The Health Guide for Preventing Modern Diseases
aka How To Save Your Life

Every person living in the United States has over a 1 in 3 lifetime chance of dying from a preventable disease. That means you and me, and the numbers are even worse for our children (almost 1 in 2). Most of the world has much lower chances, but their risks keep rising as they adopt the western diet and lifestyle.

Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other modern diseases aren't some nebulous things that happen to "other people" any more. Half of us are going to kill ourselves with our diet and lifestyle. About half a million people are going to die from cancer alone, in just this one year.

I don't know about you, but that fills me with fear and outrage. I don't want my life decided by a damn coin flip. So I've searched for the last decade for what I can do to avoid dying. When I was younger I might have quipped, "Well, of course we need a good diet to improve our health" and then blithely reached for another brownie. Now I am telling you in deadly earnest, "Living a better lifestyle is a necessary survival tactic."

Wow... just wow. Is it really that bad?

Yes. It's really that bad. I'm not even talking about quality of life issues here, especially during our later years. This is just whether we'll painfully kill ourselves when we didn't have to, and lose almost two decades of extra life.

I know you don't want to hear this; I don't want to tell it to you. It's easier to just stick our heads in the sand and hope that some smart person somewhere invents a pill that will save us all, allowing us to continue doing what we have been without consequence.

But that's not going to happen. We have to take responsibility for our own health. There's a lot of information how to do that, too much in fact, and some of it seems conflicting. I've sifted through the mountain and identified the stuff reputable authorities agree on. And there is good news: we can avoid every modern disease, if we improve our diet and lifestyle. That's why these conditions are called preventable.

Why should I trust you and your recommendations?

Put simply, you should trust me because I'm like you. I'm a concerned citizen who is trying to make sense of things. I have no affiliation with anyone nor hidden agendas. I just need to know, for my own sanity, what the safest course of action is to save my own life. And since I've spent ten years figuring it out, I thought I'd share my findings so you don't have to go through the same trouble.

As for the recommendations, none of them are mine. I'm going to be citing tons of other people who do have the relevant and impressive qualifications in science, medicine, nutrition, and health. Everything I'm going to tell you is well established, and someone else's idea. My main focus is merely distilling and highlighting the important parts you need to know, today, in order to keep you and your family alive.

Something new that I have done is economic analysis to identify the best areas to invest our time in. There's lots of good advice out there, but we have limited time and effort to spend. We're going to rate guidelines by common economic metrics to identify the best things to do: first, with greatest benefit / effort, that cost the least, etc.

Sincerely,
Kim E Lumbard
June 2011

The Radical Solution Summary

We have become disconnected with six vital biological needs for cellular and organismic health: Need What we need What we do H2O / Na A precise water to sodium ratio Drink harmful malhydrating drinks instead of water, and consume too much added sodium Sunlight Frequent daily sunlight Shun the sun, use sunscreen and other health-reducing skin products Oxygen Get ample oxygen outdoors Stay indoors, smoke, chest-breathe, and reduce our oxygen metabolism Motion Frequent walking / full body motion Have long sedentary periods, which impair crucial body systems Food Eat fresh, whole foods Subsist on dangerous edible products that ruin our health Eustress Happiness, challenge, and relaxation Lead hurried lives filled with chronic distress, loneliness, and discontent We further ignore several highly corrective healing approaches, many with large impact on our mental health: Heal What we want What we do Sweat Periodic heavy sweating Climate control, avoid heat and exertion, and "never let them see you sweat" Sleep Ample restful sleep every day Sleep deprive ourselves, shift our times, go to bed too late, and get sleep without rest Timing Constant nourishment and activity Haphazardly eat, digest poorly, and go long periods without food or movement Friends Social contact with those who care Isolate ourselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually from others Purpose A meaningful reason to live and thrive Extinguish our passions with unfulfilling security and unchallenging monotony

LEGEND     Something... great for us that we need to GO get good for us that we want to get bad for us that we want to avoid deadly to us that we must STOP     Indicates... an essential requirement a curative recommendation (for nursing) a complete restriction an avoidance restriction a guideline best done occasionally

So the insanely radical solution is... to actually listen to what mothers have been telling their kids for time immemorial. "Drink more water. Go outside and play. Eat your vegetables. I want you to be happy. Work up a good sweat. Get enough sleep. Have something to eat. Share with your friends. No matter what you do, I love you and believe in you." Hopefully this wisdom is self-apparent. If not, then we will demonstrate why this simple advice is an incredibly sound prescription for health and longevity.

In general, it is more beneficial for us to seek health-improving situations than merely avoiding risks factors. We need to reconnect with healthy, natural forces.

Foundation Requirements

Not only is this foundation necessary for optimum health, these requirements also have the highest ratio of benefit / effort. You realize benefits very quickly, within days. A month of concerted effort will bring you to peak benefit. All the requirements are cash positive: they are free, some actively save you money, and all profoundly reduce total life expense. Depending on your preferences, there may be one-time purchases involved (like tan-thru clothing). All the requirements are time-positive: you live far longer than the amount of time you spend doing them. By every economic metric, these requirements are the best area to focus on. They are nearly an order of magnitude better than their nearest competitors.

DRINK WATER (2L/day per 80 lbs) Min 2L, Max 8L, then to indicators away from MEALS with SEA SALT (1/2 tsp per 2L) WARM (not CHILLED / ICED) EVERYTHING ELSE, especially SODA pop, ALCOHOL, SUGARY drinks (like JUICE), and CAFFEINE; away from MEALS TABLE SALT and SODIUM Every COUPLE DAYS... Drink TEA, mild ALCOHOL, or MILK; after a MEAL	Your water to salt balance is central to good health. We are malhydrated with too little water and too much sodium. This forces our bodies to ration and retain both, leading to many problems. Three big issues are: it causes distress, the system-wide decline of nutrient transport, and promotes cancer via changing cell parameters. Malhydration also impacts the immune system, blood pressure, lungs, joints, and quality of life. We do not manage this balance at all, and we must connect sodium and water intake. A typical fast food sandwich has upwards of 1500mg of sodium in it, which requires at least 3L+ of pure water to counterbalance. We ingest too much sodium, far too little water, and too many other drinks that further malhydrate us. We must drink excess water and sweat more to correct our malhydration.		Summary References Water Cure Body's Many Cries for Water Liquid Candy Hooked On Juice Water Ref
GET SUNLIGHT every day on after meal OUTDOOR WALKS especially CHILDREN SUNGLASSES / tinted lenses SUNBURN / RAPID TANNING SKIN PRODUCTS, tanning OIL, SUNSCREEN / SPF products Every WEEK... SUNBATHE NUDE, COOL / WET, at MORNING, especially in SPRING Take a RELAXING HOT BATH	Suppose I told you that I know of a pill that could give you most of the benefits of exercise without exertion. This pill naturally boosts your immune system (the holy grail of all medicine). It's a broad spectrum antibiotic, but bacteria can't gain a resistance to it, and it becomes safer on repeated use. This pill prevents almost all disease including cancer, increases your longevity, balances your hormones, reduces stress, improves your mood, and even helps you sleep better. To make it work, you have to take it 3 times a day after meals, and then walk for 10-15 minutes to activate it. (That's because it uses no chemicals of any sort, it's just a ball of pure healing energy.) It has a side effect that can't be removed: it makes you more attractive. How much would you pay for that pill? Well, you can't buy it, because it is already free. It's called Sunlight with UV (TM).		Sunlight The UV Advantage The Healing Sun Health and Light Exploring the Spectrum Light Treatment in Surgery Skin Cancer Foundation American Diabetes Association Light Ref
STAND and MOVE FREQUENTLY TAKE CALM DEEP BREATHS DANCE and PLAY OUTDOORS SMOKING and lung impairment PROLONGED INACTIVITY like SITTING or LYING down MERCURY FILLINGS Excessive AC, target 80F ~ 26C Every COUPLE DAYS... AIR YOUR HOME, DAY or NIGHT STRETCH do some JUMPING JACKS	Motion and oxygen are two critical ingredients to your whole body circulation and metabolism. They are the rate limiters to every chemical process and are essential to cellular health. When cells receive proper raw materials, they basically fix themselves; otherwise, all cellular function suffers. Moreover, our immune system needs regular motion and oxygen in order to combat toxins, anaerobic microbes, and pH imbalance. We desire light, frequent movement more than occasional heavy exertion. Simply standing and taking a short walk outside has tremendous benefit, as does dancing. We also want as much fresh air as we can get. This entails many things: taking deep breaths, to stop smoking, and airing our homes. When we play outdoors we get the combination of sunlight, fresh air, motion, and eustress.		American Lung Association IAOMT Diaphragmatic Breathing Oxymotion Ref

Core Guidelines

Both of these guidelines require an investment phase of weeks to months before they pay substantial dividends. During investment, their benefit / effort is small and in some cases effort > benefit initially; after investment, their benefit / effort continues to grow. Benefits peak around your ideal weight and temperamental happiness then remain constant. These guidelines are barely breakeven cash-wise. They require more routine expense but incur less overall medical expense. (That's from a consumer perspective; from a social burden / insurance company view, they are hugely cost effective.) If your investment period before peak is P (say two years to get to your ideal weight), then these guidelines only become time-positive after about 2P. Since the time you can gain after breakeven is bounded only by your lifespan, these guidelines are still wise investments despite limited immediate return. The earlier you do them, the better.

EAT FRESH, WHOLE FOODS MAINLY VEGETABLES (plants) half COOKED, half RAW With range-fed MEAT / SEAFOOD EDIBLE PRODUCTS REFINED or FAST FOODS especially SUGAR/HFCS, FLOUR products, and OILS Products that don't SPOIL Every WEEK... TREAT YOURSELF to any meal or an after-meal DESSERT Eat a tiny portion of ORGAN MEAT	Food is something that comes directly from nature: a plant or an animal, whether on land or from the sea. THAT'S IT. Everything else you see in a modern supermarket is a harmful edible product, which is 90%+ of all sales. Refinement of food into edible products is the primary source of danger in our diet. Specifically, the Four Horsemen of Death (sugar, high fructose corn syrup, refined flour, and processed oil) ruin our health: disrupting hormones, immune function, intestinal flora, and organs. The Four Horsemen literally age us before our time. The standard for what we eat should be the presence of proven health benefit, not the absence of harm. Fresh, whole food is known to be good for you; if you eat food, your health will improve. Edible products are known to be bad for you. If you eat edible products, your health will decline.		Summary References USDA's Choose My Plate Reversing Heart Disease Reversing Diabetes Eat to Live In Defense of Food Sugar Busters! Diet Food Ref
BE HAPPY, SMILE, LAUGH, PLAY, and ENJOY RELAX, specifically at MEALS BE GRATEFUL and OPTIMISTIC BE SOCIAL and feel LOVED DISTRESS and DESPAIR ANGER / SEVEN DEADLY SINS JUDGMENT WORRY and ANXIETY Every WEEK... HAVE SWEATY GOOD SEX preferably with a partner you love	The hormones managed by your organs are responsible for all chemical regulation in your body, and internal balance is the definition of good health. When hormones work properly we feel good, think clearly, and enjoy life. This tight relationship with both mood and mind enables us to positively affect our hormone balance through emotions, attitude, and lifestyle. There are two kinds of stress: good eustress and bad distress. Eustress like happiness, social activity, challenges, sex, and flexible optimism improve our hormone balance; while distress like injury, strong emotions, drug use, feeling powerless, and bad attitude disrupt our hormones. Perceived time starvation and life dissatisfaction are two major causes of chronic distress and discontent. We must seek eustress and avoid distress to improve our health.		Happiness and Health How We Choose to Be Happy The How of Happiness Kill Stress Dangers of Stress Eat More, Weigh Less Escape From Freedom Flow: Psychology of Optimal Experience Happy Ref Here

Nursing Recommendations

The benefit / effort ratio for the nursing recommendations depends on your health. If you are in obese or in poor health, their initial benefit is large. However, as you become healthier, they give diminishing returns, and the curative recommendations can be relaxed. Essential requirements should always be followed, as should all avoidance restrictions. Curative guidelines peak early and then decline in benefit, while lifelong guidelines build to a peak then give sustained benefit. Timely recommendations typically have a high benefit / effort ratio, but being rate limited are only worth doing occasionally.

These recommendations are mostly cash neutral; you may save some money if you currently buy supplements or purchase according to advertisements. Nursing is very time intensive. The biggest line item on your time balance sheet is watching television. If that was over 90 minutes per day and you eliminate it, you always come out time positive. Otherwise, you are only time positive if you are currently unhealthy; healthy people barely breakeven. Hence, these recommendations are mainly for nursing yourself to health. Once healthy, you can continue them or not as you prefer.

EAT RADICALLY BALANCED with a variety of SPICES Timely BALANCED SNACKS EAT SLOWLY, with COURSES SUPPLEMENTATION including drugs, pills, and powders (UNLESS you must due to a pressing medical condition) UNBALANCED SNACKS Every YEAR... FAST or GREEN DIET CLEANSE PAMPER YOURSELF to the beach, mineral / mud bath, sauna, or massage	Circadian Rhythms Why balance is important / supplements are bad Periodic resetting Balance summary here		Summary References Cortisol Connection Diet South Beach Diet Radical Ref
GET AMPLE, RESTFUL SLEEP Watch SUNRISE and SUNSET LIGHT PHYSICAL ACTIVITY for 1 hour straight each day FIND your PURPOSE ARTIFICIAL LIGHTING especially AFTER SUNSET TELEVISION / COMPUTERS ADVERTISEMENTS Every FEW DAYS... Do a GOOD DEED for SOMEONE ELSE that makes them HAPPY	One of Ben Franklin's 13 virtues was industry: "Lose no time; Be always employ'd in something useful; Cut off all unnecessary actions." Seek importance, not convenience Activity Summary here		Man's Search for Meaning Activity Ref Here

Further Details

There you go. If you follow this prescription, you will avoid heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, and a host of other preventable modern diseases. Print out a couple pages with these icons and cut them into the seven squares. Paste each one someplace where it will best remind you to follow that particular guideline (your fridge door, computer monitor, work desk, television, remote control, morning mirror, wallet / purse, cell phone case, what have you).

At this point, you know how to improve your health and the executive summary reasons for doing so. If just knowing how to save your life is all you were looking for and you feel pressed for time, then all you need to read are a few more how to's and you'll know what to do in detail:

Make PDFs once done, provide print link
  Mod print version of page with javascript
  Bullet point here when done
    Hydration how to
    Hydration Chart
    Sunlight How to
    Sunlight Chart

If you are a curious sort and want to know why this stuff works, read on.

The Radical Solution Explained

• We eat too many acid-forming foods and drinks, chronically malhydrating us
• Our meals are severely imbalanced, as is our manner of eating
• We subsist on cheap but harmful edible products with too low a Nourishment / calorie ratio
• This yields weak digestion, undernourishment, and overeating

• We've disconnected ourselves from fundamental biological needs: water, sunlight, oxygen, motion, food, and eustress
• Time starvation creates chronic distress and dissatisfaction
• Money is the primary factor in decisions, instead of improving the quality of human life
• This leads to hormone imbalance, unhappiness, and degradation

• Avoiding sunlight on our eyes creates melatonin antagonism, inhibiting bodily repair
• Distressed and hurried eating creates insulin resistance, preventing proper nourishment
• Chronic distress itself creates cortisol antagonism, depleting body stores
• This hormone antagonism skews basic bodily functions

• We are given truthful but partial information, and therefore make bad decisions based on harmful myths
• We incorrectly apply the reductionist viewpoint, usually because of constant advertising from biased sources
• We pay too much attention to fads and controversy, and too little to evidence-based common agreement
• Consequently, we focus our corrective efforts in unproven, ineffective, and/or counterproductive areas

Antioxidants are substances that cooperate with body systems to inhibit free radical formation, make them tend to bond to safe stuff, or to correct things that the free radicals mucked up.

In short: free radicals are bad, and antioxidants are good.

Radicals are constantly being created in our bodies in a variety of ways. Some things increase the probability they will be created, while others decrease the chances. A very high probability chemical recipe is

charged ion + (poly)unsaturated fat + low antioxidants

=

Free Radical

In the American diet, this translates into:

acid-formers + processed oils + few fresh, whole plant foods

=

Free Radicals

We are keenly interested in free radicals because of a known reaction involving them:

Free Radical + acid pH + low oxygenation

=

Cancerous cell

=

Proven cancer promoter

pH and Free Radicals

Every time we ingest something with a pH away from 7, we create ionic solutions that increase the probability of free radical generation. An ion is not a free radical, but ions participate in several of the chemical recipes that create them. The net charge imbalance also plays a role, of which pH is a proxy measurement.

Now, acidic and basic substances usually react and neutralize one other, moving the resultant pH toward 7. The stuff that wants to donate electrons (+) gives it to the stuff that wants to grab the electrons (-), resulting in a net zero effect.

There are two subtleties we need to be aware of. First, the pH of a food and the pH a food induces in our bodies can be different. For example, most milk is slightly alkaline but has an "acid forming" effect. While fruits have citric acid they largely have an "alkaline forming" effect in the body. We only care about the net digested effect, so henceforth when we say "acidic food" we really mean "acts to lowers pH in the body". Here's a helpful chart with the pH of things we commonly eat. The More Ranked Food sections in the middle bottomish are the most useful.

The second is that pH is a log scale. That means a one point difference in pH is a factor of ten, so there is a 100-fold difference between pH 5.0 and 7.0. If we eat a small amount of an extremely acidic food, then it takes a lot of alkaline foods to compensate, to return us to safe chemical neutrality again.

[Scientists will (quite rightly) say the more accurate picture involves osmolar concentrations of competing ionic species, their relative pKa acidity, protein cycles, and ion trapping. These are important quantitative details but don't alter the qualitative picture, so we omit them. We are deliberately simplifying.]

The Deliberate Approximation and Poor Digestion

Alkaline foods are in general fruits and vegetables, and those also happen to be chock full of antioxidants. So we get hit with a double whammy. Not only are we not neutralizing ionic imbalance with alkaline foods, we aren't getting enough antioxidants to prevent and repair the damage the resultant free radicals do.

Now, for some modern diseases like osteoporosis, this is the real mechanism of action. The body keeps a constant pH in the blood, so the response to too much acidic intake is to pull calcium (via an alkaline salt) from our bones. For other preventable diseases like cancer, the mechanism of action is indirectly influenced by acidity and free radicals. And in some cases, no one knows what the heck is really going on.

We're going to focus on the pH model anyhoo for two main reasons. One, it is easy to understand, and is the actual underlying cause of many health problems. Two, it gives us the same exact diet and lifestyle recommendations we get from other, more sophisticated analyses. So we're going to encourage this way of looking at food even though the real benefit often lies elsewhere (such as the effect different foods have on our hormones, metabolism, or immune system).

When we more closely analyze what's happening with preventable diseases, we'll discover a consistent theme. A variety of digestion problems play a huge role in our ill health. This poor digestion causes a vicious cycle to form, where the body signals us to eat more, we overeat, and then do the same things to reinforce our digestion problems. This cycle increases calories while decreasing nourishment. Once we compensate for these problems, the body corrects itself at its own pace. So much of our attention will be focused on every last thing we can do to improve nourishment and digestion.

Hormones and Antagonism

Hormones are chemicals manufactured by our organs that act as messengers, signalling our body to do something; often they coordinate multiple parts of the body simultaneously. For example, when we eat, loads of nutrients are dumped into our bloodstream by our intestines. The pancreas releases the hormone insulin to signal cells to absorb these nutrients, smoothly transferring them wherever they need to go.

Hormone timing is very important, and most hormones are keyed to specific triggers. If too much insulin were released away from a meal, then the available nutrients in our blood would plummet and we would crash. If too little insulin is released after a meal, then our blood is saturated with too much stuff which damages the rest of our body. We need the right amounts of hormones at precise times for optimal health.

Hormones can be released at the wrong time because of spurious cues, and this can result in hormone antagonism. For example, the adrenal glands mobilize body reserves using cortisol, which tells cells to dump nutrients into the blood for emergency use. If cortisol and insulin are present at the same time, then cells get mixed messages. The two hormones "fight" each other, making each one less effective.

Two common kinds of antagonism are melatonin and cortisol. The former is caused by lack of visual sunlight cues interfering with our photoperiod, and the latter from chronic distress. These have wide-ranging adverse effects on our health, particularly our mental health and energy level.

So here's the first approximation of what's happening with our lifestyle: we've become disconnected from the natural triggers that manage our hormones. We want to seek hormone balance, where hormones work harmoniously each at the proper time.

Mention anabolism vs catabolism?  Maybe better in metabolism section

Insert graphic here: regulator, buffer, active form

Amino acid pool, muscles are the buffer
Calcium, bones are the buffer
  Calcium is also the buffer for intracellular energies
Water, intracellular fluid is the buffer

This buffer often acts as a long term reservoir. We get vitamin D only occasionally, but it gets stored and doled out in appropriate amounts in real time. Thus, for the vast majority of nutrients we eat, we only need to get enough over a period of time; the body takes care of the rest. That's a critical reason to eat a diverse diet, to ensure that we keep all our body buffers fully stocked.

However, there are some crucial things the body cannot store, and these have to be eaten regularly, optimally every day. Among these are water soluble vitamins like B and C, zinc, and several antioxidants. The retention of these unstorable nutrients ranges from one day to about a week.

