There are several principles that a layman can interpret from reading the physical-biological view of the human organism and its metabolism in its environment.
1. Stress happens in real-time and can be mitigated in real-time.
2. Stress accumulates.
3. Aging represents the accumulation of stress and changes in the structural and functional capacity to do work or think clearly.
4. It will take about 30% of the time that it took to become in a distressed, burned out state, to rehabilitate the metabolic damage from distress.
5. E pluribus unum, from many, one.
6. Stress hormones are deceptive; they give euphoric sensations in the short-term.
7. Physiological increments in metabolic support are still support.
8. Distress is traumatic to the metabolism.
9. The food supply is so fundamentally degraded that some ingredients are not distinguishable from building materials.
10. Appetite is a guide to nutritional needs under specific metabolic conditions.
The physical-biological view of the human organism in health and sickness has a solid history. It is a view that does the opposite of what the academic treatment of biological science, or humanities or social sciences does and so those who do it forfeit regular institutional support. It unifies. It unifies disciplines and colleagues, organisms with their environment, mind with body, the expert with the layman, and the organism with its environment and itself.
Now that higher education has glutted the market with PhDs and exploited their labor, highly educated people have less to lose by writing according to their commitments rather than their rewards. Anti-establishment views are more accessible now and more popular, especially when those views are practical, straightforward, able to be understood by a generally educated person, and can be used for self-experimentation. In the physical-biological view the human organism can know itself. Or at least know itself better. This problem has typically been given to philosophy and then philosophy has been written out of the curriculum because it is “old.” Most academic disciplines only date themselves as beginning after WW II. If they must go further back they do so as a matter of deep history.
I started reading Ray Peat’s papers. I ordered some of his cited books. It was slow because I was teaching. I was fortunate enough to have surfed my way to Popp and Beloussov’s Integrative Biophysics. In this volume Marco Bischoff’s Introduction became a very valuable source because it organized the history of what I’m calling physical-biology. None of these authors endorses my interpretations or even knows about them.
I am a political scientist and I didn’t want to give the impression that I had brought science training to my reading. There is something about the straightforwardness of this view, its practical nature that makes it not off limits to non-specialists.
I also took some of the nutritional and supplement suggestions in Ray Peat’s work and puzzled out my own plan for rehabilitating a case of high stress and burn out. As my metabolism improved a strange thing happened. My mind changed. I had a Gestalt switch in my view of organisms in their environments because I had a switch in my view of myself as an organism in my environment. Now this was empirical. This was science.
This physical-biological view is holistic, immediate, and gratifying, because while it captures principles of metabolism according to physical tendencies, this point of view demands organismic autonomy at the same time one becomes committed to its view. It has a weird mental effect that is a rich autonomy coupled with confidence, curiosity, and a generosity for engaging in the immediate environment. Maybe this is what Ivan Illich meant by conviviality or Hans Selye’s altruistic egoism. Clearly both of them had glimpsed an organismic holism that they thought was restorable socially and individually.
If you come to think this view is true, then you become in similar measure initiated into making decisions about your own health and welfare and the environment you find yourself in, in ways that require your moral agency, responsibility, and engaged curiosity. The physical view of the human organism is that good.
You will have to pursue this for yourself to find these answers. The following are a few principles that I have come to understand. I have listed sources that articulate these principles. None of these principles are authored by me. Mistakes in interpretation are, however, mine. Because they are general principles they appear in numerous places in Ray Peat’s articles, or as assumptions, and/or in the history of integrative biophysics, especially as it is presented by Marco Bischoff, but also primarily in the separate works.
1. Stress happens in real-time, and can be mitigated in real-time. This is almost an axiom for physical-biologists. Some of the provocative work is to demonstrate that the body is a self-organizing, liquid-crystalline structure, where gel-like substances are conductive material surrounding also self-organizing cellular matrices that oscillate as they form their structure, lose it, then form it again to create potential and exert energy. The signaling is electronic [transducing electricity into energy] or photonic [transducing light into energy] or perhaps others. Cellular energy is required to execute and this is supplied by metabolism. Stress is the characterization of the ease, smoothness, efficiency, or loss of these motions in view of an organism's environment. Stress is expressed as the structural capacity to carry out functions that facilitate energy production, life. This is a biological process with political implications.
It’s not clear that this characterization is accurate in detail because our biological testing tech is still clumsy, and it’s not complete. But it seems very clear that the body is not a big, fluid-filled beach ball with spigots and drains surrounding a lot of other fluid-filled, tiny beach balls with spigots. (Reductionism today is a problem of teaching that becomes confused with a knowledge base.) As an electronic, photonic organism within an environment that is also electronic and photonic, that is effected by temperature, humidity, pressure, light, sound, etc. the human body is continually and immediately adjusting to its environment both internal and external.
Sugar and salt are especially effective at lowering stress hormones in real-time, immediately on ingesting them. They lower cortisol and adrenaline. Sometimes one indulges a craving for sweets. We call this “emotional eating” and then assign it among the vices with defective psychological coping mechanisms. By this view “emotional eating” is a physical attempt to lower stress hormones as they are experienced as distress. It has an organic cause. To resist mitigating emotional distress and its hormones seems like the real eating disorder.
There are other supplements and practices that mitigate stress that are cheap, safe, and available like aspirin, caffeine, some antihistamines, progesterone, T3, a few drugs, keeping warm, light therapy, among other things. Nothing particularly expensive, gate-kept, or risky.
