Health

Ask a surgeon why the gallbladder came out, and the answer arrives fast, almost cheerful: you don’t really need it. That’s true in the narrow sense that a person can live, eat, and digest fat well enough without one. It’s also one of the most quietly revealing sentences in modern medicine. Cholecystectomy — removal of the gallbladder — is now among the most common abdominal operations performed in the country doing the most of them, and the organ is coming out almost always because of gallstones that track, closely, with obesity and insulin resistance. Nobody is treating a design flaw in the gallbladder. They are treating the downstream damage of a metabolic environment the organ was never built to survive, and calling the removal a fix rather than a receipt. …

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, and I am not selling a medication, a supplement, or a diet. Nothing here is medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment — it is part anecdote, part working hypothesis, part established science, 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. Updated 2026-08-13 — rewrote the page as an essay tying insulin resistance, food, sleep, movement, stress, isolation, and status together as one argument; added a section on legal drugs, social connection, and status/health; the presentation built from this essay is coming soon; the working reading list below now sits under Further reading, extended with the new sources the essay cites. …