Most importantly, each of these nutrients tends to have a chemically active form and a less reactive storage form. Dietary Vitamin D (calciferol) doesn't do jack, and needs to be converted to calcidiol for the body to store it. As needed, the body converts this to the active form (calcitriol), which has a lifespan less than a day. It is this latter form that confers the main health benefits of the vitamin.

Differentiate between cap and flush buffers?
  Maybe three categories might be more illuminating

Altogether, this means the rate at which we can utilize nutrients is limited by the buffers of other nutrients. For any given process in the body, there is a rate limiter which governs how fast it can go. Often it is a hormone, other times it is another reactant, it can also be a catalyst, and occasionally it isn't a chemical or nutrient at all. The key point is: rates increase with balance. The more balances we can maintain, the faster our bodies can fix themselves. We must gradually increase the function of all body systems together, because they are all dependent on one another.

Almost everything that our body needs it wants at a certain optimal rate (grams of protein per week, minutes of sunlight per day, liters of oxygen per minute, etc.) These intakes have both minimum and maximum rates, but we often focus on one and neglect the other. For example, 20-30% of our diet should be whole fats, but we are so concerned about reducing fat intake we forget we want at least a 20% minimum. (It actually turns out the optimal rate of fat intake is 30%.)

Minerals should be consumed in exact ratios because the body uses them in combination packets. If we get too large a dose of one mineral, we reduce the store of another. Thus, we want mineral balance, both in the food we eat and our body buffers. (It is possible we can extend this concept to all nutrient balance, though currently only the mechanisms for water and minerals are well established.)

In addition, other kinds of balance are also health-promoting. We want portion balance of the kinds of food we eat at each meal, macronutrient balance of every meal and snack, and radical balance of the timing we eat meals and snacks relative to when we sleep and the diurnal cycle.

Our imbalanced diet is a primary cause of our health problems. What we eat and how we eat it upsets our internal balances (pH, body buffers, and hormones). In addition, we create hormone antagonism by overactivating contrary hormone systems at the same time. When our internal balances are skewed, our cellular and mental health decreases. When we say someone is healthy, we really mean:

Organismic Health

=

Cellular Health + Internal Balances (Neutral pH, Ample Body Buffers, Hormone Balance) + Mental Health

However, there is one special case where our rate of absorption is not limited: energy nutrients. The rate your body can store excess energy is high... much faster than you could possibly eat! In addition, our reservoir is very large, so our ability to store carbohydrates as body fat is immense. Hence, obesity.

Reductionism Mistakes and Cofactors

The reductionist view doesn't work for three reasons. First, it is only the active form of a nutrient that matters, and the conversion rate from the storage form is usually rate limited by something else, not the nutrient itself. If you want more vitamin D, then you need more alkalinity and sunlight; that's because serum calcium, ParaThryroid Hormone (PTH) and calcitriol production are all intertwined. Eating more vitamin D merely increases body stores, it doesn't affect production of the active form in the kidney, since that is controlled by PTH (the something else). As another example, we eat calcium in order to build strong bones. But bone building is rate limited by active Vitamin D (the something else), not calcium. Altogether, that means the best thing you can do for healthy bones is to get sunlight! Increasing ingestion of a nutrient in isolation rarely confers more health benefit.

The second strike against reductionism is that having too much of something is often just as bad as having too little. Getting too much vitamin D is harmful, in some cases lethal. There are known toxicity limits on the majority of nutrients; the conspicuous lack are the nutrients the body cannot store. Balance is the desired goal, specifically of body buffers. Seeking balance removes rate limiting bottlenecks, while isolated nutrient excesses do not.

The third and most compelling reason why reductionism fails is food cofactors, i.e. the other things in the same food, or in food eaten at the same time. Food cofactors have a profound effect on how much of each nutrient gets absorbed, and in some cases can have inhibitory effects. This is related to bioavailability, how much of a nutrient gets digested, absorbed, and is useable by the body.

Zinc is an excellent example. There are many plant foods that have zinc in them, but eating those results in little bioavailable zinc. Animal meats have zinc and in addition have the cofactors that create the biologically active form of zinc. So as far as zinc is concerned, you'd be much better off eating the plants and meat together at the same meal.

Spices are another classic cofactor example. Tumeric has a number of health benefits, and is a generally good spice to use. However, when tumeric is combined with a small amount of pepper (piperine), the beneficial effects are increased dramatically.

Cofactors effects are even more pervasive than activation and catalyzation. For example, Vitamin C protects Vitamins A and E from degradation in the body. So even though Vitamin C doesn't interact chemically with either, it still indirectly increases their utilization. There are endless examples of these long-range influences. Nutrients are most effective within an internally balanced body.

Does this mean you have to learn all the cofactors and spice interactions? Not really. It's very simple: a fresh, whole food has the cofactors you want, and an old traditional folk dish usually has precisely the right spices.

[Note that there is one class of supplement that has been demonstrated to give benefit even in isolation: the nutrients the body cannot store. Their function is substantially improved when taken with their activating cofactors. If you take B-complex, C, zinc, or antioxidants, do so with meals.]

The Distillation Fallacy and Whole Foods

Another big mistake we make is to think concentrating a food increases its health effectiveness, which I dub the distillation fallacy. The more a food has been changed or processed, the worse it is for your health. Period. An apple is a healthy fruit. Apple juice is a unhealthy drink. Supplements like multi-vitamins are useless unless you eat it after a well-balanced meal. Even then, because of buffering, you likely didn't receive any health benefit.

We mistakenly view our foods as drugs. Refinement of a drug makes it more potent. In highly skilled hands, that makes them more useful. Refinement of foods does exactly the same thing, but when used indiscriminately makes them more dangerous. Anyone can eat a poppy seed safely, but everyone gets addicted to opiates. Refinement of food into edible products is the primary source of danger in our diet. This is true in general, but we now have ample evidence of how sugar, high fructose corn syrup, refined flour, and processed oils ruin our health. They are the Four Horsemen of Death.

Fresh, whole foods have maximal health and nutritional value, because they are already internally balanced. Processed foods and isolated nutrients have much less, and in some cases, none. Just because an edible product has a nutrient on the ingredient label doesn't mean you'll get any nourishment from ingesting it. This is especially true for added nutrients, since they lack cofactors or the right cofactor proportions to utilize them properly. If your body can't or doesn't use a nutrient, it doesn't matter that you ate it. You just poop it out, or have some nice shiny pee.

Edible product companies bombard us with the distillation fallacy to promote their products. All clinical evidence points to edible products being harmful. So advertisers will instead make a misleading health claim: "Our product contains nutrient X, and nutrient X is known to have (insert beneficial effect here)". They can't say that eating their product improves your health, because when studies are run where people actually eat edible products, their health declines. So companies must resort to false advertising to fool us into viewing food reductionistically, which is simply the incorrect way to view it.

"The thousands of vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals (beneficial plant compounds) in whole foods act synergistically together to create a more powerful effect than the sum of their parts, producing a result which cannot be recreated by supplements." - Vice President for Education at the American Institute for Cancer

There are hundreds of authorities which prove the health benefits of fresh whole foods in a variety of ways. There is not a single authority that promotes edible products to improve your health. Moreover, the evidence is that edible products are not only unsafe, they are actually dangerous.

[Athletes will sing hosanas in praise of the effectiveness of supplementation, because it helps them achieve high performance levels. What's important to understand is context: athletes strictly follow very carefully researched and designed regimens that create the conditions that makes those supplements useful. Said differently, they induce specific body imbalances that those supplements correct. Said yet another way, their requirements are so high they need supplements to remove rate limiting bottlenecks. Supplements can have tactical value within a high performance lifestyle context, but applied randomly are just as likely to be harmful as helpful. Many things that enhance performance decrease health and longevity.]

The Health Spectrum: Health and Unhealth arise from Small Behaviors

Insert graphic here: healthy, unhealthly, sick
First shows in: mood, energy, blood, illness
focus on: fitness, musculymphatics, health

The difference between healthy and unhealthy people is even more pronounced when they actually get sick. Healthier patients have higher recovery rates, shorter recovery times, and are more functional during the actual illness. Unhealthy patients have more severe symptoms, frequent opportunistic complications, and higher chronic relapse. So health affects not only our quantity of sickness but also its quality.

Moreover, each end of the spectrum is self-reinforcing: healthy people naturally engage in acts that make them healthier, and unhealthy people tend toward unhealthy behaviors. That's how they got healthy or unhealthy to begin with. Every act we take moves us slightly toward one end or the other, and the sum of those acts every day improves or decreases our health. We want big movements toward health, but that's not how it works. It is the consistent application of many, small, healthy activities over long periods of time that improves our health.

THERE IS NO MAGIC BULLET. We waste our efforts chasing "big scores" instead of focusing our attention on known, proven approaches. We are unhealthy because our internal balances are messed up, not because we are missing a magic pill from our diet. Those balances can only be recorrected slowly, and only if we stop doing the unhealthy activities that caused the imbalance in the first place.

Healthy and Unhealthy: Two populations with drastically differing life experiences

There is an old joke that exercise will extend your life by a few years, but you would spend all that time exercising! Let's work out the numbers. Implementing the Radical Solution in full requires a time investment of around 25 hours per week, or 1/7th of your time. Over seventy years this is a decade of investment, which gains you 17 years of life. So being healthy is a net time-positive investment, conservatively a 70% return on investment (ROI). Moreover, our 25 hour per week estimate isn't exclusive. Most of the health-promoting activities (walking, food preparation, (sun)bathing, etc.) can be readily multi-tasked with other desirable life actitivies (socialization, music appreciation, relaxing, reading, etc.) The true exclusive time investment is probably on the order of 10 hours per week, which means for every hour you must spend on being healthy you gain 3 extra hours of life, or a 300% ROI. More than 40 hours per week devoted exclusively to health activities gives diminishing returns. That's the breakeven point where the old joke become true: the 41st hour is only extending your life by one hour. One to three hours a day of healthy activity has the largest benefit / effort ratio, about half that time being exclusive.

There is a widely held belief among unhealthy people that being healthy wouldn't be "worth it" if they had to give up their vices. "I'd rather die happy than live miserable." This is based on the mistaken view that healthy lives are filled with denial and austerity, i.e. a lower quality of life. Healthy people are happier with a greater range of sensual pleasure than unhealthy people. They have more frequent and better sex, better moods, more sensitivity, and subtler palates. They get more visceral enjoyment from simpler activities, in particular eating. They can achieve the same perceptual high of a lot of alcohol with a small amount of chocolate. Healthy activities provide more sensual pleasure to healthy people than they do to unhealthy people.

Healthy and unhealthy people literally experience the world differently, and it is often difficult to reconcile the views. Said differently, it is a mistake to estimate future happiness given our current self. We must factor in how our future selves will perceive their own happiness. A healthier you receives tremendous pleasure from activities your unhealthy self derives little sensation from, and vice versa. Moreover, that future you psychologically weights things differently than you do now; things which aren't important to you now become important to that future you. The biggest regret your future you has is: "I wish I had..."

Being healthy is an incredibly sound personal investment with 70%-300% ROI. Healthy people live much longer and have a higher quality of life than unhealthy people. This is around a 25% longer x (some hard to quantify quality factor). If we were to take a stab at the quality of life factor, it might be something like this:

Total Happiness

=

Good Mood

X

Pleasure

X

Eustress

X

Feeling Worthy

X

Feeling in Control

X

Feeling Attractive

X

Spontaneous Physical Activity

Total Unhappiness

Bad Mood

Discomfort

Distress

Feeling Useless

Feeling Powerless

Feeling Unattractive

Rate of Illness X Severity of Illness

Each of these terms easily differs by a factor of two. Moreover, some terms might be more relevant than others (males might weight control over attractiveness, while females might do the opposite). Terms may also overlap (for example, feeling worthy may be central to your good mood). If we adopted this as a metric of quality of life, we could conservatively say healthy people have 8+ times the quality of life of unhealthy people. So investment in health and happiness not only extends our life but also profoundly increases its day to day quality.

Nourishment / Calorie (N/cal)

Nutrition, nourishment, and calories are different, they are not the same. Nutrition is a measure of the nutrients contained in a food. Nourishment relates nutrition to movements along the health spectrum. Calories are a measure of energy.

For a healthy person, nutrition and nourishment are reasonably synonymous. For an unhealthy person, nutrition and nourishment can be widely different. Depending on their condition, some foods might be highly nourishing to them and others much less so, even though they have the same nutrient density. Said differently, the same food with the same nutrients can offer different nourishment to different people, depending on their conditions. We tend to focus on nutrition, but what we really care about is nourishment: whether we get healthier or unhealthier.

Our bodies have a minimum nourishment that they require every day. When we receive more nourishment than our daily need, our health improves. When we receive less, our health decreases.

We also expend calories every day. When we eat more calories than we expend, we gain body fat. When we eat less calories than we expend, we lose body fat.

That means we have a target N/cal for our foods:

Nourishment / Day	=	N	=	Minimum Food Ratio
Calories / Day		cal

However, while calories are variable, nourishment is fixed. So a far more useful way of viewing things is:

• When we eat foods with high N/cal, we gain health and lose body fat
• When we eat foods with low N/cal, we lose health and gain body fat

A healthy person with a good diet is already receiving adequate nourishment; their nutritious foods already exceed their minimum N/cal. Consequently, a reasonable way for them to view losing weight is as managing their calories.

An unhealthy person with a bad diet is not receiving adequate nourishment; their less nutritious foods already fail to meet their minimum N/cal. The best way for them to view losing weight is as managing their nourishment. That means replacing foods with low N/cal with foods with high N/cal, as well as improve their digestion et al. Managing calories is an ineffective approach for unhealthy people. We are unhealthy and obese because we are undernourished. For unhealthy people, evaluating food in terms of nourishment and balance is far more productive than nutrients and calories.

Looking at food in terms of ratios can be illuminating. For example, sodium is a modern health hazard because our edible products have a "too high trifecta": Sodium / Water, Sodium / Nourishment, and Sodium / cal.

[It turns out N/cal isn't exactly the stat we want, because of extreme cases where N or cal approach zero. However, a normalized stat like this would go a long way to helping consumers make better food choices, mainly because they would see how dangerously low it is for the edible products they currently eat. The stat could be color coded, required to be listed on the front of packaging, and with a skull and crossbones if it falls below a certain limit.]

Cravings and Hunger

A healthy person with a good diet rarely feels hungry or has cravings. For them, hunger means that they need more nutrients in general, and cravings are an accurate indicator for specific nutrients. If they follow the signals their body is giving them, it leads to improving their health.

Unhealthy people chronically feel hungers and cravings. They are caught in two bad cycles. First, they have weak digestion and aren't receiving proper nourishment. So the body correctly signals for them to eat more in order to meet their nutrient requirements. This leads to an overconsumption of calories, because N/cal is too low.

Second, their internal balances are out of whack. Consequently, the body incorrectly sends craving signals, usually for foods that make the situation worse. Most importantly, if an unhealthy person follows these body signals, it worsens their health.

Irrespective of your health level, if you are eating properly, you should not feel hunger or cravings. "Properly" here includes: what you are eating, the manner you are eating it, your portioning at meals, and when you eat it.

Thus, while the particular cravings an unhealthy person has is suspect, the frequency of the signals is useful. Frequent hunger and cravings are cries from your body to improve your diet. They are not a normal, healthy response.

Starvation diets are counterproductive. They aren't effective, you can't stay on them, and they are dangerous to boot.

Disease and Approaches

There are two broad mechanisms of disease out there: infectious and preventable. Infectious diseases are caused by small germs that coopt our body systems. Left untreated, they usually run a course, and then have some residual consequence. An effective approach to combatting infectious diseases is to reduce exposure to infection vectors. Many infectious diseases have been eliminated from the first world because there is literally so little of the germ in the local biomass that people just don't get exposed to it.

Preventable diseases work very differently. They are caused by small, consistent biases in the local environment. These biases adversely affect our bodies, often disrupting a body buffer or the hormone(s) that regulates it. Eventually the long term misfunction of that one subsystem has widespread effects in the body, which is when we start noticing it. This has two important consequences. One, by the time we observe gross symptoms most of the damage has already been done. That's why modern diseases seem to strike out of the blue, and need to be caught early in order to treat them.

Two, unlike infectious diseases, trying to control exposure is an ineffective tactic. The most effective approach is to proactively compensate for the bias. Paradoxically, because the biases are so small, the corrections are also small, so tiny that they hardly seem like they could make any difference. Don't be fooled. The Radical Solution is simple, but when consistently applied, removes the risks for preventable diseases. But the reverse is also true. You can't skimp on the recommendations, just because they seem like such minor things and "oh it couldn't hurt just this one time". Remember, those small biases are going to kill half of us unless we counter them every single time.

A couple scary diseases in the US today are cancer and heart attacks. No matter how hard you try, you will never be able to control exposure to carcinogens and free radicals completely. At this very instant, each one of us has dormant cancers waiting to be promoted into dangers, and are generating damaging free radicals. Our most effective strategy is to become healthier. We need to create bodies that robustly fight off bad biases despite immersion in them. Now, if we can also control for exposure we should, but that is a secondary goal. Our primary goal is to increase our health by improving our diet and lifestyle through applying several, small techniques consistently.

Prevention, Cure, Treatment, and Relief

		DAMAGE
CAUSE		Imbalance / Disease		Symptoms
#1 PREVENTION		#2 Cure / #3 Treatment		#4 Relief

Unhealthy states arise from an underlying cause. This cause induces an imbalance in our bodies, which eventually leads to a disease. Along the way, we present with different symptoms depending on the advancement of the condition. As our condition progresses, we do damage to the body. Sometimes this damage is reversible, but more often it is not.

There are several ways to approach fixing a disease. The least useful is relief, where we alleviate the symptoms. The next form is treatment, where we act to remove the disease and/or change the imbalance. A related and preferable form is cure, where we not only fix this instance of a disease and correct the imbalance, we repair the damage that was done. The most desirable approach is prevention, where we address the underlying cause so that an imbalance never develops and damage is never done. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, a slug of treatment, and a ton of relief.

The success of modern pharmacology lies in tactical intervention. Pharmaceuticals provide excellent relief and considerable treatment, but drugs do not cure nor prevent. An antacid will instantly relieve your stomach and correct the acidic imbalance... this time. It does not cure the damage done to your stomach nor prevent it from happening again. Using pharmaceuticals to manage or improve health is a fundamentally flawed approach. The strength of drugs lies in life-threatening intervention; they completely fail at curing and prevention. Drugs are a method of last resort.

Our goal is to prevent disease naturally without drugs or supplementation. A major cause of modern diseases is our disconnect from basic biological needs: water, sunlight, oxygen, motion, food, and eustress. Satifying these essential needs provides relief, treatment, sometimes cure, and most importantly: constant prevention. Fulfilling biological needs is our frontline defense.

Correlation is not Causation

Interpreting information given to us can often be confusing because we need the complete context to make real sense of it. We are frequently only given partial data, and come to bad conclusions because of it. For example, suppose I told you these few facts:

• Alcohol consumption increases visceral body fat, i.e. "beer belly". This is true even for moderate intake (every other day after a meal in a social setting)
• Visceral body fat is correlated to higher incidence of heart disease, with confidence
• Heavy alcohol use / binge drinking increases your risk of heart disease

• Moderate alcohol consumption reduces risk of heart disease
• Moderate alcohol consumption relaxes you
• Distress causes body fat to move into your viscera from the rest of your body
• Distress is correlated to higher incidence of heart disease, with high confidence

It becomes clear that distress is a more important factor in heart disease. In this case, we'd say distress is a causal agent and visceral body fat is a proxy marker for stress. We'd also say alcohol consumption is a confound because at moderate levels it decreases stress while increasing visceral body fat (which goes counter to the typical correlation between distress and visceral fat) but then at high intakes reinforces the correlation and raises heart risk. We'd then try to calculate the contribution each causal agent makes to visceral fat; for example, other factors like malhydration also contribute central obesity.

Just because two variables are correlated, it doesn't mean that there is any direct causation between them. It usually happens that many variables need to be considered before a picture emerges that fits all the data. Moreover, affecting a proxy marker doesn't reduce our real risk unless it was through a causal agent. Reducing stress and alcohol consumption lowers heart disease, while ab crunches or attempts to reduce visceral fat directly do not.

In some cases, a risk factor is tightly bound with a true causal agent. Physical inactivity and smoking, for instance, directly impair our circulation and metabolism. In most cases, though, risk factors are only correlated to disease states and are not causal agents themselves. For example, income and education are two commonly measured risk factors, but are only indirectly related to causal agents.

The Harmful Myths: Fat, Cholesterol, Sunlight, and Degradation

The first is the Fat Myth: that dietary fat creates body fat, and is harmful to us. This myth got started because somewhere along the way, processed oils got grouped with animal fats. Processed oils are harmful to us. But fat (i.e. "the body fat in animal flesh whose cofactors we consume at the same time") is exceptionally healthy for us. In short: fat is good, and processed oils are bad.

The second is the Cholesterol Myth: that dietary cholesterol determines blood cholesterol, and is harmful to us. This myth began when atheroschlerosis got implicated in heart disease. All the cholesterol-based hypotheses have already been systematically disproven. We now understand that clotting factors and hormone balance are the relevant preventative factors. The actual root cause of heart disease is still unknown, but is most likely a response-to-injury mechanism, and more saliently is definitely not your cholesterol level. Summarizing: cholesterol is good, and distress is bad.

