Chapter 42: The Second Law of Life with Stress and Placebo

 

‘According to Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, “until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth.”’ (Meatonomics, David Robinson Simon, p xix) This is a statement similar to reality: ‘get along with your neighbours’, but ‘most of our beliefs about nutritional needs, consumption levels, and farming and lawmaking practices are based on traditions that have largely melted away – at a pace so slow and seductive, we’re barely aware of it. As the comic strip’s Calvin put it, “Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything’s different.”’ (p xxi)

 

The best that we can hope to be, in an evolutionary sense, is a person that is successful in the Survival of the Best and to do that, we have to know what we are doing, and that is, presumably, the reason for reading this book. We have seen that the more facts that you learn, the more creative that you become because there are more dendrites to interact within the brain, and in the Mathematics of the Mind it is the number of attractors considered, which is also the broadness of your learning. As an added bonus, the more that the brain is used, the less chance of dementia later in life and one of our aims must be to have a long and healthful life.

 

With an enquiring mind, you will no doubt have accumulated a significant number of assets and are financially comfortable and wish to enjoy that state for many years. If you are not financially comfortable, now might be the time to change your life by considering these simple steps, and they are simple because the Rule of Life indicates that whilst an organism or animal might increase in complexity, the organization simplifies (plus, it can’t restart, which we will see to be important later)).

 

It is the organization that concerns us because our genes are in the Palaeolithic, our epigenes have probably changed over one or two generations, our seventh sense thinks that we are in a drought, our eighth sense is uneducated and completely lost, and as the first paragraph says we don’t even realize that we have lost our way and are being played by marketeers and ‘big’ business. The result is the Obesity Epidemic, where 60% of the population are overweight or obese as well as the prevalence of ‘modern’ diseases of cancer, strokes etc.

 

‘Today, 99 percent of the farm animals raised in the United States live in steel and concrete factories with no resemblance to a traditional farm.’ (p xxii) Consequentially, they are fed inappropriate diets that produce weight gain, are bred to increase output with minimum inputs and ‘then there’s the fact that meat and dairy keep getting cheaper. This development is driven partly by subsidies, partly by efficient methods of factory farming, and partly by the industry’s practice of offloading its costs onto others.’ (p xxii)

 

The above paragraph was quoted in the context of the state of mind and the condition of the cells of the farm animals held and fed under these conditions as an illustration of the last two chapters and shows that our food has changed, as above, to make money for Big Business and we are the poorer in health for allowing it to happen, but there are ways to circumvent this degrading of the food supply and the first step is knowledge and the second is to act on it. Consequently, this chapter is about the logic of what to do about turning modern food to our advantage and not to Big Business’s advantage, taking control of our situation, lengthening a healthy life, and so on. In the next chapter, I present a means of allowing us to act on it.

 

Going back to the end of chapter 40, firstly we have not two effects in the placebo/nocebo, but a continuum of effects, and the act of measurement that this continuum opens up means that there are many possibilities in mental health that we can explore. Secondly this continuum ranges from the mind being able to repair knees etc. to killing the whole individual. This is a huge power that the cells have turned over to the mind and we should know more about it and be able to control it better than we do, and as we shall see, it is part of the second Law of Life, which is the state of mind, exercise and nutrition.

 

Firstly, I must re-visit the discussion of components, which are necessary, because, under the Rule of Life, the organization of the body should be in its ‘simplest’ state and that state is ‘componentization’, which is a logic machine used in atoms, reproduction and now we see it in the formation of our bodies. Every part of us must be a component that will cause the least impediment if it is little used, but can expand to do any job required of it. For example, a muscle gains strength if it needs to be stronger, and it does this through being used, myelin sheath is added to nerves to increase our reaction speed, if needed, in both cases, presumably by the emotion of close ‘calls’ with predation that cause the mind to instruct the cells which produce it. This communication can now be better understood in the light of the last two chapters where we looked at the signalling between cells in the body.

 

If I seem to be ‘jumping about’ it is because I need to bring attractors into the argument, so that the second law can be expanded to state that ‘state of mind’ is the placebo/nocebo continuum (downward acting), creativity/consciousness (downward acting) and the seventh sense (upward acting) and stress (up and down). Also, nutrition is a continuum from ‘take-aways’ to the Palaeolithic diet and exercise can be from the ‘couch potato’ to the athlete. I have replaced the individual terms with continua, which are measurements and enables us to use the fifth dimension in the same way that measuring the photon caused determinacy. This may sound strange, but the dimensions of our universe must encompass everything that we can do, and space-time is not enough to include measurement, that is logic and aligns with entanglement.

