fact, are regularly and often quickly assimilated and taken as given by our ancient human brains. Though perhaps startling or curiosities to us at first, these new items routinely lose their novelty through the force of habituation and become accepted by a human nature often poorly adapted for life in a rapidly-changing environment. In this process, yesterday’s innovations often become today’s norms and reset us in a new physiological zero.
According to Barrett’s account, supernormal stimuli were first discovered and explored scientifically in the 1930s by the biologist and eventual Nobel Laureate Niko Tinbergen and his colleague Konrad Lorenz. Their important discovery began humbly enough and yet led to a profound new insight into the workings of the evolved natural world, one that scientists are still grappling with today. In summer fieldwork in Greenland, Tinbergen observed that nesting terns would retrieve nearby eggs of different shapes and sizes (their own eggs and the eggs of other birds) with different degrees of intensity, sometimes more strenuously gathering the eggs of other bird species.
This initial observation led to pioneering research and findings that remain a source of productive inquiry. Tinbergen first demonstrated that various species of birds would reliably prefer to sit on artificial eggs to their own natural eggs, if the artificial eggs included certain “supernormal” characteristics or cues tailored to a specific species. A species of songbirds, for example, would forgo their normally small, pale-blue eggs for the opportunity to care for slightly larger plaster eggs, if the plaster eggs were colored a brighter shade of blue and speckled vividly with black.
Similar research obtained comparable findings for a number of bird species and then for behaviors outside of egg-tending. Certain species of geese, for example, were found to prefer retrieving volleyballs to their native eggs. Later, artificial baby chicks that were slightly larger and that had redder beaks than normal were found to be preferred by parent birds to their own living chicks. And male barn swallows, with their breasts darkened by paint, were shown to receive a greater share of female interest than would otherwise be the case.
Subsequent studies of these phenomena soon expanded beyond bird species. Tinbergen and others found a similar ability to influence animal behavior through various supernormal stimuli in fish and insects, and then in mammals. Soon, the fashioning of these special stimuli was shown to be more than the work of a few scientists shuttered away in laboratories – nature and evolutionary dynamics were found to regularly produce supernormal stimuli as an adaptive strategy for a variety of host species.
As a case study in natural supernormal stimulation, Barrett highlights the reproductive strategy of the cuckoo bird, which has evolved to lay and leave behind a single egg in the nests of slightly smaller birds and to produce hatchlings that are larger and more attractive (through their size and redder beaks) to their adoptive parents. Barrett also introduces research showing that some species of orchids have evolved flowers that are more sexually attractive to male wasps than female wasps, via the use of specific visual cues, co-opting normal male wasp mating behavior to increase orchid pollination and gene transmission (at some cost to target wasp populations).
As suggested, Barrett points to the now many known examples of natural supernormal stimulation in animals, indicating that these stimuli are both a widespread and powerful class of natural phenomena and an inevitable consequence of evolutionary forces acting amidst complexity. Included in this finding is the conclusion that supernormal stimuli influence human populations too, in nature and especially now – in our modern, rapidly-evolving, and increasingly artificial and technological setting apart from nature.
Supernormal Stimuli in Principle
We can define supernormal stimuli simply enough, even as these phenomena are anything but simple, and even as they prove strange and unexpected when we find them working on us.
Distilling down the somewhat technically-oriented Wikipedia definition, a supernormal stimulus can be thought of as an exaggerated version of a natural stimulus or cue that takes advantage of an existing instinct or tendency in an animal, especially a new stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the normal stimulus for which the instinct originally evolved.
The theory of supernormal stimulation explains and predicts the irresistible lure of bigger and brighter eggs, or of darker and redder mates and adversaries in some animal species. It offers a means to make sense of widespread animal preferences for larger and cuter hatchlings and babies. It offers a foundation to understand at least some of the natural emergence of bold and exotic attributes and behaviors in plants and animals (even as predation threats counter this trend and encourage greater anonymity and camouflage).
Supernormal stimuli can explain the intoxicating power of at least some naturally and artificially evolved scents and tastes. The influence of supernormal triggers is likely a driving mechanism behind bigger and more curvaceous flowers, both in nature and at floral shops. And supernormal stimuli are almost certainly behind the ubiquitous trend of industrial-age restaurants and supermarkets offering ever sweeter, fattier, and saltier foods, even as these natural and instinctively-pleasing triggers work to our near-universal detriment.
In all cases where supernormal stimulation in animals and humans can be demonstrated, this co-opting of natural instincts involves harnessing long-evolved, normally-useful, and often far stronger unconscious drives than we may understand – drives that we may be more apt to rationalize than realize when they occur in us. In fact, it is the unexpected and unappreciated strength of our supernormally-triggered natural instincts that makes unnaturally free humans so vulnerable to both evolved supernormal stimulation and intentional supernormal manipulation. In modern times, both can cause us to be led unknowingly and undesirably by new and potent influences in the industrial environment.
In saying this, we should also highlight that the threat of extreme supernormal manipulation has been present in our species for a significant time, notably since the advent of formal language, and may even have been a driver of our long-increasing brain size – providing selection advantages for people better able to observe and counter undesirable or manipulative instinct triggers. As we will see, this important idea and natural capability may prove both true for people living in our natural past and valuable for people living today.
Barrett writes that when supernormal stimuli are at work, we have the potential to be undone by whatever we most strongly desire – by the content of our most firmly established personal habits and by the strong universal pull of our oldest natural instincts, intuitions, and human emotions. All that it really takes is for us to give into these things, to live comfortably with our habits, and to “go with the flow” of unexamined impulses, intuitions, and prerogatives.
What could be an easier way to live, and a potentially more dangerous and unhealthy one too, especially in a modern world newly-filled with powerful and unprecedented technology, resources, knowledge, and freedom?
Supernormal Stimuli in Humans
As suggested before, animals and people living in wild nature will almost inevitably encounter supernormal stimuli amidst the long course of their evolution. Over thousands or millions of years, exaggerated versions of natural anatomical features or behaviors will randomly appear in many species of plants and animals.
Some of these variations in a host will prove especially activating to the instincts of others, whether animals of the same species or another, promoting changes in the behavior of the target animal. And some of the host attributes will prove not just compelling to a target animal, but also will directly or indirectly result in increased gene transmission for their host plant or animal and thus be reinforced. These special cases of random attribute variations prove, for a time at least: 1) supernormally stimulating to a target and 2) useful to the enabling genes of the host.
In this way, a species of insects or birds might evolve markings that make them appear more sexually attractive to potential mates or more fearsome to potential predators. Certain fruits might evolve to become unusually bright, sweet, or large, encouraging an increased scattering of their seeds. Antlers and plumages might grow to supernormally stimulate mates and rivals. In fact, a great many natural variations of this kind are possible, though always subject to specific and discernable environmental limits. Why? Because all attributes are subject to a variety of natural constraints, such as predation pressures, climactic variability, maintaining sexual or social currency, and even the natural mechanics and design of the host species.
The natural evolutionary development of supernormal stimuli is thus inevitable, given sufficient time and environmental complexity, but this development is also always constrained, since it is a time-consuming process and real evolutionary work, and always subject to various and changing environmental demands. And any successful new supernormal stimulus in nature is likely to become normalized in the life of its target species, either through success, ubiquity, and then counter-adaptation, or as other demands and constraints on the host or target force an optimization of the permissible size, shape, color, scent, flamboyance, and power of any exaggerated characteristic or stimulus.
As suggested, people today live in a human-influenced environment that is increasingly freed from many of the natural evolutionary constraints on supernormal stimuli affecting or potentially affecting our species. This trend began with our use of simple technology, increased with the agrarian revolution and rise of Neolithic life ten thousand years ago, and has become especially pronounced with the historic and sudden ascent of scientific knowledge and industrial technology in the last five hundred years. We are now far freer as a species, in principle at least, to fashion our world in less constrained and more instinct-pleasing ways (and in more chosen and rational ones too). We now can introduce new technologies and act on far-reaching ideas in ways not possible before our time, and potentially can evolve our environment and behavioral patterns far more rapidly than we ever could in natural conditions.
For identical reasons, the release of humans from earlier natural constraints is also a release of potential supernormal stimuli affecting humans. Prospective new stimuli targeting our instincts have been similarly freed by science and technology to evolve or be fashioned in new and unnatural ways, and have been made similarly less constrained by natural limits on their number and impact on their human targets. After all, supernormal stimuli, like any other anatomical or behavioral attribute, need only be functional in a species and environment to advance. There is no unchanging standard for or limit on their viability, diversity, or novelty – other than the speed in which they can emerge and exploit niches in a larger environment.
Two critical questions result from this important insight regarding the potential for a modern proliferation of new supernormal stimuli. First, is a radically-accelerated evolution of supernormal stimuli targeting people now underway? And second, is any demonstrable increase in supernormal stimulation actually impacting us, particularly in negative and undesirable ways? The research Barrett summarizes, while preliminary and encouraging of further analysis, makes a compelling case that the answer to both questions is an emphatic yes.
Perhaps the best way to begin to explore and consider the likely scale and impact of emerging new supernormal stimuli around us – powerful new environmental cues already at work on our psyche and lives today – is to consider the essential facts of our earlier and long-evolved life in wild nature. With this earlier natural life in mind, we need only subtract out the key features of this earlier life from the world around us now, producing a relief of what is new around us and potentially containing modern supernormal stimuli. As I have suggested, this exercise recasts our modern world in a new and quite striking light. It moves us beyond our daily intuitions and makes our ordinary world seem immediately and genuinely strange – very strange, indeed.
Let’s take a moment to consider these essential facts of earlier natural human life – facts we must pull away from life as it is today, to reveal our modern world in less-familiar, insight-engendering, and potentially stimuli-exposing ways. If we define the natural human world as our general environment and pattern of life from the emergence of clearly identifiable foraging hominids almost ten million years ago down to our precipitous move to agricultural and then acquisitive life – on the occasion of the agrarian revolution and first large-scale human settlements ten thousand years ago – natural human life can be said to have the following essential features and attributes:
Let me leave this abbreviated summary of the science of natural human life at this level, but also encourage you to consider and imagine what our natural life was like then – and what our normal range of environmental and social stimuli were – as our ancestors moved in small bands across the vast, rugged, and dangerous African savannah over an equally vast period of five or ten million years.
If you would like help in this visioning exercise, a quote that Barrett uses in her book might help. It comes from the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, who previously wrote, “Each of our ancestors was, in effect, on a camping trip that lasted an entire lifetime, and this way of life endured for most of the last ten million years.”
Supernormal Stimuli in Modern Life
Given this general portrait of natural human life and the environment that formed our species and instincts, the modern world around us today can be juxtaposed and seen as the decidedly unprecedented, extraordinary, and increasingly strange and unconstrained new human setting that it is in objective fact.
Our relatively free and greatly-changing technological-scientific state also can be seen as a setting ripe with opportunities for new personal lures and entrapments, for the unconscious and intentional harnessing of our instincts and predispositions in novel ways, and for strange and powerful alterations of our natural outlooks and behaviors. These influences can include compelling new norms for our daily patterns of life, innovative social artifacts and trends, sexual and status symbols, and other artificial cues that trigger latent motivations and behaviors.
As I have suggested, an essential premise in this natural reorientation or reframing of our times is not just the observation that modern life is very different and more complex than that of earlier and natural forms of human life. It is equally that modern cultural and technological evolution is inherently far more rapid and uninhibited than in the past, less subject to the constraints of natural evolution, and much freer to engender new social artifacts on a much wider scale and at a much more rapid rate than in our past. As with genes in nature, new social and technological developments must still find adequate resources and not engender negative instincts or cause an immediate environmental or species collapse to propagate. Now, however, they can propagate in bold and striking new ways.