The third is the Sun Myth: that sunlight is a dangerous carcinogen, and we need to use sunscreen and shun the outdoors. This myth got started because sunlight is, in fact, a carcinogen. So are preservatives, pesticides, smoke, and the chemicals used in your bath products. You get more carcinogen exposure from your toothpaste than you do from the sun. When you sum up the exposure levels to carcinogens in aggregate you are safer outdoors than indoors (except for high smog urban areas, or near industrial plants). We receive many health benefits from being outdoors, especially the sun; we receive few benefits from being indoors, and being cooped up often reduces our health. Remember, what matters most is health-improving, not exposure control, even though the outdoors typically wins on both counts.

The last is the Degradation Myth, which is that our bodies and minds must inexorably degrade over time, and that's just the way it is. This one is the most insidious, because we see this happening all around us, and it seems self-apparent. But what we see is largely an unhealthy population barely surviving the onslaught of bad diet and harmful lifestyle. Observing elders in other countries a different picture emerges: they are active forces in their respective cultures and nothing like the frail and doddering elderly of the United States. A healthy person remains vital until the last few months of their life. The slow grind of aches, pains, mental impairment, distress, and illness are symptoms of chronic unhealthiness, not the natural state of aging or living.

Really mull that last part over. If you are unhealthy, how you are living right now is a pale shadow of the life the healthy you would be living. You need to stop accepting being unhealthy as the status quo, start fighting the toxic environment, and commit to regaining your vitality. Because once you've re-experienced what being healthy is like again (like being a vibrant young adult), you'll never want to go back to an existence of malaise.

Total Mortality and Rates of Disease

Once again, we are typically presented information about diseases in isolation instead of complete context, and are misled into bad decisions because of it.

Sunlight is a perfect example. Here are some facts:

• Sunburns significantly increase the risk of lethal melanomas (a kind of skin cancer). With current treatment, 1 in 7 melanoma patients die. UV is linked to sunburn.
• Accumulated sun exposure modestly increases the risk of ulcerating carcinomas (another skin cancer type), which are highly treatable (1 in 800+ patients die)
• Use of sunscreen increases total cancer rates, in particular the melanomas people put it on to prevent
• Regular sunlight dramatically decreases total cancer rates (including melanomas), especially among lethal deep tissue cancers (1 in ~4 patients die)
• Regular sunlight is known to prevent, treat, or cure over 400 other disease states, several lethal. The majority of health benefit demonstrably comes from UV.
• Diet influences burnability. Diets high in Vitamins A, C, E, and carotene and low in processed oils (particularly PUFAs) inhibit free radical formation and reduce burnability. Good diets tan, bad diets burn
• A host of medications increase photosensitivity, making us more likely to burn and shun the sun
• Sunlight initiates skin cancer, but does not promote it. Unhealthy local conditions in your body promote cancer, and are the preventable cause we should focus on. What matters is health, not exposure.

As a shorthand, we could have simply stated this:

• Regular sunlight profoundly decreases total mortality and rates of disease. This statement is still true if you sunburn, and further true even if you get skin cancer
• Regular sunlight uniformly improves your health

• Cholesterol is essential to cellular health. Every cell in your body makes and uses it on the spot. Blood cholesterol is a buffer to this intracellular system, not the primary provider
• Blood cholesterol levels are determined by hormone balance and response-to-injury, not dietary cholesterol. It responds to signals for cellular repair and growth, and does spot regulation
• Cholesterol levels are not a risk factor for heart disease for any woman, any male without a previous heart event, or any male over 50 (independent of heart events)
• Higher cholesterol levels only correlate to further heart disease among men younger than 50 that have already had a heart event. It is a proxy marker for distress and injury, and not a causal agent
• Higher cholesterol levels, specifically LDL, decrease total rates of disease, particularly infections and lethal strokes

• Higher cholesterol levels lower total mortality among all people aged 50+
• Cholesterol levels of around 200-250 mg/dl are associated with least total mortality among adults younger than 50

Lowest total mortality and rates of disease are achieved by seeking beneficial causal agents and removing adverse ones, not trying to manage the proxy markers that reflect those agents. Proxy markers are symptoms, not causes.

It is very important to look at the big picture when making health decisions. So, let's look at it.

The Big Picture

Big ass healthy picture, then big ass unhealthy picture

Digestive System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestion#Human_digestion_process

Lungs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lung

Skin
http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/picture-of-the-skin

Oxygen
http://altered-states.net/barry/update227/index.htm

What makes unhealthy people healthier is often much different than what makes healthy people healthier. For example, when we are sick we might take drugs that would be harmful to us were we not ill. So we have to be careful with our recommendations. In the same way that a healthy person shouldn't take drugs that correct sicknesses, they also shouldn't blindly follow the guidelines given to unhealthy people. The reverse is also true.

Some of our bad decisions arise from sincerely following the wrong set of guidelines. Healthy people follow the unhealthy guidelines, and unhealthy people follow recommendations meant for healthy people.

To make this explicit, all our recommendations will be phrased in two ways: what a healthy person should do, and what an unhealthy person should do. We call the former essential guidelines and the latter curative guidelines. Thus, it is important for everyone to self-assess their own personal health and then determine how much of each recommendation they should follow. The easiest metric to use is body weight. If you are obese, follow the curative recommendations; as you become your ideal weight, morph them into the essential.

In addition, your level of health also determines how strictly you should follow the Radical Solution. Healthy people have much greater latitude to eat and do what they want, because they are by definition better able to withstand mistakes they might make. Unhealthy people should initially implement all recommendations rigorously, without exception, and then gently ease back as they regain their health. That doesn't mean return to your current diet and lifestyle; it means focus more on the essential guidelines instead of the curative.

We are now in a position to describe why these recommendations are so effective at saving our lives. We will discover that it isn't just what we do, but the specific manner how we do it that influences our health outcomes.

Why Water

DRINK WATER (2L/day per 80 lbs) Min 2L, Max 8L, then to indicators away from MEALS with SEA SALT (1/2 tsp per 2L) WARM (not CHILLED / ICED)

Here's why you want to drink water:

• Water has a neutral pH, so it creates no free radicals
• Water has no calories, so adds no body fat. In fact, ample water helps you lose fat.
• Water is essential to digestion. It lubricates the alimentary tract, preventing damage. It is needed for every digestive secretion.
• Water cures ulcers and heartburn
• Water increases motilin
• Water is essential to breathing. It moistens cilia and alveoli, which both protects them and increases their efficiency.
• Water prevents and treats asthma and other respiratory ailments
• Water is essential to nutrient transport. When internal water flow is rationed, nutrient distribution also suffers.
• Water reduces insulin resistance
• Water enhances tryptophan retention, especially in brain cells
• Water reduces prostaglandins
• Water is essential to the immune system. Ample hydration is needed for proper lymphatic system function.
• Excess water reduces histamines, which are a part of the water rationing system
• Excess water prevents and treats allergies and other immune system malfunctions
• Excess water flushes toxins
• Excess water is essential to joint health. Ample hydration is needed for transcellular fluids.
• Excess water cures rheumatoid arthritis, joint pain, back pain, and other body aches
• Excess water prevents and treats a bunch of other stuff, like headaches, hiatal hernias, etc.

• Malhydration causes distress, and distress causes malhydration
• Malhydration impairs nutrient transport: from digestion, circulation, organ hydration, all the way to cellular uptake
• Malhydration constricts blood, in particular during digestion
• Malhydration decreases transport pathways in nerves, adversely affecting neurotransmitters
• Malhydration decreases intracellular pH and reduces cell size, making us ripe for cancer
• Malhydration skews the renin-angiotensin system
• Malhydration causes calcium loss
• Malhydration reduces our metabolism

The best times to drink water are right after you've awoken, a half hour before meals, right before a meal, and then sometime before you go to bed. The water you drink before and after sleep should be room temperature (not iced), as well as water you drink before a meal. If you are unhealthy, all water you drink should be warm without ice; that's the simpler and safer rule to remember.

A healthy person of ideal weight eating ample fruits and vegetables is usually net zero for essential water consumption: they get enough water from their foods to balance the water lost through breathing. The water they drink is to compensate for varying daily conditions like the weather, sweaty exercise, or urination. An unhealthy person, one who is overweight, and/or eating a bad diet needs much more water.

The hydration correction is in two phases. Imagine your body buffer as a bucket with a hole in it. We need large amounts of water to fill the bucket (much more than the hole loss), but then much less water once the bucket is full (just enough to keep up with the hole). Right now we drink when we are thirsty, which is when the bucket is empty. Our goal is to drink so that the bucket is always on the edge of overflowing instead. We want to drink water proactively, and never feel thirsty.

1. Filling Phase - Filling the bucket up. [Usually takes a couple days to weeks]
   • Target a 2 liter bottle per day for every 80 lbs of body weight. No matter what your weight, you should drink a minimum of 2L per day and a maximum of 8L (except extreme athletes who know what they are doing).
   • The first 2L you drink every day should be pure water. Any water you use to balance sodium intake should also be pure. All remaining water should have sea salt.
   • Mix a half a teaspoon of sea salt per 2 liter bottle. Use sea salt only, NOT TABLE SALT; the former is alkaline forming, the latter is acid forming and dangerous. Moreover, do it in exactly this ratio: both the salinity and alkalinity are essential.
   • The best sea salts to use are: Celtic, Himalayan, and RealSalt. Use RealSalt instead of table salt, and prefer Celtic salt in your water.
   • AVOID as much sodium in your diet as you can. If you do eat sodium, then match 2L of pure water per 1000mg of added sodium. This gives it around the same salinity as your 2L bottles of sea salt, though sadly it is still acidic instead of alkaline. "Added sodium" is anything you read on the food label of an edible product or that comes out of your shaker; the sodium in real food does NOT need to be water balanced.
   • Drink only warm water, room temperature or above
   • Ramp up your water intake by a 2 liter bottle every couple days until you reach your target OR you get indicators of over-hydration (see the chart below). Whenever the latter occurs, switch to the maintenance phase.
2. Maintenance Phase - Keeping the bucket topped off. [For the rest of your life.] You are now compensating for three factors:
   • Drink at least your daily loss, which is 1.5-3.5L + sweat per day. Sweat is highly variable, around 0.5-1L per day in arid conditions, 2L per heavy workout, and up to 8L per day under extreme conditions / workouts.
   • Drink to balance your sodium intake, or 2L of pure water per 1000mg of added sodium. Where possible, drink water before you eat a high sodium edible product. If you were at the USDA limit of 2300mg per day, you'd need 4.5L of pure water to compensate. The US average intake is 3400mg per day, which means unhealthy people need 7L of water per day just to balance their sodium intake. We neither need nor desire anywhere near this amount of sodium. One of the top six bullet points from the mammoth USDA 2010 Dietary Guidelines: Reduce added sodium.
   • Drink 0.5L excess water per day. This excess water is what actually reverses your malhydration and helps your body correct itself.
   • Periodically up your intake slightly until you receive indicators of overhydration, then back off. Keep topped off, not running dry.

Note that sea salted water is still useful even when you are healthy. The first 2L of pure water covers your daily loss and excess water. You should only drink pure water to balance sodium. So that majority of water you drink will be pure water. However, when you sweat, you want salted water or else you will lose sodium. The simple rule of thumb: first 2L fresh, same for sodium, sea salt rest.

Let's bring into stark contrast the pattern between healthy and unhealthy people:

	Healthy	Unhealthy
Diet	~800 mg sodium (Fresh Whole Foods)	>4,000 mg added sodium (Edible Products)
Added Sodium	~400 mg added sodium (salting food)	~400 mg added sodium (salting food)
Water Needs	~3L + Sweat	~11L + Sweat
Actually Drinks	2-3L water, more when thirsty	0-1L water, 2L+ other drinks
Results In	Not much, kidney corrects	Malhydration and hypertension

Refer to Appendix B: Malhydration Calculations for the nitty gritty details of what's actually happening with malhydration.

How do I know if I am properly hydrated?

Here's a chart of several indicators. The more conclusive indicators are near the top, but you should use several to more accurately determine your hydration level.

Under-Hydrated					WELL HYDRATED				Over-Hydrated					Notes
Thirst					Rarely thirsty (arid/exertion)				-					Strive to never feel thirsty. Pre-hydrate
														Your morning stool is the best guide, and overall regularity
Hard, cracked, irregular stool					Smooth, regular stool				Mushy, watery, frequent stool
														Urine naturally changes color / frequency; take a typical average.
Dark, infrequent urine					Light, regular urine				Clear, urgent, too frequent urine
														Many conditions can cause swelling; this is swelling without other cause.
Dry lips, skin, mouth, throat, eyes sensitive, irritable, or itchy skin					Moist and supple everything (without balm or moisturizers!)				Swelling and pressure especially around the eyes
Sticky saliva / swallowing, thirst or visceral blood rush while eating					Ample saliva while eating, energetic and alert after meals				Excessive drooling especially away from meals					Saliva is a solid indicator, but (dry) foods may confound it
														Common aches and pains are often signs of malhydration, but can have other causes. Uniform temperature requires both circulation and metabolism.
Stiff movement, joint and back pain; warm body, cool extremities at rest					Fluid, smooth movement; uniform good temperature				Imbalance, falling
														Many respiratory problems are rooted in malhydration, but they also require airborne particles or antigens to manifest
Allergies, asthma, frequent dry coughs					Cool lungs with moist breath				"fluidy" feeling lungs
Hypertension > 140/90 BP, Hypernatremia > 145 mEq/L sodium					110/70 blood pressure, 140 mEq/L sodium				Hypotension < 90/60 BP, Hyponatremia < 136 mEq/L sodium					Distress, hormones, fitness, and cell size confound these readings.
Headaches, listlessness, irritability					Clear-headedness, patience				Also headaches.					Your mood is regulated by your hormone balance, but malhydration can adversely affect both.

Note that sweating cannot be used as an accurate indicator of hydration, because too many factors affect it (in particular ones that have nothing to do with your health, like air temperature and humidity). However, sweating can be used as a rough metric of health: the more you sweat, the healthier you'll be.

Many things cause headaches having nothing to do with hydration. So while headaches are a sound indicator that something is wrong, they are very bad at telling you what.

Where you lie on the health spectrum determines your personal water needs and how much you should enforce them. If you are obese with any condition that water treats, then you should be on a tight regimen of mineralized water, and you will gain tremendous benefit from it. If you already have the indicators of good hydration, then water isn't a priority for you and your health-increasing efforts are better spent elsewhere.

How do I correct my malhydration?

There are four main ways to rebalance your water to salt ratio:

1. Excrete excess sodium in your urine. For a variety of reasons, this doesn't happen often or fast enough.
2. Sweat heavily for 20m+ straight. This is fast, excellent way. It is best paired with motion, but even lounging in a sauna will produce results
3. Take a relaxing hot bath for 20m+ after a clean shower. Once per year, use some baking soda and epsom salts.
4. Drink excess water. This is the easiest, safest way. It also has many other benefits.

1) Our fresh-water kidneys are designed to retain sodium, not dump it. Sodium is regulated by aldosterone from the adrenal glands; if you are chronically distressed, you are also signalling to hold onto sodium. If you are healthy, happy, and managing your water to salt intake, then urine alone is enough to maintain your balance. If you take in too much sodium and too little water or are often distressed (small, consistent biases), then your urine cannot compensate fast enough.

2) Sweat glands are also designed to retain sodium, but their capacity to do so is more readily exceeded than the kidneys'. That means that the longer you sweat, the higher the sodium concentration in your sweat; eventually you sweat the concentration in your extracellular fluid. Note that you MUST pre-hydrate to excess before heavy sweating for this to be effective. If you are under-hydrated, your body will overheat and dehydrate instead.

There is a caveat here. Rapid depletion of your sodium reserves can have adverse consequences. So the fact that sweating is the fastest way to shed sodium is a two-edged sword. Don't do heavy sweating too much or too often, and carefully manage it when you do.

3) Hot baths do much the same as sweating. Immersion also creates direct osmotic pressure to your skin cells, but only if your protective oily sebum has been temporarily washed away. Just using bath water will leech sodium from your body. The bicarbonate in baking soda is what your body actually uses to neutralize excess acid. Bath salts like epsom contain magnesium, which is typically also depleted with malhydration. Do not take regular baths with these! When used infrequently, they help restore body balance; when used too much, they are a small, consistent bias.

Saunas and spas should have an option to measure blood pressure and sodium levels before and after. This openly advertises one of the health benefits, and gives clients a metric to determine how much they need to apply it. It would be extra cash flow, and further medically legitimize it as a course of treatment for malhydration and hypertension.

4) Drinking excess water is the easiest way. While slower than sweating, it is also safer, and hence is the preferred recommendation. How to do this was already described above.

There is a simple law that could be enacted that would remove sodium as a direct health risk. Namely, make it illegal for any edible product to have a sodium to water ratio exceeding 0.2% saline [2 ppt], and recommend a target 1 ppt. Labeling would then change: 1.5-2 ppt would be "high sodium" and 0-0.5 ppt "low sodium". While edible product manufacturers won't like this because it will impact tastiness, the evidence in favor of it is well established and incontrovertible. This one act would overnight remove one of the three main causes of malhydration. Another cause could be reduced by putting a warning label on beverages indicating its "water deficit", i.e. how much water you need to drink to safely neutralize the adverse effects of the beverage. That label would serve as a constant reminder to drink water whenever someone reaches for a different drink, and the values will hopefully shock people into realizing how bad some beverages are for them.

Should we distinguish between high and low sodium states independent of water? 
  Doesn't seem needed, malhydration is overwhelming case

Sodium / Hyponatreia
  vomiting, headache, confusion, lethargy, fatigue, appetite loss, restlessness and irritability, muscle weakness, spasms, or cramps, seizures, and decreased consciousness or coma

Get reference for sweat time.  Calculate safe upper bound time = f(weight)?

Yes. If someone drinks a lot of sea water, their sodium balance goes out of whack, their blood pressure spikes, and they dehydrate the more they drink. If that person was already thirsty to begin with, the effects are potentially lethal. This is because 3%+ saline [or 30+ ppt] is hypertonic to body cells; the sodium to water ratio is too high.

Our sea salt cocktail is better viewed as mineral water than sea water. First, the concentration of sodium to water is around 0.13% [1.3 ppt]; 0.9% saline [9 ppt] is isotonic to the cell (which would be about 4 teaspoons of salt per 2 L). It's at precisely the lowest healthy range for your urine or mild sweat [22 mEq / L], allowing you to drink large amounts of it safely. Second, the effect it has on the body is similar to mineral tonics like glacial milk. Drinking properly mineralized water normalizes blood pressure, causes the body to excrete a favorable sodium/water ratio, and recorrects mineral balances.

However, we still need to be careful. Don't increase the sea salt, or drink more water than the recommendations above, thinking it will be more effective. It won't. Doing either to excess gives rise to other harmful effects, for different reasons. Don't drink just water in large quantities either; a 0% sodium to water ratio is too low, and in the long run causes other problems. Remember, water and sodium need to be in a precise ratio for optimum health. Follow the directions in order for your malhydration correction to be both safe and effective.

An alternate way of thinking of sea salted water is a multi-vitamin that actually works. There is clinical evidence that mineralized water improves health, along with evidence that multi-vitamins do not significantly impact health outcome. If you take multi-vitamins for "psychological protection", drink sea salted water instead.

The last way to view mineralized water is in terms of N/cal. Water is nourishing for everyone, balanced minerals are highly nourishing for unhealthy people, and there are no calories. So the conceptual N/cal is very high.

Why warm?

At the volumes of water you'll be consuming, chilled water could easily cause thermal shock. In addition, your enzymes are also tuned to temperature (though they are much more forgiving of temperature variation than pH).

A healthy person's metabolism is like a furnace; they can quickly heat up ice water without adverse effect. An unhealthy person is more like guttering embers; they can heat things up but much more slowly.

The safest course of action for everyone is simply to have all water at room temperature without ice. The worse your health is, the more hotter water is helpful. The universal home remedy for most illnesses is hot soup.

Why away from meals?

When we first start chewing food, the body deliberately creates a charge imbalance in order to more effectively digest food. It sharply raises the pH of your saliva (making it more basic), and lowers the pH inside your stomach (secreting gastric acids), and raises the pH in your small intestine. Each part of your alimentary tract is tuned to the expected pH that results from this effect.

When you drink any fluids during your meal (water included), you partially negate the effectiveness of this pH separation. Remember, acids and bases neutralize each other. Fluids taken between chews wash the basic saliva into the acidic stomach, reducing the digestive potency of both. Large amounts of fluid intake can also incorrectly signal the stomach to void its undigested contents into the small intestine. Have hot soups before a meal, and any drinks after, but don't mix fluid intake with the actual chewing and eating.

The pH separation response for a healthy person is so large that fluid intake even during a meal doesn't inhibit the effectiveness of digestion too much. The body merely draws from its ample stores and quickly recorrects the pH. But an unhealthy person has both a much smaller pH gap between saliva and gastric acids and a weaker correction, reflective of imbalanced body buffers or worse, depleted stores. Moreover, they also usually suffer from other digestive problems (as we will later see). Combined, these significantly impair nutrient uptake from food.

