Health

Try to picture an ancestor from ten thousand years ago — before agriculture, before cities, before the concept of leisure time — doing bicep curls. The image collapses immediately. Not because they lacked biceps; they had better ones than most of us. The image collapses because the question is wrong. They did not exercise. They moved, constantly, because stillness was failure. Hunting, carrying, building, walking to water, running from danger, kneeling to tend a fire. Movement was not a habit they cultivated. It was the texture of being alive. …

The body in front of the doctor is easy to measure. Weight goes on a scale. Height goes on a chart. Divide one by the square of the other and you have a number — a BMI — that gets entered into a database and flagged if it falls outside a range established in the 1830s by a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet who was studying the statistical distribution of soldiers, not the metabolic health of individuals. Quetelet called his formula the Indice de Corpulence. He did not intend it as a clinical tool. He was doing population statistics. …

I am not a physician, nutritionist, or licensed healthcare practitioner. Nothing on this page is medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. It is a reading list and a personal map of authors I find worth taking seriously. For anything concerning your own health, consult a qualified professional who knows your case. “Healthy” is a marketing word. What it means in biological terms is a system maintaining homeostasis: regulated blood glucose, low systemic inflammation, functional insulin sensitivity, adequate sleep architecture, an intact gut barrier. Most of what the food, supplement, and pharmaceutical industries sell as “health” targets the appearance of these conditions — or suppresses their downstream symptoms — without addressing the upstream causes. …