For this reason, new supernormal stimuli are all now poised to evolve rapidly, unnaturally, and therefore perhaps counter-intuitively, with fewer of the earlier limits and constraints that kept us and our environmental influences in natural bounds. This set of facts also implies that people and social artifacts of our time are more able to evolve principally based on cultural, commercial, and intellectual (sometimes called memetic) success – in ways only tangentially-grounded in genetic success and thus in ways far more difficult before our time.
After ten thousand years of rapidly evolving acquisitive life, scientific knowledge, and human technology since the agrarian revolution – 0.1% of a ten million year natural human legacy – and just over 100 years since the industrial revolution, our modern human setting surely is correctly and productively recast as strange, radically-altered, and broadly supernormal in itself.
Whether we live in an urban center of tall buildings and busy cafes, in any of the many growing mall-studded suburbs of the industrial world, or in the wired and often only outwardly natural life of exurbia, our human life today is far from the lifelong “camping trip” of our natural ancestors and the ten million-years that shaped our inherited instincts. That we often take our unprecedented life today as normal and ordinary only makes the strangeness of our times and workings of our natural psyche more poignant, revealing important limits to our native intuition and the unintentional freedom we may be giving potential new supernormal stimuli today.
With new perspective, we can see that entirely new modern stimuli are many and increasing, and that at least some already successfully compete for our time, attention, and affections. In Barrett’s compiled research, some of these new stimuli have been shown to significantly influence our orientation, attitudes, and behavior – all essential and early measures of the power and potential impact of supernormal stimulation in our lives.
By re-grounding us in the natural life and essential instincts of our ancestors, and offering the lens of new research into the seemingly ordinary (but more objectively strange) new world of ours, Barrett commendably helps us begin to explore and escape from important, overlooked, and health and life-limiting stimuli already in our midst. With these goals in mind, let me highlight some of the key modern supernormal influences summarized or suggested by Barrett’s work:
Escaping Unhealthy Stimuli
As we better understand the origin, scope, and potential power of supernormal stimuli, we of course begin essential steps to increase our daily awareness of these stimuli and to reduce their unconscious and undesirable effects in our lives and society.
In an important sense, we initiate a needed process of natural renewal and self-assertion in the face of the rapid and unprecedented human transformation that marks our modern age. We begin to move from the artificially-stimulated and unconsciously-led forms of “junk life” that are reasonably common in our times to more freely-chosen, more-objectively optimal, and more humane life. We become healthier, and perhaps in new and unprecedented ways, taking advantage of and yet rising above our inheritance.
Escaping supernormal stimuli ultimately involves and requires new awareness, responsibility, and choice by individuals and communities. While this is real work, the choice to be more aware of our times and escape the attraction of new unconscious influences it contains is ours to make. The benefits of this effort can be enormous differences in our quality of life, and in the course and tenor of our global society and even our species.
If we are each subject to varying degrees of supernormal stimulation and have at least some natural susceptibility to these stimuli, all of us seeking healthy and progressive life can begin a process of better perceiving these stimuli in our lives and replacing their negative and unintended influences with more informed and chosen attitudes and behaviors. We can begin our escape from supernormal reality. To do this, we can and must use the same tools of science that make this strange new form of human life possible – but now to create new awareness of ourselves and the seemingly ordinary modern environment around us.
An experienced psychologist, Barrett offers us help in this critical process, first by explaining supernormal stimuli and how they can affect us, and then by outlining specific research-based strategies to reduce the impact of newly-appreciated supernormal stimulation in our lives. These strategies begin from the idea that all influential stimuli ultimately play to our instincts – to specific and long-evolved activation or pleasure centers in our brain. Scientists have confirmed this important idea by examining a variety of stimuli, and resulting brain activations and outward behaviors, using both high-tech instruments and some revealing but not so high-tech experiments.
An essential insight in brain-activation research is the finding that very different stimuli – whether supernormal or otherwise – can produce nearly identical physical responses in the activation and pleasure zones of the brains of different people. Different things, in other words, can make different people equally excited, focused, angry, or happy. While this is an intuitive idea, it is a common misconception to attribute these differences to innate or character differences within people. Correcting this misperception, in fact, proves critical to understanding how our general orientation and affections are formed, and to mastering unintended supernormal stimulation.
As Barrett points out, considerable research shows us that widely different stimuli can produce comparable activation and pleasure in different people, primarily through the force of repetition and familiarity itself – that is, through the processes of habituation and fixation. With these terms, I mean the active structuring of our brains, by our brains, to view a specific set of stimuli, behaviors, or patterns of life as exciting and pleasurable, and thus to potentially become increasingly pre-occupied with them. While there is significant research showing that innate differences do exist in the brains and temperaments of people, the force of habitation (that is, repeated exposure to and familiarity with specific stimuli) appears to be a more powerful determinant of our personal preoccupations and sources of daily happiness.
This model of active stimuli-mapping and happiness-making by the brain – of individual habituation to and fixation on whatever available pleasure-inducing environmental stimuli are available – explains why so many things in life are “an acquired taste,” whether broccoli, in-laws, or film noir. Brain habituation and stimuli fixation explains why billionaires and people of average means are about equally content with their lives and prospects. And it explains the quite counterintuitive but now well-established fact that new lottery winners and recent quadriplegics on average experience about equal amounts of daily happiness and pleasure (after a few months of habituation and stimuli-seeking within their new circumstances and environment).
This important research leads to the conclusion that daily happiness and simple pleasure in life is organically created, rather than exactingly constructed, and offers two important lessons related to the mastery of our natural instincts and the new supernormal stimuli they are likely to encounter in modern life.
One lesson is that recurring supernormal stimuli have the potential to quickly and unconsciously re-pattern and co-opt our brains to seek and derive pleasure from them. While this may be true of “normal” stimuli as well, supernormal cues appear to have a special and more potent ability to co-opt our brain and control behavioral patterns in this way. Without our realizing it, supernormal stimuli can interact powerfully with our brain to cause us to find and cultivate happiness from their specific content – in effect, pushing away other stimuli and behaviors and co-opting us in proportion to the relative strength with which the supernormal stimulant unconsciously triggers our instinctual affections.
Through the force of supernormal stimulation and the natural process of neurological mapping by our brain, we can thus become unconsciously subject to dominating pleasures in (and feel separation pains from) many otherwise entirely exotic life experiences. Such pleasures might include arbitrary styles of dress we have become accustomed to and that trigger our sexual or security instincts, the vagaries of a mercurial but highly engaging co-worker, ambling sitcoms that provide a familiar ebb and flow of dramatic tension and resolution, or the sweet and fatty but unhealthy smell of hamburgers and french-fries. Left undirected, our evolved brains will automatically and unintentionally tend to make these and other unnatural but instinct-triggering pleasures an increasing part of our lives and the sources of daily happiness, displacing alternatives that are healthier and even preferable to us (if we could chose objectively and without unconscious natural biases).
A second lesson about active happiness-making by our brains is that we can change. Through new awareness and specific circumvention strategies, we can “re-remap” our brains and alter the ways we make pleasure and happiness in our daily lives. Research shows that just as our instincts and brains can cause us to slip accidentally into unhealthy and dysfunctional pleasures and fixations, we can also more consciously choose and re-habituate ourselves in new life patterns. In fact, we can be confident that we will soon enjoy our newly-chosen behaviors, as we repeat new behaviors and steadily increase our distance from and lessen the pull of even strong habituated stimuli in our lives.
We can steer clear of fatty foods, addictive drugs, dangerous relationships, or the painful pull of status symbols of others. It may be unsettling at first, but many have done and soon report equal happiness from healthier and more chosen patterns of life.
Out of the Modern Labyrinth
Barrett suggests several specific strategies for countering supernormal stimulation and other undesirable patterns of habituation in our lives, and for re-making the way we live in more chosen, more optimal, and healthier ways.
The strategies are supported by extensive research and can be expected to reliably succeed, if we use them in a sustained and attentive way. None of the techniques are complicated, but all do require honesty with ourselves and a commitment to sustained action. And they suggest a universal modern need for us all to commit to envision and pursue life beyond the things that immediately stimulate us and, personally and collectively, to quest for fuller, more engaged, and more conscious life:
I suspect I have given you much to consider, and hope our extended discussion of critical research into natural and modern supernormal stimuli creates new paths and opportunities for added health and freedom in your life, and in the lives of others in your care. Let me end our discussion as Barrett does, in her valuable and thought-provoking book, by encouraging you to “get off the plaster egg” and to begin to examine your behavior and goals more deeply, and what is driving both of these things, beginning today.
I will recommend Barrett’s Supernormal Stimuli to you, as long as the time that it takes to locate and read her book does not delay you from starting the work of seeing and acting on what may be a great many unconscious, wholly artificial, and powerful life-limiting stimuli or instinct-triggers in your life already. Whether in the form of fatty foods or comforting possessions or in hours adrift in televised or streaming melodrama, your personal work to escape from and live beyond unexamined and supernormally-stimulated reality can and should begin right away.
You can start this process of self-discovery and progression anywhere you want, but you must begin. If I might help you in this task of beginning, I would suggest that you start with the most obvious and indefensible instances of “life on autopilot” you have today. This work of examining behaviors and checking for unconscious attitudes and choices is done, quite easily and insightfully, simply by asking ourselves “Why am I ___________?” for any behavior or attitude in your life that is unexamined, troubling to you or others, or objectively unhealthy. In time, this self-questioning can expand to touch the totality of your life and personal choices.
In this way, Barrett encourages us to grow beyond a life of listening to our instincts. She challenges us to exercise our will, to seek new awareness, and to chose and pursue the life we really want. She suggests that we more deliberately use the top part of our large brains and not be used by the middle parts of them, or by the brains of others who intentionally or haplessly manipulate us with attractive traps of the kinds we have discussed. “In a world increasingly designed to stimulate hunger, sexual arousal, and acquisitiveness,” she reminds us, “chasing the supernormal is a losing game.”
With relatively unrestrained industrial and information markets now using modern science and technology to rapidly and ceaseless evolve – principally seeking financial rather than genetic fitness – we all must now take new responsibility for our individual lives and support more enlightened public policies to regulate unhealthy social practices. We must actively pursue and encourage new understanding of ourselves and the world, and use science to escape and not be held by the growing and enshrouding supernormal reality that is our modern environment – perhaps the eventual fate of any insular and unmanaged, but adequately-resourced and rapidly-evolving technological society.
To do both these things, we must first see, then see through, and finally defy the supernormal stimuli around us. And we must take on new stimuli as they inevitably arise in an advanced technological society, using science and the counterforce of informed choice and policy. Only in this way can we find our way through the strange and yet ordinary labyrinth of competing and compelling distractions, security threats and status appeals, and pointless dramas that can occupy us in this new world of ours. Ours is indeed a brave new world of industrial-strength stimuli that actively shape our brains and unconsciously distort our attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors – if we allow it.
Instead, we can chose the lives we live and want to live, shape the environment we already actively create with our technology and individual and collective choices, and grow freer and more aware, as individuals and a species suddenly alive in an advanced scientific and technological society.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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In what has been a long, sometimes passionate, and decidedly behavior-changing debate about the risks and benefits of sun exposure, the pendulum has now begun to swing back once again toward the sun, away from life in the shade. This time, however, the change may be a more lasting one, with the potential for a stable and far more informed scientific consensus about the importance and optimal needed amount of sun exposure.
As the dust, or rather the data, begins to settle in this debate, extending back centuries, our once revered and now frequently reviled sun is now far more likely to come out on top than it was just a few years ago. This may not be surprising to some of us, who have wondered quietly how we evolved beneath the sun if we were not able to withstand its rays – and even what parts of our human physiology might be dependent on regular doses of sunlight.
