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By Mark Lundegren

Did the title of this article catch your eye? 

Maybe you have an interest in ancient Egypt, and the rise and fall of the pharos and their mighty monuments, which sanctified their social order in stone.  Or perhaps your interest is in the mythic escape of the Jews from this land.  In truth, my topic is more contemporary than either of these, though its themes do trace their lineage to our earliest civilizations.

I write today about the collapse of ancient human pyramids that are still in use today.  By this, I mean our many hierarchical orders and pyramidal ways of thinking and acting, some of them older than the pharos.  But our discussion is about events unique to our time and should be worth your time.  It may even work to reorder some of your own thinking.

Whether or not you have thought much about the topic before, we are and have been living in a world of pyramids, and have been living this way for a very long time. Tall pyramids and small pyramids, wider and narrower varieties, but pyramids nonetheless.  The looming shape of pyramids, in fact, are almost everywhere we look.

Pyramids are the form of the hierarchies that governed earlier societies and still are the basic order of much of our human world today.  They are the shape of earlier forms social organization and early forms of human understanding too.  This ubiquitous silhouette has governed and ordered the lives and thinking of people for many centuries.  Pyramids are the form of classes and of classifications, the structure we still use in most of our schools to shape our children’s minds.

But the pyramid is a shape that is coming to an end, beginning in our time, though not evenly or for everyone equally, or all at once.  This end of life among pyramids comes for understandable reasons and with many benefits to people who can walk from beneath the shadows they cast (which has been the case in all times, but before possible only in exceptional cases).

In our time, old and seemingly eternal pyramids are literally crumbling before our eyes, allowing or compelling people to seek and create new order in the world and themselves.  You can see this trend already.  Our global civilization and modern perspective, after all, are far more complicated phenomena than the simple symmetry of a pyramid can describe. 

We all now live in a much richer and more dynamic epoch than earlier periods of our history, with far more knowledge and freedom than the past.  Instead of two or three life paths to choose among, we often have two or three hundred, and can access all of the cumulative learning of humanity in seconds.  As I will explain, our emerging new social structures are much more natural in shape, and much better described by the analogy of hubs and spokes. 

Our time is increasingly one that does not fit well into cascading hierarchies, however carefully or subtly we craft them.  Let’s start with a simple example, one coming out of the emerging new science of natural human health, and then turn to broader examples of the changes of which I speak.

The Nutritional Pyramid

If you are interested in natural health like me, you may have noticed the U.S. government’s attempts over the last several years to revise its nutritional or dietary pyramid, the ubiquitous and unambiguous shape that most Americans have grown up with, and eaten and unknowingly suffered under, for so long.

In fairness to my national government, the United States was not the only nation to promote this particular pyramid, though it did export or sanction such thinking around the world.  Wherever you grew up, there’s a good chance that you too can recall the four food groups from grade school and perhaps remember how these four groups fit neatly into a pyramid.

A generation or two later, with new advances in the science of our well-being, it turns out that human foods don’t actually occur in the four groups or government recommended pyramids.  It turns out, in fact, that the old nutritional pyramid and its underlying dietary ideas are actually quite harmful to us.  They reflect an older and now plainly inaccurate view of what a healthy human diet should encompass. 

The familiar nutritional pyramid has been and remains, even with recent revisions, a disaster for people, assuaging traditionalists and commercial food interests but categorically undermining our health – as more than two hundred million obese or otherwise unhealthy Americas attest. 

But pyramids move slowly, even when they crumble.  The governments of the world may spend years in face-saving baby steps, shuffling slowly from their old paradigm, leaving people comforted in diets that are far from desirable or optimal.  Ultimately, the trend and needed changes are clear already: away from this old form of pyramidal thinking.  We see this happening, of course, but with governments lumbering to keep pace.  It is in the private domain, enabled by the Internet, that we see vigorous and seemingly unorganized debate about how an optimal diet should be structured.

As we look ahead to what may be years in correctly re-formulating new governmental policy in this most important area of our health, let me make a suggestion for right now, admittedly one from a particular side of the current debate (but one that has time on its side): abandon the food pyramid altogether, call it a mistake, and speak plainly about what people ate (and didn’t eat) in nature and what we likely need to eat today to optimize our health.  It’s a simple proposal, and one that produces visible, measurable, and near immediate benefits to people.

We’ll watch to see which government can first escape the hierarchical shape of bureaucracy and mire of entrenched ideas and interests – and the shadowy, reactionary outlook they combine to produce – to recognize and actively promote new thinking in this critical health policy area.

The Organizational Pyramid

Berating today’s governments is a necessary but hardly compelling pastime.  It is akin to kicking a slowly moving giant in the toe.  It’s easy enough for the small and agile, but unlikely to get much of a reaction or to break the giant’s stride, unless done repeatedly by a committed militia working gingerly and in tandem to kick away at the leviathan. 

Nutritionists and health officials of the 1950s and later, those who brought us and now seek to re-point the bricks of the food pyramid, were themselves products of and alive in an ancient world of pyramids.  Importantly for our discussion, they worked each day in military-like, command and control organizational structures that are in many ways like a pyramid made of stone – hierarchical and heavy, limiting in the way information and ideas can move and how human action can proceed.

It’s no surprise, then, that when these people looked into the question of human diet, with superiors and powerfuls over them and subordinates under, they narrowed their answers to fours and quarters and arrived at pyramids.  Environment drives our outlook, after all, unless we actively and sometimes courageously work to override it.

This perspective on one of many bureaucracies of our time, struggling with ambiguity and new ideas entering their domain, brings us to another pyramidal structure that is beginning to collapse these days: the organizational pyramid.  In this case, the collapse will not just impact our health and the length of our lives; it will change the way we live and work each day over the course of our lives.

How can we be reasonably certain that today’s pyramidal organizations will become tomorrow’s artifacts?  Because we can see hierarchies failing everywhere now and in an accelerating fashion, with new and more decentralized structures successfully replacing them, again and again.  Here are just a few examples, but among the most important:

·         The Internet – you probably know that the structure of the Internet is not a pyramid.  As its name implies, the Internet has a webbed shape – many points connected directly or indirectly to one another.  There is no top or bottom to the Internet, no preponderance of regular angles, just a thick weave of connections that link information and people in new ways.  Instead of ascending or descending through traditional hierarchies for what or who we want, we can now search the “web” to make far more connections, far more quickly, and at far lower costs than hierarchical navigation would allow us to do.  Control systems in a networked world change too, away from a caste of professional controllers toward imbedded and decentralized protection systems (including greater intelligence on the part of network participants).

·         Open Source Systems – related to the evolving Internet is the rise and emerging dominance of open source software over the original model of commercially (or hierarchically) produced computer programs.  The typical pattern for open sourcing today is development of a common computing language by a small group of facilitators, who enable vast, networked development of new code and applications that are openly shared, edited and revised, and then re-shared.  Such systems are plainly evolutionary, starting crudely but then reaching remarkable complexity, sophistication, and innovativeness through small, iterative instances of bootstrapping.  The open source movement is proving a much more robust, agile, and lower cost approach to traditional top-down software development.  Open sourcing has now spilled over into many new areas, aided by the Internet, with similar results.  In the world today, we see powerful new open sourcing in technology and design development, community and non-governmental social activism, agriculture and biotechnology, and environmental preservation.

·         Social Entrepreneurs – in our more networked and accessible world, away from rigid pyramids and insulated command and control systems, we see the new and often dominating emergence of social entrepreneurs and cooperative organizations.  These alternatives to traditional governmental programs are normally structured to pursue defined social missions in new and often highly creative ways.  They are often rule-breaking, paradigm-shifting, and even radically decentralized organizations that can deliver community services and achieve their goals far more effectively and at lower costs than traditional or more formal approaches.  As the Internet and open source systems become pervasive, and as interest in and funding for traditional hierarchical organizations decline, we should expect a continued expansion of entrepreneurialism across many domains, including historically commercial and for-profit ones.  Organizations created in this approach may endure over time or rapidly emerge and then disintegrate with need, but in either case may be the central means products and services are made and delivered in the future.

·         Globalocal Order – if we are attentive to the previous trends of networked information and people, open source systems, and the efficacy of entrepreneurship, we can look around us and begin to glimpse what literally may be the emerging new world order.  From linked community activism to global on-line commercial auctioning to social and professional networking, we see an alternative order rising in our midst.  We have good reason to believe this order will be based on network linkages and global in scope, but also increasingly involving local or domain actors and actions addressing individual and community needs.  Because of their fluid and more autonomous structure, the new systems have the potential to bypass traditional hierarchical organizations entirely, whether they are commercial, governmental, philanthropic or religious in nature.  These old pyramids are now ripe for decline and replacement, as the fine sand that underlies them shifts in the winds of a new human age.

