Assuming you have been born with a functioning body and it has not been compromised by injury or accident, it’s continued health and vitality is a matter of choice. The maintenance of health requires several inter-relating factors and associated practices that are all important. They must all be in place for the benefits of any one of them to be fully realised. They include the following:

Maintain a healthy gut.

Eating the right real food so that your body gets what it needs.

Burn fat as your body’s primary fuel.

Avoiding toxicity in food and in the living environment.

Physical movement and exercise.

Drinking sufficient pure water. (and basic hygiene)

Getting adequate good quality sleep.

Spending time outside, grounded to the earth in the healthy ecosystem of the natural environment and be in the sunshine.

Periodic fasting

Having a stress reduction strategy

Health is a choice to the extent that it is possible to control these factors. New parents may struggle with disrupted sleep patterns for a while, and clean water can be difficult and expensive to secure. In latitudes further north than southern France you will struggle to maintain optimum vitamin D levels in winter. However, consider the possibility of planning over the long or medium term to bring all of these factors within your control. Health is a consequence of lifestyle choices, so choose every aspect of lifestyle around health. Any lifestyle choice that undermines your health (including what we eat) is a not a good idea in anything but the short term. For example, shift work that means not sleeping correctly is not compatible with a choice of health.

Education

The first cause of your health is ‘knowing what to do’ to achieve it. Human beings are not born with innate knowledge of what to eat or what poisons to avoid. Until fairly recently in human history people did not know that clean water and basic standards of hygiene are requirements for health, nowadays we take that for granted. Similarly, knowledge of germ theory, viruses and bacteria and the role they play in infection and the spread of disease are also very recent in terms of our evolution.

To learn what is required for health (or anything else for that matter) either you can copy those around you, or you can think for yourself and make your own choices. Thinking is the way to knowledge and always has been, but historically the first strategy has not been as risky as it is these days. The context has changed for 2 main reasons.

Firstly, since the industrial revolution our number of choices has increased beyond what most people can imagine. In the past such choice didn’t exist, and health outcomes were largely a result of circumstances. For example, most people ate what they could in an effort to ward off starvation, and environmental pollution of the kind we know today was not an issue.

The second reason is the most important. Copying what others do is no longer a successful strategy because so many people are doing the wrong thing! We are in the information age and all the information is available, but its all mixed up together. There is official advice that is wrong, and absolutely spot on correct new information, yet they point in opposite directions. For example, dietary saturated fat cannot be healthy and unhealthy at the same time. Cholesterol cannot be an essential substance for human life and at the same time be bad for you and the cause of heart disease. Mercury amalgam fillings cannot be safe in your mouth and a dangerous neurotoxin at the same time. In all of these cases, only one option is true. The other one is false. The challenge is to sort fact from fiction, to discern truth from untruth, and this is why it is no longer satisfactory to just do what everyone else does.

Thinking for ourselves

To acquire knowledge requires thought and a process of...