In case you have been living deep in the jungle or beneath a rock, the dominant view has been and still is that sun exposure is bad, a carcinogen, especially during the midday hours and if you are fair-skinned. If you have been following this accepted thinking, you may well have been living in a shaded jungle, or beneath or along the shadows of rocks and roofs. In the least, you probably have steered your outdoor experience to early and late in the day, and have ventured out at midday only with a film of sunscreen applied to your exposed skin.
In either case, it is definitely now time to come out of the shadows you may have been living in. While no one is likely to advocate prolonged sun exposure anytime soon, or allowing sunburns ever, it is time for us all to reconsider our views and even to begin to revisit the sun above us once again, firsthand and with our skin.
The Vitamin D Connection
What has caused this new and perhaps permanent turn in the debate about sun exposure is new research into the roles and effects of Vitamin D. Vitamin D is really more of a pre-hormone than other vitamins, in that it fosters natural human steroid production, an essential component of our human physiology and health.
It has been known for some time that sunlight exposure was crucial to our natural production of Vitamin D, and that this production was in turn important to the health of our skeletal and nervous systems in particular, and to cellular metabolism in general. More recent research has revealed the significant problems we can have in getting and keeping adequate Vitamin D in our system for our health in all these areas, especially if we are not in strong sunlight frequently enough, if we are not light-skinned, or if we are overweight.
Dietary sources of Vitamin D come primarily from oily fishes like salmon, which have many other health benefits and are an essential part of a natural human diet. But these dietary sources provide only small amounts of Vitamin D in comparison to the amount that can be produced though sun exposure, which is thus likely to be essential to ensuring adequate Vitamin D and our long-term health.
There are of course Vitamin D supplements and fortified foods, but these are generally problematic from several standpoints: 1) they are often provided in unnatural, health-reducing foods like calf’s milk, 2) they usually contain Vitamin D2 instead of the more desirable Vitamin D3, 3) they often are provided along with the canceling effect of a vitamin A supplement, 4) they may not reliably increase circulating Vitamin D in a way comparable to sunlight exposure, and 5) there is a risk of toxicity with high oral Vitamin D doses aiming to mimic the effects of sunlight exposure (sunlight-produced Vitamin D does not have this toxicity risk).
Like dietary supplements in general, Vitamin D supplements are usually not a good substitute for real life, whether the subject is eating natural foods or getting natural sun exposure. It is worth noting that HumanaNatura does not advocate supplementation of any kind for people on our natural diet plan, except on the advice of a physician. A natural diet, informed by modern health science, is still by far the best way to obtain the optimum amounts and types of the many nutrients we need to ensure our health (nature’s billion-year head start on the supplement industry is indeed a formidable one).
Beyond the limited sources of Vitamin D in our natural diet and the various problems of supplementation, there is an added issue for people who are dark-skinned. Research has shown that the impact of sunlight on Vitamin D production in dark-skinned people is much less than their lighter-skinned brethren. Lighter-skinned people can get a significant Vitamin D boost in just 15-20 minutes outdoors in bright sunlight (on the order of 10,000 units of Vitamin D – a very healthy daily dose), reflecting an evolutionary adaptation favoring lighter colored skin in the upper latitudes (where there is often less and less strong sunlight with which to make Vitamin D).
The response to sunlight is very different for darker-skinned people, who produce far less Vitamin D in strong sunlight and almost none in weak sunlight (even in midday sun in winter in upper latitudes). This is an important finding for many of us. When we talk about lighter-skinned people being adapted for weaker sunlight, it is a bit euphemism. After all, what we really mean that this attribute has been naturally selected. In earlier life in upper latitudes, slightly lighter-skin people maintained healthier physiologies than darker-skinned people, and had lower death and higher fertility rates, leading to a selection of lighter skin color over time. For these reasons, darker-skinned people are health-disadvantaged in low sunlight conditions. We’ll come back to this topic in a minute, including Vitamin D’s likely role in driving selection for lighter skin and the implications of this for natural health today.
Finally, to conclude our survey of the problems we may face in maintaining adequate circulating Vitamin D, we must also mention that overweight people have added problems with Vitamin D too. Vitamin D is a fat-soluble compound and can build up in our fat cells, which is why toxicity from oral or dietary supplementation is an issue with Vitamin D. It is also why overweight people can have much lower levels of free Vitamin D than average weight people, even with a comparable diet – Vitamin D generally gravitates to and stays in the fat cells of overweight people, instead of circulating more freely in our body.
The Sun & Cancer
As important as these findings are, there is still more to consider about the sun. In fact, what is really new in the debate about sun exposure is recent research on the effects of high levels of Vitamin D in actually reducing, not increasing, cancer incidence and mortality (and thereby pointing to the likely mechanism for the natural selection of lighter skin complexions in upper latitudes).
There are a growing number of studies supporting this linkage of Vitamin D and lower cancer mortality, most notably comprehensive research published in 2005 by Edward Giovannucci of Harvard University. These results are still preliminary, but they are significant and will likely force a significant and permanent rethinking of sun exposure over the next few years.
Ultimately, long-term objective studies will be required to settle the science of sun exposure, which will take time. In the meantime, as I said before, the pendulum has begun to swing back toward the sun, and now with new and decidedly added momentum.
Here is a synopsis of what we now know about sun exposure today:
A New Day In The Sun?
You may have found this article because of my involvement with the HumanaNatura natural health community, and perhaps may know that I am an advocate of our pursuit of natural health (a term often misunderstood but carefully defined by HumanaNatura).
Part of this advocacy involves suggesting and encouraging dietary and lifestyle changes to promote greater health and well-being. This includes a call to increase the amount of time we spend outdoors, away from modern civilization (to get perspective on it) and in wild nature (to reconnect with it and our natural selves). Inevitably, this alternative life means more time in the wind and heat, and rain and, yes, even in the natural sunlight of nature.
For the last two or three decades, as consensus built against sun exposure, I have always felt uneasy about this aspect of my natural health advocacy work. Perhaps, I’ve thought, the sun is one area where nature and natural life does not promote our health and well-being, an exception to what is otherwise a sound and pervasive general rule. But alongside this uneasiness, as I mentioned before, I have always questioned this anti-sunlight consensus, since it seemed at odds with what we know about our human life and evolution in nature.
I always avoid sunburns and will use a sunscreen if there is a chance I will burn, and you should too. This takes some attentiveness when you first spend more time outdoors, and then when you spend a great deal of time outdoors, as I sometimes do – often an hour or more each day and then even for entire days when I am on an extended walk or hike. I should add that I occasionally use sunscreen lotions, although I prefer the more natural methods of wearing a hat and other protective clothing when I am in the sun for extended periods, and of seeking midday shade and enjoying a leisurely lunch with friends in the summer and when I am in lower latitudes.
Still, with all these preparations, I know I am getting more sun than many would advise today. It is a personal choice I consciously make and I know there are risks and uncertainties. For me, not being outdoors would mean be not being fully alive, not being fully human, so there are enormous immediate benefits for me balancing out my potential long-term risks. If you spend time outdoors, I know you appreciate the freedom and joy that being out in nature inevitably is, each day of outdoor life, and understand that we are willing to give up things for a life of these experiences.
If you do not spend time outdoors, you may not understand my position and may disagree with the choices I make. Before you condemn me completely, I would point out that the risks we face from the sun may be smaller than previously thought. Indeed, it may turn out that I am actually healthier in the way I live than if I had spent the last two or three decades avoiding the sun more aggressively, as many have suggested. It certainly feels that way, emotionally and physically, but I will wait with you to see what the science of the sun finally says.
In the least, perhaps you will now feel better about the sun, and may even venture out beneath it and into nature more like me, extending yourself across the land in an ancient and more open human pattern of life. Perhaps you will try it just to experience the fuller life I have spoken about, to see if you can really be fully alive and human, and truly healthy, without a life in the sun.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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Would you like to begin to improve your health, right now and for the rest of your life?
As part of my work for HumanaNatura, almost every day someone expresses this wish to me and asks for help achieving it. Like you, many people today want to live more healthfully, and almost all of us want to live longer and more fully. And we should – we should want to get more out of our health and lives, and we should act on and fulfill this wish each day.
If you are ready to improve your health and take your life to a new and fuller state, there are two important ideas about your natural health I can share with you. One idea is that dramatic new health and well-being can begin for you right away, from this moment forward, by focusing first on your diet and beginning to eat more naturally,
The second idea I can share is that natural and optimal eating is quite simple, and even surprisingly simple for most people. In fact, more optimal eating is so uncomplicated and health transforming that you may soon suspect you have been misled about other critical aspects or dimensions of your health. And this suspicion turns out to be true.
Don’t get me wrong. Others may have misled you with good intentions, or not, but their actions point to a larger and quite important general misunderstanding of our health in our time, a fact rooted in our common history and that limits all of our lives today. And this misunderstanding includes many dimensions of our health, dimensions of our healthy human life that lie outside of the way we eat, with critically important implications for our well-being and quality of life.
The truth is that our modern world is full of many things that we simply do not need to be healthy and well, or that actively impede progressive health for us. Because of this, you may be more distracted and living apart from your health than you realize, and also may have far more control over your health and well-being than you recognize too. Perhaps what you most need is to better understand your options and opportunities for greater health and well-being, which is the mission and focus of HumanaNatura.
In the very least, one thing we all most certainly have enormous and immediate control over, an aspect of ourselves which can have rapid and lasting impacts on our health and quality of life, is the way we eat each day.
A Natural Diet Explained
Information on HumanaNatura’s natural diet program is available free on our community website, as part of our seven-part natural health program. For now, let me break natural human eating down to its simplest terms:
I did say natural eating was simple, and I hope these four short points convey that I wasn’t kidding. Before I list the five natural food types, I want to also add that these food types have been hypothesized and confirmed as our natural foods only in the last few decades, through the patient work of a great many anthropologists and evolutionary scientists.
In truth, the list of five food types I am about to give you may seem, well, too short and quite counterintuitive at first, and is very likely at odds with many things you have been taught and believe today about correct eating. But, as I said, many beliefs about our health are like that in our time – modern science is undoing old ideas and re-making our understanding of many aspects of our human life, health, and well-being.
Regardless of what you have been told or taught in the past, or what you believe today, there really are only five food types in a natural human diet:
Every other food, everything else not on this list, whether it grows on a farm or in nature, is simply not part of our natural human diet, not a part of the way people ate for millions of years in wild nature and before the beginning of fixed civilization about 12,000 years ago. And you can confirm this now well-established scientific idea on your own. How? Simply by eating only these foods for a time and seeing for yourself that this is our natural diet, that this way of eating greatly promotes and proves essential to our health and well-being.
You can learn more about natural eating and the science behind it in the HumanaNatura natural health program. For now, let me just add that there are four food types people commonly eat today that are not part of a natural and optimal human diet, foods that are toxic to us and work to undermine our health and well-being: a) grains and cereals, b) beans and legumes, c) potatoes and other starchy plants, and d) every other food you can name.
Perhaps you question or disagree with these lists of natural and unnatural human foods. That’s alright for now, but if you really want to be healthier and live more fully, beginning today, and if you want to change positively and perhaps live longer, you will need to begin to explore new alternatives in your life.
So for now, as a case study in such an exploration, please try to keep an open mind about these natural diet ideas, and try them for yourself to see what you will see. To help you begin this trial, and perhaps to set the stage for still larger personal exploration, let’s next consider just how easy (and not just how healthy) it is to eat naturally and optimally.
Introducing Salad Meals
Hunting and foraging in wild nature for our five natural foods is no longer a realistic alternative for most people today, nor will this necessarily guarantee an optimal diet for us. Nature does still contain all of our natural and optimal foods, but they are normally spread out and the land around most of us has been converted to the cultivation of grains, legumes, and starchy roots (a process that began roughly 12,000 years ago as I said) or to commercial activity and sprawling cities and suburbs. In any case, eating naturally today must be done in new ways.