Organizational pyramids were intended to promote control: control of resources, control of people, and control of information.  This wasn’t necessarily conspiratorial, even if it enabled conspiracy, just a first attempt at getting things done (whether managing a community’s harvest or going to war or running an enterprise).  With some exceptions, this structure has continued to our time, held in place primarily by our inability to communicate with one another on a broad scale until now.

The new information technology of our time allows person-to-person communication on an unprecedented scale, undermining the need for many if not all pyramid-shaped organizations.  It also suggests a future of far more decentralized and faster evolving forms of organization around human needs and wants.  The twentieth century may well be remembered as the height (and the end) of the long trend of hierarchical organizational control and pyramidal thinking, which first enabled and then was undone by our evolving technology.

The Social Pyramid

In our flatter and more interconnected new world, where information and people live in a network and are readily accessible to almost everyone, new and greatly improved forms of social organization are possible, likely inevitable, and probably desirable, since they offer important potential benefits to us all.

Changing social organization is possible because of the new networked structure of society made possible by the Internet.  Change is likely inevitable and probably desirable because network structures are proving more efficient, more flexible, and more satisfying in the way they relate people to people, relative to life in pyramids.  The new forms are also probably more adaptable and durable, with less risk of a total collapse, than the pyramids of earlier centuries and today, handed down to us from the pharos and before.  Networks are certainly more natural, more in harmony with how people actually operate in their “real” lives, and how nature works within and around us.  So, perhaps, it is only natural that civilization reverts to a networked state once it is able to on the large scale of a civilization.

If we look at nature, in fact, we do not see a pyramid.  There is no command and control, no building of classes and classifications.  What we see is a vast, decentralized universe, subject to and organized by cycles of feedback that emanate from and reach to many places, all at once.  The earth’s biosphere (and now, our human infosphere) is organized not from the top down, or from the bottom up.  “Everywhere out” is perhaps a better description.  Nature is shaped more like a web, a network of signals rippling along its many pathways, not a pyramid reached by fixed boulevards.  No one is in charge of nature; there is no hierarchy.  Everyone and everything, large and small, exerts its own influences, and has its own gravity, attractions, and aims in the intricate web of that is nature and being.

If our technology and organizations are now evolving to better reflect the structure of nature, and of our human nature, perhaps far-reaching and long-lasting, and immediately disruptive but ultimately beneficial, social changes are not far behind.

In many observable ways, a world beyond the pyramids has begun to emerge already.  We see it in the remarkable and sometimes devastating social changes around us now: the changing role of women, the movement of people to new environments, the decline of traditional values and social institutions, and the emergence of new priorities and goals by people around the world.

Such change toward a new world order is an upsetting and even frightening place for many people, especially those wedded to the past – to life, even stilted life, in the pyramids.  At the same time, the new order is also an extremely interesting and much more open and humane one for many people too.  The new networked human society promises to make old ways of thinking and acting obsolete, along with the old social structures this thought and action created and was created by in turn.  A networked world opens up to us (and us to) new ways of living and working – and yes, even new ways of eating and ensuring our health – and likely will require this of us if we are to adapt into the future.

Our networked world has the potential to be a larger and smaller place.  One where new opportunities for human connection and learning foster unprecedented advances in our understanding, adaptability, creativity, freedom, and well-being – in short, our health.  It perhaps even holds the promise of a new and lasting fusion of nature and civilization, as human society increasingly looks less like a pyramid and more akin to the eternal, networked structure that is nature.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

HumanaNatura’s principal focus is the health and quality of life we enjoy each day.  Still, as a prelude to talking about living longer, who of us can say they are indifferent to the length of their life as well?

Ancient philosophers wrote about the trade-off between living well and living long, and wondered which was more important.  The wisest of them – who could see that new and higher human life waited beyond the excesses and preoccupations of their times – knew that this dichotomy was a phantom only. 

For them, living well and living long were consistent and even complementary goals.  The long life and the good life were aspects of the same complete, more balanced human existence they knew was available to us.

As we acknowledge this ancient realization, we must not overlook the many advances in human science that have occurred since antiquity.  We might lament that the diffusion of modern scientific understanding in society, like the advance and spread of older knowledge about living well and long in ancient times, has not kept pace with science’s recent dramatic expansion and progress.  But this only underscores our potential to make important improvements in our health and quality of life, in our time and building on the ideas and practices of the ancients.  

With our modern knowledge is the opportunity to raise the ancient art of living well and long to true science.  In this article, we will provide an extended survey the current science of living long, of human longevity, knowing in advance that this will be a survey of much of the new science of living well too. 

If you are acquainted with HumanaNatura’s health principles, you will find themes and findings here that are familiar, but perhaps some new ideas to consider too.

The Science Of Longer Life

We should start a discussion of the science of longevity by saying that scientists have learned much in recent years, and still have much to learn.  There are a number of important new theories of longevity, which we might see as competing, but which ultimately will be unified and integrated as part of a general science of health optimization.  All these theories aim to explain, and ultimately forestall, human aging and degeneration.  But none of them are settled science just yet.

Reminiscent of ancient discussions, today’s theories of aging once again consider and invoke contemporary assumptions about quality of life, and the potential for trade-offs between living well and living long, as they probe the length of life available to us.  In a full retracing of this old debate, the subtlest of today’s scientists understand that the dichotomy between longevity and life quality remains largely, though perhaps not completely in its extreme, an imaginary one.  Then and now, our inclination to see living well as nearer to either to urbanity and excess, or to nature and moderation, ultimately drives the strength of this dichotomy.

As we gradually move to a unified science of health, encompassing life quality and longevity, almost all scientists would agree that genetics will play a large role in the formulation of this science.  However, this is not to say that we are each held hostage to our genes, or that the length of our individual life is largely determined at birth by our genetics, or that we have little control of our actual lifespan, as some are apt to think. 

The importance of genetics in a modern science of aging has more to do with the fact that our genes ultimately create the structure of our bodies, including the physiological pathways that are critical to our health and quality and length of our lives.  In other words, our genetics create important and specific vulnerabilities and opportunities for health and longevity in each of us.  We are all subject to these genetically derived structures, although some of us clearly have greater health sensitivities than others.

There are five primary scientific theories or models of aging and longevity today: 1) Dietary influence, 2) Stress & oxidation, 3) Hormonal interaction, 4) Telomere dynamics, and 5) Selection mechanisms.  Let’s summarize and consider each of these theories briefly:

·         Dietary influence – the idea that our diet is important to longevity is not new.  The science linking diet and longevity was preceded by centuries of popular intuition that a moderate diet was essential to both daily health and long life.  But intuition is not science, and some of this earlier intuition is proving incorrect under the scrutiny of modern science.  What we know now is that when many organisms have their diets restricted, they live much longer and generally maintain their natural vitality throughout most of this added lifespan.  We also know that severely restricted diets, however, reduce the fertility of these organisms and thus their quality of life in at least some sense.  We still do not understand the impact of restricted diets on human longevity, or human fertility, or the impact of selective food restrictions, although comparative and longitudinal studies of people living on restricted diets are well underway.

·         Stress & oxidation – after diet, the science of stress and physiological oxidation, and their effects on longevity, is most widely known.  In fact, it is hard to scan the popular health press and not see articles recommending we counter “free radicals” in our bodies with anti-oxidant therapies to achieve a longer life.  What many people do not know is that oxygen-free “radicals” (also known as oxidants) are a natural by-product of cell metabolism, and that the healthy body is well equipped with enzymes to control excessive build-up of these free radical oxidants.  The body contains these enzymes, as you may know or have guessed, because oxidizing radicals are damaging to the body and accelerate aging.  There is also little question that environmental stress (including lifestyle and occupational stress) increases the presence of free radicals and the harm they can cause, including their potential to shorten life.  The control of chronic stress is thus an essential strategy to minimize the harm and threat to longevity caused by excess oxidants in our body.  The effect of anti-oxidant supplements in increasing the body’s ability to control free radicals, however, is much less certain.  Many scientific studies suggest it is very likely that a natural human diet (see the HumanaNatura natural diet program for an explanation of this term) provides a sufficient and readily absorbable supply of the anti-oxidants to control normal oxidation, and even may help to moderate free radical production in the first place.

