7 secrets to transform your Health Society doesn't want you to know about

You are here because you want to sort out the confusion we are faced with everyday.

We all want to have the same discipline Marie Kondo applies to her drawers when in comes to food and health, but in reality what most of us get is a Seth Rogen starter pack. We try, get to laugh at it and everyone loves us for it but it doesn’t lead us anywhere.

There are many industries that benefit from your confusion. They feed you junk at the beginning of your life so they can ‘heal you’ later on.

Let’s start from the beginning so you can stop relying on all those professionals and get back the sovereignty of your body.

Since the dawn of time, civilisations have been drawn to understanding the nature of reality.

With the first civilisation being tracked down up to 65.000 years ago (Australian aboriginals y’all) a lot of trial and error was involved into understanding what was nutritious and what was instead poisonous.

In the process, storytelling was used to pass down the knowledge, so that all the tribe would know and remember that it’s ok to eat an amanita muscaria on a friday, but only after soaking it in milk, while for a day to day smoother meal, a porcini mushroom would be a safer option.

The first step towards a simpler lifestyle was discovering fire, and not only because this gave an immediate edge to the tribes of hunter gatherers to scare predators off, but also because cooking food meant evolving very fast:

COOKING FOOD → breaks down the complex structures of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, making them more accessible to our digestive enzymes = less energy required for digestion → digestive system shrinks over time → more energy to allocate to other critical functions, such as brain development and physical activity.

Australopithecus appears → Homo habilis discovers fire → homo erectus celebrates → homo sapiens walks out of the restaurant.

Civilisations slowly start to form, life becomes sedentary and with food being planted and harvested there is plenty more time to think, plan and grow. All in a sudden there are new dynamics appearing and with people and civilisations confronting, societies starts to form and with those, people start investigate the nature of reality deeper.

In Greece Hippocrates of Kos (460–370 BCE) is the one of the first one that start investigating the human body trying to understand its inner work. To this day he is referred as the father of medicine: Hippocratic medicine was based on the theory of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), which he believed to determine a person's health. According to this theory, an imbalance of the humors resulted in illness, and treatment involved restoring the balance through lifestyle changes, diet, herbs, and occasionally, surgery.

He believed the 2 most important elements for health are water and air. If you look at the quality of each today you know something went wrong.

To this day, Ayurveda is still an invaluable resource that bases its foundation on the same principles (each one of us has one or two dominant elements and he/she has to eat according to that for a better digestion).

In the late 15th century in Italy Leonardo da Vinci was secretly dissecting bodies in a time where the church was forbidding similar practices labelling them as unethical to satisfy his curiosity to understand the human body. He was sketching his discoveries and taking notes in front of a mirror to prevent others from deciphering them.

Now we live in the information age with every piece of information accessible in no time, but maybe it’s the overload of information that prevents us to absorb what we really need and separate it from the background noise.

Fast forward to today: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2019-2020, the prevalence of obesity among adults in the United States was approximately 42.4%.

From the CDC website: The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was nearly $173 billion in 2019 dollars. Medical costs for adults who had obesity were $1,861 higher than medical costs for people with healthy weight.

In Australia, according to a study from 2017-18 from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare:

Two in 3 (67%) are living with overweight or obesity. This is approximately 12.5 million adults.

36% are living with overweight but not obesity.

31% are living with obesity.

12% are living with severe obesity, which is defined in this report as having a BMI of 35 or more.

This datas are PRE CO-VID. If this doesn’t look like an epidemic, I don’t know what does.

In the last decades we experience our health decreasing at a pace never seen before. What we have been doing till now must not work then.

‘You are either moving forward or you are moving backward’ the saying goes.

But what if the solution would be to stop, acknowledge that this trajectory won’t take us far and take a step back. Get back to the basics.

Imagine you go to a car saloon and since you have no money limitation, you see a sparkling Lamborghini Gallardo and you walk out of the shop keys in hand.

You travel around for months enjoying your new ride, but with the prices of fuel increasing you have to cut the budget. You became very fond of your new vessel, but there is no chance you are getting rid of it. So fuel and oil it is, maybe even maintenance. As long as it keeps running why should you spend money into it?

After years of neglecting, the car stops. You take it to a mechanic and he says to you ‘why you filled it with cheap fuel?’ And why didn’t you come before?’ ‘It was cheaper,’ you say. And it didn’t give me any signs'.

‘Yes it did, you just ignored them or you were not listening’.