Why avoid the other drinks?

EVERYTHING ELSE, especially SODA pop, ALCOHOL, SUGARY drinks (like JUICE), and CAFFEINE; away from MEALS TABLE SALT and SODIUM

Here's the compelling reasons to drink only water:

• Every time you drink something other than water you are pouring ions directly into your body, which increases the rate of free radical creation.
• Other drinks with calories typically become body fat. This is especially true of sugary drinks (like fruit juice, soda, and sport drinks)
• Other drinks with low calories typically offer no nourishment; most offer malnourishment (they reduce your health)
• Other drinks are acid forming, exacerbating our already too acid condition
• Acidic drinks promote tooth decay
• Other drinks taken away from meals bypass the hunger cycle. Calories don't get "recognized" by your body, and you overeat.
• Other drinks taken away from meals also bypass the salivation response, which means nutrient heavy drinks are improperly digested. In particular, sugary drinks are virtually injected into our bloodstream without the mitigating effects that would occur during full digestion. Ditto for alcohol, which is why it is more potent on an empty stomach.
• Caffeine releases intracellular energy stores, which gives short term energy but long term metabolic loss
• Caffeine is a phosphodiesterase inhibitor that increases cAMP
• Alcohol and caffeine exacerbate respiratory problems
• Sugary drinks raise histamine levels, adversely influencing internal water rationing
• Sugary drinks promote cavities, taxing the immune system
• Sugary drinks spike your glucose levels, ruining your hormone balance
• Other drinks increase your need for water, and are a root cause of malhydration. This is especially true of soda and alcohol and somewhat of caffeine and fruit juice.

Water hydrates you but other drinks do not. Other drinks malhydrate us, specifically acidic drinks, alcoholic beverages, caffeinated drinks, and sugary drinks (in decreasing order of severity). Do not fall prey to the distillation fallacy: just because a drink has water in it doesn't mean you gain any hydration benefit from ingesting it. Sea water also has water in it, but if you drank sea water all the time you will die from it, 100% guaranteed. Other drinks do exactly the same thing, but just more slowly and painfully. We must look at the whole food (or drink in this case) in order to assess its health value; reductionism gives us the wrong answer.

Malhydration has already been measured multiple times in a variety of venues. The effects of salinity on plant health are already well established and well understood. Quote: "The main point is that excess salinity in soil water can decrease plant available water and cause plant stress." Ditto for livestock as well. Quote: "Salts, such as sodium chloride, change the electrolyte balance and intracellular pressure in the body, producing a form of dehydration. Salts also place a strain on the kidneys." Moreover, the optimal salinity and pH for most livestock is already known. The same principles and chemistry apply for humans; even bodybuilders already know about this stuff.

Refer to Appendix B: Malhydration Calculations to see how different drinks malhydrate us. In a nutshell, they all act to reduce available water, artificially raising our total sodium weight.

What's the deal with table salt?

The two main ingredients in table salt are sodium chloride and potassium iodide. Sodium is an essential mineral that we need in small quantities to balance losses through excretion and body processes. However, too much sodium and too little water leads directly to malhydration. We also need trace amounts of iodine to prevent diseases of malnutrition; there is also evidence that larger amounts of iodine is health promoting.

Here are the drawbacks of table salt:

• Our diets are already high in sodium (because along with sugar, it's the go to ingredient used to make edible products taste better) and low in water
• Too high a sodium / water ratio is one of the root causes of both malhydration and hypertension
• Sodium by itself is acid-forming, so it worsens our already acid condition
• Table salt also contains anti-caking agents and dextrose, which some suspect are health hazards themselves

At the moment, the best thing we can do is to use sea salt instead of table salt. Sea salt is alkaline forming, helping to combat our acidic condition. The sea salts with the highest trace mineral content are on this list; the ones with the best corrective mineral proportions are Celtic, Himalayan, and RealSalt. These sea salts also contain iodine, but at around one third of the minimum levels we need. If you mineralize your water and drink to hydration, then you are receiving enough iodine. If you use sea salt just as a table salt replacement, you will not meet your iodine requirement. Your diet must be then be supplemented with regular seafood.

Trace minerals, particularly in the water supply, improves sodium utilization and overall health. People in agriculture, greenhouses, horticulture, and specifically hydroponics have already mapped out second order ionic interactions on sodicity (sodium concentration). The gist: when salinity increases in plants due to other minerals it is good for them, while increasing sodium concentration in their intake water (irrigation or soil) was bad for them. Similar results have been found for livestock and humans.

At some point, the necessity of using sea salts instead of table salt will be recognized by a government agency. Then sea salts will be fortified with iodine the same way that table salt is, and all problems (acidity, mineral balance, and iodine consumption) will be solved at once. Moreover, given the health benefits to excess iodine, it would be an opportunity to raise the level from its previous minimal (non-malnutrition) standard.

Makeup benefits of sea salt comparison chart?

Every COUPLE DAYS... Drink TEA, mild ALCOHOL, or MILK; after a MEAL

First, if you are going to drink anything other than water, it is best to do so immediately after a meal. (In fact, the safest time to ingest anything you probably shouldn't be is right after a meal. Hence, dessert and most medications.) That's the time your body is best able to handle free radicals and correct pH before it hits your bloodstream. It's also when you extract the most nutrition from a drink.

Second, there are demonstrable health benefits to the occasional intake of tea, wine or beer, and milk, so every couple days you should have some after a meal. Strong alcohol like liquor, heavy alcohol use, and binge drinking are bad for you in a variety of ways, so don't do that. Of course, don't drink milk if you have an allergy or (like me) are lactose intolerant.

Will drinking water really help me lose weight?

Yes. In fact, drinking ample water and nothing else will help you lose body fat.

The first reason is caloric. You only need 100 excess calories a day to gain 10 lbs a year. A cup of orange juice has 100. A Starbucks Frappucino has 400. One fast food shake can have 200 to 800. Caloric drinks taken away from meals become body fat. If you eliminate them, then you get rid of a major source of fat gain. In addition, drinking water before meals encourages you to eat less calories.

The second reason has to do with toxins. The body can only allow so much toxicity in the blood. The first response to a toxin is to use an appropriate body store to neutralize it, and then excrete the result. If that body store is depleted or the exposure is too much too fast, then the body shunts the toxin into a soft tissue until later, when more nutrients are available. Adipose tissue (aka body fat) is a major toxin dumping ground.

A healthy person with ample body stores barely notices a toxin they are exposed to, even when large. An unhealthy person, on the other hand, lacks sufficient body buffers and balloons in response. Worse, when exposed to the same consistent bias the same body store(s) get depleted over and over, keeping them at misfunctioning levels. The constant accumulation of acidic pH forces the body to retain body fat, despite other factors that would induce fat loss. This is one reason why people have "problem fat" that won't disappear no matter how much they exercise or count calories (the other reasons for fat retention are hormonal).

Drinking ample water slowly leeches toxins from fat tissue, allowing the body to let go of it. The rate of toxin removal can be dramatically increased by also improving diet, which restores the body buffers needed for detoxification. So while drinking water alone has some weight loss effect, this gets amplified when combined with the right diet. The reverse is also true. Drinking water has a much reduced effect when combined with a bad, toxin-forming diet.

Are there any other concerns I should be aware of?

Yes. Like any life change you should make it gradually instead of all at once. Ramp up your water intake by a 2 liter bottle every few days until you reach your target. This spreads out the side effects from toxin release, which could be substantial depending on how unhealthy / obese you are.

If you had a lot of body toxins, expect ample stinky sweat even without physical activity. A decent indicator that lymphatic toxins have been cleared is when your sweat becomes odorless.

Be prepared. If you currently drink a lot of sugary or caffeinated beverages, when you switch to water you will probably feel horrible for a few weeks. That's withdrawal from a drug addiction likely coupled with a massive toxin release, not a sign the drinks were good for you or that you "need" them.

Stick with it. How you will feel after a month is life-altering. You'll be clearer headed, feel lighter on your toes, and you'll reduce aches and pains you didn't even know had before.

Why haven't I heard any of this stuff before?

You haven't heard much of this because at one point, recommendations to drink more water were ridiculed as a conspiracy by water bottlers to increase sales. Then one of the major proponents of water therapy mixed bad science with good science, and the medical profession stopped listening.

Fortunately, the government has taken notice and started incorporating the dangers of drinks into their official messages. One of the top six bullet points from the mammoth USDA 2010 Dietary Guidelines : "Drink water instead of sugary drinks." And here are some cute promos by the New York Department of Public Health.

Drinking only water is the single most important thing you can do for your health. Ample hydration is the riverway upon which all nutrients flow; water is the foundation upon which good health is built. The blithe manner we drink calorie-rich toxic-acid free-radical immune-suppressing malhydration bombs is the most damaging sector of our diet. But we don't manage our drinks very well, or worse, view them as entitlements that we "can't live without." Wake up. Half of us can't live with unregulated drinking.

We use drinks to drug ourselves into false feelings of health. The reason you "need" that morning cup of coffee to get you going is because you are unhealthy; a healthy person is normally alert and energetic without stimulants. The reason you "need" drinks to feel better is because you are unhealthy; a healthy person has a better mood and feels good to begin with. While drinks make us feel better in the short term, they are killing us in the long term.

The Radical Solution is in order of importance. If you only remember one thing, DRINK ONLY WATER, AWAY FROM MEALS.

If you can remember two things, then...

Why Sunlight

GET SUNLIGHT every day on after meal OUTDOOR WALKS Especially CHILDREN

Here are the benefits that sunlight shares in common with exercising:

• Sunlight raises your metabolism
• Sunlight reduces blood sugar while increasing gyclogen stores
• Sunlight improves breathing by inducing slower, deeper breaths
• Sunlight increases both the oxygenation and oxygen carrying capacity of our blood
• Sunlight improves endurance
• Sunlight raises energy level
• Sunlight reduces lactic acid produced after exercising
• Sunlight increases tissue adrenalin
• Regular sunlight increases our tolerance to stress
• Regular sunlight aids muscle formation
• Regular sunlight normalizes blood pressure while increasing cardiac output
• Regular sunlight lowers resting heart rate and improves electrocardiogram shape

• Sunlight prevents, treats, or cures over 400 disease states. Where mechanisms are known, the majority are attributed to UV, then far infrared, and lastly visible light. Many of these diseases are heavy hitters:

  Cancer I	Cancer II	Modern	Bone	Infections	Bacteria	Viral	Autoimmune	Other
  Breast Prostate Ovaries Uterine	Colorectal Stomach Bladder Brain	Heart Disease Stroke Type 2 Diabetes Seizure	Fractures Rickets / Osteomalacia Osteoporosis Osteomyelitis	Tuberculosis Cholera Typhoid Dysentary	Anthrax Staph Strep E coli	Hepatitis Herpes simplex Herpes zoster Chicken pox / smallpox	Type 1 Diabetes Multiple Sclerosis Lupus Rheumatoid Arthritis	Blood poisoning Mumps Pneumonia The list goes on...

• UV is a natural antimicrobial agent. It was used to treat infection and diseases prior to the advent of modern antibiotics, and is still used for large scale disinfection. UV treatment is superior to antibiotics in many ways, specifically prevention; antibiotics are more convenient and profitable
• UV increases our internal resistance to infections
• Tanning increases skin protectiveness (tanning is caused by UV)
• UV reduces cAMP
• Sunlight is crucial to bone health. Bones are themselves essential to cellular growth and the immune system
• Sunlight increases bone density and reduces fractures, the most common bone problem
• Sunlight dramatically increases our detoxification ability
• Sunlight mobilizes trace minerals into their most effective utilization points
• Sunlight treats many respiratory problems
• Sunlight treats many skin disorders
• Sunlight relaxes you and relieves stress
• Sunlight on your private parts stimulates sex hormones and lowers blood cholesterol
• UV normalizes Vitamin D and sex hormones
• Regular sunlight balances your hormones, in particular Vitamin D
• Regular sunlight manages your hunger (lack of Vitamin D interferes with leptin)
• Regular sunlight relaxes the renin-angiotensin system via Vitamin D, helping blood vessels
• Regular sunlight increases thyroid response and effectiveness, also improving metabolism
• Regular sunlight retards atheroschlerosis, and aids its reversal
• Regular sunlight breaks down drugs
• Regular sunlight stimulates the immune system, raising lymphocyte and interferon levels
• Regular sunlight stimulates the immune system, increasing neutrophil effectiveness
• Regular sunlight reduces tooth decay, dental cavities, and caries
• Regular sunlight improves mood disorders, especially depression, suicide, and PMS
• Regular sunlight makes you feel better, releasing seratonin, dopamine, and beta endorphins
• Regular sunlight decreases daytime melatonin production, reducing hormone antagonism
• Regular sunlight increases nighttime melatonin production, improving restful sleep
• Regular sunlight corrects circadian rhythm disorders, like SAD and shift work
• Regular sunlight profoundly lowers your total mortality

In the interests of fairness, let's collect together all of the known drawbacks to the sun for comparison:

• Accumulated sun exposure increases the risk of ulcerating carcinomas (a skin cancer type), which are highly treatable (1 in 800+ patients die)
• Accumulated sun exposure causes liver spots / age spots. These are cosmetic and not harmful to your health
• Excessive UVA causes wrinkles and leathery skin. The former is mainly cosmetic, but the latter can adversely affect health
• Excessive or intense sunlight increases the risk of lethal melanomas (another kind ofeskin cancer). With current treatment, 1 in 7 melanoma patients die. Melanomas occur with or without sunburn.

How do I know if I'm getting enough sun?

If you are caucasian, the rule of thumb indicator is a light golden tan. No tan means how much sun you are receiving is unknown, and you are probably receiving too little. A golden tan guarantees you are getting just enough that your body needs to respond. A dark tan has too much variability; you may be getting too much intense sun. The tan itself isn't the direct goal per se; don't rapid tan or use chemical products to get the "right color". What we want is a reliable indicator you are getting enough sun regularly, for which a tan is an indirect measure.

	The Rule O' Thumb Chart
Tan
Goldilocks says	Too cold		Just right			Too hot

Unfortunately, the real situation is much more complex than this simple guideline. Your precise goal for sunning is to receive 50% of 1 MED per day, where 1 MED is the amount of time that would cause you to barely sunburn given your current conditions if you did it consecutively. Your sunning strategy is heavily dependent on your Fitzpatrick skin type:

Skin Type	Examples	Usually	Sunning Strategy	Other Factor Notes
Type 1 Rarely Tans Usually Burns 1 MED ~20m		Alabaster skin Green Eyes White, Blond, some Redheads Albino	You need to carefully manage your sunning. Get 5m, frequently every day. Aim for 100% body exposure, briefly. Favor morning and evening. Beware overexposure.	Time of Day - 1 MED shown at peak noon sun Farther from noon, increase times. 3 hours off-peak sun is ~5 times weaker than noon sun.
Type 2 Seldom Tans Burns Easily 1 MED ~30m		Pale skin Light eyes Blond, Some Red Northern European	You need to manage your sunning. Get 5-10m, frequently every day. When possible, expose most of your body briefly. Be mindful of overexposure.	Latitude - 1 MED shown at 45 Degrees Closer to the equator, reduce times and increase care. Farther from the equator, increase times.
Type 3 Tans Gradually Burns Readily 1 MED ~35m		Light skin All eye colors Blonds, Brunettes Caucasians	Take 10-15m walks after meals, thrice daily. Aim for > 25% body exposure (face, arms, legs). Be mindful of exposure (over and under).	Seasonal Variation - 1 MED shown for mid-summer Farther from mid-summer, increase times. Spring and autumn are ~2 times weaker than summer. Sunning is very hard to do in winter.
Type 4 Tans Easily Burns Sometimes 1 MED ~50m		Olive Skin Dark eyes / hair East Asian	Take 10-15m walks after meals, thrice daily. Devote time to a short duration outdoor activity. Be mindful of exposure (over and under).	Pharmaceuticals - 1 MED shown without drugs Most drugs increase photosensitivity. Increase total sun (shorter but more frequent) for more medications. Strive to eliminate supplements entirely.
Type 5 Usually Tans Seldom Burns 1 MED ~70m		Dark skin Dark eyes / hair Indian, Hispanic, Arabic	You need to manage your sunning. Devote time to longer duration outdoor activities. Be mindful of underexposure.	Diet - 1 MED shown for a good diet Bad diets increase photosensitivity and decrease tanning. Increase total sun (shorter but more frequent) the worse your diet is. Strive to eat fresh, whole foods.
Type 6 Doesn't Tan Rarely Burns 1 MED is Hours		Black skin Dark eyes / hair African, Caribbean	You need to liberally manage your sunning. Seek sunlight at every opportunity. Lounge outdoors. Favor midday. Beware underexposure.	Common Sense If you think a factor affects sun, it probably does. Adjust accordingly.

How do I get sun safely?

Sunning is eustress just like exercise, both literally and figuratively. Literally, sunlight has the same effect on our bodies that exercise does, right down to the growth of muscles. But like exercise, it is also eustress. No one would expect to start training by bench-pressing 300lbs or running a marathon; if you tried, you'd hurt yourself. Going out into peak summer sun is similar, and should be treated with the respect it is due.

We should approach sunning like an exercise program to build our "sun muscles". As with physical training, the trick is to consistently challenge yourself without over-extending. Start by sunning during off-peak hours to establish your baseline off-peak "sun weight". Then target extending your total time by 10-15 off-peak minutes per day. Within a week, you should have safely built up a light tan. A tan is nature's sunscreen, except it self-adjusts, doesn't wash off, is free, and is actually good for your health. Make sure to use the right clothing for sunning (which we'll describe in more depth below).

Once you've acquired a tan, then start getting sun during peak hours closer to noon. Recall that peak hours can be a factor of 5 more intense than morning or evening, so be sure to adjust your times accordingly. If you were getting 60 minutes of off-peak sun, try starting at 12 minutes of peak "sun weight". Follow a similar regimen of slowly increasing time by a few peak minutes per day. Within another couple weeks you should hit your 1 MED goal (unless you have Type 5 or 6 skin, which requires a different approach). Get both peak and off-peak sun; that's akin to weight training for high reps and low reps.

Listen to your body and adjust if you begin to feel over-exposed. You have three tradeoffs you can always perform:

• Reduce time and increase frequency. If 20 minutes thrice a day feels too long, try 15 minutes four times daily.
• Reduce time and increase body exposure. All estimates assume a 25% body exposure (face, arms, legs). If you expose half your body, you can halve your time. If you expose your entire body, you can quarter your time.
• Trade peak minutes for off-peak. If 20 minutes peak is too long, try 15 minutes peak and 25 off-peak minutes instead.

Once you've gotten a golden tan and can withstand peak sun, you can relax your timing vigilance a bit. You can also start spending less time total sunning by going the opposite direction and trading off-peak minutes for peak ones, if you so desire. However, even when your sun muscles are "strong" all the caveats for exercise still apply to sunning. Make sure you are properly hydrating, are getting a good diet, are resting properly, and beware overheating.

There is one difference between "sun muscles" and normal muscles worth pointing out. Normal muscles are gained and lost on the order of months; "sun muscles" are built up and lost on the order of weeks. That's a two-edged sword. While we rapidly gain "sun strength" in the spring, we will probably lose it during the winter. So unlike real muscles that can be maintained year round, "sun muscles" usually need to be rebuilt each spring.

As a final note, it is possible to get your required daily sun without tanning if you are meticulous about your times. This is necessary for those with Type 1 skin who are largely unable to tan, and may be preferable for other reasons. If you expect to get peak sun and are able to tan, then that is the safest course (but not the only one). Except Type 1 and Type 6, everyone can get a tan, even these ghosts:

But doesn't the sun cause skin cancer?

Technically yes, but really no. Accumulated sun exposure definitely causes carcinomas. These kinds of skin cancer ulcerate instead of metastasize, are highly treatable, and are only lethal in extreme cases where they have been left untreated. Carcinomas are found on the areas of the body exposed most to sunlight, and are linked statistically to total amount of time spent in the sun.

However, regular sunlight is not a cause of lethal melanomas; the evidence supports excessive and/or intense UV exposure (with or without sunburn) as a risk factor. Here's what is known:

• Regular sunlight reduces the incidence of malignant melanomas
• Melanomas occur more frequently in populations that receive less sunlight
• Melanomas occur more frequently in those who have difficulty tanning
• Melanomas usually occur on body parts that receive no sun, sometimes internally
• Melanoma risk factors include sunscreen, diet, drugs, chemical exposure, trauma, viruses, moles, hormones, and heredity
• UVA/UVB sunscreens increases incidence of malignant melanomas. This appears equivalent to the amount of sunlight they block (i.e. the risk increase is merely from lack of sunlight)
• Sunburns increase the risk of malignant melanomas. UVB is what typically causes sunburn
• UVB-blocking, UVA-transmitting sunscreen significantly increases incidence of malignant melanomas (this cannot be explained just by lack of sunlight, and is greater than the risk increase from being sunburned)

The most salient fact for us is that regular sunlight reduces cancer. This is true not only of skin cancer, but all cancers. In fact, even if one believed that sunlight caused every lethal melanoma (which it clearly does not), sunlight would still prevent 50 deaths from other forms of cancer combined to 1 death from skin cancer.

Disregard the "There's no such thing as a safe tan" campaigns. Tans are good for your health and an important part of cellular immune response.