·         Hormonal interaction – slightly less well known is the scientific research on human hormones and their potential impacts on aging and longevity.  Hormones such as human growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone have been used successfully to reverse disease conditions associated with aging, such as bone loss and other forms of chronic tissue wasting.  These results have led some scientists to hypothesize that hormonal supplements could be used to counter aging more generally and thereby increase longevity.  The results of animal studies using hormones to forestall aging and prolong physical vitality have been inconclusive so far, however.  Some studies have suggested, perhaps unsurprisingly, that significant side effects may result from hormonal use and that these supplements could actually reduce life span.  As was the case with anti-oxidants, it is again likely that a healthy body produces all the hormones we need, in the correct proportions, to live a long life.  Nature has had a billion years to balance the costs and benefits of hormonal use, even if its optimization is more species than individually focused.

·         Telomere dynamics – now we’re getting into much less well known science and theory on aging.  It is been known among scientists for some time that many cells can only reproduce about fifty times, leading ultimately to physiological aging and the death of the organism, but scientists weren’t sure why cell reproduction was limited in this way.  More recently, the shortening of our DNA’s telomeres has been established as the most likely contributor to this cellular limitation.  Telomeres are the tips of repeating code at the end of our chromosomes.  As cells reproduce naturally through division (or artificially through cloning), their telomeres shorten, eventually becoming so short that further cell division is inhibited (perhaps by the body’s chemistry in an attempt to limit increased risks of mutation and prevent the formation of cancers).  On the other hand, it has also been observed that certain cells are able to divide without telomere shortening through the use of special enzymes.  This has led scientists to hypothesize that more general use of telomere-protecting enzymes could lengthen cell reproduction and delay aging.  Unfortunately, the early studies testing this approach have not been encouraging, and the strategies employed so far may well increase the incidence of cancer formation, shortening rather than lengthening our average lifespan.

·         Selection mechanisms – least well understood, but perhaps ultimately most important to a unified understanding of human health and longevity, is the science of natural selection.  Included in this general science is selection’s crafting of our physiological mechanisms for health, and the specific structures, limitations, and opportunities we have for longevity and vitality during our lives.  As alluded to before, our genes do not wholly determine our individual lifespan, but they have created us as a species and as individuals.  Evolutionary biologists seeking to understand the impact of selection on our longevity start by asking: why live long at all?  What is in it for our species, and our genes, to have us live to a certain average age?  And what aspects of our biology are consequences of selection pursuing these special advantages?  It is important and worth noting that scientists have roughly doubled the lifespan of simple insects through repeated laboratory selection for long-lived variants.  The mechanisms and implications for humans of this change in longevity are just beginning to be understood, but appear ground-breaking and will be covered in the next section.

Important Learnings In Longevity

To begin to integrate these scientific theories, it might be worth thinking of genetics as the beginning, rather than the end, of an eventual science of longevity.  Much follows from this starting point, including a new understanding of the physiological pathways they create that support human health and longevity, as well as the resulting strategies essential to optimizing both our health and lifespan.

Genetics, of course, are the result and key medium of biological evolution.  If we reflect on evolution and selection, in nature and in human beings, we normally would expect specific genes to be responsible for each of our adaptations and bodily structures. 

It is an easy and familiar trap to think about our bodies broadly, and fail to see the genetic trees underlying our anatomical forest.  In truth, selection always progresses via an amalgamation of specific genetic mutations.  When we see the physical or physiological attributes of an organism, we should expect to find specific genes and resulting mechanisms that cause the attribute, rather than having the whole organism devoted to the attribute’s expression (as many thoughtful people believed from ancient times and until just recently).

When we talk about health and longevity being based on our genetics, we mean that there have been past genetic adaptations that influence human lifespan and that these adaptations are fairly few in number.  These adaptations are still complex, but they are also identifiable and specific, and cause predictable features and consequences in our bodies.

This specificity and predictability of the genetic drivers of longevity are exactly what we are beginning to see revealed, as science starts to probe the drivers of aging.  Scientists are narrowing in on just a few genes and biochemical processes as the likely key contributors to a long and healthy life.  While some individuals are more likely to live longer because of their genes, much more is common between us.  Almost all of us have the potential to influence our lifespan – to live longer and better.

Below are a summary of current longevity research findings, most based on or involving evolutionary science and genetics, and microbiology:

·         Longevity as adaptation – as discussed before, scientists are deepening our understanding of human longevity as a product of evolutionary selection.  In this light, our genes can be seen as mechanisms of longevity, as they are for many of our other attributes, with specific genes crafted to optimize the length of our lifespan against other design requirements that, in the aggregate, best promote overall gene survival.  Our human adaptations have produced a relatively long lifespan, likely reflecting the utility of having elders in society (although other explanations are possible).  In any case, our natural and naturally long lifespan is not arbitrary, and is potentially alterable by optimization of the physiological pathways that foster our natural longevity.

·         Health understood genetically– as scientists narrow in on the key genetic and biochemical drivers of longevity, the importance of a healthy diet, lifestyle, and environment is becoming both validated and better understood.  Research continues to uncover the physical mechanisms that drive our health and their linkages to specific genetic and biochemical pathways essential to human health and longevity.

·         Sirtuins – if you haven’t heard about sirtuins yet, now is a very good time.  Sirtuins are a name for a family of genes that scientists are focusing on in their search for the keys of longevity.  We are just beginning to understand how sirtuins work and what they drive physiologically, but it looks like a good bet that they both promote daily health and lengthen our lives when they are activated.  More on sirtuin activation strategies in a moment.

·         Longevity therapy – animal experiments to increase longevity through diet restriction, drugs, and selection techniques have produced interesting early results, with lifespan increases generally in the range of 10-50%.  Therapies for humans, however, are still a ways off, for both practical and bioethical reasons.  The current life-extension drug of highest focus is Resveratol, which activates sirtuins and may extend life.  One obvious shortcoming in all human life extension experimentation is our already relatively long human lifespan.  It could literally take decades, even generations, to fully validate potential life extension therapies for humans (a long time relative to each of us seeking longer life individually).

·         Laboratory vs. human results – it is worth noting that short-lived animals such as mice or insects, so often used in longevity research, have different genetic and biochemical structures than longer-lived animals like humans.  These animals have evolved to achieve species flexibility and adaptation through rapid metabolism and regeneration, making them useful in the laboratory.  Humans, on the other hand, have evolved to adapt by focusing on biochemical and social stability (and adapt now as much or more through cultural learning and teaching as reproduction).  What this means is that it is quite possible that longevity therapies that work well with short-lived animals may have a significantly diminished impact in humans and other longer-lived animals.

·         Metabolic stability – building on this idea is recent research suggesting that metabolic stability may be more important for health and longevity than metabolic deceleration, especially for long-lived organisms like humans.  Earlier thinking was that our metabolic rate, and our corresponding rates of oxidation and creation of free radicals, was the largest determinant of physiological aging and longevity – and slowing everything down seemed like a good idea.  It now appears that the stability of free radical production, rather than their actual rate of production, is more closely linked with health and extended lifespan.

·         Right amount of stress – though it may seem counterintuitive, newer research suggests that mild stress may be better for your health and longevity than low levels of stress.  The reason for this is that mild stress appears to activate your sirtuins, promoting your natural defensive biochemical pathways and therefore physiological health.  If you think about it, mild stress actually may be more natural a state than low stress environments, and may trigger our body’s natural health-inducing mechanisms more strongly.  In nature, we were apt to be on the move and moderately challenged in our daily life.

·         Plant sirtuins – in case you were wondering, it is not just animals that have sirtuins.  Plants have them too.  In fact, ingestion of plants rich in sirtuin-created compounds may be important to our health and longevity.  And, as is the case with humans and animals, food plants under mild natural stress may have the most active sirtuins and therefore be the most health-promoting compounds.  For this reason alone, organic produce may be healthier for us (and is likely a good health bet for other reasons too).

·         Insulin production – it has been known for a long time that excessive production of insulin was a key contributor to reduced health and longevity.  In addition to promoting obesity and other forms of physiological degradation, excessive insulin appears to curtail sirtuin activity, inhibiting the natural biochemistry of human health and longevity.  This becomes just one more of many important reasons to control your insulin levels through a natural diet and exercise program.

·         Fat mass -a person’s total amount of body fat appears more related to longevity than food intake.  The reasons for this are still being studied, but a good guess is that reduced fat means fewer stored toxins, which generally end up in our fat cells, as well as more stable long-term insulin, free radical, and hormonal production in our daily lives.