Because of our historical inheritance and the physical facts of modern life, most of us must now obtain our natural foods from supermarkets and restaurants, which we can easily do, and then consume these foods within our local culture’s patterns for meals, which we normally can do quite easily too. As we adjust and learn to eat naturally amidst modern life, we soon find that the simplest and most optimal way for us to eat naturally, enjoyably, and healthfully is to eat “salad meals” for our main meals each day.
I want to make sure I was clear about this, since it is very important to your long-term health and to making natural eating intuitive and nearly effortless. Please note that I didn’t say we should have a salad with every meal. What I said instead was that it is best if we have a salad for every main meal. By this, I mean that it is best to eat “salad meals” for all, or almost all, of our meals (but not for snacks – and yes, you can and should snack on a natural diet). When I say salad meals, I do want you to think that in the middle of your plate is a salad, and on the side of your plate is, well, the side of your plate.
When I speak with people about this idea, that they should eat salad meals for all their main meals, many of us initially conjure up a mental image of lettuce, and feel an immediate void and longing for “real” food. Perhaps you just did this as well. Lettuce is a good start of course, a “base” as you will learn in a moment, but it is only a start, only the base of a salad meal.
Lettuce is the foundation of a natural and optimal meal, but not the whole meal. After all, raw vegetables are only one of the five types of natural human foods. Since we have four more food types to go, and only one plate, we have to think more than lettuce when we talk about turning our meals into salad meals.
Salad Meal Basics
In practice, natural eating varies a bit from locale to locale, due to climate and cultural differences, and also due to personal food preferences. But there are many fairly consistent aspects of natural eating around the world, in addition to the five natural food types and the optimal nature of salad meals.
Most natural health practitioners have a piece of fruit in the morning, and/or maybe a cooked egg or two, and/or some raw nuts or veggies. This is a very typical breakfast and how many of us typically snack as well. It’s a quick and easy meal, and a good way to begin or refuel during the day. Some people, however, and perhaps all of us sometimes, will make a fruit salad for breakfast, for a snack or special treat. Personally, if I do this, there is usually company involved.
Let me quickly summarize how to make great fruit salads, consistently and simply, in case you want one right away or maybe have guests coming. Fruit salads are very easy to make and extraordinarily delicious to eat. In addition to breakfast and snacks, fruit salads can be served as desserts and for special occasions where a light meal is desired.
Perfect Every Time Fruit Salads
Fairly easy, isn’t it? The truth is that we can make wonderful fruit salads in almost no time and with great results, time after time. Just one word of caution: it is just as easy to eat too much fruit. Do keep in mind that fruit is natural but also high in sugars, was only a portion of our diet in nature, and needs to be consumed with a bit of moderation. Please see the HumanaNatura diet plan for more information on optimizing your fruit intake – usually a serving or two of fruit once or twice a day is plenty, unless you are a very active person. Fruit is also ideally served and eaten earlier in the day, especially if our goal is to minimize conversion to body fat.
Now, let’s turn our attention our main topic, and the main course, salad meals.
Leaving aside breakfast, snacking, light meals, and special occasion desserts, what is left in an optimal natural diet are usually two meals, or I should say two salad meals, to complete our daily food intake. We may perhaps eat more than two salad meals a day if we are a child or an athlete, or a child athlete I suppose. But for most of the rest of us, what this probably means is a salad meal for lunch each day, and then another salad meal for dinner.
Salad meals take a little more time for preparation than fruit salads and can be quite elaborate if you want, but day-to-day, we are still talking very simple. When I say simple, I mean usually less than twenty minutes to prepare and serve once you get the rhythm of making salad meals.
If you will be preparing daily salad meals yourself, whether for yourself or others, a few guidelines are in order:
Perfect Salad Meals
In practice, salad meals can be prepared quickly and expertly if you think of the salad meal as having four key components:
When thinking about salads this way, creating perfect salad meals becomes much easier and quite intuitive. Salad meals simply involve preparing and then combining a base, mix, nut, and (if desired) an animal protein in new and inventive ways. The underlying process of creating what are quite often very inviting salad meals is therefore very simple and the same every time, while offering the potential for tremendous variety and truly exciting daily meals.
Perfect Every Time Salad Meals
Even the most skeptical among us will have to admit that this is a fairly easy process for preparing a full meal. In truth, anyone who can lift a fork can learn to do this, and do it quickly and expertly. Pushing buttons on a microwave may be easier, but is far less likely to help us be as healthy as we can and to live as long as we might. And we would miss the exquisite taste of a true salad meal, with its fresh mix of authentic foods from nature, foods that are natural for humans and a healthy celebration of natural human life, every day of our life.
Your Next Meal
With just a bit of practice, beginning today, you will surprise yourself and others at the marvelous fruit salads and nutritionally complete salad meals you bring to the table. Both are natural meals that we can create quickly and savor slowly, enriching our mealtimes and transforming our health, for all our years to come.
If these ideas are new to you, I will again encourage you to keep an open mind and to explore, explore, explore the power and pleasure of natural eating in this way. Even just thirty days of eating this way can change your level of health in remarkable ways, re-making you and perhaps making you a lifelong convert to natural eating – and perhaps leaving you to wonder what else in your life can be made healthier and more supportive of your well-being.
Let me end by encouraging you to make your next meal a delicious salad meal, and by wishing you great eating and abundant health and life.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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Are the holidays fast approaching? Or are they here already, or just over, and you want advice on how to make your holiday seasons healthier?
We all face an enormous barrage of ideas and icons when major holidays approach. Each year, we are reminded of what to expect, how to act, where to shop, and what to buy or make. Implicit in these reminders is the idea that the holidays should and must be a certain way, even if this ideal is less than ideal and unhealthy in some respects.
Because holidays are in fact so often unhealthy and times of excess, we also are barraged with many ideas on how to mitigate holiday behaviors and get through them with our health intact. I should add that we receive far fewer ideas about how to transform our holidays altogether, so that they are made healthy and restorative, their negative aspects removed entirely, for the future. I will come back to this idea in a moment.
Of course, most of us relish and have high expectations for traditional holidays. Because of this, we are often conflicted about the holidays. They are seemingly special times of the year, but we also know they can slow or even derail our long-term quests for greater health and personal well-being. So what are we to do?
Below are seven steps you can take to make your holidays much healthier. Some are simple ideas to offset the least healthy aspects of traditional holiday rituals. Others go beyond this to help you reconsider your approach to holidays altogether. Have you considered a family trek across Costa Rica or Greece or Japan for your next major holiday? If not, read on:
1. Start a conversation – if your holiday celebrations typically get the better of you, or if holidays are times of stress and negativity, you are probably not alone and it’s time to talk. Naming the parts of your holidays that are unhealthy and undesirable is the first step to improving them. This may seem, and even literally be, sacrilegious in some settings, but you will have to make a start if you want to change your holiday environment. Perhaps there are members of your family and social network you can start the discussion with, building support before you try to influence the more conservative members of your clan and community. Talking about the negative aspects of a holiday ideally should be done well before or right after the holiday, setting a new tone before emotions run high or using events of the recent past as examples. In any case, a discussion of holiday excesses should focus on specific, actionable issues, rather than the holiday in itself. Since many of our major holidays evolved over hundreds of years, their improvement may take more than a year or two.
2. Dematerialize – in the last hundred years, many traditional holidays have become much more commercialized and materially focused than before the industrial age. This development is apparent not just in the size and range of gifts that are given or expected, but also in displays of new wealth and status, both of which can lead to negative, instead of positive, holiday emotions. How did our holidays unravel so in this way? It’s important to understand the origins of our major world holidays and rituals. Most began in earlier times when meeting our basic materials needs was not guaranteed, and even quite uncertain, and when religious traditions were much stronger. Holiday gift giving was therefore a useful source of saving and provisioning. In our more industrialized, secular, and competitive times, these practices have evolved to the point where they now run contrary to the goal of group bonding that initially engendered our holidays. In your family talks, getting out of the rut of obligatory and ostentatious gift giving, and ensuring care with displays of fortune, should figure large. After all, the expense of gifts or lifestyles has little correlation with holiday (or life) satisfaction, while positive interpersonal experiences certainly do.
3. Set new limits – once you have talked your family out of the shopping malls and back to hearth and hamlet, another important step is to set limits on the most negative aspects of your holiday traditions. Depending on where you live and your customs, this can involve a wide range of behaviors and pastimes. Beyond uncontrolled gift-giving, perhaps the most common holiday negatives are excesses with food and alcohol, though by no means does this exhaust a list of possible areas where new limits may be needed. In your family talks, share your concerns and listen to the concerns of others. You may find a willingness to agree to limits and even new ideas for ways to celebrate together, again knowing that not everyone will be receptive to change at first. The act of discussing holidays, after all, is something new itself and should be considered progress. As mentioned before, most holidays emerged and developed without conscious thought, at both the community and family levels. It is only by chance that your holidays will be optimal unless you and others consciously make them so.
4. Chose your company – as you begin to design and optimize your holidays to promote health and well-being, inevitably you will find people around you who share and do not share your goals and views. This can be welcome and painful, and it may force choices and decisions. I do not mean to divide families on the issue of health at the holidays, and the importance of health and well-being generally, but there may be extreme situations that call for extreme actions. If you have people in your family or social network that are abusive at the holidays, for example, or that simply do not share your basic values, it may be time to seek other holiday company or to minimize your time with them (while remaining charitable and open to new beginnings).
5. Eat before dinner – when all else fails, you can always preempt holiday excesses with a bit of dietary inoculation. Remember when you were a child and your parents told you not to eat before dinner because you would spoil your appetite? You get the idea. Filling up on healthy foods before or amidst traditional holiday meals and celebrations can greatly limit your intake of unhealthy food and drink that you would otherwise later regret. As with all steps toward healthier holidays, this step needs to be handled and communicated with care to avoid offending others in your social network.
6. Take a walk or have a talk – in addition to minimizing the health negatives of traditional holidays, you can also begin to add new practices to them that are health promoting and supportive of deeper interpersonal bonds, which again was the purpose of holidays in the first place. Consider planning walks or hikes when you are together, or other fun and guilt-free outdoor activities. Alternatively, you might plan discussions and talks when you and your family and friends are together. These can take the form of sitting together and discussing issues of common concern or recapping the last few months and talking about plans for the future. So often, the holidays are over before we know it and we feel things were left unsaid. Create opportunities for rewarding discussion and sharing. Will this be uncomfortable for some at first? Of course, but setting time for talks can evolve to become among the most memorable aspects of our holidays.
7. Consider reinvention – as I mentioned at the beginning, in addition to correcting the less desirable aspects of traditional holidays, we have the opportunity to reinvent our holidays altogether for the future. Keep in mind that holidays and rituals are important for maintaining our social and community networks, but also that all holidays emerged over time, and rarely by design, to arrive at their present state. Holidays are important, but need not continue in their current form. Imagine new ways and reasons to celebrate the holidays and the gatherings of people we may not normally see or speak with. Perhaps pilgrimages to sacred natural places or other new shared experiences that nurture us and build deeper bonds are in our future.
Wherever and however you celebrate traditional holidays, you probably have more options than you realize for improving the form and function of your holiday gatherings. Consider the many ways you can remove or minimize the negative aspects of your celebrations, while building on the positives and perhaps re-emphasizing to the essence of most of our holiday – deepening and renewing the social networks that are critical to our personal and community health.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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I have been thinking about an idea for some time – the idea of our getting stuck in “N.”
It is a thought that returns to me in my work for HumanaNatura, especially when coaching people at a particular stage in the development of their natural health. In this stage, there is a common tendency to become stuck in a certain way, even in a strangely satisfying one, though in truth the path of health and life more generally holds many other risks of comforting entrapment.
