BodyWisdom
Written on : September, 2024
Edited last: February 2025--------------------- Still under construction; the concept is clear, but the presentation needs to be improved. -------------------------------
Preamble
Humans have survived and evolved successfully to present day for millions of years. They have been so successful that they have come to control all other species. A question that comes to mind is:"How have they managed so well in a our hostile environment of competing organism, large or microscopic, all out to eat us up?".
This page was written to try to answer this question.
BodyWisdom
Our body is processing continuously simultaneously existing sets of many substances that that are changing continually. These include the substances that the body has ingested, has inhaled, has been injected with, has absorbed through the skin and eyes from environmental exposure including ambient temperature, or has synthesised in response to physical activities or other factors. In this context, the term "substances" is intentded to cover anything physical that affects the functioning of the body.
In general, these sets of substances include nutrients (such as food and vitamins) and non-nutrients (such as medical drugs, lifestyle drugs, recreational drugs, substances absorbed from cosmetics, or substances absobed from environmental exposure such as ambient temperature), but they can also include pathogens and poisons. Let the term "SubstanceSet" denote the set of simultaneously existing substances that the body is presented-with at any one time.
Our body has the intrinsic "wisdom" (4) to know how to process the SubstanceSet to achieve continually the equibrium amongst the myriads of vital body regulation variables (such as body temperature, blood pressure, blood platelets count, cholesterol level, etc.) that delivers the best health possible. If the SubstanceSet is kept optimal, this "wisdom" will keep impelling the trillions of physiological reactions ongoing in our body to deliver optimal health. On this website this intrinsic "wisdom" that keeps continuosly impelling the body to deliver continuosly the best health possible health permitted by the SubstanceSet, will be referred to as "BodyWisdom".
A very interesting phenomenon is that if a change is introduced in the SubstanceSet, BodyWisdom impels the trillions of physiological reactions ongoing in our body to achieve an equilibrium that minimizes the impact of the change on our health. If before the change our health was optimal, after the change BodyWisdom insures that the deviation from the optimal health is the absolutely minimum possible. In other words, BodyWisdom is always at work to maximize survival.
The property of physical systems, such as our body or electrical power systems, to react in a way that minimizes the impact of changes is enshrined in the "Le Chatelier Principle" discovered by french chemist Henry Louis Le Chatelier. His work initially applied to chemical systems in equilibrium. In the days since Le Chatelier, this principle has proven to apply to all physical systems including living organisms.
Summarizing tha above discussion, the BodyWisdom in each one of us is continually adjusting our interdependent internal regulating variable to achieve an internal equilibrium that maximize our health with the resources (SubstanceSet) that our body is being provided. It is important to understand that the values of our internal regulating variables are interdependent, meaning that a change in one reverbarates through all the others and causes them to change as well. And, under the guidance of BodyWisdom, all the variable settle to a new equilibrium that keeps minimizing the impact of the change on our health.
Let's assume that we are eating an optimal diet which has enabled ou BodyWisdom to continuously impel our regulating variable to an optimal equilibrium that is delivering optimal health. Assume that now we ingest a non-lethal dose of a poison, such as a plant toxin. This forces BodyWisdom to impel all internal regulating variables to a new equilibrium to minimizes the impact of the toxin on our health. So BodyWisdom keeps us functioning but not as well as before and likely we would start having issues such as headaches, tummy aches, or not as energetic as before. So, with the toxin, body wisdom will keep us functioning, but at an internal equilibrium which is not otimal and which, over time, will likely cause disease.
Homeostasis
Medical science developed the concept of "Homeostasis" formally starting with french physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878) in 1865. He called it "milieu intérieur" which means "internal environment". American physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term "Homeostasis" to refer to this internal environment of the myriads of regulation variables in our body when they exist in an equilibrium that maximizes survival in the face of the SubstanceSet present at any time. Central to this equilibrium is the concept of "Set Points" which represent the value to which each of the control variables has to be regulated-to in order for Homeostasis to represent the best equilibrium possible in the face of the SubstanceSet that the body is confronted with at any one time. The array of "set points" values when this SubstanceSet is derived from the optimal total diet (BeneDiet) with no pathogens present, is different from the array of "Set points" with the same diet but with a pathogen present.