·         Calorie restriction – yes, back on calorie restriction.  Recent research is bearing out the effectiveness of moderate calorie restriction in humans, especially when they involve diets that are insulin-stabilizing and sirtuin-activating.  Moderately restricted diets may actually lead to less efficient metabolism, but afford much cleaner metabolism than unrestricted diets – moderating and stabilizing free radicals, oxidants, and insulin levels.

·         Happiness – returning to our earlier discussion that living well and long are complementary goals, studies of centenarians (people living over 100 years) reveal one important, common, and cross-cultural attribute of these long-lived people: optimism.  Centenarians are much more optimistic than the population as a whole, and report having felt that way throughout their lives. 

Implications For People Today

As mentioned before, there has been a great deal of progress in developing a true and more complete science of human health and longevity.  Various theories of aging and research findings are slowly fitting together to form a unified understanding of health promotion and life enhancement.  But we have a way to go and all of our conclusions still need to be made tentatively, even if we have reason to be hopeful and can see future understanding taking shape in our time.

Certainly there are evolutionary constraints on our human lifespan, but these constraints may be mitigated through lifestyle choices today and longevity therapies in the future.  In both cases, it is worth asking: If we choose a longevity strategy today, or a longevity therapy in the future, what will the trade-offs and side effects be?  Will we really be able to live well and long? 

We know already there are life choices that promote, but do not guarantee, a good and long life.  Ancient ideas of moderation and simplicity work as well today as they have for centuries, and can even be improved by our more complete modern understanding of natural human health and vitality.

If you are interested in living well and long, today, while we all wait to see what new techniques and understanding science will bring tomorrow, here are several strategies to improve your health and life today, and perhaps extend it further into the future:

·         Health management – the most important idea in our discussion and emerging health science is that our health and longevity are inextricably tied together.  While you may come from an ancestral line studded with centenarians, or not, this fact only hints at a possible lifespan and is not a guarantee or a sentence.  Lifestyle matters a great deal in our lifespan.  And of course living long is only half the game of life – let’s not forget living well.  In truth, we can pursue both goals, but only through a deeper understanding and managing of the contributors of our natural health and well-being.  In health, we can create longer life and enjoy better lives for ourselves and those in our care.

·         Physical environment – while we have spent most of our time in this article talking about our internal environment (our genetic and biochemical processes), it is also critical to remember that our external environment plays a large role in longevity and quality of life too.  Important factors in our physical environment include sanitation, food and environmental quality, physical safety, freedom from excessive stress, open space and access to nature, timely and proactive healthcare, and an extended, supportive network of family and friends.  All these environmental factors are essential to a longer and better life.

·         Natural diet – an essential strategy to extend and enhance our lives is adoption of a natural diet (see the HumanaNatura natural diet program for detailed information).    This strategy involves following a diet that approximates human eating in nature and is consistent with research showing that lower (but not low) calorie and carbohydrate diets are associated with longer and higher quality life.  A natural diet reduces insulin production and is metabolically moderating and sirtuin activating, combining to lower important health risks and foster critical health and longevity-promoting biochemical processes.

·         Metabolic moderation – based on current research, strategies to lower metabolic activity and/or to offset metabolism via anti-oxidant supplements (such as vitamin E) appear less important to health and lifespan promotion.  Instead, strategies to moderate metabolism and free radical and insulin production appear more likely to promote health and longevity.  A natural diet is thus well equipped to promote metabolic moderation, while providing a rich supply of anti-oxidants for health and long life.

·         Organic produce – I’m sure I’m not the first person you’ve heard suggesting that you eat organic to live longer, but let me do it for a different reason.  In addition to keeping toxic compounds out of our outer and inner environments (i.e. fostering the health of soil and tissue), you should eat organic produce because it is under mild stress (the natural condition of living things).  Remember that mild stress activates sirtuins, which plants have too, promoting healthy biochemistry in the foods you eat.  Eating healthy, mildly stressed produce appears very good for you.  Chemically treated produce, on the other hand, is protected from the environment and is under almost no stress.  It looks better on supermarket shelves but comes from plants with less active sirtuins and likely fewer health-enhancing and life-extending compounds.

·         Active lifestyle – a balanced, active human lifestyle seems like another good bet to actively promote a long and good life, activating our sirtuins and other drivers of physiological health.  The mild or moderated stress that comes through sensible work, family, friends, community, daily exercise, creative activities, and contact with wild nature appears health enhancing and life extending.  Low and high stress lifestyles, by contrast, appear much less healthy.  This, it may well be time to get off your mountaintop, or out of your high-rise office, and down into the streets and lanes where community and healthy human life await.

·         Optimism – scientists don’t fully understand the linkage between centenarian longevity and their more pervasive and lifelong optimism but suspect their positive attitudes moderate stress and promote healthy chemistry.  Are there certain people genetically pre-disposed to both optimism and long life?  No one knows, but why not work on being happy already.  In all seriousness, you may have much more personal power to live a good, long life than you realize.  The old parable about changing our attitude when we cannot affect our circumstances may be just what we need to consider.  Often, a change in attitude is even sometimes all that may be needed to change our circumstances, favorably and permanently.

I hope this survey of the current science of longevity has been interesting and informative, and will help you consider your own strategies for living a good, long life. 

None of us can be honestly indifferent to the prospect of having a long and healthy life, but many people remain poorly equipped for pursuing these goals, and few may still understand that they are indeed complementary, rather than competing, human preoccupations.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

Would it come as a surprise if I suggested that our requirements for happiness, and joy and fulfillment in our individual lives, are precisely those that ensure our natural health, including the health of the communities we live in?

After all, didn’t the first set of requirements, for our personal happiness, evolve concurrently in nature with the second, with our needs for individual and collective health?  Imagine the prehistoric that survives against the challenges of nature but is unhappy in this survival.  While perhaps a phenomenon in life today, our best science suggests this was at least an exception, and even an impossibility on any scale, during our time in wild nature.

Many today may argue that our needs and requirements for happiness have changed since natural times and that the pursuit of our natural health can no longer reliably and fully satisfy us.  On reflection, and looking at contemporary research on human satisfaction, I believe there is little reason to think this way, to think that the ancient link between our health and happiness has been severed by modernity.  Indeed, our best science suggests that when we turn from implicit conditions of our natural health, we greatly lower our feelings of well-being and fulfillment too.

In our times, with people still generally unaware of our opportunity for natural health, we often live in ways that do not make use of this strong link between our natural health and personal happiness.  Our modern bias is to think of happiness and fulfillment as unique and highly individualized states, even as ones demanding extraordinary freedom and resources to attain.  We thus often view our happiness as inhibited and our fulfillment impinged by the requirements and regular demands of our health.  Again, there is little fact or reason to support this pervasive view, even as it is actively and perhaps circularly reinforced by our commercial society and mass media today. 

Today, we are encouraged to act in ways contrary to our natural health and fulfillment, paradoxically often in the name of our happiness and contentment – to buy, to indulge, to seek comfort, to entertain ourselves with ourselves, to pursue and possess more, to display our possessing to our neighbors ,.  And yet, this formula never fully succeeds in making us happy, at least for long or without more encouragement and the use for more resources.  In parallel to this common trend of our time, if we are attentive, we can find curious examples of people who are naturally healthy and happy, by design or chance.  Such people do not follow the general trend and yet are often quite fulfilled, and often with far less freedom and resources than us (as people once did in wild nature).  In our haste, we are apt to discount these live examples of natural human joy, of an alternative and more natural human living, as oddities and non-conforming, and thus continue in our conforming ways.

The common perspective of our time may see life satisfaction as resting on a tentative and transient foundation, even as operating without discernable logic or process.  Or the reverse – we may have a greatly simplified and narrowed outlook on our happiness, seeing it as dependent on our attainment of particular objects or stations in our society and culture.  These are both unexamined and extreme views, even as they are pervasive and emotionally compelling to many people today.  We know, after all, that the form of our subjective self was selected to have specific attributes and that it has specific needs, arising out of our long evolution and persistent natural conditions as a species.  Through studies of contemporary Paleolithic people, we also know that happiness was our natural state, attained through a natural life in human community and closeness with the environment, without possessions or special status, and even as our life was harder and far less free than today.