We must completely change our mental and emotional orientation toward the sun. Regular sunlight is the most beneficial healing force found in nature.

Don't I have to worry about the ozone?

Yes, but that has little impact on what your sunning habits should be. Ozone depletion is largest near the poles, and there have been measurable increases in UV radiation in Antarctica and as far north as Australia and New Zealand. There is no significant change in UV farther away from the poles, so this is a non-issue in the United States and most of the populated world. Even the increase in Australia is at most 10%, which means sunning for shorter times more frequently is an effective workaround, as is shifting sun times 15 minutes farther off-peak.

The real reason why you should worry about ozone depletion is because the ozone layer and atmosphere screens all UVC radiation. UVC is inimical to all life on a cellular level. If enough UVC reaches the earth's surface, we'll see the planet-wide collapse of all ecosystems. But's while that's Really Scary Shit (TM), it is also not relevant to your sunning.

Why after meals?

There are four completely different reasons for after meal walks:

• It improves digestion. Mild muscle use after meals signals uptake of glycogen into your large muscles, thereby managing the post-meal blood glucose spike. It increases insulin output and decreases insulin resistance. Postprandial walks are one of the core lifestyle treatments given to diabetics, and is arguably the most effective.
• It gets you sunlight. Favor light loose clothing that exposes as much of your body as possible while walking. Think cotton shorts, shirts, and sun dresses, if not actual tan-thru apparel.
• It gets you full body motion. There's an entire section below why this is good.
• It gets you oxygen outdoors. There's another entire section below why this is good.

After meal walks are the most economical use of time because of the combination of so many health benefits in a single activity. (Outdoor walks are only exceeded by "no time" guidelines, like no smoking.) Since you need to get sun every day anyway, you might as well get other benefits at the same time.

After meal walks should not be strenuous; they merely need to be 10-15 minutes of continuous movement.

Last but not least, getting outside and sunning after you eat is an easy mnemonic (better yet, just eat outside to begin with). If you always link sunning and eating, then it becomes a part of your lifestyle and you won't have to "remember" to do it.

What's the connection between sunlight and Vitamin D?

The effect sunlight has on Vitamin D is worth (ahem) illuminating. Sunlight changes cholesterol into a thermally released buffered form of Vitamin D that slowly works its way through a bunch of precursors into the active form. At the same time sunlight also breaks down your active vitamin D and precursors into the buffered form as well. The net effect is to normalize the vitamin D level. Recall that too much Vitamin D is just as bad as too little. So sunlight does more than simply produce Vitamin D, it moves us toward the optimum amount, irrespective of what our current state is. The effect of any one exposure is small, but regular sunlight guarantees that we have precisely the right amount at all times.

The effect that sunlight has on our entire hormone system is equivalent. Sunlight does much more than simply stimulate the production of a variety of hormones. Regular sunlight balances our hormones. Many hormones act as checks and balances for one another, and sunlight is a small, consistent force that activates them all in just the right proportion. You cannot reproduce the effects of sunlight by taking supplementation or hormone therapy. That's because sunlight always improves your health, while supplementation just adds to stuff willy nilly, which is harmful just as often as it is helpful. Sunlight accounts for your current body state, while supplementation does not. The benefit sunlight provides to our hormones is much greater than just the sum of the hormones it produces. This is another clear case where the reductionist mindset fails and we are better off viewing things in terms of balance.

This normalizing benefit cannot be emphasized enough. Let's say it differently: at the moment, there are only three known forces in the whole world that rebalance your hormones: sunlight, eustress, and (partnered) sex. Many many things affect your hormones, but only a handful normalize them. Sunlight is the most comprehensive of the three, and the easiest to obtain regularly and consistently.

Can't I just get enough Vitamin D through food and supplements?

No. In addition to normalizing the level of Vitamin D in your blood, sunlight also directly produces the active form of Vitamin D directly within your cells. This has been confirmed in immune, skin, breast, prostate, colon, and brain cells; it is likely that all cells can synthesize active D this fashion. This is used right on the spot within the cell, and never makes it outside into the blood. That means that sunlight can provide you with very large quantities of useful Vitamin D without raising your body buffer and inducing toxicity.

Dietary and supplementary Vitamin D raises the body buffer and thus easily causes toxicity problems when taken in large doses. In addition, the rate at which they are converted into the active form is limited by the kidney. This rate is far below what even a modest exposure to the sun will provide. Moreover, actual testing of fortified products reveals massive inconsistency: around a third had the advertised amount of Vitamin D on the label, but around 20% had none. The rest had varying degrees. Diet and supplementation are unreliable sources of Vitamin D. Sunlight and UVB are the only reliable and desirable sources.

We want a lot of active Vitamin D, much more that we currently get. Not only is ample Vitamin D associated with the reduction of modern diseases, lack of Vitamin D is also linked to a host of problems: bone diseases, fat malabsoption syndromes, kidney problems, seizure disorders, liver problems, and autoimmune diseases. Recent measurements of Vitamin D levels among first world populations show alarming Vitamin D deficiencies (40-60% of the population) because we are not getting enough sun.

What's up with children?

It is absolutely crucial that children receive ample sunlight from the moment they are conceived. The amount of sun a child receives is a primary determinant of their health later in life. There are many results that conclusively demonstrate this: here are a few related to vitamin D, bone health, and rates of disease.

Levels of Vitamin D in breast milk contributes to infant and child health. Vitamin D is only passed through breast milk when the mother has ample quantities to spare. That means that pregnant women and nursing mothers also need ample sunlight, in addition to ensuring their infant gets enough sun. Sunlight on infants cures jaundice and other childhood diseases. Lack of adequate vitamin D is linked to the early establishment of what are typically adult onset diseases (there are now teenage children developing multiple sclerosis, Type 2 Diabetes, etc.).

Childhood is the time of our greatest bone development, and a large bone buffer is vital to good health. Bones are constantly being broken down and rebuilt; as children we have net bone gain, as adults we have net bone loss. Regular sunlight is the single greatest factor in bone health. Sunlight prevents and cures rickets and osteomalacia, increases the rate of bone rebuilding and improves bone density, and enhances the action of calcium and other bone minerals.

Measurements of rates of disease are linked to lack of sunlight in childhood. A person is nearly twice as likely to develop Type 2 diabetes if they lack sun in youth. They are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases like Type 1 Diabetes and Multiple Sclerosis. They are more likely to get cancer. The most telling results decouple sunlight in youth and adulthood, and still demonstrate the increased rate of disease even when an adult has received sufficient sun for years but lacked it as a child.

There are several additional results that demonstrate the importance of the early sunlight. Average height has seasonal variation: children born at the start of spring are tallest, while those born at the start of autumn are shortest. This same pattern is seen in infant mortality and rates of other diseases. So getting sunlight just 6 months earlier plays a huge role in not just health but sheer survival. This is likely the origin of the historical tradition for early summer weddings; children conceived in early summer are born at the start of spring and have the greatest chance to reach childhood.

It is hard for me to get enough sun because I (am black, live in Norway, overheat easily, have a skin disorder, etc.) What do I do?

If you can change the condition(s) preventing you from getting enough sun, then that is the best solution. If you can solve your problem with more sun (e.g. you are black) then that is the next best solution. If the situation cannot be changed, then you are forced to rely on special technologies. The three that are of interest to you are:

• Blacklight Blue Lights. These lights emit UV radiation. You want the self-ballasted bulbs emit UVB radiation, basically the same lights they use in tanning booths. Make sure one light is in each area you commonly inhabit during the day, at a distance of ~6 feet away. Get weekly full body exposure.
• Daylight Spectrum Lights. These emit a visible spectrum closer to sunlight than typical lights. If you live in a remote area where you don't even see sun, you may also want to invest in a Light Box. These have not only a sun spectrum but also increased intensity (over 10 times normal lighting, which is 1/10th noon sunlight).
• Far InfraRed Ceramics. These sheets emit radiation similar to human bodies and the sun. They are typically found in spa units since they physically heat you up by direct radiation, just like fire or the sun. Use these weekly around noon, or omit them entirely if heat is part of your problem with sunlight.

Circadian rhythm disorders seem most affected by early morning light, far infrared seems most beneficial around peak sun (noon), and low-grade UV over the entire day has greatest benefit. Plan your use of these technologies accordingly.

Someone needs to create a complete sunlight unit that mimics sunlight as closely as possible. It should be made from LEDs that would be both energy effficient, programmatically controllable, and avoids the secondary side effects like buzzing, flickering, etc. The unit would screw into / replace common fixtures found in the home or office.

The natural variation of sunlight has health benefit. These units should have a few settings to control the diurnal curve, the seasonal curve, and occasional dimming (like clouds passing overhead). In addition, the infrared portion should be independently controllable (to turn up during winter and down during summer). The commercial office version should be passively settable from a master control unit, probably via RF pulsing a la theft prevention devices.

Why avoid sunglasses?

SUNGLASSES / tinted lenses SUNBURN / RAPID TANNING SKIN PRODUCTS, tanning OIL, SUNSCREEN / SPF products

Sunlight has several mechanisms of action:

• Direct exposure. These benefits are realized by exposing cells directly to sunlight. All wavelengths affect cellular health, and they all appear desirable in the natural proportions
• Hormonal balance. These benefits are primarily through light shining on the eye, sexual organs (groin and breast), and skin. UV and visible light have the greatest effects here, and the action on Vitamin D, melatonin, and your sex hormones are currently the best understood
• Thermal effects. These benefits are because of the heat generated by sunlight, mainly from the infrared wavelengths and UV-absorbing melanin. Far infrared seems particularly good for our health for some reason, more than can be simply accounted for by heat
• Disinfection. This is a side effect of pure UV. Disinfection not only occurs inside multi-celled organisms, but also in their habitats (like our houses, car, and workplaces, if sun shines in them without a UV barrier like glass)
• Unknown. There are many deep body effects that aren't readily attributable to the known pathways. There is a still a great deal about sunlight that has been measurably observed but is currently unexplained

Blocking the light reaching the eye is one of three major sources of hormone antagonism in our lifestyle. Here's why you want sunlight to shine on your eyes:

• Sunlight on your eye activates pituitary and pineal glands (while sunglasses inhibit this)
• Sunlight on your eye is the primary force setting your circadian rhythm
• Sunlight on your eye suppresses daytime melatonin and increases it during the night. Melatonin is a "master hormone" that regulates several others.
• The iris of your eye is directly connected to your Sympathetic and ParaSympathetic Nervous Systems, which is one of the major balances in your body
• Tinting causes mood problems. In particular, red and pink colors without blue cause irritability and aggression
• Sunglass use increases incidence of retrobulbar optic neuritis, which is associated with multiple sclerosis
• Sunglass use causes pterygium (a benign growth of conjuctiva that can cloud eyesight)

Let's describe the action of hormone antagonism via melatonin. Melatonin is secreted during darkness and controls the entire nighttime cycle. It shuts down our bowels, makes us feel tired, and signals for bodily repair. When we are active during the day and sleep during the night, we are in natural synch with our diurnal hormone cycle. But if we do not receive sufficiently strong light cues during the day, our body produces small amounts of melatonin that antagonize other hormone function. Melatonin during the day inhibits digestion, contributes to fatigue, and interferes with nutrient allocation. We'll have much more to say about the effect of circadian rhythms when we discuss the nursing recommendations. At this point all we need to know is that this class of hormone antagonism is severe enough that shift work (changing your sleep cycle regularly) is a known risk factor for heart disease and other modern diseases.

Note that the beneficial effect of light shining in the eye cannot be easily duplicated with artificial lighting. First, sunlight is orders of magnitude brighter than light bulbs; special high intensity light boxes are needed to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder and related conditions. Second, UV appears to be a crucial component of hormone balancing and standard bulbs do not emit UV radiation. Our body responds to UV, even though we cannot "see" it. We want natural sunlight to cue our hormonal systems properly.

Regular sunlight is not the causal agent for cataracts nor other eye problems it was suspected to long ago. The WHO estimates that no more than 20% of cataracts worldwide are related to UV exposure, which means more than 80% are being caused by something else. Eyes that get regular sunlight have less health problems than those that don't. The situation here is similar to melanomas: excessive and / or intense UV exposure seems to increase risk of eye problems, while regular sunlight acts to reduce the risk.

There are some situations where protective eyewear is legitimately called for. Make sure all protective eyewear blocks the entire spectrum equally (and does not eliminate any part of it). If necessary reduce the intensity, but do not change the spectrum.

Wearing sunglasses cosmetically forms a vicious cycle. Eyes unused to full sun become sensitive to it, making you more dependent on sunglasses. If you have worn sunglasses for a long time, you may need a few weeks to rebuild your visual tolerance to sunlight. Healthy eyes can see comfortably without impairment even in full summer sun. If your eyes cannot do that, it is a sign your eyes are unhealthy, not that you want sunglasses.

The same caveats for sunglasses also apply to glasses used for eyesight correction; while those usually retain the visible spectrum, they often screen UV. Someone needs to develop and promote corrective lenses based on Plexiglas G-UVT or similar material. In that same area, developers of glass and sheeting are likely to see an upsurge of interest in UV-transmitting materials, so they should prepare not only a diverse selection but also to educate clients and other manufacturers about the tradeoffs involved.

Does color and spectrum really matter?

Yes. They matter in two different ways: the energy reaching your eye, and the wavelengths bathing your cells. There are at least four well-documented effects of color on the eye:

• Vagina pink - Causes arousal and aggression in animals, especially primates and males
• Blood red - Causes vascular and hormonal reactions. In some cases this is so severe people faint at the sight of blood
• Leaf green - Affects hunger and induces deep breathing in animals, speculated to be the sight of foliage
• Sky blue - This modulates animal perception of night and day, and controls diurnal and seasonal hormone cycles

Electromagnetic radiation on cells has a clear general trend on organismic health:

• Full Natural Spectrum - When we receive the full natural spectrum of sunlight (UV + visible + IR) at normal intensity, everything works the way it is supposed to and our health improves.
• Partial Natural Spectrum - Natural wavelengths but in lopsided proportions or increased intensity makes things work incorrectly and cause health problems
• Unnatural Radiation - Anything that isn't a common wavelength is usually tumor-forming, cancerous, free-radical creating, DNA-damaging, outright kills cells, or all of the above. This is more true at higher energy frequencies

Note that we are immersed in unnatural EM radiation created by artificial lights and electronic devices, and virtually all of it has been proven harmful. However, trying to eliminate all unnatural EM radiation is an ineffective tactic. Our time is better spent making ourselves cancer-proof. Remember, health improving is more important than exposure.

[Btw, the topic of light becomes even more interesting when we enlarge the scope. There are numerous predator / prey coloration responses in the animal kingdom. There is also a much wider variety of EM mechanisms among plants; some are the same as animals, while others are far different. Plants are even more sensitive than animals to the wavelengths of light they receive, and thrive best under the full natural spectrum found in their native habitats.]

Why avoid sunburn and rapid tanning?

Because evidence is suggestive that the real root cause of lethal melanomas is excessive or intense overexposure to UV radiation. Moreover, there do not appear to be any known health benefits to sunburned skin or to rapid tanning over slower tanning.

If you want a tan for cosmetic reasons, it is best for your health to acquire it through frequent natural sunlight rather than long sessions in a UV booth. Avoid chemical tanning products.

Why avoid skin products?

Despite what skin product manufacturers want to brainwash you into believing, you do not want healthy-looking, moisturized skin. You want actual healthy, moist skin. More importantly, you want the biological forces in your body that promote the real health that is reflected in that skin. Skin products do not improve your health, only the cosmetic appearance of it.

Moreover, skin is an ingestion pathway. Patches placed on the skin can distribute drugs into the bloodstream, which means stuff we put on our skin goes everywhere in our body. Don't put anything on your skin that you wouldn't put in your mouth and eat. In fact, slathering things on your skin is even worse that eating it, because at least during digestion there are chemical neutralization effects. The skin is a highly effective barrier against microbial invaders, but fails against harmful man-made chemicals like those found in skin products.

There are two large categories of skin products that we should specifically avoid. The first are processed oils like tanning or minerals oils. This is just an extension of the fact that all processed oils are bad for you, whether you are ingesting them through the mouth or skin. The second are SPF products like sunscreen. This deserves its own special mention:

• Sunscreens block the majority of health effects of the sun, specifically cancer prevention, Vitamin D normalization, and aiding the immune system
• Sunscreens incent you to get excessive intense sunlight, which is a risk factor for lethal melanomas. It also ages skin prematurely
• Sunscreens increase allergies
• Chemical sunscreens create free radicals, which actively initiate cancer
• Chemical sunscreens have estrogenic activity, disrupting our hormone balance
• Chemical sunscreens contain a bunch of toxins and carcinogens, including: PABA and PABA esters (p-aminobenzoic acid, padimate O, ethyl dihydroxy propyl PAB, glyceryl PABA), cinnamates (cinoxate, ethylhexyl-p-methoxycinnamate, octocrylene, octyl methoxycinnamate), salicylates (ethylhexyl salicylate, octylsalicylate, homosalate), anthranilates (methyl anthranilate), benzophenone (avobenzone, oxybenzone, and dioxybenzone), and digalloyl trioleate.

There are valid uses for skin products for spot correction, say against extreme conditions like arctic weather. In that case, you are better off with the proper protective gear than skin treatment. Skin receiving regular sunlight rarely develops the common modern skin problems. Local topical application of medication may be called for in some cases (like poison ivy rash). But once again: healthy skin recovers from upsets much faster, too.

Last but not least, altering our skin using skin products robs us of one of our most useful health indicators. Glowing healthy skin is a great confirmation of total body health, while the specific way our skin seems unhealthy (moisture, suppleness, coloration, growths, etc.) is a major self-diagnostic. Healthy skin already has all the desirable properties we want and requires no skin products; according to theories of biological ornamentation, the healthiest skin is by definition the most attractive. Besides the forces that create healthy skin (water, sunlight, motion, oxygen, diet, and eustress), one needs only occasional exfoliation.

I have sensitive skin! I have to use skin products / sunscreen / avoid the sun. What do I do?

If you have a skin disorder, then you need to rely on special technologies as described above. If you have Type I skin, then you need follow the sunning strategy described in the sun chart. If your skin is sensitive otherwise, then you and your skin are unhealthy. There is no "sensitive skin"; there is only healthy skin and unhealthy skin. Increasing the health of your skin will cure your sensitivity and prevent it from recurring. Skin products and avoiding the sun merely provides relief; it doesn't even treat your condition.

There are many factors that influence skin sensitivity. If you address these causal agents then your skin with become healthier and its sensitivity will disappear:

• Lack of Sun. The number one reason for sensitive skin is because your "sun muscles" are weak. Remember, sunning is just like exercise, and you need to carefully build up to strong sun. Even healthy, non-tanned skin can be "sensitive" to peak sun
• Skin products. The very skin products you are using to provide relief to your skin are depositing chemicals that continue to make it sensitive
• Pharmaceuticals increase photosensitivity, in particular medications, recreational drugs, and skin products
• Antibiotics and Birth Control are so bad for sensitivity they deserve special mention
• Drinks other than water, caffeine in particular. All malhydrating drinks adversely affect your skin by decreasing its moisture
• Physical Inactivity also decreases the fluid and nutrient turnover in your skin
• The Four Horsemen increase prostaglandins, which breaks down melanin. (Poly)Unsaturated processed oils in particular are bad for your skin and sunning
• Poor diet specifically lacking plant foods high in Vitamins A, C, E, and carotene.
• Distress increases all sensory irritation, including to light (and sound)
• Allergies increase histamine reactions, and are often a reflection of the other causal agents on this list. Allergies and skin problems go hand in hand because they share causal agents. Allergies are also not a normal, natural condition

Just like sunglass use, perceived skin sensitivity is a vicious cycle. If you believe your skin is sensitive then you do the very things that continue to keep it sensitive, in particular avoid the outdoors and the sun. Except for people with rare skin disorders and alabaster skin, everyone can have robust, healthy skin.

We frequently misattribute the sensations in our skin. Sunlight acts to break down drugs, the products of bad diet, and other foreign invaders to the body, which is a very good thing that what we want. But when we get sun and experience that unpleasant sensation, we mistakenly attribute it to the sun and not to the foreign substances. Healthy skin has a highly pleasant reaction to regular sunlight. Think cats purring in the sun.

Manufacturers of skin / hypoallergenic products will do their best to convince you that "sensitive skin" is a kind of skin. It is not. Sensitive skin is a symptom of ill health, not a natural state nor one you should accept. It can also be easily cured, which no corporation will ever advertise to you.

What is the Vit K2 connection?

Every WEEK... SUNBATHE NUDE, COOL / WET at MORNING, especially in SPRING Take a RELAXING HOT BATH

At the turn of the 20th century, heliotherapy (using the sun medicinally to improve your health) was the most successful treatment for the ills of health at that time. In the words of Arnold Rikli a century earlier: "Water works wonders, air can do even more, but light works best of all." We can see remnants of heliotherapy in recovery programs like NEWSTART, but by and large the practice has fallen out of mainstream consciousness.