Mitigating stress in general means taking daily stresses seriously in terms of recognizing them as they occur, and having an inventory of techniques and supplements to lower stress responses throughout the day, week, and year. A significant part of the history of integrative biophysics is in the effects of weather, geography, rhythmic cues, and seasons on the body and mind. There is some controversy over whether the rhythms are located in the organism or in the environment.
There is no hypothetical nutrition, there is only real nutrition in time and space, applied to a real body that has its unique history. Darkness is more stressful than daylight, winter is more stressful than summer and these call for adjustments to eating, activity, maintenance. For example, anticipating the stress of night on December nights I can take cyproheptadine at 4:30pm to lower serotonin [a stress hormone in this view] and as a mild anticholinergic. I spare my metabolism the full effects of a stressed or distressed state. Stress and its treatment are very straightforward in the physical-biology view.
Salt lowers adrenaline and aldosterone, stress hormones that increase blood pressure and heart rate as stress responses. Salt is nutritionally misunderstood as a result of the fact that salty, commercially prepared foods are often heavy on PUFA, and also a simplified view of how water behaves in the body. Interestingly, these problems lead to an upside-down view of how salt works in the body.
Ray Peat has written on the practices of Tom Brewer, and obstetrician who recognized that the standard of care for pregnancy toxemia was the opposite of what actually cures it, adequate salt. Tim Noakes has written about hyponatremia in endurance athletes who drink too much plain water. It’s a shock to read that a marathoner who collapses from hyponatremia should really be given a diuretic, which is the opposite of what is usually done in race medical tents. Emergency personnel usually do 2 things to help a body stabilize itself against its own defensive reactions to trauma, which is shock: they start IVs of saline and glucose. The body’s adaptations to distress are not different in kind from its reactions to trauma, just different in extent.
As I read this material I began to get accustomed to seeing some medical practices for degenerative conditions as precisely the opposite of what they should be to support the metabolism. So much so that the insanity began to make itself so plain I had to laugh. And then I got a little paranoid. I had never perceived the world so well.
2. Stress accumulates. The passing of time presents physical opportunities for restoration of metabolic integrity, or destruction of its capacities for work and thought. Hans Selye’s theory of General Adaptation Syndrome has 3 successively more intense organismic ways of coping with stress from alarm to exhaustion. Peat treats this in one place as increasing "residue" of fatigue and the growing ineffectiveness of adaptation [Fatigue, Aging, and Recuperation]. The history of chronobiology seems more concerned with rhythms than stress accumulation.
Once the human organism is going in a particular direction, either building potential or destroying potential, momentum grows to keep to the same direction. At some point it takes less energy to keep to the same course than to improve that course, a kind of thoughtless persistence. By that time the mind probably doesn’t have the capacity to imagine or pursue a better organismic state.
The further along in time a body is adapted, the longer and more challenging it will be to improve. In Selye’s terms death is the incapacity to adapt any longer. The real danger in putting up with stress is that the mind will reach a point at which it can no longer tolerate the prospect of thinking through what it would take to improve metabolism and then execute a plan. You’d want to start a plan to lower stress before you’re too exhausted to want to pursue it. That’s a metabolic product, too.
3. Aging represents the accumulation of stress and changes in the structural and functional capacity to do work and think clearly. Differentiation of structure is fundamental to differentiation of function. This principle would be common to any physical view of the human body. There is no absolute limit to the length of a physical human life, provided stress could be mitigated so that the body retained its structural and functional integrity. There is no absolutely stressless life. Some stressors are supportive. The tissues of the body vary in their capacity to recover from chronic stress.
Children sleep deeply, play hard, eat a lot at least intermittently, enjoy moving, vocalizing, exploring, socializing. The child’s body wastes considerable energy as heat. They are the models of a metabolic rate that tends to be fast, hot, and restorable. When children run a fever it is higher than when an adult does. Enzyme functions are temperature sensitive. When children get serious childhood illnesses they recover fast. Use the child’s metabolism as the model of a robust metabolism.
Besides the physical mitigation of stress with adequate carbs, salt [and magnesium and calcium], supplements if needed [T3, pregnenolone, progesterone, CO2, niacinamide, caffeine, aspirin, for example] you'd want to measure progress. To monitor this you’d want your metabolism to be fast enough to produce a temp of 98.6 at least in the afternoon, and a pulse rate that is around 80 bpm.
This will seem counterintuitive because we have been popularly trained for at least 2 generations to think that a slower pulse is healthier because it means our rate of living is slower, so we are conserving our energy in order to make it last. But the body cannot conserve something it cannot actually demonstrate having: energy. The body can be active or resting. It cannot really conserve energy. The organism that can more fully engage its environment in different ways is the one that functions more youthfully.
© Celise Schneider 2016
Image: StarzySpringer https://pixabay.com/photos/grunge-chalkboard-chalk-texture-2667529/
Sources:
Peat, Ray. www.raypeat.com. I have read about 35 of the approximately 94 articles. I have read some of the Townsend Letters, and listened to about a half dozen lectures and radio interviews. I have found the following most contributing to the understanding I am writing about here:
Serotonin: Effects in Disease, Aging, and Inflammation
Fatigue, Aging, and Recuperation
Estrogen receptors, What do they explain?
Meat Physiology, Stress, and Degenerative Physiology
Hot Flashes, Energy, and Aging
When Energy Fails: Edema, Heart Failure, Hypertension, Sarcopenia, etc.
Radiation and Growth: Incoherent Imprinting from Inappropriate Radiation
Protective CO2 and Aging
Regeneration and Degeneration: Types of Inflammation Change with Aging
Serotonin, Depression and Aggression