This particular trap is important, since it is quite common in many early natural health practices. However appealing it may be and though it often comes because of personal progress, it is still a trap, a way for us to get stuck and not move forward. It is thus a barrier that many of us must overcome to achieve new steps toward our health and well-being. I struggle sometimes to help people see this personal barrier, and would like to share my perspective with you. It may help you in your own quest for health, or with others you are helping in theirs. In any case, I suppose it is just something that has been on my mind and I need to get it off my chest.
The reference I make to “N” may be ambiguous or uncertain to you. It is a colloquialism that non-native speakers of English may not initially understand, so I do need to explain it. With this upper case letter, I refer to the now ubiquitous symbol, in the English-speaking world at least, that indicates the neutral mode of an automobile’s transmission. If one is not careful when starting off or changing gears in a car or other vehicle, it is possible to get stuck in “N,” stuck in neutral, and unable to move forward.
Whether one drives an automobile or not, the expression is used figuratively in many English-speaking circles, and perhaps in other languages as well. Someone who is not making progress on a project or toward a deadline, or in their life more generally, is often said to be stuck in “N,” stuck in neutral. In our free-wheeling and freeway-dominated times, the expression often arises in discussions of relationships, work groups, and other endeavors where we have become stuck, unproductive, or otherwise not making needed progress. It is an easy metaphor that people use and can relate to, and a sign of our times as I said.
My own use of this fairly familiar expression, however, and the suggestive letter “N” in particular, is a bit different in this case and even less literal than usual. In the context of HumanaNatura and the many people that come to or through our natural health community, I mean the “N” to mean “nutrition.” One of my most surprising learnings, over the last few years of natural health mentoring, is just how many genuinely health-oriented people are stuck in “N,” stuck in nutrition, and because of this are unable to move forward – in this case, to higher states of natural health and the important new life experiences available to us through our health.
Don’t get me wrong. Natural eating and nutrition are critical to our health, and I have written and spoken about healthy eating and nutrition on many occasions. And there are of course worse places to be stuck. If we don’t eat correctly, we are less likely to achieve even the first levels of our natural health, let alone learn to use our health to catalyze our full potential as people. Without natural nutrition, we are unlikely to be freed of struggles with our weight and stamina, with common health problems, with unsteady energy levels and emotions, and even with mastery of our priorities and values, so important is natural eating to understanding and unlocking the power of our own natural health. A healthy diet is the foundation of our overall health, and even a prerequisite to our ability to rise fully to the occasion of our lives each day.
While natural eating is important, it is also not terribly complicated either, and need not and should not take up much of our time or attention once it is mastered. After all, what is natural eating? In simple terms, it is eating consistently with our human evolution and long life in wild nature. It is a daily diet of what I like to call greens and reds (raw vegetables and gently cooked meats), with just a bit of fruit and nuts, and enough water (or herbal drinks) to meet our physiological needs. This way of eating, being natural to us, is quite simple in both theory and practice. It is not difficult to understand and assimilate this dietary pattern into our lives, with just a bit of determination and persistence, freeing and energizing us for new personal perspectives and challenges. Pre-civilized people gave little thought to this way of eating, after all, and in the sense that it is natural and optimal for us, neither should we. We should master nutrition and move on to the rest of our lives.
Since natural nutrition is this simple, it is both surprising and disquieting to me to meet the number of people I do who are stuck there, stuck in “N,” absorbed in natural eating and culinary pursuits or mired in arcane nuances of human physiology and digestive science. I often meet people who feel accomplished in their quest for natural health through a natural diet alone, as though this is all we need do to complete ourselves and find full expression in our health. It is a superficial outlook on our health, one that sees natural health techniques as augmenting the general life of our times, as our regular life only healthier, rather than encouraging and enabling entirely new and more natural approaches to life today.
In reality, our natural health involves and offers much more than our old lives made cleaner and longer-lasting. Our health offers us entirely new and different lives, in our modern times especially, if we want them. It allows us to live in a more natural and grounded way, and in more conscious and uplifting ways, in our time. When I meet natural health practitioners who do not yet see this, I suspect they may be stuck in nutrition, temporarily or permanently, and unable or unwilling to move forward to what comes after natural eating: to natural exercise and a return to wild nature through walking and hiking, and then, to natural living, to the conscious restructuring of our lives for greater health and well-being each day – to the creation of new expressions of our self through our health.
As a friend’s arrival for lunch today reminded me and is covered in HumanaNatura’s natural health program, I should add that natural eating does have important psychological and social benefits, beyond simply meeting our physiological need to be nourished. Enjoying our meals, alone and with others, and using meals as part of our celebrations of family and community, are definitely not forms of the nutrition fixation I am writing about. It is very important to eat enjoyably and to use our meals to bond with and enjoy the company of others. But enjoyment and bonding are really more about natural living than natural eating. Which brings me back to my topic, and the idea of our getting comfortably stuck in nutrition, when we should be on the road to greater health and new life.
Perhaps like you, I take extended walks and hikes quite frequently. As I write this, I am just a few weeks back from a long summer hike in the mountains, a journey that included periodic returns to village and city life after time in the alpine environment. The experience of these returns to civilization, and the narrowness and much lower health and vitality in life there, remains fresh and compelling to me, and I should share this perspective with you while it is still vivid and palpable.
Moving between nature and society offers a study in how important it is that we all “get out more,” another colloquialism, by which I mean out into wild nature – to better understand and return to our human origins, to know our original place as people in the natural world, and to understand the physicality of human life in nature and thereby better sense our full personal potential for health and well-being. An extended hike is a reminder that we must not get stuck in nutrition, or in exercise, or in any other narrow preoccupation or imperative that limits the breadth of our life, our openness to new experiences, and growth in our conceptions of our own health
If you think you may be stuck in “N,” stuck in nutrition, whether comfortably or not, I would encourage you to consider the role and place of eating in your life, and if it is a preoccupation and obstacle to your next level of health. A useful technique, at any time in our quest for greater health and well-being, is to make a list of the three things that most inhibit our health. Likely, at least one of these things will be beyond the scope of nutrition, and maybe all three things if you are accomplished at natural eating. There, you can look with new focus and for new sources of vitality.
Be patient and gentle with yourself in this process. Remember that many people do not enjoy the benefits of natural eating as you do. But it may be time for you to focus more on the world outside the supermarket and kitchen, to move from what you know to what you do not yet know about your health and well-being, to get out more and to be more.
A world full of new experiences, and new health, waits just outside all our doors and well-worn paths.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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Does it ever seem that natural health is a test of sorts?
By this, I mean a personal challenge of discovery and learning, even if only by trial and error at times. How about if I asked if you ever see your quest for health and well-being as an adventure or an odyssey, like the original?
I have found the first idea fairly common among health-minded people today, people at many different stages of uncovering their health. The second idea, however, is far less common, even though it is often much closer to the truth of pursuing health in our time and over our lives. This often overlooked, but often quite accurate perspective, that our quest for health is an odyssey, is thus an opportunity for learning and potentially for new health in our lives too.
HumanaNatura advocates exploration of our natural health in a pragmatic and iterative way, encouraging us to reconsider our health as it improves and matures throughout the course of our lives, in what we call the practice of natural living. Natural living can be summarized as the pursuit of health, in and with our lives. This phrase highlights the idea that health in our lives is related to, but distinct from, health with our lives.
Creating health in our lives involves replacing unhealthy habits and outlooks with new behaviors and approaches that more directly and immediately promote our health – in other words, improving our health amidst our lives. Pursuing health with our lives is more than this, and usually begins after we have eliminated obvious impediments to our health and well-being. These impediments may unnatural eating and activity patterns, as well as specific personal and cultural habits and biases that directly inhibit our health. Natural health with our lives comes next. It is the changing of our life and its course for still fuller and more authentic expressions of our health and self.
Pursuing health in our life can be seen as health as a means, while health with our life is health as an end. Together, they can combine to form a progressive and open-ended approach to pursuing new and healthier life. When we speak of health with our life, as an end and destination and not simply as a means, it is obviously a far bigger and more personal commitment to growth and change. In committing to our health in this larger way, in fact, we open ourselves to the potential for and even the near certainty of new and challenging perspectives and experiences. We open ourselves up, in other words, to the prospect and likelihood of odyssey.
As we commit to seeking greater health, to health in and then health with our lives, we soon learn that this requires us to become far more attentive and observant as people – attentive in the way we perceive both outwardly and inwardly. We must look outside ourselves to nature and the science and facts of our human history, to better understand the natural origins and many dimensions of our health. We must observe carefully our society today, and civilization before our time, to understand the many impediments to our health, rooted in our history and present in our modernity.
We must equally look outward on the world for opportunities for new health and life, ones now possible or that will be possible in the future – in both cases, ones that should be set out for today. Because our outward look is first to and a learning primarily from nature, new opportunities for health are often quite ancient and recurring pathways, rooted in nature and our past and available now for expression in new ways. Aspects of our natural health are thus often correctly seen as returnings to nature, even as they are adventures and movements forward, much like the protagonist Odysseus’ own legendary and adventurous forward movement of returning.
When we attend inwardly in our pursuit of natural health, we find similar hints of personal odyssey and ancient pathways in waiting. To become healthier and to live more fully, we must better understand ourselves and uncover inner feelings and impulses that may have been repressed earlier in our lives, especially as they might either mobilize or inhibit our health and well-being over the course of our lives. Our health requires us to become more deeply aware of ourselves, exploring ourselves for ideas and new feelings, and then to summon our creativity and commitment in lifelong progressions to new growth and higher life. With greater mastery of our inner life, new choices open and are made possible to and through us, choices leading even to our greatness as people, to adventure, and even to new expressions and ideas of human greatness.
To find or to create human greatness, the naturalist Emerson once advised that we must be willing to be heroic and to refuse as needed to reconcile ourselves with the world. In our returning and progression to our natural health and vitality, this refusal certainly involves shunning the many unhealthy and even demeaning human norms and patterns that we see in the world today. This refusing is often at the cost of old friendships and familiar ways of living, but is not yet the heroic. Heroism, instead, must at least involve our working to change these unhealthy and dehumanizing patterns, whether they are old or new, in our communities and the world as we can. Transcending them for ourselves alone is refusal only, and unlikely to engender greatness.
In its higher reaches, our natural health has a selfless and even heroic quality, compelling us to help others to become healthier, to be freer and more open in the lives and closer to the natural world that contains us and is the source of our health. Often, the cost of this selflessness and heroism in the name of our health, measured in ease and comfort, is high. But this has always been true – the price of higher life has always been the many appeals of lower life. Only with a heroism of sorts, only with both our refusal and our commitment to change, can we hope to not just achieve our health, but to help others find their health, and in doing so, fulfill our own full potential for health. The alternative is to stop at refusal, in withdrawal and regression, and not to move forward in the unending and outward progression that is our health and the mark of all vibrant human life.
With this talk of commitment and heroism in mind, I’d like to return to the idea that the full pursuit of our health inevitably leads to and culminates in a life of adventure and challenge, and the prospect of personal odyssey. This idea, of thinking of our health as the choice of a more challenging path for ourselves, of health as an odyssey-like movement forward in and returning to nature, is the inspiration for my title and the theme I wanted to leave with you today. In practice, all sustained and creative acts, including acts of pursuing new health and fuller life, form odysseys – personal, heroic, and transcendent journeys. Creative life is a quest and test of our spirits, as odysseys are. Life that demands a certain amount of fortitude and refusing, as odysseys will, from wherever they begin and across whatever expanse they traverse.
In a sense, it is not such a leap to say that the pursuit of health is akin to odyssey, a path of challenges and surprises. After all, we each begin our pursuit of health with only a general sense of our destination and needed direction, or even with entirely incorrect beliefs about this direction, about the true nature of our health. The goal of true health and well-being, the goal of truth, is therefore always a path of unexpected turns and learnings, with shoals and sirens we must pass and pass successfully. Our health is a challenge to us and our ideas about ourselves, as we proceed along our own length. Practiced fully and deliberately, creatively and vitally, our rise to the opportunity of our own health is also never formulaic. It is always personal, varied, uncertain, unfinished, and sometimes dangerous. It is always a passage, and it is often an odyssey.
