“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~ Krishnamurti
What does “healthy” really mean for modern people? Can it simply be defined as a state of well-being, free of disease (dis-ease)? Another, newer definition of health is “not displaying clinical signs of disease or infection”. (Emphasis mine.)
This updated definition views health or the lack thereof through an increasingly narrow and clinical lens.
This is arguably a myopic way of defining health – and further, it indicates that our ideas of health have shifted a lot in the last 120 years.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a doctor was part of his community, and frequently treated whole families over many years’ time. He got to know each member of the family intimately, and was a hands-on master of reassurance who resorted to medicines only when necessary.
Prescriptions of fresh air, mountain spring water, seashore and sunshine may sound quaint to us today, but in our recent ancestors’ time – these were taken seriously, and frequently got beneficial results.
Undeniably, modern medicine has brought many life-saving advances into our homes and hospitals alike – yet our overall level of health and wellbeing has, somehow, significantly decreased in the past few decades…
Heart disease, strokes, and metabolic dysfunction used to be uncommon, if not rare – yet in modern times, the statistics are shocking. Over 88% of North Americans suffer from metabolic dysfunction, and cardiovascular disease is the cause of 1 in every 3 deaths.
In fact, the last few decades have seen alarming rises in many types of illness, and chronic illnesses especially seem to be multiplying at a rapid rate.
Worse still, children and young people are often in just as poor health as older populations, and taking just as many pharmaceuticals – many of them for chronic conditions that ostensibly have no cure or hope of abatement.
The result is that we have normalized chronic illness and health issues as if the human body is simply prone to dysfunction, and medical intervention has become a routine, expected part of life.
In contrast, our recent ancestors typically had boundless physical energy and rarely, if ever, saw a doctor – whereas modern emergency rooms are too often filled with people looking for reassurance in the form of a prescription for the most basic of health concerns.
All this begs the question, WHY are we in fact getting sicker as a collective, in spite of all our advances in science and health care?
Holistic wellness practitioners like me have a wide variety of theories.
Mostly, we suspect the reasons have to do with massive changes to our food, water, and air quality; a decline in physical movement habits; mass over-prescription and reliance on synthetic pharmaceuticals; and above all, a radical redefining of what we consider “healthy”.
A hundred years ago, grocery stores as we know them today did not exist, backyard gardens were quite common, and “local food” was the only type of food most people had access to.
Now, the “food products” that line most of the grocery store shelves have lengthy ingredient lists, and most produce travels an average of 5000 miles before it arrives on your store’s shelves. Freshness is augmented with chemicals, and large-scale growing practices deplete the soil to the point that there are drastically fewer nutrients in our food today than there were in the 1970s.
Factory-farmed meat and dairy may be a travesty for both the environment and the quality of our food – however, synthetic meat alternatives are full of questionable ingredients that our ancestors never ate, such as hydrolyzed pea protein.
Genetically modified grains, sugar, and inflammatory seed oils make up the bulk of the modern diet, and few people are even willing to consider that their diet and health are intertwined. Rather than rethink our food choices, “health” is now being prescribed in the form of pills. Most doctors receive little to no training in nutrition, eat the same diet that their patients do, and have accepted the idea that chronic illness and steady decline is just “normal”.
Modern life is all about convenience – and in the last 120 years, we have invented so many ways to allow us to sit still! While the avoidance of backbreaking, repetitive, and dangerous work is a relief and a boon for our bodies, the transition to sitting so frequently is not.
Our work has largely shifted from physically challenging to mental tasks, and we spend hours of our lives in stuffy, climate-controlled offices, hunched over an electronic screen, wearing clothing and shoes that restrict or confine our body’s natural movements. Many workers do not take time to eat breakfast or proper, nutrient-dense meals, and office work demands mean that access to nature and sunlight is greatly restricted.
Our recent ancestors typically rode bicycles regularly, walked everywhere, carried heavy loads, and generally were more active both indoors and out.
Today, chronic fatigue and adrenal fatigue are commonplace, even in young adults. High levels of depression and anxiety often correlate with low energy. Even our culture’s libido is lagging, due to alarmingly low testosterone levels in so-called “healthy” young men.
Perhaps the biggest underlying issue is in how we have chosen to define health as simply being free of something negative (i.e. dis-ease).
In other words, modern health care encourages us to see our body as a stripped-down, generic machine of isolated systems, and if none of the systems are sending out obvious emergency signals, then voilà! We are deemed healthy.
However, our bodies are not machines, and our parts and systems do not function separately. We are interconnected, dynamic beings who respond to much more than just pharmaceutical inputs (or a lack thereof).
If we view health through an additive lens, we start to look at health not just as the absence of dis-ease, but as something we can take pride in creating and pursuing, as if our actions and choices actually matter.
An additive approach to health care might include building muscle mass and challenging our bodies (positive stress), adding deeply nourishing foods to our diets, taking steps to optimize our sleep, and creating habits that increase our feelings of joy, delight, and community with others.
When we define health as pertaining only to our physical body, we miss the mark in so many ways.
We crave a well-rounded, emotionally stable and grounded lifestyle, free of extreme stressors, with ample opportunity to heal, to challenge ourselves to grow, and to find peace and joy in our everyday actions – all these things are critical to our health and wellbeing, yet they are largely dismissed by health care professionals whose myopic focus on lab results and protocols leave little room for conscious co-creative health care.
The implications of trauma and stress are real and far-reaching, with epigenetic impact for up to 14 generations. This means that our levels of health, wellbeing, stress, and resilience now are actively creating the future of humanity via the genes we pass down to our children, and their children.
Taking a proactive, additive approach to our emotional wellbeing includes taking time to re-calibrate our nervous system, and prioritizing ways we can actively heal from past traumas, instead of repressing our unconscious feelings.
So how do we cultivate true health, strength, and resilience in both body and mind?
We can choose to become more intimately acquainted with our food supply. We can reflect on our daily decisions of how and how much we move our bodies. We can choose clean water sources, free of toxic additives. And we can look to our internal voice, learning to trust that we are our own best physician, rather than always seeking external “expertise” from a system that is irreparably broken and financially tied to massive corporations that would choose to keep you unwell.
Finally, we can rethink our definition of health from simply the absence of clinically-defined diseases to include holistic, additive perspectives that enrich our lives in a variety of ways.
Returning to our roots may help us to remember what health really looks and feels like.