Cosmetic sunbatheing and heliotherapy are completely different practices. I stress this because when I say "sunbathe" in the guideline, it conjures images of the modern practice, but what I really mean is heliotherapy. I couldn't think of a better word, because we don't even have a concept for heliotherapy any more.

qqq

Why nude?

direct action
sex hormones
cancer connection
clothing

Modern architecture has fallen away from sun-based design, and there is a great opportunity here for enterprising architects. We need to return to the days of porches, verandahs, outdoor lounging, and solaria; combine Vitruvius with LEED and you have the next wave of architecture that will be in high demand. Specifically, there is a need for a screened open air solaria with short privacy walls for nude sunbatheing. That would satisfy the modern needs for privacy while getting the essentials for health.

Why spring?

long winter (like sleep)
weakened "sun muscles"
buildup for summer

Why a hot bath?

A malhydration recommendation; wrong timescale

Blood Thinning
Sunlight reduces cyclic AMP
  stress increases CAMP, promoting cancer
  caffeine inhibits CAMP breakdown
  prostaglandins increase CAMP
blood glucose and atherosclerosis
  blood glucose rises because of impaired glucose uptake
  insulin -> atherosclerosis
  sucrose -> blood pressure

Sweeteners increase hunger, resulting in higher caloric consumption

OBESITY REDUCES EFFECTIVENESS OF SUN ON DEEP TISSUES
  comment on nude exposure

Open-air treatment, heliotherapy
  NEWSTART
Sunbathe near natural bodies of water, preferably with breezes
  COOL CONDITIONS are key for some reason
  Morning is best time to sunbathe.  Van Allen radiation (negative ions) sleep
  Spring and early summer are most important seasons to sunbathe
  unpolluted area air and water
  Diet is big, integral part of all proven successful heliotherapy treatment
  dropsies?

?

War wounds, open better than bandaging
  Binding reduced lymphatic action
  Casts and slings block sunlight


Maybe I should catalog by researcher, would be easier to find primary sources
Michael Hollick - Vitamin D researcher
Zane Kime - Treated cancers with sunlight
Gordon Ansleigh - Epidemiological researcher
Oskar Bernhard - war wounds in WWI
Henry Gauvain - combined sea bathing with sun bathing
Auguste Rollier - Rollier method to treat tuberculosis
John Nash Ott - Discovered spectrum effects on plants and children
Niels Finsen - 1903 Nobel Prize - Heliotherapy cure of tuberculosis,
developer of Finsen Lamp
Robert Koch - 1905 Nobel Prize
Downes & Blunt references - Established UV bacteriocide
http://members.shaw.ca/TPBLUNT/index.htm
Leonard Erskine Hill - Heliotherapist and hospital architect

Your circulatory system has three main parts

• Blood = Fast highway lanes. Responsible for maintaining homeostasis and communication between internal organs
• Lymph = Back country roads. A crucial part of the immune system, toxin neutralization, and fat transport metabolism.
• ISF = InterStitial Fluid = Your driveway. The last mile buffer of nutrients and waste the cells bathe in

We often focus on the blood but it is only a small part of a much larger circulatory system. To give you a sense of scale, here is how water is usually distributed in the body:

• 60-70% ICF = IntraCellular Fluid (The fluid inside cells)
• 30-40% ECF = ExtraCellular Fluid (The fluid outside cells)
  • ~ 6-8% Plasma (The fluid in blood and lymph)
  • ~ 2.5% TCF = TransCellular Fluid (The fluid in joint cavities, urine)
  • ~ 20-30% ISF = InterStitial Fluid (The transport fluid between plasma and cells)

The health of all your body water matters. The heart is the most important muscle for blood circulation, but all muscles participate in circulation. Muscle contraction forces blood back up from capillaries into veins toward the heart. Far more importantly though, motion is the primary way fluid moves in the interstitial spaces and through the lymphatic system. Frequent motion refreshes ISF, improves cellular health, increases your immune system effectiveness.

Three kinds of motion are particularly helpful for us:

• Full body motion, aka walking. This gives perfusion to almost all cells in the body, and reduces load on your heart
• Bouncy motion aka jumping jacks and sex. This guarantees rapid turnover within the lymphatic system, which directly increases circulation to the cells
• Stretching aka yoga. This refreshes joint cavity fluids, which are notoriously hard to turnover. Joint linings are the weak point in our immune defense; they are classic sites of attack, and main sources of inflammation

Once again, let's give a sense of scale to how important motion is. Water diffusion across capillaries is estimated to be around 80,000L+ / day, your heart pumps around 8,000L / day, and while at rest your lymph circulates less than 4L / day. Even small pressure differentials can increase lymphatic flow by x20, and any motion can provide that. Slight outdoor variations in temperature and wind pressure also stimulates lymphatic flow.

So should I get big muscles with vigorous exercise then?

Only if you want to. Evidence suggests that muscle mass is not related to total mortality; you won't live longer by bulking up. However, muscle strength and effectiveness do directly correlate with longevity, particularly among males. Healthy often-used muscles are the goal for everyone. Size does not matter... for health and long life, though it does for sexual opportunity.

Frequency of motion is more important than exertion. You can get great circulation with only mild movements, as long as motion is frequent. Said differently, prolonged periods of physical inactivity are worse for us the longer they are. Three hours straight of couch potato TV watching is much more harmful than if you got up and did something during commercial breaks.

Every moment you are moving you are building up your ISF nutrient buffer. Every moment you are not you are depleting it. A healthy person has a large enough buffer they can go long periods without moving, but an unhealthy person cannot. The worse your health, the more important it is to get frequent, mild movement. That 30th minute of consecutive inactivity is much worse than the first.

For healthy people, the only way to improve their health is to improve their fitness. They achieve this by undergoing intense physical eustress, i.e. vigorous exercise, and then eventually interval training and isolated weight lifting. Exercise is counterproductive for unhealthy people. It causes stress on an already distressed body, depletes stores even faster, and health-improving efforts are much better spent on motion frequency than intensity. Healthy people should focus on cardiovascular fitness; unhealthy people should focus on musculymphatic flow.

The easiest way to do this is seek minor inconvenience and inefficiency. Park far away and walk (I find this is actually quicker than hunting for a spot!). Always walk downstairs. Walk upstairs until winded, then use the elevator. Chop vegetables instead of using a food processor. Put your water in the other room, and get up to drink it. Basically, contrive ways to use your body and interrupt long stretches of not moving.

So is frequent motion all I need for good circulation?

Motion is the largest factor in good circulation, and also one of the few directly under our control. However, many other things impact your whole circulatory health, among them:

• Sweating - This forces capillaric flow to replace lost interstitial fluid
• Temperature - Heat itself can cause sweating, while temperature change can also induce the pressure difference helpful for lymphatic flow
• Variation - Being in an environment with high variation (outdoors) is better for circulation than one with less variation (indoors)
• Heart - A healthy heart is an excellent indicator of complete circulatory health
• Gravity - Headstands and odd positions help lymphatic flow, while prolonged lying down can lead to orthostatic problems
• Blood viscosity - "Thinner" blood is more effective than "thicker" blood
• Lung capacity - Oxygenation thins blood, though it is currently unknown why
• Membrane size - Thinner cell membranes are more efficient than thicker ones, though what modulates membrane size is also speculation

While we should focus on motion for pure circulation, we should also avail ourselves of other ways to improve circulatory health. And luckily it turns out the main ways to improve these other factors (water and sweat, sunlight outdoors, avoiding smoke, etc.) gives us additional benefits.

Microcirculation?  Doesn't seem necessary

Anatomy of lymphatic system

Make up single circulatory chart with symbols

Walking for one hour activates hormone sensitive lipase
Walking increases brain tryptophan reserves
Histamines increase Tryptophan breakdown
Walking reduces stress

Predominant pathway for proteins to re-enter circulation is via the lymph
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starling_equation
Thus, lymphatic circulation recorrects transcapillary protein leaks
Maintain plasma oncotic pressure
  http://www.anaesthesiamcq.com/FluidBook/fl2_4.php

Proteins have negative charge - 
  acids = increase in H+ = decrease in negative ions = increase in positive
  bases = decrease in H+ = increase in negative ions = decrease in positive

Energy rate limiter
CO2 acidic, O2 is oxygenator
aerobic vs anaerobic - bacteria, body states
breathing channel
lung utilization
relaxation - Deep breathing reduces stress
  increases nitric oxide
treats necrotizing soft tissue infections
treats diabetic derived illnesses
treats burns
treat inflammatory bowel disease

SMOKING
  Impairs oxygen
  Lung cancer, heart disease, stroke
  Causes wrinkles

A food is something we get directly from nature, from a recognizable plant or animal. It is something your great-great grandmother would consider food. So foods are plants (fruits, vegetables, nut, seeds, sea plants, etc.) and animals (meat, eggs, dairy, fish, sea animals, etc.). THAT'S IT. Anything else is an edible product, no matter how it is advertised or what picture it has on the box.

Food is good for you, and if you eat it, you will become healthier. Food has a high N/cal, and some foods have very large N/cal; in addition, food has high baseline minimum nourishment. Anything else is a harmful edible product. If you eat edible products, you will become unhealthier, no matter which products you eat or the health claims of those products. Edible products have dangerously low N/cal, which is where we get the term "empty calories". Edible products have low nourishment, regardless of their calories.

In short: food is good, and edible products are bad.

The easiest way to determine whether something is an edible product is packaging. Most real foods have minimal or no packaging; almost all edible products have prominent packaging. Produce has none, meats have clear wrap, and usually the only foods that are packaged are because they need a container (nuts, seeds, oats, dairy, et al). The rule of thumb is: the less packaging, the safer it is; more packaging, more danger. Another heuristic: eat from the outside rim of the supermarket, not the interior aisles, because that's where the produce, meat, and dairy are usually placed.

Using these guidelines, we can start telling foods and edible products apart. Fruit (the thing you pick off a tree or bush) is a food, fruit rollups and fruit bars are products. Meat (the flesh you cut from an animal or fish) is a food, lunchmeat and hot dogs are products. Vegetables (the root, stem, or leaf of a plant) are food, french fries and V8 are products. Seafood (plants and animals living in water) is food, fish sticks and salmon burgers are products. While not fresh, aged sharp cheddar cheese is still a food, while Velveeta and american cheese are products.

It doesn't matter if something appears to "come from" a food, or even if it contains bits of real food in it. That's the distillation fallacy. Moreover, the way edible product companies fool us into thinking that their products are safe and nutritious is to make them appear like they come from actual food. You want as close to the whole food as possible: the original, unaltered thing you would find in nature.

Let's really drive home the difference between food and edible products. Butter is a food that is made; margarine is an edible product that is fabricated. They are placed side by side in the supermarket like they are somehow comparable or similar. Let's look at how both are manufactured:

Insert butter vs. margarine production pics here
  Include historical counterparts
http://www.enotes.com/how-products-encyclopedia/butter-margarine
http://www.cip.ukcentre.com/marg1.htm

EAT FRESH, WHOLE FOODS MAINLY VEGETABLES (plants) half COOKED, half RAW With range-fed MEAT / SEAFOOD

• Frozen food has less nutritional value. Its N/cal is too low. Empty your freezer.
• Canned food also has less nutritional value. Its N/cal varies, but is generally low. Empty your cupboard.
• Most cans are lined with plastic that releases Bisphenol-A (BPA), which is harmful
• Canned foods typically have high sodium
• Fresh foods usually don't have carcinogenic preservatives added to them
• Edible products with any shelf life offer malnourishment. Their N/cal is dangerous. Empty your pantry. Take all the stuff you just emptied and donate it to a local food bank.

Why mainly vegetables?

• Vegetables are alkaline, and slowly reverse the effects of an acid diet
• Vegetables are our primary source of antioxidants, which mitigate free radical damage
• Vegetables are high in fiber, which improves digestion.
• Vegetables require chewing, creating better salivary response and slowing down eating. Hence, they further improve digestion.
• Vegetables have low calorie density, making it almost impossible to overeat
• Vegetables also have high nourishment, giving them a very high N/cal
• Vegetables have low sodium and a good Sodium/cal ratio. You may sea salt them to taste.

When selecting vegetables, prefer leafy green and brightly colored ones, which are high in antioxidants. Buy organic if your budget allows. When preparing, rinse fruits and vegetables in water to remove any possible pesticides.

Fruits and vegetables are the safest foods to eat. There is little danger to eating them in moderation, and many proven benefits. The only problem with eating plant foods arises if you eat them exclusively (vegetarinism). Then your diet will lack some key nutrients, in particular the ones our body can't store (B vitamins and zinc). We also need and want regular animal foods.

When you make major changes to your diet, you should do so in small stages spaced out over several days. If you change from a low fiber diet to a high fiber diet too fast, you will experience many unnecessary problems. Take your current plant food intake and increase it by 1/8 of your plate every couple days, until you reach 3/4 of the plate.

The benefits of fiber are numerous:

• Fiber manages blood glucose; it also moderates glucose spikes after meals
• Fiber absorbs some toxins and promote their excretion
• Fiber aids in evacuation
• Fiber works in concert with stomach bile to improve digestion

Comment on Vit C?  It's important
  Vit E... maybe I need plant food breakdown

The whole circle represents the view of your plate. Your plate diameter should be no greater than the size of your extended hand (since that's the size of your stomach). You are free to eat as much as you like, but no course should be larger than your open hand. Wait a half-hour between courses that large.

The green lines mean vegetables. At least half of what you eat should be vegetables. You are always free to have more vegetables. It's fine to have a meal that is almost entirely vegetables, so the green line extends around the entire plate.

You want to target about a quarter of your plate to be fresh fruits (the orange line), and another quarter to be an animal food (the brown line). That could be meat, seafood, an egg, or anything else that comes from a healthy animal.

It is very important that this is what your plate looks like at every meal. It's NOT okay to have a salad at lunch and a steak at dinner. Every meal needs to be balanced. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and in-between meal snacks. We receive tremendous benefits from a balanced meal:

• Balanced meals favorably affect our hormone systems, while imbalanced meals mess up our hormones
• Balanced meals increase our metabolism
• Balanced meals manage our blood glucose levels substantially better than any other intake profile

Like fiber, each of these bullet points has its own list of why they are good. These are such important topics we'll explore them further once we've introduced notions of Radical Balance.

Why does the Radical Plate differ from the government's Choose My Plate?

Let's go through each of the three differences and we'll see that the USDA recommendation is actually very similar. First, the government's My Plate is for healthy people; that's what your plate should look like once you are healthy. The Radical Plate is aimed at unhealthy people, who need a higher vegetable intake in order to restore their health. If you want to lose weight and gain health, you need a larger vegetable portion. If you simply want to maintain, you can lower your vegetable intake and replace it with any food you like. Grains are a good choice at that point because they will safely increase your energy load, which active healthy people want but obese unhealthy people do not.

Second, Choose My Plate has an icon for dairy because there is a strong dairy lobby in the United States, so any official recommendation has to include it. If you check their recommendations, they explicitly mention that we should be drinking primarily water. I personally feel their dairy icon is misleading; it suggests that we should be drinking milk at each meal. Milk is an "every so often" kind of drink, not every day, and should only be consumed after a well-balanced meal.

The third difference, grains, deserves a page all its own. The highlights are:

• Whole grains and cereals are excellent sources of protein and complex carbohydrates that are healthy for you
• These health benefits arise when the grain is properly prepared (soaked, sprouted, fermented, ground, flattened, etc.)
• It is very difficult to find properly prepared healthy grains in the United States. They are sold in obscure places, not in the supermarkets where most people shop.
• Often, shops will sell just the whole grain (which is good!) assuming consumers know how to properly prepare them (which we don't, and that's bad)
• When you say word "grain", people immediately think bread and pasta, which is bad for you (because in the US they use refined flour and not whole grains)
• When you say the word "cereal", people immediately think breakfast cereal, which is bad for you, period.
• Grains in the US tend to be edible products and not whole food
• Grains in the US have a dangerously high sodium trifecta

Consequently, unhealthy people should be cautious of grains. While the food itself is fine, the scarcity of healthy sources coupled with the confusion around it makes them likely to be a large source of dietary error. Animal foods are a better choice to improve our health, not only for their properties but because of a better ability to distinguish between higher and lower quality foods.

[Just the other day I was in a health food store and picked up a hearty looking bread in the whole foods section that prominently displayed its seven whole grains. The first three ingredients were: refined flour, water, and sugar, i.e. two of the Four Horsemen of Death. The standards currently regulating grains allow for too loose an interpretation on labeling, and thus they should all be treated as suspect.]

There is one area of direct agreement between the Radical Plate and MyPlate worth pointing out. At least 3/4 of your plate should be plant foods. At most 1/4 should be animal foods. This is true along the entire health spectrum.

Why half cooked and half raw?

Cooking a food changes the bioavailability of its nutrients. Raw foodists will be quick to point out that this robs them of several vitamins and minerals, which is definitely true if you boil them and throw out the broth. What they often omit is that cooking also changes cofactor proportions making the absorption of other vitamins and minerals better.

To get the maximum nourishment from a food, you want to vary its preparation. Have it cooked sometime, have it raw sometimes. In addition, combine it in different ways with the other foods you eat. This has the benefit not only of giving you the largest breadth of nutrient extraction from the same foods but also a more pleasing variety of dishes.

Won't eating so many vegetables get boring?

Only if you allow it to be. Americans tend to view a vegetable as a side dish, having only one per meal. Salads are usually dominated by one leafy green with a few other foods thrown in.

Vegetarians often have more than a dozen plant foods at one sitting. They make complex dishes that taste good. In particular, plant dishes explore a much wider range of texturing than our typically bland fare. (I'm a card-carrying carnivore foodie and as a food critic went to many swank places, yet Green's Restaurant is hands down one of the best places I've ever eaten.)

If you look at an American fridge, there are perhaps 5 different fresh fruits and vegetables inside at any given time. A vegetarian fridge has a couple dozen, along with diverse fruit bowls, and dozens of spices along with fresh accent plants. The plant foods they favor often rotate according to what's in season (which is when they have their highest nutrient value). That's what we want our kitchen to look like.

We've lost the art of preparing plant foods in the US, and we desperately need to regain it. Get a vegetarian cookbook. Take an ethnic cooking class. Join an online recipe community. Get your grandmother's recipes. Travel to India. The more you discover about plant food preparation, the more savory your fruit and vegetable dishes will become. For the rest of your life, at least 3/4 of every meal should be plant foods and at most 1/4 animal foods. That is the foremost, repeated proven diet that improves your health, loses body fat, and avoids modern diseases all at the same time.

Moreover, it is also the diet that people stick with the longest. Fad diets cause you to yo-yo because they are hard to adhere to. Yo-yoing is as bad or worse for your health than simply remaining obese. You want a lifelong dietary change that slowly brings you to your ideal weight, not a rapid fad diet that induces wild weight fluctuations.

Why meat?

• Meat is a potent broad spectrum detoxifier. It is the single best thing you can eat to remove body toxins
• Meat has a full range of amino acids, which ensures no bottlenecks to digestive processes
• Meat has fat, rich in fat-soluble vitamins
• Meat has cofactors that enhance the uptake of fat-soluble vitamins
• Meat has cofactors that enhance the uptake of many minerals, too; in particular, zinc over copper
• Meat has cofactors that create the active forms of several nutrients
• Meat is very nourishing, resulting in a high N/cal
• Meat (the food) has low sodium and a good Sodium/cal ratio. You may occasionally sea salt them to taste. Meat products have high sodium. Pork is food; bacon is an edible product.

• Plant and animal foods have complementary cofactors, so we receive more nourishment eating them together than at separate sittings
• Plant and animal foods taken together complete the entire B-complex, which make them more effective. Remember, B-vitamins are one of the few things the body cannot store
• Plant and animal foods are rich in precisely the nutrients crucially lacking in the other

Why seafood?

• Fish have nearly all the benefits of meat, except for detoxification
• Seafood has exactly the right Sodium/cal ratio; they don't need salt.
• Seafood is rich in iodine, which we need in trace amounts
• Seafood is slightly more alkaline than their land counterparts. Fish is less acidic than meat, and seaplants more alkaline than land plants
• Some sea foods in particular, like seaweed, exactly combat our unhealthy condition

Well, first we need to distinguish what we mean when we say the word "fat". Dietary fat is good for us (except for trans fats found in fried foods, which come from oils). Body fat is related to obesity, which is bad for you. We also say the word fat but refer to processed oils, which are bad for us. So part of the reason why we have the negative association with "fat" is because two thirds of the time we use the word, we mean something bad.

When we use the word "fat" here and now, we mean the stuff contained in food. That's mostly animal flesh, eggs, dairy, some seeds, and a few select plants. Oil is not fat; oil is not a whole food. We do NOT mean processed oils, irrespective whether they come from food or industrial processes. Fat, by that definition, is your friend:

• Fat is an essential nutrient. It is a fundamental building block of our cellular membranes. It isn't optional; you must eat it.
• Fat has fat-soluble vitamins. Animal foods are by far the best sources, with fatty seeds being a tolerable second.
• Fat manages short term blood glucose by slowing down the absorption of glucose while you are digesting
• Fat manages long term blood glucose while you are fasting by providing an alternate higher energy source
• Fat triggers the shutoff of our hunger mechanism by making us feel sated, leading to less eating

Now let's look at the numbers and reveal what's happening:

• The USDA recommends a 20-30% intake of fat by calories, which is around 13% by mass. Americans eat 40% by calorie on average, which means unhealthly people are eating 50%+. So we are told to eat less fat, not because it is dangerous, but because we simply eat too much
• The rock bottom safe fat intake is around 5% by calorie, or 2.5% by mass.
• Unhealthy people should be targetting around 10% by calorie, or 5% by mass. This is for caloric reduction, not because fat is bad for you.
• Healthy people should target 20-30% by calorie, but realistically don't need monitoring, except to ensure they are getting enough quality fat.