Our personal needs and feelings are thus never the result of our personal birth and circumstances in the first case, but always of countless births and circumstances occurring before our own.  Our needs and feelings are first human and universal to all people, even as they are influenced by our culture and individualized in us.  Our birth and life circumstances are wisely viewed amidst nature and against the backdrop of our human past.  This natural past includes the often arduous demands of human life and health in nature, and the natural imperative of joyful and motivating individual and community life amidst these demands of nature.  With our quite specific and resulting human nature – which includes intelligence, curiosity, and adaptability – we can and must make our way in our individual circumstances today, creating optimal health and well-being in our life and times, given our original nature.

If we fail to make this connection between our natural health and happiness – admittedly established through recent but now well known advances in human science – we often try again and again in the relative freedom and prosperity of modern society to seek and see our happiness as we once did in pre-modern society.  By this I mean apart from our naturalness and indifferent to the requirements of our evolved human nature and natural health.  Though we may not intend it, this recurring modern view implies that we are somehow not human and not of nature (rather than strictly human and strictly of nature).  Popular and seemingly new ideas about our happiness and ourselves often hearken back to and simply recast medieval thinking in many cultures, telling us we are spirits, apparitions or metaphysical entities, passing through the natural world, but not of it.  Nothing of course could be further from the truth.  Our life, health, and happiness all lie in the natural world.

We can see this common tendency to view life unnaturally, to see our health and happiness separately, in the everyday lives of people around us each of us.  We can see it in the heavy choice of excessive work and striving, in the superficiality and suppressed emotions of our times, and in our response to this new world – a gradual retreat into comfortable isolation.  We can see this separation of natural life and happiness just as plainly in the proposals of people in public and intellectual life, who should know better and may, but perhaps only in an intellectual sense and not in the life-altering way that is possible.  In both cases, we can watch the inevitable consequences of this unnatural disconnection of human health and happiness:  the inescapable fact that human unhappiness persists and even increases, despite increasing freedom and comfort, wherever and to the extent our natural requirements for health and well-being are neglected or misinterpreted.

Instructively, our common inclination today to see happiness apart from our health is an error we are far less likely to commit when we consider or are tasked with ensuring the well-being of other species.  When we think about pets, livestock, and even wild animals in our care or circle of influence, it is nearly a universal and intuitive truth that we consider and provide for the animal’s health, first and foremost, and assume that happiness will naturally follow and in direct proportion to the degree the animal’s natural health is promoted.  We are typically and rightly perplexed when the healthy animal is also not a happy animal.  And when we see an unhappy animal, our first thoughts often are to those circumstances that keep it from its own natural life.

Because of our own historical legacy and active selection forces at work within our culture today, we make an extraordinary and generally unappreciated exception when our concern is for the human species, and for the human animal in our care.  We commonly begin from the archaic assumption that we are not animals in some way and can act with relative disregard to our natural needs and still achieve a happy result.  Often imbedded in this approach is the idea that it is not noble to be an animal, or to live naturally as people.  The result of this special exception, for us and our well-being, is significant and often disastrous.  Our tendency to see our happiness apart from our health inhibits and even precludes our ability to understand fully our natural condition, our condition as it is in the world today, and how we might create new and improved conditions in society today, conditions far more supportive of our health and happiness.

Though it is admittedly a new truth in our time, owing to the advance of science and society since medieval poverty and its ideologies for and against wealth, the truth still is that the link between our happiness and the mastery of our health is an indissoluble one, and one that must be better understood if we are to be happy today.  This natural link operates without regard to time and place, class or level of prosperity, or the growing extent of our freedom and life options.  Indeed, research already suggests that the acuteness of human suffering today, amidst our unprecedented wealth and freedom, is fostered or exacerbated by the unnatural expectations and aims that excessive and unwisely directed wealth and power create for us all, in individual and collective life.  We are all well advised to examine the fulfilled people in the world today.  They come from remarkably diverse walks of life, have no common station or circumstance, though they rarely live far from their health.  This must be an overarching lesson for us all, in these modern and unprecedented times of ours.

If you can accept or at least entertain these perhaps new and unfamiliar ideas – especially that our happiness and health are part of the same natural phenomenon, that this phenomenon is understandable and accessible to us through science, and even that only modest resources are required for both our health and happiness – a next step immediately presents itself.  This step is to ask what lessons our natural life and health hold for us today, to ensure and even increase our happiness and fulfillment, in modern times and in all times.  For the curious and adaptable mind, this line of inquiry proves quite fruitful and yields many important lessons for our lives.

One immediate lesson, which is our focus today, is that nature presents three personal imperatives to us all, each crucial to understanding and attaining our natural health – and equally to achieving natural human joy and fulfillment. 

Our First Imperative: Self-Reliance (Individual Health)

Nature’s first imperative for human happiness and fulfillment is self-reliance, our ability to secure and maintain the basic conditions and capabilities that enable our individual health and well-being.  We must first and obviously ensure we are able in our person to meet our central physiological and psychological needs – from air and natural food to goal setting and self-directedness – and thereby achieve a level of autonomous life comparable to other adult organisms in nature, even if our life is broader and more complex.

We see this imperative of self-reliance almost fully expressed in the instincts of very young children.  Their self-absorption and selfishness, in all its many expressions, is a certain and primordial sign of our natural impulse to health.  Consider the young child’s initial compulsions, whether conscious or unconscious: to find protection and food, to have space to move in, to have physical mastery of self and surroundings, to find intellectual and emotional stimulation, to decide and to act on decisions, to create, and even to compete. 

Where a child lacks one or more of these basic human impulses, we naturally feel that something is amiss and worry that the essential preconditions for personal well-being and a happy life are not present.  We might rightly worry that the child may have health problems, and that she or he may be in long-term jeopardy and potentially unable to function properly and autonomously as an adult. 

On the other hand, we should and frequently do delight in both the bold obstinacy of the two-year old and the precociousness of the four-year old.  Their immature and often immodest instincts, first for self-determination and the removal of obstacles and then for self-expression and the removal of obstacles in new ways, through reasoning and the influence of others, are a reassuring signal of young health and offer the promise of a self-reliant adult life.

If this is our early and natural course as people, we should think it strange and decidedly unnatural when we find examples of dependent adult life.   And yet we do find dependent adults quite commonly, lacking in one or more dimensions of our natural self-reliance, both in society today and in the history of earlier human civilization.  What is not surprising is that the dependent adult life of our time is normally marked by low levels of health, and poor health’s familiar siblings: unease, unhappiness, cynicism, contempt, even self-contempt, fear and its close twin, aggression, and another strange pair, apathy and impulsiveness, both born from the absence of natural goals and motivation.  However dependency may be manifested in the lives and outlook of people, it is a sign of a reduced and unnatural condition, of lower human health and well-being.

In our quest to make our communities and global society healthier and happier, we need to understand the adult conditions of dependency we see, especially as they may be far less numerous in cause than case, and thus ultimately preventable.  Perhaps some of this dependency was evident early in life, although observations of very young children make it seem unlikely that there are a sufficient number of unhealthy infants to account for the many cases of adult dependency, and that this is the center of causation.  Far more likely, and as suggested in research already done, a majority of adult dependency is the result of specific events or dependant adaptations that occurred in young or middle childhood, or even as late as young adult life in some cases. 

Adult dependency is quite often the result of childhood abuse and a low quality family environment, specific childhood trauma, drug use in or around the family, or a hostile and unsupportive environment outside of the family itself.  Where specific factors such as these cannot be identified, we might look to see if there has been a more general decline in the individual’s health over time, particularly when dependency sets in well into adult life, and thereby suspect that essential conditions for natural health have been consistently unmet in one or more ways.  Importantly for our discussion, in each case of adult dependency and regardless of what interventions they suggest, we see the first natural imperative of self-reliance unmet.  We are apt to see such cases as an individual condition, but because of their high numbers, can and should be reframed as a social trend of reduced natural happiness and well-being, a trend linked through one or more mechanisms to conditions of reduced health.

Our compassion naturally does and should go out to the dependent among us.  We feel empathy and sorrow for the chaos and hardship in their lives, for their lack of natural health, in other words.  In our quest to understand and reduce this adult dependency, however, we should also ask what our hearts ultimately go out to.  To be truthful, it is often conditions of underdeveloped and unhealthy human life, forms of human life we would not encounter in nature and that are also likely unable to meet nature’s other two imperatives for our health and happiness.  I say this not to criticize the dependent among us, but as a larger critique of our society and its broad patterns of conduct today, conduct that is often in ways clearly contrary to our health and the findings of contemporary science.