The original odyssey is, of course, the Odyssey. The story of wily Odysseus’ long journey home from the Trojan War, still an engaging tale and a surprisingly easy read after more than 2500 years. Blown from his planned route with his ship and crew, and then finding himself alone in the wilderness and on the sea, the first odyssey is a tale of hardship, discovery, and triumph. It is framed by our protagonist’s unrelenting desire to return from war, to return to his life and wife, even as this return is delayed and convoluted by remarkable encounters and turns of fate. In these turns and encounters, so many of life’s lessons and patterns unfold. The story is as penetrating and thought-provoking today as it has ever been, a classic from classical times. It is a reminder that the quest for greatness and our own overcoming is perennial and universal in human life. Though our challenges are of the present and future, as they always are, much has come before us that can remind and benefit us.
Our personal quests for health and fuller life, coming in modern times, can be like the original odyssey from classical times. The ascent to our health and truer self is often a journey of many years, of passing through strange and unfamiliar settings, and of difficult and sometimes even heroic and even life altering choices. Our progressions to health are often stories of triumphs and returns from conflict too, even if our wars are with our times and with misunderstanding. Our war may even be our own inability to understand and foster our basic nature and needs as people, a conflict that may have began early in our lives and in centuries before our time. Our journeys to health and well-being are perilous at times too, when we must make hard, life-altering decisions, or venture into the unknown and risk being blown astray by unexpected forces. In our search for health, as in the original odyssey, we almost certainly will encounter odd and even seductive entrapments, some seemingly standing for our health, but in reality obscuring its true nature, delaying and belaboring our returning.
The philosopher Nietzsche, a dedicated student and strong believer in ancient Greek culture and art, once suggested that, if we find ourselves adrift and exposed on an undulating sea, such as the many barren seas that pock our modern world – in other words if we find that we are caught up in personal odyssey – we should make land, promptly and even at high cost. He advised us to seek safe harbor and shelter without delay. His presumption, metaphorically, was that with firm ground beneath us once again, we could begin to build new lives, and for Nietzsche not re-build old ones, in the aftermath of our estrangement on whatever was our odyssey and stretch of sea.
Odysseus’ lesson to us regarding odysseys and seaborne life is different. It is more spirited and ambitious than this, befitting the younger and more spirited time in which he lived and the audacity of his sea-faring people. His older example suggests that we should seek not just firm ground but ideal ground, high ground, and avoid all imperfect and even comforting lands. Odysseus’ example to us is to suffer ordeal as we must, to stay on the sea and prolong our odyssey, as we must, and to fight and undulate with the waves until we reach the ground we need and want. If we remember that Odysseus sought this high ground, tired and heavy hearted and returning from a ten year war, it is indeed a spirited and ambitious prescription. It is the heroic ideal of classical times, from many centuries and withdrawls from nature ago, echoing and inspiring us through Emerson and others. This ideal even berates and belittles us moderns, with all our knowledge and power, coming from a time when people were less knowing and powerful, but more vibrant and daring than many of us today.
Common to both lessons, of course, is our eventual need to find good harbor and to make land, to escape the perilous sea, its nagging winds and thorny beasts, to return from war and to have our returning and homecoming to nature, to endure and succeed in the odyssey of finding our health. As we pursue health and our own vitality, our higher reaches as people especially, each of us must decide if the land beneath or near us is adequate to support our goals of new health and new life, if it is land right for building and not just re-building. Or if we must re-enter the sea for a time, or cross the land and sky, to find our place and thus complete our returning in truth to ourselves.
However you have begun your journey to health, whether you are creating new well-being in your life or with your life, I will end today by encouraging you to seek clarity and perspective, to be attentive to the world and yourself, as you look ahead and around you to the many possibilities contained in the prospect of your health. When you can and as you must, climb to the nearest hill if you are on firm land, or to the highest mast of your ship if still at sea, and survey what is in and around you. Aim for what is healthiest around you and truest within you, again and again, always building and never re-building, ever forward and always as returning.
As with all odysseys, your returning will come, and nature and new life will embrace you.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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I recently received a note asking about raising children in the HumanaNatura natural health program.
It was a reminder that we have offered only modest amounts of guidance elsewhere on the care and natural health needs of children, which is my subject today and an opportunity for additional work for the community in the future.
As you might expect, the topic of raising children naturally begins before conception. It starts with the healthy pairing of women and men for child-rearing, requiring us to ensure both sexual attraction and personal compatibility. By compatibility, we must mean this to include a strong mutual commitment to healthy and nurturing family life. This may seem obvious, but such commitments are often inadequately made by people today, despite their clear and beneficial nature.
In modern and many traditional forms of coupling, one or both of these essential ingredients of healthy pairing often are overlooked, with tremendous consequences for individual, married, and family life. As divorce rates approach or surpass fifty percent and the number of single parent households grows rapidly in many industrialized countries, and assuming this is merely an overt indicator of our failure to prepare ourselves for the work of child-rearing in modern times, our pairing practices seem ripe for re-examination and fresh approaches today. In another article, entitled “Sexual Health Naturally,” I explore the topic of healthy pairing in greater detail.
When good pairing and a mutual commitment to optimal family life are achieved between women and men, a strong and natural human foundation is formed to enable healthy children and an enriching social environment for all members of the family. This foundation both reflects and promotes a mutual and healthy promise to work and share together in the joys and responsibilities of family life – even amidst the challenges often enumerated in traditional wedding vows. Regardless of the nature and structure of the marriage, each prospective parent’s commitment to healthy family must be in place before having children and endure until after the couple’s children become adults themselves. Without this, the health and well-being of children are placed at risk.
Ideally, this foundation and commitment to healthy and natural child-rearing is supported by an extended natural network of family and friends, who can share in the life and work that is involved in raising a family. If not, even before conception, couples can begin to fulfill their commitment to healthy life by working together to build a strong and health-oriented network of family and friends around them. This can include actively building new relationships and nurturing existing ones, relocating to a new area and finding work that is more family-friendly, and making other changes in our personal and physical environment to make it more conducive to the natural care and raising of children.
Whatever steps may be needed to create a supportive environment, our network of family and friends must be strong and flexible, ready to respond and adapt to the challenges and opportunities that family life inevitably present, which can be much greater and more urgent once children are born. Perhaps surprisingly to many people trying to be modern super-parents today, high incomes and time-intensive careers are not necessary parts of our nature foundation for healthy families, and may even undermine the health of children. Moderate but reliable resources are all that is needed to foster healthy and health-oriented children, and to help them grow and develop into intelligent and caring adults. Strength of character and commitment, as well as adequate time for nurturing and teaching, are far more important to healthy family life than high incomes and consumption levels.
After conception, but before childbirth, much can be done to ensure the natural health and development of a child. These steps of course include great care in the diet and lifestyle of both mother and father. It includes creating a loving and healthy environment before birth and that patiently awaits the developing child, in this way nurturing and promoting the health and development of the child before she or he is born. Importantly, post-conception health includes ensuring a low-stress environment for the mother and unborn child, including low noise levels (since sound is greatly amplified by the fluids that surround a fetus), as well as loving sounds and voices (since emotional and cognitive imprinting begins well before birth and brain development overall is thought to be influenced by environmental sound patterns).
HumanaNatura does recommend early and regular physician or health care provider visits to ensure a healthy baby and pregnancy. In some countries, pregnancy care has become or has already long been excessive, with pregnancy treated far too much like a medical condition. Even though screening for maternal and fetal medical issues should be a part of pregnancy care, most of this care should be directed at preparing the mother and family for childbirth and early child-rearing.
Childbirth itself is an area most apt to be treated like a medical event today and where more natural alternatives are clearly in order. While proximity to health care is certainly desirable, childbirth in healthcare facilities is often far less than optimal. Essential features of healthy childbirth include: the presence of husband and key family members, a supportive and comfortable environment for the delivering mother, soft lighting and quiet surroundings, and the opportunity for the parents and family to bond at length with the child immediately after birth. Many health care facilities offer few of these features, though efforts have been made in this direction. Midwifery, and home birth and alternative birthing centers, are thus compelling options for many families.
Once born, the long work of ensuring the natural health and development of a child begins. This process is similar in many ways to promoting natural health in an adult, but there are important differences, reflecting the extended but natural period of development that is our human childhood. Using HumanaNatura’s three-part framework for natural health, and with the consent of your child’s physician, here are some specific natural child-rearing practices to consider, all aimed at fostering health and well-being in your child:
Natural Diet
For optimal health, infants need to be breast-fed until physiologically ready to be weaned and can manage regular natural foods. The science of natural breast-feeding and the experience of many families are quite clear on the benefits of this practice, although it is a decidedly inconvenient approach for modern parents caught in the trend of two-income families. Modernity notwithstanding, breast feeding is the natural diet, and a key part of the natural experience, of a young infant. Breast milk fosters young immune systems and physiological development, and provides all essential nutrition during the early weeks and months of life. Breast feeding also has immediate, lasting, and health-promoting psychological benefits for both child and mother, and is strongly recommended by HumanaNatura.
The exact point where weaning should begin will vary by child and circumstance, and is best a topic taken up with your family’s physician, but beginning this process at one year of age is often a sensible rule of thumb. It is true that women in nature quite often breast fed for up to four years, but there were extenuating circumstance that made this practice necessary then and less compelling in our time. In our often nomadic life in nature, a woman could only physically carry and care for one child at a time. Since breast feeding stops ovulation and provides a natural (though not 100% reliable) form of birth control, it was thus was used in pre-settled life to prevent new conceptions before existing children could walk comfortably with the adults of the tribe.
Once a child begins to wean, a natural human diet can gradually begin (please see the HumanaNatura natural diet program for a definition of our natural diet). The beauty of natural foods, for humans or any other mammal, is that they can be eaten essentially from the point of weaning. Starting with mashed fruit and then graduating to mashed or shredded vegetables and ground, cooked eggs, meat and fish, simple natural eating can begin and increase as the child is weaned. Once a child’s early teeth are in place and the child has mastered chewing, small pieces of fruit, vegetables, and meat and fish can be introduced, and breast feeding can be curtailed rapidly and then stop altogether. Nut pastes may be introduced at weaning as well, but whole nuts must be avoided until the child is old and skilled enough to eat nuts with care and without risk of choking. Honey should not be given to young children because their immune systems are not developed enough for this food.
In planning a child’s natural diet, it is important to add that the consumption of milk is not recommended, other than the mother’s breast milk and then only until the point of weaning. After that, no other milk is needed and use of animal milk and infant formula is not recommended on the HumanaNatura diet. A diet rich in fruits, leafy vegetables, and nut pastes will provide the child with adequate vitamins and minerals for strong bones, and cooked eggs, meats and fish will provide the correct and high-quality natural proteins needed for a healthy growth throughout childhood. When the child is thirsty, which will be less frequent on a natural rather than a grain and legume-based diet, water is the best liquid to use, or two-thirds water and one-third fresh fruit juice.
The best rule for feeding children is to do so whenever and only when they are hungry, but not during the night after about three months of age. Both child and mother need rest as much as food, after all, and all but newborns can go without food for an extended time if need be. With a bit of training, most young children can and should pass the night without eating – and often sleep with much less fidgeting. It is important to add that long before small infants can speak, they can be taught to use hand signals to indicate when they are hungry, and when they are simply uncomfortable or want to be held, reducing frustration for baby and uncertainty for parents trying to assess the child’s state and likelihood of hunger.