 

This measurement of these three continua allows a reality to be constructed as an orthogonal system and we can produce a simple Mathematical Model to measure a combination of the three factors. This is the first step in measuring our ‘fitness’, which is fitness in a health aspect, our usefulness to society, our fitness to pass on our genes, our fitness to be part of society and so on. Obviously more attractors would be needed, or more terms in the model would be needed for accuracy, but the principle is the same.

 

What is evolution passing on? Survival of the Fittest contains many factors, such as ability to fight, ability to hide, ability to procreate, ability to eat a range of foods and so on. The Survival of the Best must cover these also, in a forward not backward-looking sense, but at this point I want to restrict the discussion to personal fitness and a simple mathematical summation of the three factors should suffice. State of mind is a form of measuring ‘mental health’ and the placebo/nocebo continuum shows the power and dangers of thought to the functioning of the body. Exercise and nutrition are also necessary, but from above: “day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything’s different.”’ Our job is to rationalize the situation.

 

Traditionally in a ‘slower’ society, you ate what your parents ate and you knew that that food would give you adequate nutrition and you would have had to work physically for it. The modern world, from above, changes rapidly and we have ‘lost’ role models and people tend to eat what tastes good, which is those foods that are hard to find in the wild: carbohydrates, fats and salt. Likewise, exercise is not pleasant and we try to do as little as possible and muscle mass decreases and we become fat and so on. At the moment sixty percent of adults are overweight or obese, so the only sensible way is to go back to a regime that worked and that was the Palaeolithic way of life. Of course we can’t afford to emulate this way of life, but we can try to change it using the Survival of the Best, the forward looking reality and the Mathematics of the Mind using our minds as drivers, and what I am doing here is an example.

 

The subject of this chapter is to formulate the best medical plan, so we will have to restrict the discussion. Our bodies are composed of components that do everything we ask of them unless we abuse them, and that is precisely what we are doing when we eat the ‘incorrect’ food, think sloth and neglect exercise. One of the principal requirements of Survival of the Best is to look after ourselves in all ways, and that includes living as long as possible.

 

The result of our living is in our hands, and the life that we have lived, shows our capabilities of strength of mind, determination, willpower and any number of other positive and negative attributes, and these are factors that can be used to determine the Survival of the Best. But, not knowing is the same as not caring if we don’t learn, and this book is the opportunity to learn, and it is being made available to be used on the internet. Given that the answer is now available, sickness is to a large extent due to modern life and if we allow ourselves to get sick it is our fault. If we get sick, we turn to the medical profession that is largely based on the placebo effect, and expect a dramatic turn around! Surely, it is better to give our bodies the thoughtfulness, exercise and nutrition that it was designed for.

 

If you are worthy of passing on your genes, you should have the determination to do something that you think is worthwhile with your life and the basic inputs that you need to support that life are strength of mind, nutrition and exercise. Your body has evolved to do what the mind says is necessary to do to survive and pass on genes, and those social attributes are not genetic or epigenetic. In other words, we pass on genes (long-term), epigenes (short-term) and social attitudes (short-term), by means of DNA, some sort of blocking of DNA for organ differentiation, methylation of the DNA for epigenetics and the family life and teaching for social attitudes.

 

On the path of greater socialization, our cortex grew, but was restricted by body shape for birth, the cortex came into the world in a minimum ‘cut-down’ package, grew as a component and learnt about family life as soon as possible. This required a long nurturing period and the family (and extended family) evolved. This family-life brought problems of inbreeding that were solved hundreds of millions of years ago and show why the Rule of Life is so necessary in that there is no going back because any reduction might have unexpected consequences.

 

Somewhere hard-wired in the hindbrain is the solution to inbreeding, and that is that the young must move away to a new tribe or feeding ground to prevent inbreeding. Another piece of hard-wiring is that you must look after, feed, protect your progeny etc. Clearly, these are attributes of Survival of the Fittest, and are still with us today. However, the Mathematics of the Mind is imprecise and ranks the attractors, so if the above two attractors are still with us, what of less ‘important’ attractors.