Apply this to your body with food, not exercising, not drinking enough quality water. You wouldn’t do it to your car, why it’s acceptable for your body then?

In the next weeks, months and hopefully years I want to provide you with the knowledge to help you master your own body, teach you how to cook healthy meals and show you the skills and habits that will make maintaining thriving health effortless.

Here are 7 steps to change the trajectory of your life:

1) Remove processed sugar (and any inflaming substance) from your life. Completely. ZERO. Kaputt! The reason being is that there are a lot of problems that introducing sugar into your body does on the long run: from turning you into an addict (the never ending craving loop from hell) to increasing inflammation, risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, decreasing attention span, cognitive function and interrupting digestion.

2) Remove soda drinks: the reason I’m adding this to the list is that most people seems to be oblivious on the fact of soda on the body, with the most impactful long term effect being reducing bone density → meaning highly likelihood of developing osteoporosis. On the contrary, lifting weights increases bone density.

3) Choose your influences wisely: You are the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with. Think about that. You need to understand how your mind works and build on that: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.'“ That goes with anything you watch, listen to or read. Only surround yourself with the things and people that will help you grow into the person you want to be.

4) Practice healthy sleep: with one third of your life invested into it, I’d say figure out how to make the best our of it is a big win and will reward you widely. The one thing to avoid completely is blue light, you know that. Either stop your blue screen use 2 hours before bed or apply some orange gradient (or glasses) to block the blue light. The second thing is, do not eat heavy food, fruit or alcohol before at night time because they will all disrupt your sleep. And fruit at night is heavy to digest, unless you cook it. I’m used to meditate every night for 15/20 minutes, journal and most of the nights, read a book. All this will slow the pace down and put you to sleep.

5) Understand the relation of food on your body. Replace medicines with food: I don’t remember last time I went to a doctor. The reason being is that in the years I learnt how to listen to my body, limit the things blocking the connection between my mind and my body (a simple exercise is trying to feel the heartbeat anywhere in your body) and build enough barriers to prevent sickness to even happen. The food you eat daily either lowers those defences or raise them.

One of the most eye opening encounters of my life was with aboriginal people and being exposed to how much they know about healing plants. This guy was an Aboriginal chief in the Kimberley, up north in Western Australia. He told me his community and him have been living there for 38.000 years. One day he was stung by a deadly scorpion and he went to the river, grabbed a mangrove root and after extracting a moist out of it, he applied it to a wound. I met him 4 days after that accident and he was as lively as anyone can be. In 2008 they sent that mangrove to the University of Queensland and after studying it, they extracted 10 new medicaments from it. A plant. No side effects. Free to anyone.

6) Practice mindfulness and sport: Meditation is 3000 years old but not enough people practice it. On top of bringing changes in personality, there are studies that demonstrate that: meditation and mindfulness practices may have a positive impact on telomere length (protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that play a role in aging and cellular health). Longer telomeres are associated with better cellular health and longevity. And sport (and stretching) is what will play a difference between a lot of diseases that are ‘normally’ occurring with age, the difference between running and dragging yourself, and preventing cardiovascular diseases (the calves are referred as a second heart).

Some research has explored the influence of meditation on gene expression. A study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology found that experienced meditators showed differences in gene expression related to inflammation, cellular stress response, and immune function compared to a control group. These changes suggest potential benefits for overall health and well-being.

7) Our modern lifestyle gave us food and shelter in abundance but took us away from all the hunter gathering skills and knowledge. The first one being able to hunt and cook our food, and with that I do not mean we should all learn how to use a bow or a spear and go into the woods to feed ourselves and our loved ones (although fishing is quite accessible to anyone) but the basic skill to know how to cut, cook and preserve food should be a MUST, otherwise the option is to rely on overpriced, processed food and that is not sustainable on the long run (you should see how they process food in certain restaurants). The second skill is how to grow food: they say money do not grow on trees, but if you look at the last two years, the price of food and primary resources went up 20%+ and if you had a land with a garden and some veggies, an apple tree and some other fruits, you would be harvesting a lot of money each year.

If you read this far, I salute you and I send you a digital hug. From this point on every email will be specific to a topic and will take you down a rabbit hole of information you can immediately apply to your life.

Each information will be a dot. It’s your responsibility to keep up with the habits, but down the line you will be able to connect the dots together.

Everything is connected to everything else.

My vision is to create a community of people empowered with the practical knowledge to be able to live longer, healthier and as far aways from medicine and illness as possible.

I hope you will join me on that journey.

Prometheus aka Luca @Panacea