What happened to Brent Pottenger — when he improved his diet along ancestral lines, a serious health problem unexpectedly went away — also happened to Aaron Blaisdell. He improved his diet along ancestral lines and his sun sensitivity went away. A non-nutritional version happened to me: By adopting elements of Stone-Age life, I slept much better. And, at the same time, I stopped getting colds. Another example involves flaxseed oil. My discovery that flaxseed oil made my brain work much better implied that prehistoric diets contained more omega-3. A dosage that produced brain improvement also greatly improved gum health and recovery from injury.
This is the opposite of conventional medicine. As far as I know, every major drug has serious bad side effects. The drugs often help the problem for which they are prescribed, but your health has a good chance of becoming worse — sometimes much worse — in other ways. Against Medical Advice (2008) by James Patterson and Hal Friedman is the true story of a boy (Friedman’s son) with severe Tourette’s. (Recommended by Alexandra Carmichael.) In an epilogue, Friedman says, “Our family is convinced that his most extreme symptoms were caused by medicines prescribed but with unhappy results, almost without exception.” The cure was worse than the disease.
The phenomenon of positive side effects isn’t mysterious. Our bodies need certain inputs to work well. The whole body evolved with the same inputs. When something crucial is missing, several things break down. And when the missing thing is supplied, several things get better. We write all our words using the same 26 letters. If one letter is missing, many words will be misspelled. When the missing letter is supplied, many words will be spelled correctly. Fixing one word fixes many words. For example, suppose you lack “k”. Blink will be spelled “blin”, mark will be spelled “mar”, and so on. When you realize you need “k” to spell blink, at the same time you will improve the spelling of many other words.
The implication of positive side effects is profound. Finding the right inputs isn’t a new wrinkle on current health care, it’s a whole new way of being healthy. Public health officials haven’t had much luck selling prevention but maybe that was because their ideas about prevention have been poor — telling people to eat according to the Food Pyramid, for example. And if you are sick (as Brent was), you are highly motivated to do something about it. The old saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure should be revised: a ounce of the right cure is worth a pound of prevention. The dietary improvements that cured Brent’s migraines will prevent many other problems. Going from the old saying to the new saying is like going from thinking the sun revolves around the earth to realizing the earth revolves around the sun.
A great change is coming.
Hey Seth, thanks for the great pair of articles! They sound like the synopsis of your talk for the Ancestral Health Symposium next year. Cheers to bringing theory to health care, and to our modern-day Copernicuses!
Hi Seth,
Today, in parallel, Mark Sisson posted a nice essay too on the importance of inputs and their remarkably interrelated effects:
https://www.marksdailyapple.com/gut-flora-inflammation/
One input he highlights is prebiotics, for instance.
Best,
Brent
“A great change is coming”
Seth,
Why do you think this great change is coming now, rather than 10 years ago or whatever? Is it mainly the internet, which disintermediated the medical profession and made it much cheaper to disseminate the results of self-experimentation?
I suspect that the Internet is linking up patients (as e-patients) in powerful ways that we have never experienced before in human history. Health information flows so rapidly now that ideas can be tested and results can be captured quickly and widely. Many people are tinkering in the “fat tails” of health inquiry, and we are able to falsify more conjectures in less time, creating conditions for rapid evolution of health understanding. The challenge is structuring these interactions strategically to “Cure Together” efficiently and effectively.
Aaron, thanks, maybe you’re right, maybe I should talk about this broad stuff at the Symposium.
NNM and epistemocrat, yes, I agree — the Internet, in particular blogs. Not only do blogs spread the results of self-experimentation, they also help like-minded people find each other. And I believe blogs will also empower those people. The Ancestral Health Symposium can be advertised entirely through blogs. If there is enough interest (and attendance) that makes possible a second symposium and other related activities, such as publications. All this without needing the blessing/approval of anyone in power.