What are the most influential drivers of health?
Written by Mike Smartt, co-owner of Bay Functional Fitness, musician, and personal trainer
Data from a recent 5-year survey of Americans found:
12.2% are metabolically healthy(1)
(based on waist circumference - fasting glucose -
blood pressure - triglycerides - HDL cholesterol)
Hello my bff’s: here we are, week 20 of the SIP. I dearly hope you and yours are all doing well, staying safe, and taking measures to maintain your wellbeing.
In light of COVID and the significant role of pre-existing conditions as risk factors for the disease, I’m starting a series of articles that look at the pillars of health and wellness - those daily practices and lifestyles that truly and most significantly determine how our mind, body, and soul will or will not stay youthful, verdant, and free of disease.
Purpose - Sleep - Movement - Stress
Community - Circadian Rhythm - Nutrition
The great thing about the pillars is that you’re doing them already. The question I encourage you to ask yourself is: are you giving them enough attention to be as healthy as you want to be while avoiding chronic disease? We’ve all heard the basics: get 8 hours of sleep, exercise, eat right, etc. But here, I hope to go beyond that and help you understand more about why these things are important and whether or not you want to give them more attention in your own life.
The thing is, it’s not just about being healthy however you choose to define that. The pillars are literally the means by which we will or will not develop one or more chronic diseases in our lifetime, not to mention be more resilient against infectious diseases like COVID.
Currently, 6 in 10 adults in the US have a chronic disease (diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and neural disorders) and 4 in 10 have two or more! (2) Keep in mind, genetics play only a modest role, accounting for ~10% of chronic disease risk. (3) This is actually a great thing, as it gives us a lot of power to choose, to make the change when necessary and to largely determine our own fate - the chronic disease is not preordained!
Unfortunately, if we go about our lives, taking the pillars for granted, or choosing not to prioritize them, we will find ourselves as one of the people included in the statistics above. Even worse, as a culture, we have come to the point that many of us consider these diseases as a normal part of aging. I’m here to tell you that there is absolutely nothing normal about this. These chronic, avoidable diseases have never occurred in human history in any significant number - ever.
The current rates of chronic disease are an unintended result of our modern lifestyle, not the inevitability of our genetics. It is a mismatch between our environment and our biology. (3)
But fear not - instead of hammering you with more dreary statistics that foretell the magnitude of the impending health crisis, going forward we will instead focus on how each pillar supports us, nourishes us, and what we can do to leverage them in our favor.
Also, to give greater meaning and context to the pillars, we’ll look at why they are relevant in relation to our biological history: this is referred to as the ancestral perspective. Using an ancestral lens to look at modern health and wellness issues helps account for what our bodies have come to need and expect, via ~2.5 million years of evolution, and how that differs from what modern society asks of it. The ancestral perspective really highlights and makes sense of the mismatch, which is at the root of our modern health crisis and a critical concept to understand. Looking at our health through the ancestral lens is, I believe, the most useful and relevant way to do so.
And lastly, let me say that it’s not helpful to put the pillars in any order of importance. I won’t be telling you how I think you should go about prioritizing the pillars in your life. Rather, my goal is to help you decide for yourself what matters most to you, for your life, and what you can do about it. Any value placed, a decision made or change attempted is more likely to succeed, and subsequently have a greater impact on your health, simply by virtue of it being your decision.
So next time we speak, we’ll dive into a pillar that underpins our motivation behind just about everything we choose to do: Purpose.
1. Araújo J., Cai J., and Stevens J. Prevalence of Optimal Metabolic Health in American Adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2009–2016. Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders Vol. 17, No. 1
2. https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/
3. Rappaport, S. Implications of the exposome for exposure science. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 21, 5–9 (2011).
4. Power, M. L. The human obesity epidemic, the mismatch paradigm, and our modern “captive” environment. Am. J. Hum. Biol., 2012.
Author’s note: The Smartt Talk series focuses on a particular area of the health, wellness and/or fitness industry from the point of view of Michael Smartt, MS, student at The Kresser Institute, Z-Health trainer and co-owner of Bay Functional Fitness. The views expressed below are solely his own.