In this discussion, I have proposed that our natural self-reliance can be impinged sometimes by specific environmental trauma or influences.  I have also suggested that self-reliance can be compromised by poor general health practices compounding over time, even practices arising amidst autonomous individual and family life.  Both scenarios suggest limits to the power of self-reliance and an incompleteness to the imperative of autonomous life.  Even with autonomy, we may misunderstand specific needs for health or may use our autonomy in ways that actively harm ourselves or others, leading to dependent adult life.  These facts underscore our need for knowledge and support beyond ourselves and the immediacy of our lives – of the importance of life in and in support of cooperative community, which is our next imperative for natural health and happiness.

Our Second Imperative: Cooperation (Community Health)

It has been said before that none of us is an island.  If humans are naturally animals, then we are naturally social animals, and highly communicative and cooperative animals at that, each of us inseparable from and enlarged by those around us.  In the immediacy and seeming autonomy of adult life today, ironically most especially in the myopia of young adult life, it is easy to forget that all of us were nurtured extensively as children, literally for years, to become autonomous and self-reliant adults.  It is only through the fact of this extensive nurturing that we are able to achieve the natural and autonomous adult life we enjoy and may naively assume is our own creation. 

We are inevitably interdependent with (as opposed to dependent on) others for our individual life and for true human life in any real sense of this term.  Interdependence is how we all obtain our sustenance, learn about the world and ourselves, experience new perspectives and enrich our lives, and respond to challenges in the environment greater than us individually.  Our second natural imperative of cooperation develops in us throughout childhood and even long into adulthood in many cultures.  It is our natural instinct to create and maintain human groups and human communities.  As such, it is an instinct to create human life in a way that is not possible individually and on our own, a life of relationships, a truly humane life – whole, complete, and larger as a consequence of our shared lives.

Our instinct towards community is of course notably pronounced in the strong and often unconscious conformity and peer-absorption of older children and young adolescents.  Here, we see, often emphatically expressed, our natural human need to participate in and benefit from tribe, to find our place in our time and generation, to give and receive in turn.  Fortunately, for adolescents and all around them, this often overwhelming phase naturally passes or matures, but the lifelong imperative of interdependence that it highlights is never diminished.  Interdependence, in fact, is always an integral part of natural adult life. 

This natural pattern of growth and maturing awareness of our need for interdependence is not always reflected in the imperatives and norms of our contemporary society.  Perhaps never more than today, driven by the leverage of modern technology and new industrial wealth, the immature adult delusion and romanticism of personal independence seems to have infected the minds and hearts of many people among us today – holding so many of us in odd and perpetual variations on late adolescence.  Wherever this immaturity dominates, wherever individuality becomes pronounced and severe, and where cooperation and community health is lacking, just as in the case of the loss of autonomy, individual life is far poorer and less healthy, and less happy.  This is true even amidst affluence and unprecedented freedom. We can of course all see examples of wealthy, selfish, and disaffected people around us.

Given our natural imperative for interdependence and community, our unambiguous need to contribute to and receive from others, it is extraordinary to examine or revisit the excesses of individualism around us today, the pervasive indifference both toward and by communities in our time.  And again to find this life unsurprisingly neither happy nor healthy.  Whether such extreme individualism is expressed as a general antipathy toward others, in guarded and unexpressive personalities, as a stark indifference or hostility to society, by the unchecked presence of aggressive and exploitive personalities in our communities, through the unabashed self-aggrandizement of media celebrities, or in the laissez-faire attitude of our political leaders (all various forms of sociopathy), we see another important and unmet imperative of nature, our human nature, and our natural health. 

In this pattern of excessive individualism, we also see compromised human health and community imbalance in an especially dangerous form, one that is not unique to modernity and whose consequences have been clear and predictable throughout our long cross-cultural history – the weakening of communities and a reduction in the quality of individual life.  This condition of hyper-autonomy, entirely perceptual but with tangible consequence in the world, is as if a difficult phase of self-centeredness has failed to pass and now extends unnaturally throughout all our adult years. 

Particularly troublesome and unhealthy, our broad pattern of modern individualism, under the guise of classical liberalism, has even shaped itself into a persistent and intransigent modern ideology that exists in our time with great strength, one paradoxically seeking the general undoing of public life.  Its seemingly virile and decidedly uncompromising views of the world are quite seductive to many, even if its foundations are increasingly undermined by the findings of science, and as their social and industrial policies produce increasingly less fulfilling life for us all.  We should thus be emboldened to call for a resurgence of the imperative of interdependence and healthy community.

As was the case with people lacking autonomy, our compassion must also extend to individuals lost in immature and myopic individualism, to those among us who cannot see or do not have concern for the effects of their actions on others, and who cannot rise to meet the second imperative of our human nature – cooperation.  After all, many individualists are the iterative product of weakened communities, ones that no longer adequately prepared their members for mature and healthy adult life.  But this time, it is even more essential that we ask what our hearts go to.  Unlike dependent people, we do not have the luxury of indifference people who have power or advanced technology, and are indifferent or hostile to us.  In truth, there is real risk that they may harm us with their immaturity and excesses, as has been done in the past when individualism was left unchecked by wisdom and forcible constraint.  We may be left harmed, even as they are left unchanged – and unhappy and unhealthy.

Faced with unrepentant and thoughtless individualism, we may, must, and often already do demand community health.  We can and must compel a curbing of the excesses of underdeveloped and overly individualistic people, especially in the cases of people, behaviors, and groups that are clear risks to social harmony and the most basic dimensions collective health and well-being: our safety, the environment, our food supply, and our freedom of assembly and movement.  Naturally, in the strict sense of this word, we must exercise care in the process of asserting community and social health over even immature and potentially harmful people, so as not to exceed reasonable, prudent, and healthy limits on individual freedom and expression. 

Increasingly, though, in our ever more complex, globalized, and interlinked world, we must now say no, and say no more firmly and frequently, to those among us who have not learned or who disregard the natural imperative of cooperation and community health.  This can be in the obvious cases of the polluter, the exploiter, the criminal, the aggressor, and the fanatic.  But needed action may also be in new and more subtle domains of excessive individuality as well, ones that compromise our collective health and threaten others committed to cooperative and healthy life: the crass commercialist, the insipid apologist, and the unenlightened plutocrat.

In our discussion of the imperative of community, I have suggested a strong need to better curb excessive and dangerous forms of individualism in our new environment of advanced industrial society, in the interests of our health and general happiness.  I have also suggested that communities can become weakened or otherwise fail to optimally foster our health and happiness, potentially curtailing both autonomy and cooperation, in a downward spiral of declining health and well-being. 

Both challenges suggest innate and quite specific natural requirements for individuals, communities, and our global society.  One is that we define carefully the responsibilities and limits of individual and collective action, in our quest to promote and maintain both healthy autonomy and interdependence.  The other requirement is that individuals and communities must actively pursue their present and future health.  Both must commit to being vibrant, curious, learning, and adaptive.  Together, these natural requirements thus reveal a third and equally compelling imperative for our human health and happiness – our need for individual and community growth.

Our Third Imperative: Growth (Future Health)

Once we have achieved personal autonomy and interdependence in a community environment, we next want this environment to be healthy, nurturing and supportive of the health of its members, in our time and over time.  We need to ensure that our community is not and does not become staid and unhealthy, unresponsive to its members and the changing environment.  We thus find that another natural imperative presents itself in the fact of community, with the same urgency as the first two.  This is the imperative of human growth, which applies to both individuals and communities in their natural pursuit of health and happiness.

To examine this imperative, imagine a person or a community that did not change.  Even imagine the setting to be a happy one, but entirely known to us and without the prospect of growth or change.  As humans, we would soon tire of these circumstances, or would creatively manufacture change within them, a fact that may be counterintuitive but that can be observed empirically.  However idyllic – and our individual lives and communities today are often far from this state – it is in our nomadic and seeking nature as humans that we would inevitably feel stifled and seek to move beyond these or any borders, past anything that hems our curious nature and inhibits our growth.  When we feel constrained, in fact, we often seek novelty instinctively, for its own sake and even at the risk of our health and happiness.  Isn’t the inevitability of change, of temptation, the underlying learning from the parable of the Garden of Eden?  Or from historical studies of human life amidst constraint?  We instinctively pursue growth and change, and when this instinct is frustrated, so often turn to distraction or become aggressive (both signs of an unhealthy and disintegrating self).

As humans, we naturally need growth and change in our lives to be healthy and well.  Without the fact or prospect of growth, we and our communities stagnate physically and emotionally.  We are then apt disengage from our lives and communities as they are and seek change elsewhere, or live with frustration, in other words in lower states of vitality and happiness.  Our instinct for growth and newness is part of who we are as adults and how we evolved to be the dominant species on our planet (and the dominant individuals within our species).  It is through our proclivity for change and our instinct for growth and learning that we explore our world and naturally keep pace with and stay aligned with our environment.  Growth is basic to how we adapt, and to how many other species naturally adapt, even if this process is conscious only in humans.