Now let's talk about two big problems that are happening in the US. First and foremost, we have mistakenly replaced whole food fats with dangerous processed oils. We are starving for nourishing fat in our diet. Stop using or eating oil; eat a whole food instead. Animal foods are the best source of nourishing fat.

The second is paradoxically occuring among the healthy population. They are repeated told to reduce fat intake, so they do, to dangerously low levels. If you are ideal weight, you likely already have the right fat intake, and your attention would be better spent elsewhere.

Do not worry about lean meats, saturated vs. unsaturated, lowfat milk, or any of the stuff we are bombarded with. It's irrelevant if you are eating food; it's only relevant to choose the lesser of evils among edible products. The important thing is eat range-fed, whole foods, and avoid processed oils.

Does range-fed really matter?

Yes. The same way that our diet affects our health, the diet of our livestock determines their health. Grain-fed farm animals have too acidic a diet, and they pass on that excess acidity to us when we eat them.

Because factory-farmed animals are more unhealthy than their range-fed counterparts, they get sick more often. They require more antibiotic and drug intervention, which also gets passed along to us. 40% of all antibiotics manufactured in the US goes to farm animals.

The normal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids found in nature is roughly 1:1, and that is around what is found in free range-fed animals. Ratios as high as 40:1 have been measured in grain-fed animals; that's comparable to what is found in processed oils. This reduces the total amount of omega-3's in the meat, lowering its health-promoting benefits. It also messes up your hormones. A range-fed animal has modestly acidic meat combined with healthy fat. A grain-fed animal is basically an unhealthy combination of acid and oil.

Farming practices profoundly affect the healthiness of the food produced, and that applies to plants, animals, and seafood. Our modern food is literally less nourishing than it used to be.

EDIBLE PRODUCTS REFINED or FAST FOODS especially SUGAR/HFCS, FLOUR products, and OILS Products that don't SPOIL

The apparent controversies between well-respected authorities is confusing and misleading. While they argue fine points of exact mechanisms and key factors, the vast area of their common agreement goes unemphasized. The Radical Solution is just that: the area different experts agree upon. Any "disagreement" is usually about rate: not whether the guidelines are effective (they all are), but which ones are the most effective (so we can direct our efforts accordingly).

It is hard for me to convey just how overwhelming and emphatic the alignment is on this particular recommendation. Every authority agrees YOU MUST ELIMINATE edible products, refined foods, fast food, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, flour products, and processed oils from your diet. It elevates this guideline to the status of an absolute decree. It doesn't matter what field or profession the authority started from, they all universally come to this same conclusion.

Furthermore, in 10 years of investigation, 100s health books, and 1000s of articles, studies, and web pages, I haven't found a single credible source that promotes the "health benefits" of edible products. There is no doctor who created the "Candy Diet" locked in heated debate with the scientist who invented the "Canola Diet" over whether sugar or oil is better for your health!

Sugar, HFCS, Flour, and processed Oil offer malnourishment. They ruin our health. They are pleasurable toxins a healthy body can tolerate in small doses but an unhealthy body succumbs to. They are the Four Horsemen of Death.

The Four Horsemen are one of the top three ingredients of virtually every edible product. It appears we eat a variety of things because we get different products, but in reality we are simply eating vast amounts of the Four Horsemen. They are in your condiments, peanut butter, tuna fish, yogurt, hummus, and many other places you wouldn't expect.

Edible product companies try to obfuscate the Four Horsemen by calling them different names on the ingredient label. If you know the equivalencies, then reading ingredient labels is a shock. The Four Horsemen are everywhere. This is another reason why our sincere efforts to improve health have been hampered; it appears we are eating a healthy food, but instead we are really eating a harmful edible product.

Here's the reasons to eliminate the Four Horsemen of Death, and thus by extension edible products:

• The Horsemen have dangerously low N/cal
• The Horsemen are strongly acid-forming
• The Horsemen directly increase free radical formation (unsaturated oils in particular)
• The Horsemen adversely affect our hormone systems. In particular, our insulin / glucagon balance and sex hormones
• The Horsemen promote internal inflammation; there is some evidence that they actually cause it
• The Horsemen adversely affect our immune system. This creates food sensitivies and eventually autoimmune diseases
• The Horsemen disrupt our internal flora, promoting candida and other microbial imbalances
• The Horsemen overwork our corrective organs, leading to organ fatigue and eventually failure

Special section on sugar?
  AGEs, RAGEs

Products with a long shelf life are either a) filled with the Horsemen and/or b) filled with preservatives, neither of which you want.

Real food tends to spoil quickly; that's what you want to eat. Fruits overripen, vegetables wilt, meat rots, dairy spoils, etc. Some foods are naturally resistant to spoiling (e.g. nuts and seeds), but these are recognizably foods and not edible products.

Thinking in terms of food spoilage is a good safety check. Any edible product that could last more than a month in your house is unsafe to eat.

Being safe means changing your shopping habits. Buy small amounts of a wide variety of foods every few days, instead of large trips every couple weeks. Try out farmer's markets, CSAs, and other ways to get fresher food.

Every WEEK... TREAT YOURSELF to any meal or an after-meal DESSERT Eat a tiny portion of ORGAN MEAT

Here's why you want to treat yourself:

• Treats make people feel better, in particular about their food
• Occasional treats increase your dietary diversity (while excessive treats reduce your dietary diversity)
• Social eating in restaurants tends to be an uncontrolled environment anyway

Organ meats are particularly useful at raising our health.

• They contain a broad dosage of vitamins and minerals, along with (nearly) complete cofactors
• The function of several organs is detoxification, and they have an even greater detoxification effect than meat already has
• They contain a skewed ratio of vitamins that is helpful for correcting our too acidic condition

This latter point bears expanding. Organ meats taken in small portions regularly promotes health because it skews our internal balance back toward healthy. Eating organ meats more frequently or in larger quantities doesn't help; the beneficial effect is rate-limited by other buffers. Eating large portions of organ meats too frequently is potentially dangerous, because the skewed nutrient distribution introduces a different harmful bias.

Do not worry about toxins being in organ meats. Large heavy metal exposure does cause those toxins to be shunted into our internal organs. But livestock is not exposed to anywhere near the levels that were used in those studies. Measurements show heavy metals in organ meats are generally no larger than found in meat to begin with. Since meat has such a powerful detoxifying ability, we come out net ahead. Remember, health-promotion is more important than exposure.

Why Happy

Convenience and price drives food decision
  not N/cal
Time starvation is major cause
  overcommmitment
  stress
workforce marginalization
Slow, enjoyable activities

(We have so little eustress and so much distress we
only mean the latter when we say the word "stress"!)

Defense catastrophe
stress depletes vit C
  Vit C protects A & E
Stress decreases tryptophan buffers
  seratonin, melatonin, and tryptamine

mirror neurons, pathways
pheremones, chemical synch
far IR
verbal fluency, wit, confidence
interrupts compulsive thoughts

cortisol => sugar craving, fat craving, weight gain
  fat relocation => visceral area (abdominal obesity)
http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/stresscortisol.html

Investigate Brodish and Lymangrove

The hormones that switch on catabolism are the stress hormones: adrenaline,
growth hormone, glucagon and cortisol. The hormone that switches on anabolism
is insulin; and insulin and the stress hormones are direct antagonists in
many organs. Insulin switches off sugar production in the liver, stress
hormones switch it on. Insulin makes fat and muscle cells absorb sugars and
fats. The stress hormones do the opposite

Sex reduces stress
Sex reduces blood pressure
Sex improves immune response (IgA)
Sex is pleasurable, calorie-burning exercise
Sex improves cardiac health and reduces cardiac risk
Sex raises self-esteem
Sex reduces pain and increases pain threshhold
Sex strengthens pelvic floor muscles (reducing incontinence, etc.)
Sex improves intimacy (oxytocin)
Orgasm improves restful sleep
Ejaculation reduces risk of prostate cancer

Libido inhibitors:
Stress
Alcohol
Relationship problems
Insufficient Sleep
Parenting / Scheduling
Drugs and Medications
Body Image
Obesity
Erectile Dysfunction
Hormone imbalance
Depression
Menopause
Lack of intimacy

Yes. Take your meals at exactly the times suggested (6AM, Noon, 6PM) and go to bed at 9:30PM. This further synchronizes your body:

• with diurnal hormone cycles, specifically your cortisol curve
• with diurnal acid / base body floods
• with diurnal sunlight
• with your circadian rhythms

Overview of circadian rhythm, regimes
  http://www.psycheducation.org/depression/clock.htm
Dark Therapy
  http://www.psycheducation.org/depression/darkrx.htm

Chronotherapy
  http://www.chicagochronotherapy.com/index.html
  
Explain hormones
metabolism
blood glucose

melatonin => alcoholism in rats


AVOIDING ARTIFICIAL LIGHTING & RADIATION
  Lights increase levels of ACTH, causing distress
  Flickering from flourescent lights causes headaches
  Lights unsynchronized to diurnal cycle
  Lack of variation - impacts circulation and robustness
  Read John Ott
    Plant growth and budding often suppressed by artificial lighting
    Light of any kind interferes with diurnal and seasonal cues
    Artificial light can kill some kinds of plants
    Color influences hormones, in particular sex hormones 
      Pink aggression, blue docility
    Artificial light skews cellular functions
    Artificial light causes lesions
    Artificial lighting provokes aggression and irritability
    UHF fields influence acetylcholine => hyperactivity and listlessness 
Red light => cellular rupture; incandescent lights => heart disease?
Pink light caused calcific myocarditis
Pink light promoted tumors

• Your mouth (salivation, chewing). It takes 15-60s per mouthful to chew a proper bolus. The mouth does the most physical breakdown of food.
• Your stomach (gastric acid, enzymes). Food typically remains around 30-120 min in your stomach after you stop eating. The stomach does the majority of chemical breakdown of food.
• Your small intestine (nutrient extraction, balancing). Nutrient-rich mush stays in your small intestine up to 2-6 hours after you stop eating. The small intestine does the lion's share of nutrient uptake.
• Your large intestine (removal, excretion). Everything else hangs around your bowels for 6-72 hours longer. While minor nutrient uptake occurs in the large intestines, they are mostly focused on removing body excesses.

An unhealthy person has weak and slow digestion. They tend toward the upper ends of the time estimates. Food passes through their system slowly and sluggishly.

If you are being properly nourished, digestion tends to raise your overall body buffers, and rebalance them; this occurs specifically in the small intestine. Every moment you are not digesting (i.e. have mush in your small intestines), you are fasting. While fasting, you are depleting your body buffers.

A healthy person has ample body buffers and can withstand long periods of fasting. They can also go longer between receiving any one nutrient. So the particular timing of their eating has a minor impact on their nourishment.

An unhealthy person has low or imbalanced body buffers, and the timing of their intake has a major impact on their nourishment. Moreover, small biases in their environment tend to deplete the same body buffer(s), making them misfunction.

Proper digestion requires the coordination of many systems in concert to gain nourishment. A misfunctioning body system not only impairs health, it also impairs the body's ability to self-correct by reducing dietary nourishment.

Why Radical Balance

EAT RADICALLY BALANCED with a variety of SPICES Timely BALANCED SNACKS EAT SLOWLY, with COURSES

Radical Balance is a combination of pH balance, macronutrient balance, and timing. Everyone needs macronutrient balance, while pH balance and timing are mainly aimed at helping unhealthy people nourish themselves and restore their digestive potency.

pH balance is eating acid and alkaline foods at the same sitting, so that they neutralize one another before they hit your bloodstream. This minimizes the generation of free radicals.

Macronutrient balance is ensuring a proper distribution of the four categories every time you eat (meals and snacks):

• Carbohydrates. These provide fast, immediate energy usually less than 15m after you digest them. Complex carbs can extend to 30m. Depending on your health, this usually occurs 30-90 mins after you eat.
• Proteins. These provide moderate energy in the 1-3 hour timeframe.
• Fats. These provide longer term energy, specifically 3+ hours after you eat.
• Fiber. This helps regulate the energy macronutrients

Timing is to coordinate your food intake. Your breakfast and dinner should be at the same time, and your lunch should be in between them. So if you eat breakfast at 6AM, your dinner should be at 6PM, and lunch at noon. A healthy person is fine with only three square meals a day.

An unhealthy person needs to rebuild their body buffers and prime their next meal. This is done with in-between meal snacks, and water taken around 30 minutes before any food intake. This maximizes digestion time (your body buffers being increased) and minimizes fasting (your stores being depleted).

After every meal, take a short walk outdoors. If you are unhealthy, try to take a brief walk after every snack as well.

For an unhealthy person, a balanced breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Morning is when your buffers are at their lowest. The American tendency to skip breakfast or hastily eat edible products is harmful for unhealthy people.

So what does this icon mean?

Think of it as a dial. Take whatever time you eat breakfast and rotate the 6 o'clock to it. Large circles are meals, small circles are snacks, and droplets are water breaks. The plus and minus symbols are just a reminder to balance your meals and snacks. The walk symbols are reminders to take outdoor walks.

Does this means I have to start memorizing the pH and macronutrients of every food and snack?

Not really. As long as your plate looks like either the Radical Plate or the MyPlate, then your meal is already pH and macronutrient balanced.

It is also important that your snacks be radically balanced. But there is also a simple method there. Combine two items:

(1-2) Plant food(s) + (0-1) Animal food

=

Balanced Snack

Good snack choices include: nuts, seeds, cheese, and plain yogurt. These foods are already well balanced and complement almost anything else, like some tasty fruits or snackmeats. Vary your snack combinations; this gives you greater diversity and pleasure. If you are comfortable with nutrition, then follow the balance guidelines to create other balanced snack recipes.

Why spices?

• Spices are often cofactors for food nutrients of foods they "go well with"
• Spices mobilize cellular activity. In particular, many dislodge toxins
• Some spices (like garlic) are themselves detoxifiers
• Spices make food taste better. Some even say it is the variety of life. ;-)

When we say "spice" we also include accent plants, garnishes, and other plant foods used in small quantities. The health benefit of a spice is improved the more fresh and whole it is. So it is better to grow a cilantro plant than to get chopped cilantro. Not surprisingly, fresh spices also taste much better than spice products. Where practical, prefer fresh, whole spices.

Why eat slowly?

Our tendency toward large meals wolfed-down is too much too fast for a weak digestive system. Chewing slowly is a simple, proven way to improve your digestion:

• Chewing slowly allows saliva more time to build and digest. If your food is too dry, wait between mouthfuls
• This reduces the tendency to drink fluids between chews. If you feel that need, you are chewing and swallowing too fast. (Or you are malhydrated, but since you are drinking ample water, that's not the case.)
• Chewing slowly creates a better bolus, improving digestion. You want to chew your food to a mush before you swallow
• Chewing slowly reduces air intake, reducing flatulence

If you are unhealthy, you may also want to use courses to further spread out your digestion.

This guideline is almost exclusively curative; healthy people have such strong digestion their attention is better directed elsewhere.

SUPPLEMENTATION including drugs, pills, and powders (UNLESS you must due to a pressing medical condition) UNBALANCED SNACKS

Here's why you want to avoid supplementation:

• Supplements in general are acid-forming. Drugs and medications are very acidic
• Studies show multi-vitamins have no impact on health outcome. They increase our nutrition but do not nourish us
• Multivitamins tend to have improper mineral ratios; in particular, copper over zinc
• Narrow-band supplements (like specific vitamins) introduce a small, consistent bias in your diet whose effect is unknown
• Narrow-band supplements are more likely to disrupt your body balances than rebalance them
• Supplements should in general not be taken without consulting a doctor or relevant authority. There are many non-obvious, long range effects of supplements taken in isolation

Remember, nutrition and nourishment are not the same. Supplements increase our nutrition; whole foods increase our nourishment. The latter is what we really want.

Lastly, when we say the word snack, we mean a couple fresh, whole foods taken between meals. We NEVER mean edible products! This is merely another safety check to ensure that you are eating real food in between meals and not junk products.

Every YEAR... FAST or GREEN DIET CLEANSE PAMPER YOURSELF to the beach, mineral / mud bath, sauna, or massage

Here's why you occasionally want to fast or cleanse:

• Occasional fasting / cleansing has a substantial detoxification ability (in the context of an otherwise healthy diet)
• Fasting/cleansing allows the inflammation / upset related to food sensitivities to subside, improving digestion
• Fasting/cleansing has proven beneficial effects, like improving your breath, skin, and reducing constipation
• Fasting/cleansing has known beneficial effects, like reducing allergies, increasing energy, and improving mood
• Fasting/cleansing removes accumulated colon matter, which is believed beneficial
• Water fasting reduces biomarkers linked to coronary heart disease

Some people use excessive fruit juicing aimed specifically at colon cleansing, which isn't recommended. However, fruit and vegetable juicing may be advisable for very active people who have a high caloric needs.

How long you fast depends on the kind you do. Water fasting is safe to do for a day, no more than two. Either green or juice fasting can be done for a week; both together is fine for a couple weeks.

Why Activity

Circulation
Oxygenation
Oxytocin
Better health

Greek arenation: exercising nude on the sand to maximize sunlight exposure
  sunlight and exercise is more potent than either alone

try it
refer to friends, family, loved ones
    word of mouth
facebook stuff
translation 
medical professionals
public health, nutritionists
policy makes
decision makers
libraries

You May Want To Skip Reading

The fundamental problem is that corporations make money when people are
recurrently sick

food politics, Marketing
soil and remineralize
Businesses and Monsanto
instabilities in monoculture agriculture
Corporate money sponsors authoritative research

Government alternate sources
Local Franchise farming

Movement toward time and convenience
Dollar moving out of the home into restaurants
Products because of longer cycle time to buy foods
Food preparation being done on large-scale centralized because of efficiency
Need to make small-scale, local, personal food preparation "kitchens"
  Some centralization necessary for variety, too much is too impersonal
Want to focus on freshly-prepared dishes "buying convenience and health"

Fast food nation

Pharmaceuticals
Americans obsessed with "the pill"
We can change our biochemistry through behavior as effectively as drugs

SUNLIGHT, OUTDOORS:
Cities and Hospitals have classically been deathtraps, and they are becoming
so again
City architecture and planning
10% Hospital acquired infection (HAI)
40-60% of population Vitamin D deficient, centered on cities
walkability
greenery
sun

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
Florence Nightengale Principles - Notes on Hospitals
http://www.iasdr2009.org/ap/Papers/Poster%20Highlight/The%20Nightingale%20Principles%20-%2019th%20century%20thinking%20for%2021st%20century%20sustainable%20practice.pdf
Radiant heat by fire

MODERN EDUCATION
Must include gardens
trips to farms
food preparation
health

Aim For                Avoid
Diverse Selection      Dietary Sensitivities
Meat and Vegetables    Too much of either
Organic, Free-Range    Toxins, processing, preservatives
Planned Snacking / Fasting   Very Large Meals
2000 cal               Calorie bombs and bingeing

 urine is most acid at 2:00 A.M. (pH 5.0 
to 6.8) in the morning (the base tide) and most alkaline at 2:00 P.M. (pH 7.0 to 
8.5) in the afternoon (base flood

link to cortisol?

Apo B100
Calcified Plaque
OxLDL

Fish oil and tuna fish
  Vitamin E oils

Could saline concentrations affect bacterial growth?

lack of zinc and cysteine 

DIAGNOSABLE INTERMEDIATE STATES
  Binary function of organs, when evidence is against

COUNTRY-WIDE EPIDEMIOLOGY
  Current methodology is the incorrect one to capture what we want
  Difference of proof required for practicum and mechanism
  Single cause blind spot
  Epidemiology captures effects we are unaware of
  Already collecting data
  Basis for legislation

Soil image = diet of plants
Animal grazing = diet of animals
human eating = diet of humans

Iconography every section
  break why sections up by icon

Plant care recommendations

http://www.cortisolconnectiondiet.com/ch3_1.php

http://www.womenfitness.net/ugly_truths.htm
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=81
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/othernuts/omega3fa/


http://www.wereyouwondering.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-digest-food/

Personal food preparation

Sleeper agents

Fat: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio104/lipids.htm

Cholesterol Myth
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8SSCNaaDcE
  http://www.thincs.org/members.htm
  http://www.ravnskov.nu/cholesterol.htm
  http://www.amazon.com/Fat-Cholesterol-are-Good-You/dp/919755538X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1297748778&sr=1-2

Insulin -> Liver -> Cholesterol levels

oxygenation + cancer
acidity + cancer (lactic acid)
oxygen + mitochondria = energy
free radicals hurt mitochondria

processed oils contain trans fats
burning causes skin cancer
  burning + prostaglandins = suppresses immune system
  prostaglandins produced from Linoleic acid in processed oils
  polyunsaturated fat suppresses the immune system
wheat -> causes food sensitivity, PUSF then suppresses immune response
  vitamin A, C, E, carotene reduces sunburning
  also reduces cancer skin cancer
sunlight inhibits cancer, lung, breast, etc.
hypertension correlates to cancer
PUFAs reduce vitamin E
Animal foods are rich in vitamin K2

vitamin D regulates intracellular vitamin C

excess cortisone => cushing's disease = obesity, hypertension
Excess vitamin D causes magnesium depletion, yielding heart attacks

Rho bad, reduces (Nitric Oxide good)
esterified cholesterol (bad when too much)

Consumption of refined sugar and refined grain products also cause the body to metabolize omega-6 fats into pro-inflammatory prostaglandins

http://www.oleda.com/oleda_tips/tips.asp?dept=48

http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/natural-health/high-fructose-corn-syrup-dangers/

Appendices

and Other Vestigal Organs

Let's look at the data, and then talk about how to interpret it. All charts and quotes from this appendix come from the WHO report. Here's the number of deaths broken down by risk factor and country income:

Here's the same data but interpreted by Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs). The majority of DALYs lost worldwide are due to psychatric disorders and hormone imbalances; these rarely kill us, but often rob us of years of our lives.