 

Reality (‘getting along with your neighbours’) requires ‘quiet time’, a settled existence, but we have seen that a disrupted family life, even (in some cases) one-parent families increases the risk that children are more anti-social. Keeping this as brief as possible and considering the mental disruption as another attractor, modern life with stress at work, home, upbringing etc. may have changed the health outlook of modern civilization. ‘Almost every major illness that people acquire has been linked to chronic stress. (Segerstrom and Miller 2004; Kopp and Rethelyi 2004; McEwen and Lasky 2002; McEwen and Seeman 1999) (The Biology of Belief, Bruce H. Lipton, p 121)

 

As we have seen, the placebo/nocebo continuum directs a stress in the form of un-natural variations in hormones etc., in a ‘reverse’ seventh sense, to every cell in the body where it must cause ‘distress’ to the working of the cells. The seventh sense is the effect that a change in diet has on the mind, and poor nutrition has the same effect as a drought and causes a stress into the brain as the seventh sense.

 

It is my opinion, though I will continue to use the term, the mind is a concept, not a ‘thing’ because it is a ‘bonus’ of leaving off or reducing the insulation on a computer. The brain is a computer in the normal sense of the term, but it uses a tree structure to hold the memories and varying levels of neurotransmitters to ‘age’ memories into the subconscious. The long dendrites serve two purposes, firstly to connect and secondly to create consciousness when the myelin sheath is lacking. ‘There is no tissue that is not “body,” and no response that is not “mind,” and any analytical terminology which tends to divert one’s attention from these irreducible facts must be used with extreme care.’ (Job’s Body, Deane Juhan, p 148)

 

I want to accentuate that ‘There is no tissue that is not “body,”’ means that every part of the body is a cell, even the myelin. ‘Specialized glial cells, oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells sheath nerve axons with myelin, an insulating fatty substance which improves the transmission of neural impulses.’ (p 146) ‘And no response that is not “mind,”’ means to me, that every response is due to the ‘mind’. The mind, by this definition is not just in the brain, but throughout the body, because that ‘this significance is considerable is strongly hinted at by the sheer size of the “hidden” gamma system: As it turns out, fully one third of the motor neurons in the human body are gamma.’ (p 197)

 

I am trying to condense this as much as possible so, to generate a better understanding of the second Law of Life, I have inserted some figures to add perspective, bearing in mind that I am over 70 years old. I consider myself to be young, but have been around a long time!

 

The second Law of Life can be stated as:

 

1.   Nutrition. I consume over thirty varieties of nuts, seeds and fruit in the morning and over thirty varieties of vegetables, herbs and spices with fish, cheese etc.
2.    Exercise. Each day I work FAST for about two hours, or dance FAST for the same time as well as walk for 45 minutes every second day. One hundred push-ups (2×50) and four minutes standing on one leg (alternately, one minute each time) with eyes CLOSED.
3.    State of Mind.
   1. (a)  placebo/nocebo continuum (downward acting from the mind) The placebo/nocebo pathway is the effect of being told something, whereas
   2. (b) creativity/consciousness (downward acting from the mind) is the generation of thought by your mind, and
   3. (c) the seventh sense (upward acting from the body) is the changing of the minds thinking through the type of food eaten.
   4. (d) Stress is very important (upward and downward) as the seventh and anti-seventh sense.So the answer to a ‘health package’ is that it is part of a ‘whole’ and it behoves one to look to nutrition, exercise, mental attitude and stress levels in modern life, and trust to your body to stay healthy, as it should. While modern medicine has many good points, it might be best to consider that much of it depends on the placebo effect and we can update the saying ‘let food be your medicine …’ to ‘let the second Law of Life be your medicine’.Predictions, comments etc.: the subject above is complicated and intertwined and that is why the Mathematics of the Mind works so well, but it requires predictions and I will use them to illustrate where we are going. The second Law of Life is one of three intertwining laws and concerns Life in the environment, and as such is basic and all-encompassing. We can use this fact to say that a solution will be found for any problem that we set, and that will be a general solution.In particular, the second law defines a method, and gives a system for considering that solution, and a subject that has caused much controversy is the ‘Diet’. Hundreds of diets have been formulated and it is considered that none of them work, so here is the system that allows you to use your favourite diet and measure the effects using a forward indicator. In other words, measure the effect before you start the diet, and if the results are not good enough, try looking at another diet. I have my favourite and I will give it as an example in the next chapter.