Our natural human imperative for growth and progressiveness is perhaps most poignantly, though by no means exclusively, revealed in the frequent crises that come to us in the middle of adulthood.  When middle-aged, we are especially apt to feel the pressure and fact not just of our mortality, but also of constraint – declining growth, reduced learning, and fewer new experiences in the world.  This condition can come from a number of sources: excessive commitments or attention paid to fulfilling the social obligations of adulthood, life in staid and unhealthy community, an overly conservative outlook or pattern of life choices, or simply by our allowing our lives to become overly structured and unchanging over the course of time.  But change, and self-confidence in our ability to change, is central to our natural instinct to move and grow, and to our ongoing health and happiness.  The force of growth encourages us, and for us to encourage the people we may lead and influence in mid-life, to remain or to again become flexible, to be adaptable in the face of nature’s forces and our own social environment.

Mid-life crises take many forms, including changes in occupations, changes in pastimes, and changes in relationships.  In the many options of advanced society, sometimes this change is healthy, and sometimes not.  Often, people come to these times living comfortable and even highly desirable lives, from others’ perspectives.  We may be willing to give up much, and much that is certain and desirable, to satisfy our renewed and now urgent imperative for growth.  Our actions may seem illogical on their face and to others, but they are usually understandable, and often quite humane and health-seeking, when viewed from the perspective of the person experiencing stifled growth in the middle of life.  This mid-life growth imperative, like those earlier in life, is a clear sign of our natural human health and well-being, and again reveals the deep link of our happiness to our health.

A community’s need for growth and change is as healthy and important as in our individual life.  The imperative of growth adaptability for the future, as I suggested before, creates a central requirement that all communities and society be committed to the health and vitality of their members, for the present and future, and not simply exist to manage public infrastructure and resolve their private disputes.  The imperative of growth and adaptability is also an ultimate and essential check on excessive community conservatism and constraint on individuals and their autonomy, particularly in the case of constraints on the young.  Where individuals of any age are excessively repressed, and our natural growth and progressiveness are inhibited, the community becomes a rigid, destructive, less adaptable, and thus less healthy force.  It can fail to fulfill the imperative of growth, and that of protecting or fostering individual health and growth, leading either to sudden or slow rebellion or abandonment, but in either case to lower states of community health and well-being.  Always, if there is inadequate growth and openness to change in human life and the greater community, our health and vitality sufferer, and often long before obvious signs of discontent and physical decline. 

Our need to ensure natural growth and adaptability is the counterpoint to our need to prevent and check the potential for destructive individualism – in communities and our own lives.  Taken together, healthy communities thus involve achieving a balance that averts both stagnation and chaos, promoting and harmonizing healthy and autonomous individual life.  Given this seemingly clear and natural imperative and place of growth in human life, once again we are rightly startled by the lack of attention paid to it by many individuals and communities today, notably as we live with the benefit of science and hindsight and their compelling calls to ensure growth.

Inadequate individual and community attention to growth can result from a number of causes: excessive human dependency and a loss of our natural health and curiosity, a general and secondary response to more specific and inadequately mitigated threats of individual excess, or entrenched fear and conservatism (whether fomented by a few, engendered by a past event or future threat, or simply as a pervasive and persistent unnatural sensibility).  Whatever the cause, we frequently can see that nations, communities, organizations, and individual people around the world fail to foster sufficient growth and change in themselves. 

All of these entities so often seem to act, re-act really, from fear of internal disequilibrium than toward external opportunities for new and still healthier states of integration and well-being.  Since this fact is so pervasive today, even as we immerse ourselves in modern novelty and thereby cause unexpected and often unhealthy change, we must conclude that we are all at risk of an unhealthy conservatism, and a related superficiality, in our lives.  This bias is to hold the ground we have gained, or to live in ongoing celebration of our attainment.  We thereby so often overlook the many opportunities we have to enrich the ground we have gained, and to become more healthy, vital, and relevant to the future. 

To return to our example of emphatic and sometimes radical change in the middle of adult life, and perhaps as an obvious lesson for human groups of all kinds, we accept and even expect mid-life crises in individuals today.  But we often do not consider that such events might be unnecessary, and are often largely absent or less emphatic in lives where there is adequate and continuing lifelong growth.  Change and progression can come in measured, forward-looking, and progressive ways, as part of lifelong maturation and adaptation to new learning and experiences, and need not first engender existential crisis.  This is a critical lesson for people and groups of people for all times and ages.  It leads us to question which of our communities and organizations today have adequate, sustainable, and self-sustaining growth, as part of their culture and operating systems, and which face the prospect of crisis at mid-life or some other time, particularly at time of environmental or internal stress.

It is true that we often must struggle to create order in life, as individuals and groups, especially amidst our current conditions of great social complexity and greatly imbalanced and misdirected wealth.  With this struggle, we are thus always in danger of continuing the quest for order and security beyond its natural limit for optimal health and well-being.  We may struggle too vigorously and too long to create order, and then defend that order too artfully and intransigently once it is established, especially when change and adaptation are most needed. 

Integrating Our Imperatives

Estranged from nature and our natural health, we live today in a world of often fleeting or only outward happiness.  Under this surface, feelings of fear, insecurity, and the need to ensure order and protection are frequently quite pervasive.  Some of this emotion is natural and healthy, but much of it results from our often unconscious use of possession and status, in themselves and competitively, as a surrogate for our natural health and well-being. 

Our possessions and stations can engender a defensive mindset, and produce fear and insecurity in us in irrational and unnatural ways, in ways that directly and unnecessarily reduce our health and happiness.  Importantly, our elevated fears and anxieties do not simply afflict and motivate us to often act conservatively and contrary to our health and happiness.  They often equally possess the people we fear, instilling in them an identical fear of us and a motivation to act in reactive and unhealthy ways as well.

This persistent and sometimes escalating spiral of human fear and hostility is well known in our world and history, both between and within communities.  In our time, amidst modern abundance unimagined in earlier times, such cycles are now primarily the result of inherited human social systems, premised on the idea that poverty and hardship are our natural or a threatening condition, and must be guarded against through the competitive accumulation of wealth and power, and the control of others. 

While hardship was our true condition in many early civilizations and is always possible in the extremes of war, epidemic, famines, and other worst cases, it is not in all others, whether in our time or earlier in wild nature.  Outside of these acute conditions, which we now can and are right to guard against, our natural state is normally one of abundance and freedom from hardship, of health and joy, though admittedly without significant possession.  Our natural state does involve some human competition, but only in limited and periodic ways.  In our natural state, as with other social animals, our daily relationships with others are primarily and overwhelmingly cooperative and gregarious.

Unnatural fear can result from and perpetuate excessive self-protective systems and guarded relationships with others.  Fear may overwhelm us as individuals and communities, and keep us from happy life.  The unexamined quest for comfort, for a forestalling of seemingly natural and looming poverty, and for security in our comfort, can paradoxically foster a general sense of scarcity in our lives.  It can even work to create or heighten the threats we seek to diminish, by threatening others with our single-minded quest for power and control, compelling them to act in kind.  Because of this basic flaw in and the antiquated nature of many of our modern social systems and world ideologies, we very often lack adequate ability to learn and change, in individual and collective life.  Owing to this genuine modern inadequacy, we now inhibit our own natural and self-conscious movement to more cooperative and beneficial arrangements in our time,

So many human systems and groups today are far too biased for self-protection and insufficiently forward-looking and adaptive.  They are forged from fear and to forestall threats, not to engender human growth and health during the long peace that natural human life often is – and that it most certainly now can be with foresight and cooperation.  In continuing to live amidst and support these systems, we inhibit our many opportunities for positive change, in large and small ways, everyday of our lives.  We stultify and make oppressive individual and community life, far more than is necessary or healthy, and do not clearly see our abundance or seize the chance for true happiness that is our contemporary and natural condition.  In our conservatism, we also do not work long and hard enough on opportunities for cooperation with others, integrating their views and creating the conditions for peace and enduring abundance for all people.

From this state of affairs, our imperative of individual and community growth takes place amidst fear and is often actively discouraged.  We thereby encourage far more severe and unnecessary crises, in people, communities, and our global society, and at mid-life and other times.  As a study in contrast, we might begin to imagine new systems of human organization – ones that are more adaptable and less threatening to others, creating orderly and principled communities of people, and committed to the advancement of human health and thereby human fulfillment. 