For example, if no pathogens are present and the total diet is optimal (BeneDiet), the body temperature set point is in the normal range of 36 to 37 degrees Celsius. However, if the body is confronted by a SubstanceSet which contains a pathogen that is causing an infection, the body will shift these set points to be in the range of 38 to 41 degrees Celsius to make the body inhospitable to the pathogen causing the infection. When the body temperature exceeds 37 degrees Celsius we say that the body has a "fever". When the body is "fighting" a pathogen that is causing an infection, Homeostasis must regulate to a "fever" to maximize the body chance of survival because the higher temperatures weaken or kill the pathogen.
When I was growing up in the early 1940s, I remember being in bed with fevers in the range of 38 to 41 degrees Celsius for several hours every day for several days when I was battling my "Children's" diseases around age 6. I remember spending the last two weeks of my grade one year in bed fighting the Mumps with fevers often exceeding 39.5 degrees Celsius. I still remember the terrible pain in my jaws! Those were the days when the body had to fight its own battles! Today, when we have fever most of us reach immediately for Tylenol to bring the fever down. Is this practice better for us or worse? I'll discuss this more below.
As the SubstanceSet in our body keeps changing (as a result of factors such as what we ingest, what we are exposed to, or what we are doing physically) the Homeostasis set points must continually be adjusted to maximize survival with the various SubstanceSet that the body is being confronted with. What in our body does these adjustments? It is BodyWisdom. Accordingly, BodyWisdom intrinsically "knows" what is best for us at any one time. So if our body is fighting an infection, BodyWisdom "knows" that the body temperature has to be raised. And it does so by ensuring that at the same time all other regulating variable set points are also adjust to value that optimize survival.
Body Wisdom through the Lens of my Roots
Mostly because of my roots growing up in a peasant community within which the importance of good nutrition was on everybody's lips, I somehow always understood the importance of nutrition and physical work to stay healthy. And I also learned early that we are not all the same when it come to what food is good for us. My older brother thrived on all kind of food, but I could not eat the same things that he ate and feel as well he did. For example in late August the wild peaches in our fields ripened and my brother was always under the peach trees eating peaches. But I learned that when I would eat the peaches, I did not feel too well. Unfortunately we did not have many food choices in those days, and if one could not eat whatever was available, they would starve. And because I could not eat everything that was available, I starved. I had a picture of when I was about 12 years old that showed how skinny I was growing up. I was so skinny that my mother made the picture disappear because it bothered her to remember those days.
So, as a result of my experience supplemented and often reinforced by the books and articles that I have been reading, I learned pretty early that if one wants to stay healthy, they have to eat good food and tune their diets so that it contains only the food items that they feels well with, eliminate all those that they do not feel well with, and avoid daily use of prescription drugs. Unfortunately it was not until my heart attack at age seventy, that this sunk-in real well.
I completely believe that the body has the Wisdom to keep itself healthy as allowed by the nutritional substances available in the body. Otherwise, how could humans have survived so successfully for millions of years without modern medicine. At any one time the Body Wisdom drives the Body Control System (BodyRegs) controls to an Homeostasis that represent the optimal health posture possible with the nutritional and non nutritional substances available at that time. So, if in a particular homeostatic state the blood pressure is judged to be too high, this is the wrong judgement because, having considered all other variables, Body Wisdom has judged that the "high" blood pressure is needed for the best health possible. If the doctor prescribes a blood pressure drug which disable blood pressure control mechanism, this forces the Body Wisdom to guide the remaining functional controls into a homeostatic state that is less healthy than the state that existed before the drug was administered.