Natural Exercise
As their bodies strengthen and coordination improves, children become naturally and even astonishingly active on their own. At an early age, the primary role of the parent is to ensure that this natural activity is safe, varied, and increasingly challenging. Young children naturally need and ask for time outdoors, at first to observe their surroundings and later to engage actively in the natural world – walking and running, jumping and climbing, and engaging in group play. This activity is of course how children develop their strength and coordination, learn about their personal abilities and limits, develop their cognitive and social skills, and prepare for life as adults.
Well before children can walk or crawl, it has been discovered that most can swim, though we lose this natural ability if we do not swim when very young (both facts have sent evolutionary scientists into frenzy to understand why). If this is an option, closely-supervised swimming with a parent is a marvelous outlet for both physical and cognitive development before walking begins, and after too. Once a child can stand, short indoor or patio walks usually can start within a month, followed by supervised neighborhood walks, and then escorted outdoor treks of increasing duration and intensity as the child ages and matures. Family walking and hiking, and swimming, are all wonderful natural opportunities for mutual exploration, learning, connection, and growth – for healthy individual and family life.
For an active young child, calisthenics are not normally needed or recommended, because of their already diverse natural activity. But beginning at age four or five, calisthenics or equivalent physical activities can be introduced as a form of recreation and to promote added physical development. Many children find calisthenics fun, especially when practiced with the adults in their lives, helping to set the stage for a lifelong orientation toward health and fitness. Long distance running is not recommended during childhood, especially before puberty, and should be considered a less healthy and natural alternative to walking, hiking, and swimming for children and adults.
Natural Living
By far the broadest and most far-reaching natural health topic in the lives of adults is the active management of our overall lifestyle, our life when not eating or exercising, which HumanaNatura calls the work or practice of natural living. Natural living includes optimizing the health of our physical and social environment, our goals and priorities, our perspective and attitudes, and our patterns of daily behavior. All of these considerations apply to the natural lives of growing children too, if in initially abbreviated or then graduated forms.
Beginning before age two, each child begins to be called upon to make choices, simple ones at first for sure, but then with increasing complexity on the way to early adulthood and beyond. Success in this progressive and natural challenge of autonomous choice is of course essential to the health and well-being of the child and eventual adult, and must be carefully and deliberately fostered by parents and other caregivers as the child grows.
Early in life, we are all completely dependent on the adults in our life for our health and well-being, for both our safety and development. Here, parents must ensure an optimally healthy environment: freedom from excessive stress, caring and nurturing relationships, good emotional and behavioral models to shape imprinting, adequate stimulation and rest, and tasks and goals of increasing complexity to focus the child’s attention and foster cognitive growth. In early life, parents must act for and on behalf of the young infant, with the child’s health and development in mind, at all times. Parents must create, manage, and actively balance the amount of structured and unstructured time to create a healthy family environment for the infant and themselves
As children age, responsibility for their life and health – their environment, perspective, priorities, and behavior – can and must increasingly be delegated to them to foster natural autonomy and eventual adult health. This natural delegation of control to the child can often begin in small ways before the age of two, accelerate slowly and then significantly during mid and late childhood, and be largely complete before or during the independence-minded teen years. A parent’s primary goal in this transfer of responsibility is twofold: 1) to ensure safety and freedom from excessive failure (but not all failure since this is an important source of learning and maturation), and 2) to make certain that, by late adolescence or early adulthood, the child is fully capable of living autonomously and interdependently, as a growing and self-developing young adult, even if this is no long necessary economically in modern and post-modern family life.
Well before age eighteen, and even if vocational learning and maturation await, children should be able to attend to all major activities of daily adult living, set short and long-term goals, spend time alone without boredom and the many impulsive behaviors boredom can engender (in children and adults), make sound decisions and manage impulses when they do arise, optimize their behavior against their goals and in the circumstances and groups they find themselves in, and actively select their circumstances and build social groups for optimal health and growth. In other words, by their mid-teen years, children should be ready to lead a healthy and happy life, autonomously and interdependently with others. This is a gradual process that comes in small and incremental steps throughout childhood, inevitably with mistakes by and learnings for both child and parent, and with rites and major milestones too. It is a goal that many parents today want for their children, but do not always actively foster.
In truth, the development of children into healthy, self-managing and socially integrated young adults normally occurs quite naturally, with caring and attentive parenting, but environment plays a large part in this process, shaping our identity and influencing our maturation. Today, there are many environmental factors that can help or hinder a child’s natural development toward adulthood, which can be considered and managed in the graduated process outlined above. This natural and conscious process of child-rearing promotes healthy autonomy and interdependence – initially by parents ensuring environmental quality and a healthy environment for the young child, and then increasingly by allowing and insisting that the growing child do this her or himself. In this way, parents prepare the child for adult life in a world that contains both threats to and opportunities for natural health and higher life.
In our industrial world, just as in times before ours, many factors can negatively influence the process of natural childhood development and undermine our successful advancement to healthy adult life: excessive mass media exposure and other forms of electronic stimulation, poor peer quality and undesirable adult role models, incomplete training and guidance in essential life skills, limited or biased development of personal focus and goal-setting, either inadequate or excessive demands on and structure for the child, infrequent contact with and activity in wild nature, unnatural eating and inadequate exercise, and a lack of learning and social enterprises during childhood, to begin a list. In natural child-rearing, children need to be exposed to negative influences, in supervised and age-appropriate ways, so they understand and can live healthfully as adults amidst them, even as a parent’s primary focus is their avoidance and nurturing and cultivating the child to natural and healthy life.
As mentioned before, particularly pervasive and health-endangering facets of modern childhood are conditions that lead either to boredom, the feeling that one has nothing meaningful to pursue, or to frustration, the feeling that one cannot pursue things that are meaningful. Both feelings, or more rightly both conditions, open children and adolescents to stress and a broad range of impulsive and unhealthy behaviors. They are signs and signals of unnatural development, of reduced health and well-being, and demand a parent’s urgent and compassionate attention.
Another unhealthy circumstance of our times is the increasingly frequent condition where children feel overwhelmed with excessive commitments and structure, where they lack natural freedom and healthy reflective time, another important source of stress and impulsiveness and an important danger-signal for parents. Children of all ages naturally need some structure and assistance in cultivating themselves and their aims, but increasingly should be doing this for themselves, with confidence and even surprising maturing, before or by their mid-teens. And, at all ages, should feel neither overwhelmed nor underwhelmed in their emerging and maturing self-management.
I hope and suspect I have given would-be and already active parents much to think about, as they consider the opportunity to use natural health techniques in the raising of their children. Fortunately, and in case these many ideas feel slightly overwhelming at first, all of the approaches highlighted are well within the control and mastery of parents. In addition, the art of raising children naturally can and should include the child as a true partner and resource in her or his own development, as well as other adults and children around us, making the task easier in practice than it may initially in summary. Natural child-rearing is also always mastered gradually and day-by-day, in the many days that are our natural human childhood and parenthood.
In many ways, the process of raising children naturally and optimally is quite simple. It involves balance and focus in a few key areas, and we are all naturally endowed to do this, with just a bit of learning and patience, and a commitment to attentive nurturing. We all naturally enjoy nurturing children, whether they are our own or not, and this suggests just how intuitive and natural child-rearing is, and how well equipped we all are to be healthy and caring parents.
As adults, we all can make choices that create supportive, cooperative lives near nature for children and ourselves, lives based on nurturing the health and happiness of all the people we touch. In living and participating in healthy families and community in this way, we naturally and enjoyably create conditions for the health, well-being, and growth of both children and their parents today.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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Before we get started, please don’t worry about my title. I am not going to ask you eat a specific proportion of your body weight in salad every day. This idea may have occurred to you when you read it, or not. In either case, we are not going there today.
It is true that I am a passionate health advocate, but also a kind one and I don’t even own a scale myself. The goal of the HumanaNatura program is a progressive exploration of our own health, not a fixed regimen. I have learned that this exploration is best advanced through new perspective, not rigid formulas, especially when we can see our health (and lives) in an open-ended way, with opportunities for new health and discovery from wherever we are.
With this disclaimer, I would still like you to think about your diet for the next few minutes. I say this whether you are following the HumanaNatura natural health program or have not yet started it. I have been on our natural diet plan for a number of years now. You might think I wouldn’t have much new to learn about this way of eating, but the idea of our “salad-to-weight ratio” is relatively new for me, and I think an important learning for us all. Let me explain the idea and how it may change the way you think about what you eat, as it did for me. It at least will demonstrate that our health is journey, always holding more for us if we are attentive and have a progressive frame of mind.
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The idea of our salad-to-weight ratio occurred to me after reading Eaton & Eaton’s excellent paper, “Evolution, Diet and Health” (see “Human Diet Science” in the HumanaNatura article library for more info). Their analysis begins by looking at the diets of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, with whom we shared a common ancestor about seven million years ago. The authors note that about 95% of their diets are what I will call salad foods (in the words of the authors, “plant foods such as fruits, leaves, gums, and stalks.”).
Eaton & Eaton rightly go on to point out that a lot has happened to humans in the ensuing seven million years – profound changes in our appearance, physiology, cognitive abilities, lifestyle, and natural diet – since we were nearly identical genetic cousins to chimps and bonobos. From an evolutionary standpoint, humans grew from simple gatherers into skillful hunters, and moved from life around trees to one principally out on open range land (and perhaps along the sea for a time). Cognitively, we developed formal language and the ability to mange more complex social relationships. Nutritionally, our dietary consumption of proteins and fats increased substantially and progressively over the seven million years of our true human lineage.
Still, despite these many changes, we kept eating lots of salads (again, my choice of words and defined here as raw fruits and vegetables). Eaton & Eaton conclude, “Paleolithic humans commonly obtained 65% of their food energy from fruits and vegetables.” Significant gathering, and consequently a high salad-to-weight ratio, continued with human populations down almost to the present day. For this reason, it is reasonable to suspect that a high salad-to-weight ratio is still essential for our proper nutrition and health today.
As HumanaNatura community members know, our human nutritional story has taken two sharp turns very recently in historical time, both decidedly for the worse in terms of fostering our natural fitness and health. The first turn was about 10,000 years ago (~0.15% of our human history), when our Paleolithic ancestors began settling down into Neolithic villages focused on farming. There, from an evolutionary perspective, three unnatural food groups were introduced or greatly increased in our diet: cereals and grains, legumes, and starchy plants. Eaton & Eaton suggest this change “may have reduced intake of fruits and vegetables to 20% or less of total energy intake,” down from its long pattern of closer to 65 percent.
This historically recent change is a large and very rapid drop in “salad food” consumption, and represents a dramatic decline in our salad-to-weight ratio. Compare it with the prior drop from 95% to 65% of energy intake from salad foods, a gradual change that occurred over a few million years. With the agrarian revolution, in just a few generations, our energy from salad consumption then went from 65% to 20%. These two rates of change – total change over time of change – are many orders of magnitude different, with our more recent drop in salad consumption something like 100,000 times faster.
The second sharp turn in our diet has of course occurred in the last 100 years or so, a blink in the eye of our history, with the industrial revolution and the increasing industrialization and commercialization of our food supply and life more generally. Eaton & Eaton do not recalibrate the salad percentage in a modern industrial diet, but we all can see what people are eating. No doubt many people are still getting 20% of their energy from raw fruits and vegetables, but many others are not. And one must look hard to find people getting 65% of their energy from salad foods – though when you do find such people, you notice they are often far healthier and more fit than the general population.
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This all brings us back to the idea of our salad-to-weight ratio. Before you surmise that you have to make sure 65% of what you put in your mouth is salad (raw fruits and vegetables), consider two more things. First, natural but non-salad foods like meats and nuts have much higher energy content (calories) than vegetables, and a bit more than fruits. So, kilo for kilo, or pound for pound, we all have to eat a greater volume of salad foods for the same amount of energy than these other foods. Second, if we assume a diet with excessive fruit (from experience, more than about 30% of our energy) introduces too much sugar into our diet for optimal health and fitness, this means raw vegetables need to be a considerable and conspicuous part of our energy intake.