Such systems would reconsider the inevitability and naturalness of poverty.  They might begin from the idea of natural abundance and well-being, and entertain the new human possibility of uninterrupted peace.  They might well be premised on and perpetuate the imperative of continual human change, learning, and improvement.  And the communities result from these new ideas might be very different places, physically and spiritually, than the often guarded and fearful environments where many of us live today, and that have almost universally existed in our recent past, but that were not our natural state and certainly need not be our future state. 

With new systems and ideas of human organization, our human civilization could become a place, not of self-perpetuating feelings of fear and scarcity, but of increasing health and emotional security.  With an overriding focus on promoting our common natural health and human vitality, the result might be a diversity of safe, protected communities where all three of our imperatives of human life could be fully met.  Autonomous individuals would bring themselves fully to their lives, community, and global society, understanding our universal need for interdependence and growth.  Freed from unnatural cycles of competition for comfort and control, the needs of the collective and those the individual could be better balanced, though perhaps never perfectly and always in active and evolving ways. 

Likely, in new social systems dedicated to our health and well-being, there would be far greater focus on cooperation, globally and locally.  There likely would be a move to create relative material equality among people and clear principles guiding individual and community conduct, promoting general security and more open life.  But there would perhaps be even greater human freedom than today, with resources no longer needed to serve fears and insecurity redirected to the areas that most lead to human fulfillment – those that foster natural human curiosity, learning, nurturing, and innovation. 

If sustained, a new cycle of human progress would naturally emerge and become our future, fostering material and emotional abundance and far greater feelings of security.  Communities would remain aware, perhaps deeply aware, of our past and the threats that can come from an unmanaged environment, especially when communities become isolated, fearful and guarded, or ill-adapted to the ever changing realities of our larger environment.  With prudence, we might all look to the future with hope and openness, amidst and even because of our pragmatism and constructiveness. 

For me, places from this future civilization seem now ready to exist.  By this, I mean today, in our time, in our individual lives and in new and revitalized communities and nations.  I mean in our special time in history, with our material abundance and our advanced and rapidly evolving technology, and amidst our scientific awakening and discovery of our true human place and state in the natural world.  And I mean after millennia of misunderstanding ourselves and the nature of our own health and happiness, millennia of life impoverished by limiting and self-perpetuating cycles of fear and hostility.  

These new places of the future even seem actively prepared and waiting for us to go to them.  They already may exist, amidst and in spite of our modern landscape.  They already may be formed, through our modern knowledge and opportunities for new choices that leverage science and the science of our well-being.  These places of the future seem ready to contain us and allow us to live new, extraordinary, and more artful lives, even as they require constructiveness and prudence from us too, now especially and probably in all times. 

In truth, we can each now choose to redirect our energy and focus in new ways, to live from science rather than inherited ideas, to live in natural abundance rather than fear and insecurity, to have less and be far happier, in our lives and communities and amidst our modernity.  We all already can live in the future – in new, healthier, and larger ways.

I call these now waiting places, HumanaNatura, but you may give them another name.  If you have re-discovered your natural health and its link to our natural happiness, then you understand our own natural human link to the world and one another in a new and unprecedented way.  You also know that nature presents us with three imperatives for lasting natural health and compelling human life, in our time and in all times, and for you and for us all. 

Little else is needed, and enduring life awaits.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

If you are a HumanaNatura member and natural health practitioner, I suspect you are asked quite often what aspect of our natural health practice is “most” important.

For people in the midst of pursuing health on many fronts, it can seem a funny question.  But it is an important question too, especially for people who are just beginning to consider healthy changes in their lives.  And how we respond as natural health practitioners is often critical as well, bringing with it significant implications for the progress, and sustainability of progress, that others will make toward unlocking their health and own lives.

So, what is the most important aspect of natural health enhancement? In one sense, it is a tough question to answer. Health includes so many important components – nutrition, exercise, lifestyle choices, social support, stress management, emotional and self-awareness, goal setting, growth and learning – to name some of the most important aspects of our health covered in our natural health program. 

In another sense, though, the question very easy to answer, since most people who ask it are just starting down the path of enhanced health, or have yet to look seriously at their own health and quality of life. The truth is that the most important aspect of a natural health practice, at any point in time, is our own principal barrier to a new level of health – the one thing that most holds our health and well-being back at that point.  I personally reply, almost always, with this answer.  This is not always what people want or expected to hear, but it is advice that stays with people and can last a lifetime.  And it is the truth.  Our health is always most constrained by one thing, a dimension of our lives that is specific to us, until we overcome it and then our health is held back by something new.

As such conversations turn to the specific principal barrier in the person’s life, often there is confusion, since there may be many things inhibiting their health, especially when just starting out to create a healthier life.  In these situations, I often suggest that that their diet may be the most important obstacle to new health and in any case can be seen as the foundation of our health and its enhancement. If our diet is not right, the rest of our potential for natural health is a hard, if not impossible, path.  Our prospect for new health is even hard even to grasp conceptually and experientially if we do not know the early resurgence of our health that comes from a natural diet.

I should add, and you may have noticed, that I have left myself a caveat.  In discussing my advice about diet, I said “often.” The times I do not talk about diet as a most important obstacle are when I am speaking with someone with a drug addiction (including nicotine and alcohol) or if the person is struggling with an obvious life-limiting personal relationship (an interpersonal addiction). For them, the first step to greater health may be even closer at hand than their diet, although in many cases, they may be able to use new awareness of their diet to gain control of their addiction and begin the long and open-ended movement of our lives that is the pursuit of natural health.

Often, when such conversations in my health counseling work turn to diet as the most important initial aspect of health enhancement, and when the way we eat is framed as the gateway to a lifelong path toward enhanced health, people will immediately share the frustrations they have experienced in trying to get their diets right.

In these conversations of our diet, I find that about ninety percent of the time people do not have a clear picture of a healthy diet and are often carrying a great weight of dietary and health misinformation (often in addition to the physical and emotional weight of extra body mass).  To counter this, I discuss a natural diet in very simple terms, as eating that is based on the way humans lived in nature for millions of years and informed by modern science.  Perhaps like you, I describe a natural diet as extraordinarily simple and easily understood, and as a way of eating that has five components:

– Meats (including fish, poultry & eggs)
– Raw vegetables
– Fruits
– Nuts
– Water

As you might imagine, or as you may often experience firsthand, newly health-oriented people are almost always surprised and frequently quite skeptical that our ideal human diet can be so simple.  To address their skepticism, I may speak with them about the reasons why this is our natural diet, the benefits of a natural diet, and their own needed steps to move closer to this way of eating. These discussions often drift into lifestyle issues beyond diet, of course, to considerations of other health barriers.  I almost always encourage people to consider these other items, even to make a list as we speak, but still to explore the benefits of a natural diet as a “gateway step” toward new health in their lives.

Many times, our conversations end with a recommendation for people to see their doctor, and to go home and empty their kitchen of unhealthy foods (ones that are not on my “short list” of five foods), and for them to try the HumanaNatura diet program for thirty days if their physician agrees. To end our talk positively and promote new personal commitment, I often paint the picture of their starting a self-managed boot camp, by affectionately asking that they “drop and give me thirty” – thirty days of good, clean eating on the HumanaNatura program.

In my work for HumanaNatura, as you might imagine,  have this general conversation quite frequently, and often with people I may not see again or at least not see again soon, or see only online.  Much of the time, I don’t know if my advice was acted on and the result.  It is a little frustrating for me, this not knowing, but such is the nature of advocating health at a global and even community level.

With this last thought in mind, perhaps you will appreciate my delight this week when I heard from an old friend. I knew she was aware of HumanaNatura, since we had discussed it more than once, but I did not know she had begun our diet program herself.  “I lost thirty pounds and look like a new person,” she told me.

I am delighted for her and feel a certain pride of authorship.  Naturally, the next step for her, like anyone else experimenting with natural eating, is to move on to consider the other things that natural health is about, and what now might most hold us and our health back, but I decided not to spoil the moment and let us both bask in her accomplishment.  The rest would come later, and I knew we would speak again before too long. 

Getting our diet right may not be the most important aspect of enhanced health, at every point in time in the life of every person pursuing natural health, but a natural diet is the foundation of our health in all our lives.  As a community of practitioners, we should count as a success each person who adopts this new way of both eating and approaching our lives and the world.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…encourage modern natural life & health!