Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts

Friday, February 1, 2013

The social dimension of health

Maybe I could even have title this post: the social dimension of life.

Many people seem to interpret "survival of the fittest" as relating to the fitness studio. While the fittest are simply those who survived. Whether you survive depends on lot on your tribe and only partially on your self, if you do not behave too stupidly.

Frank Forencich speaking at the Ancestral Health Symposium, 2012, explains this social part of health and a full life.


Frank Forencich is blogging at The Exuberant Animal and is a refreshing sound in the paleo world. His posts are thought provoking and well worth reading.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Natural cures for Asthma?

About two years ago, I was diagnosed with asthma. After some changes to my lifestyle, the last whole body plethysmography measurement showed that my lungs are fine again although I do not use any medication anymore. The asthma is gone!

I would like to share these changes with you, hoping they may also benefit you and also to hear back what benefited others and what not. My personal experiment is a little small (n=1), thus it may well be that some improvement were just by accident and not because of lifestyle change. I have to say that I only had very light asthma. I never had an asthmatic attack, but regularly did wheeze lightly when exhaling at night, my voice was not so strong anymore and my lungs produced too much mucus (leading to some coughing and a coated tongue). Another sign was that the reliever medication (Bronchodilators) made jogging a lot easier.

Asthma is on the rise the last 50 years in the West. Already this points to lifestyle factors being important. Not much seems to be known about which factors these are. It has been noted that children growing up at farms as less affected by asthma as urban children. Based on this, it has been theorized that childhood contact with microbes is beneficial, but I guess there are quite a few other differences between the life on the country side and in cities.

The main changes I made are that I started with intermittent fasting, and nowadays sleep on a firm surface, and do much more walking/hiking. Also important may have been that I do not any grains any more, do less jogging and more sprinting and that I regularly tanning for more vitamin D.