As a country becomes more prosperous, they reduce deaths from traditional risks but increase those from modern risks. Traditional risks can be reduced to very low numbers, as evidenced in the first world; at the moment, how to control the key factors in modern risk is still a work in progress.

Lastly, these risk factors are not all exclusive. Some deaths are multiply-attributed:

Global data is more useful and reliable than local data

Global data also helps because it can help identify common etiology, even for causes that don't exist in your country. For example, take these three killers:

• Tobacco Use (includes smoking, chewing, etc.)
• Indoor smoke from solid fuels
• Urban outdoor air pollution

The Radical Solution addresses the top five risk factors, and all relevant first world factors except #13 Occupational risk:

Need	Related to WHO Death Rank
H2O / Na	#1 High blood pressure, #8 Alcohol Use, #11 Unsafe Water, sanitation, hygeine
Sunlight	Unranked
Oxygen	#2 Tobacco Use, #10 Indoor smoke from solid fuels, #14 Urban outdoor air pollution
Motion	#4 Physical inactivity, part #3 High blood glucose, part #5 Overweight and obesity
Food	#12 Low fruit and vegetable intake, part #3 High blood glucose, part #5 Overweight and obesity, All Deficiencies (#16 Vitamin A, #17 Zinc, #19 Iron)
Eustress	Unranked

It also addresses two other important risk factors (lack of sunlight and distress) that have yet to be measured adequately.

Risk factors differ in quality and causality

Similarly, differentiation of a risk factor often occurs after the fact in response to other data. For example, mild alcohol taken occasionally after meals in a social setting is good for your health, whereas lonely binge drinking of liquor leading to violence will kill you (in one way or another). However, in the charts above, both are grouped under "Alcohol use" even though the pattern of use has a big difference on health outcome. How we do things is just as important as what we do.

The commonality of the same risk factor among different diseases increases its quality and our confidence that they are a bad thing. So, for example, smoking and alcohol are known risk factors for a bunch of disease states that have nothing to do with one another. That suggests that they are linked to a deeper problem than their straightforward mechanism of action, which in these two cases are the impairment of our basic oxygen and water metabolisms.

Last but not least, we should once again remind ourselves that there is a big difference in the causality of these correlations. For example, if you got killed on the job, then it's pretty clear "Occupational risk" is what killed you. If you have a zinc deficiency and died from malnutrition, then we strongly believe that a lack of zinc was the causal agent. But a high cholesterol level is already known to be a proxy marker for a bunch of things, and may also represent as yet unmeasured causal agents behind it. Furthermore, many risk factors interact with one another in complex ways:

Remember, risk factors are anything that is easily measurable that has a correlation to incidence of disease. No one believes Education and Income are causal agents actively causing ill health. Instead, they are good proxy markers, especially among subpopulations (say, among the very poor who can't afford enough food or any medical care).

More quality risk factors are known

"The leading global risks for mortality in the world are high blood pressure (responsible for 13% of deaths globally), tobacco use (9%), high blood glucose (6%), physical inactivity (6%), and overweight and obesity (5%). These risks are responsible for raising the risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and cancers. They affect countries across all income groups: high, middle and low."

Second, concentrating our efforts in the top risk factors has a large, already measured payoff. If we eliminated the causal agents behind just the top risk factors behind death and DALYs, we would increase worldwide life expectancy by 5-10 years. That's ginormous. So WHO was trying to draw attention to areas of high benefit / effort.

Here are some other risk factors that are known to apply globally (though for many their impact on mortality are currently uncalculated):

Age Despair Distress (in particular while eating) Social dislocation Social support Depression High sodium intake Water / sodium intake Low water intake Lack of sunlight Lack of vitamin D from sunlight Metabolic Syndrome Type 2 Diabetes Insulin resistance Central obesity Low cholesterol Dislipidemia (high triglycerides and low HDL-C) Lack of sleep Shift work / circadian disruption

Gender Muscle strength, specifically grip strength Muscle effectiveness Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) Gestational Diabetes Postpartum condition Childbirth complications Factors in infant mortality Factors in child mortality

Ionizing radiation Chemical exposure in general Specific chemical exposure Infection in general Site specific infections Strain specific infections Carcinogen exposure

This list and others like it highlight how important it is to measure hormonal function, in particular around meals. Someone needs to develop a complete hormone measuring device that can capture rate change information in real time, preferably a portable unit. That device will be central to breaking open the real causal agents behind our (missing) risk factors, as well as defining the reference range interactions between hormones. Basic science with practical application and existing market all in one.

Appendix B: Malhydration Calculations

Let's overview the water balance. We have a net fixed loss per day from breathing, and this is determined almost entirely by environment (air temperature and humidity). Under comfortable conditions, this loss is around 0.5L / day, but under arid conditions can easily top 1L / day.

The water content of your poop is largely determined by what you eat. With any good diet where you eat primarily food, then it's a wash; you eat as much water as you poop out. However, if you eat junk products then your body can lose up to 1L / day. When your body can't readily supply that fluid, you get constipated.

The big wild card is sweat. Your body sweats in response to several factors, but most notably increased temperature, especially induced by exercise. This is pure water and sodium loss, and has a huge range of variability. Hydrate before and during exercise.

Urine is a special case because the kidney is primarily in the game of correcting imbalances in plasma, not excreting water per se. It also does the spot removal of toxins. It uses water because that's how other stuff gets moved around. We normally urinate 1-2L a day, but this can go up if we drink lots of fluids or induce diuresis.

There are other occasional water pathways; most are negligible. The skin normally has an oily seal that prevents water transfer, so most immersion doesn't do anything. This seal gets removed during cleaning or very long immersion, at which point water transfer can occur. The direction depends on the osmotic pressure of the water (or to a first approximation, its salinity). The other significant pathways involve uterine excretion: menses, female orgasm, etc. are fluid losses that need water compensation.

Note that the common pathways are all net loss for water. At a baseline minimum, we need around (0.5) + (0-1) + (1-2) = 1.5-3.5L + sweat per day.

We need to drink much more than this minimum. Every gram of sodium we ingest has to be balanced by 2L of pure water. But then we want excess water over and above that, too; let's describe why.

  Diarrhea!  This is huge, and a killer, too
  Lookup menses info for water calc
  blurb on fluids and illness in general

Sodium mechanism
http://www.teachingmedicine.com/pdf_files/U_Na_2007.pdf

Add salinity
Total sodium mass in and out

The same is also true of body toxins. The first toxin pathway is excretion in the urine, which can only occur so fast. At the same time, the body is constantly absorbing toxins in the lymphatic nodes where it neutralizes them. Once those mechanisms are overloaded, the only option left is to stash toxins in soft tissues until later. Those toxins can't be dislodged or excreted until the body receives excess water over and above its minimum requirements.

The body is also fearfully good at retaining water, but the water retention mechanism in the kidney uses sodium transport, i.e. by conserving water your body is also forced to retain sodium. When the body senses a lack of water, it begins rationing to different parts of the body. This effect can be seen in flow to extremities during frostbite, visceral blood rush during meals, cooler hands and feet at rest, etc. The mechanisms used to ration (vasopressin and histamines) have long term adverse effects when overactivated. Besides the direct effects of hypertension and allergic reaction, there are more insidious consequences. The first is lack of nutrient transport; bodily fluids need to flow for circulation. The second is suppression of the immune system and lack of adequate lymphatic function. The third is persistent inflammation, in particular around endothelial linings near joint cavities.

The take home point here is: we need excess water to cure malhydration. If all we do is replace our water loss and balance sodium, at best we maintain our current level of health (though in reality, if we persist in a malyhdrated state, our health steadily decreases). The only way the body can improve its health is with excess water, above both the homeostatic need and sodium balancing. With excess water, the body can shed sodium, flush toxins, transport nutrients, normalize immune response, and in general rebalance whatever it needs to.

To correct malhydration the best pathway is sweat, not urine. You can safely push much more fluid per day through sweat glands than your kidneys, and that fluid can be of higher salinity and lower pH, so your rate of correction is faster. Sweat directly helps your lymphatic system, toxin release, sodium rebalancing, acidic pH shedding, and your skin. Moreover, activities that cause you to sweat (sunlight, saunas, exercise, and sex) improve your health for other reasons.

Malhydration lowers intracellular pH and shrinks cell size

• 60-70% intracellular fluid (ICF) - The fluid inside cells
• 30-40% extracellular fluid (ECF) - The fluid outside cells
  • ~ 6-8% plasma - The fluid in blood and lymph
  • ~ 2.5% transcellular fluid - The fluid in joint cavities
  • [Rest] interstitial fluid - The transport fluid between plasma and cells

The body does everything it can in order to maintain homeostasis in the plasma, and by extension all ECF. As sodium concentrations rise in the ECF, osmotic turgor causes pH to increase inside cells while moving water outside them. This keeps the ECF sodium concentration within normal limits, but increases total sodium weight while decreasing cell size. However, the body cannot continue either volume or solute exchange indefinitely. Once healthy slack is exhausted, then the osmotic pressure differential between ICF and ECF can raise blood pressure unboundedly. This is further enhanced by ion pumps across the cell membrane that try to restore healthy cell parameters.

The situation gets progressively worse. Smaller, lower pH cells have less efficient internal chemical processing. In addition, they also tend to have thicker cell membranes (the chain of causality for this is still unclear). This thicker cell wall changes both transport across the membrane and external functions, like carrying oxygen by red blood cells. There is further evidence from trans fats that cellular curvature and membrane gaps are related to free radical formation. So a physically smaller cell is also more susceptible to radicals, the initiator of many cancers. Worse, small acidic cells are already known cancer promoters. Altogether, it means malhydration reduces our metabolism and makes us ripe for cancer.

A crucial point here is: malhydration does not exhibit in sodium serum levels until far too late. We do not routinely measure intracellular pH nor cell size, but those studies which have have shown a definite connection between them and disease states. We need direct measurements of total sodium weight and water volumes in ICF and ECF in order to more accurately diagnose water to salt balance problems.

By the way, over-reliance on blood measurements is a consistent blind side to the western analysis of disease. By the time your blood serum is messed up, systemic damage has already been done and you are already hosed. We need to develop earlier-stage diagnostics of chronic imbalances to capture small, consistent biases before they develop into serious problems.

There is a big opportunity here to create a new class of intracellular measurements. Saliva and skin cells seem to be likely candidates. The company that creates new equipment for this and proves its diagnostic reliability has first mover advantage in a guaranteed worldwide market.

Being able to measure different ECFs directly would also be helpful. Merely determining reference ranges for lymph drawn from the thoracic duct before it drains into the brachiocephalic veins would be a big leap forward.

Another much needed device is a chemical sensor at the end of an acupuncture needle. This could give real time rate information in local volumes. The most likely uses would be to sense hormone and solute changes.

The three root causes of malhydration are sodium, stress, and drinks

• Our overall sodium / water ratio from all sources is too high. That's a direct effect
• We are chronically stressed, which malhydrates us. Refer to the appendix on stress.
• We drink stuff other than water, and that malhydrates us. Let's explain that right now.

Sweat is a better pathway for correction. It is normally acidic and commonly has pH 4. That means you could remove the acidifying effect of 1L of soda with a mere 10L of sweat. (That's something that could conceivably happen.)

Now, if we are also receiving alkaline effects in our diet and lifestyle, these fluid numbers drop considerably. That's because acids and bases neutralize one another. But most adverse health effects are acid-forming. The only major alkalizing forces we have are mineralized water, oxygen (and by extension, sunlight), fruits, and vegetables. In the absence of those influences, we would need to drink 9L+ of water for every 1L of soda just to sweat away the acidic pH. We aren't even talking about the chemical action(s) that soda has, this is merely what we'd need for zero hydronium flux.

The body can't afford to shed that much water under any circumstances. So once the kidneys are overloaded, it signals via PTH (parathyroid hormone) to leech alkaline salts from your bones. This neutralizes acids without the need for more water, but also removes calcium from your bone matrix. As another unfortunate side effect, this adversely influences your Vitamin D balance, which is an important protective and regulatory hormone. Misregulation of calcium alone leads to osteoporosis, related bone and immune problems, and nervous system issues. Many suspect that skewing the Vitamin D mechanism is a major player in several preventable diseases.

More saliently, drinking soda immediately depletes your reserves of water. This is also true of alcohol, caffeinated beverages, and sugary drinks. Do not be misled by studies that measure total water in and total water out for regular drinkers, coffee consumers, etc. Those merely indicate that once the body is malhydrated it is very good at holding onto water. The more relevant studies demonstrate dose response in the absence of regular intake. Soda, alcohol, coffee, and fruit juice are all diuretic if you have them infrequently, and their regular intake keeps your water buffer chronically depleted. They are the small, consistent bias that prevent our water buffer from refilling and metabolism from functioning properly.

The body then becomes trapped in a vicious cycle. Our bodies signal thirst and need for water, but we meet it with the very drinks that further malhydrate us. Even worse, once we've done body damage we then treat those problems with drugs, which even further acidify us, malhydrate us, mess with our hormones, and in some cases our basic body chemistry. The only way to break the cycle is to drink a steady excess of only water, avoid all supplementation; then reduce medications as it becomes safe to do so, with the goal of total elimination.

Water / Sodium intake alone is an already proven cause of malhydration

A basic armchair analysis shows the severity of malhydration in the human diet. Let's get a national average of per capita daily intake of sodium and water. At last estimate, the daily sodium intake per person is around 3400mg / day per person. This estimate can be further refined: 3,100-4,700mg / day for men, and 2,300-3,100mg / day for women. From our previous calculations, that means that on average we need (7L)+(1.5L-3.5L) ~ 8.5-10.5L of water per day to balance our sodium.

The best estimate is that daily drinking water is ~ 2L / day per capita. Around 2008, the average bottled water intake was 28.5 gallons / year per capita, or 108L / 365 days = 0.3L / day per capita. This is comparable to other beverage consumption. So a generous estimate is 2.5L / day per person water consumption.

Thus, a conservative estimate is that the average American is at a 6-8L water deficit / day. Optimistically, this is equivalent to sustained 0.35% saline intake, though in reality sodium and water aren't taken at the same time.

We've already established that other drinks malhydrate us despite their water content. But assume in a magical universe that they did hydrate us. In 2003, the per capita total beverage consumption in gallons per year was about (21.6 milk) + (7.5 tea) + (24.3 coffee) + (46.4 soda) + (8.4 juice) + (25.2 alcohol) = 133.4 gallons / year = 505L / 365 days = 1.4 L / day. These figures well correlate with those found in trending reports so we can have confidence in them. Thus, water from all sources is alarmingly short of total water need, independent of the adverse effects beverages other than water have.

The situation is even worse than it looks. These are from the hip global averages that don't account for dietary patterns among healthy vs. unhealthy subpopulations. Healthy people eat less sodium, drink more water and less other beverages. The figures for these are all known (regular soda drinkers vs. non-drinkers, etc.) but I won't bore you with them. It means that unhealthy people have an enormous daily water deficit, well over 10L per day. This isn't even accounting for the malhydration effects of what they do drink; this is merely the deficit associated with sodium imbalance. This optimistically translates to sustained 0.5%+ saline among unhealthy populations, though real intakes are probably much more spikey.

We must change our laws from focusing on sodium content to directly regulating salinity. Edible products are the main culprit for the harmful sodium levels that endanger public health. Once this is removed, then our water needs drop to much more manageable levels. With luck, it will incent manufacturers to add moisture to their edible products, which will also help.

Even a brief gander at this chart shows how bad things are. Assuming all products were made of pure water, it isn't until page 14 of 26 that you start getting to food with a safe salinity; and most edible products have very little water in them. The items with the best ratios are fresh, whole foods.

Sodium / Hyponatreia
  vomiting, headache, confusion, lethargy, fatigue, appetite loss, restlessness and irritability, muscle weakness, spasms, or cramps, seizures, and decreased consciousness or coma

Malhydration effects
  Calcium balance calculation

SODIUM BALANCE CALC
overview
http://www.labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/sodium/test.html
15-250 mEq/L per day in urine
http://www.livestrong.com/article/239465-normal-sodium-levels-in-urine/
x29 = 435-57250 mg/L = .4-5.7g/L per day
http://swatlab.nmsu.edu/conv.html

136 - 145 mEq/L = 0.9% ~ 140?
http://www.globalrph.com/hyponatremia.htm
Aldosterone regulates retention
  but nothing signals release

Does sodium get consumed in the body?

Fruit juice effects
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8989331

lymphatic system
http://www.lymphnotes.com/article.php/id/151/
http://www.cloudninemarketing.com/healthhealersnews/?p=2665

Immune system
http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/BUGL/immune.htm

Electrolytes
http://www.innvista.com/health/nutrition/minerals/electrol.htm

Time analysis to get summary stats
Monetary analysis
Links to total mortality
Links to rates of disease

Hypertension integrative phenomena, not organ-based
sodium, potassium
atrial hormone, endothelin, EDRF
renal: hemodynamic, endocrine

OxLDL.  Lipoproteins, not cholesterol
calcified plaque vs. cholesterol buildup
Arteries compensate
Macrophages -> Foam cells
Layering of fibrinogen => discrete event, response to injury
Mid-size plaques most dangerous
Bypass ineffective, location makes difference

Cellular conditions:
  Acid
  Cell size
  Cell membrane
  Sunlight
Diet
RNA transcriptase
growth factor
immune and lymph nodes

RANDOM STUFF WHICH DIDN'T MAKE THE CUT TO MENTION

Floating Hospital
Reptiles and UV, needed for bone health
Ozone is a non-issue - Sunlight seems uncorrelated
PUFAs -> prostaglandins regulate nerve signaling and muscle movement
  This is the key with sunlight and MS
Trace chemicals and trace radiation
official exercise book china 4 min
  http://www.amazon.com/Knocking-Gate-Life-Exercises-Official/dp/1571456627

TODO:
  Change arrow color to be more subtle
  Create big picture summary
  Create motion pic summary
    Change icons into animated gifs!
  Acidic chart / Standard American Diet & Lifestyle
  Expand on hormone antagonism
    stress while eating
    melatonin during the day - avoid sunglasses
    Sunrise and sunset - dawn simulator
  Distinguish requirement, guideline, recommendation (stop interchange)
  Workout complete sodium calculation
  Develop stagnant water analogy
  Thumbs up and Thumbs down icons, use for all good and bad references
    Red X slash
  Include dangers of statins in supplementation section
  Generative vs Degenerative cycles
    Create iconography for each essential concept, like MoBettaFasta
    Then Mini-icons on reference.  Yes!  Better paragraph flow, too
  Connect available data sources for superproject
  Mention superfoods
  Mention architecture and planning opportunities
  Mention diffuser and solaria specifics
  Add time estimates to recommendations
  Rip Exploring the Spectrum DVD and post vids online
  Try to find videos of cellular activity
  Fix stupid vertical align for IE
  BMR expo - http://www.shapefit.com/basal-metabolic-rate.html
  http://editor.nourishedmagazine.com.au/articles/how-to-overcome-candida-part-1 - SUGAR REF
  http://www.amazon.com/Light-Medicine-Future-Heal-Ourselves/dp/1879181010/ref=pd_ys_qtk_general_recs_29
  - LIGHT Ref
  Life as a Daymaker - David Wagner
  Brandwashed - Martin Lindstrom

INVESTIGATE
  Proteins in complement system
  Nitric Oxide and Endothelial Dysfunction; G-protein link?
  Growth factors.  Liver is for 1) injury and 2) membrane growth / split
  social support
    http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/6/1227.full - REFERENCES
  http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/uvb-exposure-sunlight-and-indoor-tanning/  - REFERENCES 
  zonulin
  homocysteine 
  Sodium in cell link
  Thick / thin blood and clotting factors!
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_bilayer
  What's the deal with chloride?
  What happens to hormones?  They must consume, degrade, or be broken down
  Does sweat contain nutrients?
  Is immune system suppressed in intestines?
  Interstitial fluid -> Heart Rate?
  Peanut allergies = oil reaction?
  Hypertension, John Laragh
  CDC economics, 80s
  oxygen toxicity -> circadian rhythm -> darkness and caffeine protect?

cholesterol
  conversion to bile acids, then excretion by absorption through fiber
  conversion to vitamin D, then conversion to active calcitriol
  conversion to steroidal hormones, then ?
    What happens to steroidal hormones?

ONCE DONE
  Meta tags
  Makeup Facebook page
  Make Youtube vidoes
  Self-publish, get on Amazon
  Promote