Put another way, this analysis indicates that far more raw vegetables are needed in our diet than most of us are eating today, even for many people on a natural diet. It suggests that we need a high, even a very high salad-to-weight ratio to be optimally healthy. It suggests we should have a salad not “at” every meal, but “for” every meal, with a moderate amount protein on the side. And it suggests that most of our salads should be built from raw vegetables, with some all-fruit salads or with fruit as an accompaniment to large volumes of raw vegetables.
Does this approach seem counter-intuitive? It is certainly counter-cultural. Myself, I must admit that during my years on the HumanaNatura diet plan (with no grains, legumes, or starchy plant foods), I have eaten a lot of salad, but not this much until recently. Like many people pursuing natural or Paleolithic eating, my meals had been weighted more toward meats and nuts, with substantial but not dominating amounts of salad foods. Thinking through our ideal salad-to-weight ratio, however, I began to suspect that I needed to shift my food mix further in the direction of raw vegetables.
So I did an experiment, as health advocates are apt to do (and should do) before they advocate. I upped my own salad-to-weight ratio considerably, more than doubling the amount of raw vegetables I was eating, while leaving my fruit intake about the same and moderately reducing the amount of natural protein foods I was eating (from about 100 to 75 grams a day). I ended up with a diet based almost exclusively on what I will call “salad meals.” These meals of course included adequate protein and enough fruit for energy and to make my diet interesting, but not so much fruit that sweetness was its central theme. On a diet of salad meals, you quickly re-learn to pursue and enjoy crunchy over sweet or meaty – a different aesthetic but one that is very satisfying.
Here’s what I found after several weeks and have maintained for over a year: First, I felt better physically and mentally, experiencing a sense of greater mental clarity and evenness, without being light-headed, and with noticeable improvements in my energy and endurance over the day. I lost a bit of weight, 1-2 kg (3-5 pounds), and noticed an increased leanness in my body (beginning from a point where I was fairly paleo-lean already, as the expression goes). Third, I noticed positive changes in my digestive patterns and overall regularity. After several months of eating this way, I had a blood work-up, which indicated improvements in most categories over my previously healthy baseline.
Overall, my personal experience seems to support theory. For at least one person on natural diet, a high salad-to-weight ratio appears to be a healthier approach than eating naturally but with a lower salad ratio. And I think this should be an encouragement for others to try increasing their salad-to-weight ratio as I did.
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I began our discussion today by assuring you I would not ask you to eat a percentage of your body weight in salad every day, and I will keep my promise. But I would ask you to consider carefully your own salad-to-weight ratio in general terms, and to begin to shift your thinking, first to having salads at every meal and then to having salads for every meal.
If you are not on the HumanaNatura diet plan yet, that is probably the logical next step for you, but be sure to check with your physician first. If you are on the HumanaNatura diet, start by considering the salad-to-weight ratio of your next meal and then your meal plans for the next week. Perhaps you too need to try making adjustments, increasing your intake of raw vegetables and adjusting your fruit and protein intake to reach a more optimal dietary mix. In either case, there is an article in the HumanaNatura library, entitled “Perfect Salad Meals Today,” that can help you think through how to increase your salad-to-weight ratio a practical and reliable way, and make salad eating easy, varied, and satisfying.
No doubt, there is a natural range of food intake that will foster optimal health in humans – nature did not design us with overly delicate constitutions – but I think it is worth experimenting a bit, perhaps beginning by shifting to a diet that is, by food weight, roughly 25% fruits, 25% meats and nuts, and 50% raw vegetables (including lettuces and low-sugar vegetable fruits like tomatoes and cucumbers). If your current diet is more meat-oriented, as was mine, you may find that it is a noticeably different diet, aesthetically, practically, and nutritionally. I personally find a new balance of foods in my kitchen, reduced time preparing meals, and a slightly changed outlook on eating in general.
After moving to a natural diet, optimizing your salad-to-weight ratio may be the best step you can take to unlock your own natural health through your eating habits. Like all natural eating, the result is a diet that quickly fosters new levels of health in our lives and that is a joy in practice, affording us meals that are satisfying and delicious, with an alternative aesthetic that is at once fresh and new, and ancient and deeply revealing.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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Last week, we received an email at HumanaNatura, entitled “Everything For Your Health In One Place.” Perhaps you’ve received this email, a solicitation, or will in the not too distant future.
When the email came in, I was naturally intrigued by the subject line. My first thought, I have to admit, was that someone was writing to comment on the HumanaNatura website and natural health resources. Pride, as they say, so often comes before a fall.
I then had an afterthought, moving from unfounded pride to unwarranted fear – that maybe HumanaNatura had a new competitor, another group that had assembled an online natural health program like ours. I caught myself and wondered if they had made improvements on the HumanaNatura model we could learn from.
With these low and higher thoughts in mind, I opened the email. My initial interest quickly changed to disappointment, however. The email offered neither commendation nor a new source of competition. It was only yet another offer for online medicines, in this case of a variety used recreationally by some these days. You may have guessed this already, so familiar is this pattern of unabashed and unjustified claims, made in the relative anonymity of the Internet. Though a bit disappointed, I did see an opportunity for learning in the solicitation, which is why I am writing on this topic.
I could use this story to rail against Internet spammers, or even to lament the crass commercialization that has made its way into so much of the health establishment these days. But you know this all too well, and don’t need my voice added to the general din of disgust and protest. I share in our common sense of disenchantment with this trend, and will leave it at that.
Commercialization is an area of practical concern for me and other health advocates, however, since the trend makes it more difficult for non-commercial programs like HumanaNatura to reach our intended audience. People today are apt to see the words, natural health, and begin running, suspecting pills and therapies and miracle cures. In the end, though, commercialization is an obvious phenomenon and more of an inconvenience. Our experience is that persistence and good ideas overcome it, by fostering networks of person-to-person referrals. It is rewarding to know that, in our electronic and global world, some things have not changed: word-of-mouth still trumps spam.
What struck me as most noteworthy about the “Everything For Your Health In One Place” email, and what I wanted to focus on today, was not the method, intention, or products of the sender, but simply how far their offer and subject line was from the truth, and what this reveals about both the sender and society today. By this, I mean not just that it is shocking how intentionally wrong and misleading their subject line is, but that their pitch even misleads in unintentional and pitiable ways – in ways that are important, unappreciated, and revealing about the state of our health today and the outlook of email senders and their typical recipients alike.
Having had a chance to read through the email and scan its offerings, I would first suggest that a far better title for the subject line would be, “Nothing For Your Health From Many Places,” a complete reversal of the phrase they chose. Such a turned about phrase would have been far more factual, slightly refreshing and more amusing, and maybe even more attention-getting too, although no doubt sales would suffer. We could take declining sales as a good thing of course, as resources saved and available for the true pursuit of our health and wellness.
If you think about these and similar “health” products, offered in the now ubiquitous new wave of electronic solicitations, “nothing for your health” really is the correct description. Most or all of the compounds offered, if they work at all, are designed to counter, but not cure, one or more symptoms of reduced physical or emotional health. Their aim is to offset sickness in other words, for a price and with the requirement of regular use. In this sense, there really is nothing for our health in these solicitations, only items to counter or forestall symptoms of illness or failing health.
From another perspective, the marketing of these medicines highlights and even perpetuates a persistent and quite common social myth about our health – a myth and misunderstanding that sees our health as precarious and in need of outside assistance. This outlook is deeply woven into the fabric of our society, a part of our past and present, and one that is expressed in various forms and patterns around the world. For this reason, “from many places” would be an appropriate subject line too. It would embody the widespread misunderstanding of our natural health that motivates the interesting both consuming and producing these compounds. This is the unintended misunderstanding of our health I spoke of before – one revealed by and ultimately enabling these solicitations.
Though my revised title would be enigmatic and less successful commercially, it is strangely intriguing and would importantly serve as a window into the state of our health today. It would underscore how unnecessary these compounds are to our health and how unnecessarily mysterious and misconstrued our health still is to many people. It might even cause a few people to look up, dazed and in amazement, and ask, “What can this mean?” From the viewpoint of a natural health advocate, this would be a favorable development, an opportunity and potential new starting point for these people, an opportunity for new health in the world.
If given the chance, I would counsel these awakened people that our health is not in need of treatment, that it is disease and poor health only that require intervention, and these can be generally avoided throughout our lives though a life in harmony with nature. I would ask them to consider the idea that vibrant health is and should be seen as our natural human condition, one that occurs whenever we allow it.
Mostly, I would ask my new students to change, beginning today and even if it is in little ways at first. I would ask them to take responsibility for their health and to actively create their health for themselves, today and every day throughout their lives, and even if our society soon seems bent on impeding their health and perpetuating myths at every turn. These health impediments and misunderstanding are never intentional. They are contrary to our nature and natural aspirations, and a sign of limitation and frustration. They are why there is so much “health” spam, why so many symptom-mitigating drugs and chemical aids are demanded and purchased, and therefore supplied.
A final thought from this solicitation, which occurred to me while writing to you, is regarding the HumanaNatura program itself. As suggested earlier, our intention in developing the community and online health program was to create a place that had “everything for your health in one place.” And this, of course, is not quite the truth of what we have created. Our website falls short of everything and must inevitably for a very important reason – because our website and our health program are external things. Not like pills and chemical aids, perhaps, but like them in some ways too.
It is true that the HumanaNatura website provides comprehensive information on natural health enhancement in one place. It includes guidance in key health areas and a natural health program you can follow on your own. HumanaNatura thus creates the potential for natural health and learning in our lives, and for new personal connections and community dedicated to health, but a website and network of email exchanges are neither our health nor a true community. Health and community are much more personal and human than this, and can only be pointed at or enabled with technology.
Our health is within each of us, as we are in our lives in the world today and however healthy we may be. Health is created through the way we live and the choices we make each day, and the imperatives we attend to and do not attend to amidst our lives and choices. A website or health program can awaken these imperatives, but cannot anticipate the number and scope of choices we can and must each make ourselves in determining how we will live and what choices we will make. Our lives are unique and complex, and our choices require improvisation and self-knowledge. For this reason, we are each endowed by nature to know and choose what is most healthy in our lives and the world, including opportunities for healthy community.
This very personal knowing and choosing of our health is also essential for us. Choice is transforming and health promoting in itself, and no one can or should do this for us. We are our choices and must live with our choices, which reveal our values and assumptions, if we are to be fully healthy, learning, and growing. In the same way, a natural health community is formed from people sharing a common and tangible commitment to create healthy life together. It is only as deep and lasting as the strength of the human commitments that either exist or do not exist within our email addresses. The act of creating community is required to create and understand the true nature of community.
In keeping with the theme of everything for our health in one place, if health is our natural state and you naturally aspires to this state, even if imperfectly, you then are the everything you need for your health. You and each of us already have everything to create our health, in one place. That place is our lives, ourselves, with our own personal ability to seek and maintain health in our lives, each day of our lives and over the course of our lives. This capacity includes our human ability to create and foster health in others – to form family and community in the spirit of our health. You don’t need a website, ours or any others, to create your health. At best, we can speed you along in your own finding of your own health, in your making and learning from your own choices, and in your finding others who share your commitment to action and learning.
If we want, each of us will find a way to eat naturally, to exercise naturally, to live naturally, and to cooperate naturally in these and other areas aimed at our health. We each will create healthy and enriching lives, in a way that no one else can for us. We each have everything we need to live well and to be well, and to help others live and be this way. We need only begin, to begin.
We each are everything for our health in one place.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
Tell others about HumanaNatura…encourage modern natural life & health!
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