Resilience
Resilience Reimagined
Resilience—the ability to withstand difficult life events without lasting harm—is deeply connected to nutrition and hormonal health.
Resilience
Resilience—the ability to withstand difficult life events without lasting harm—is deeply connected to nutrition and hormonal health.
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Resilience is the hallmark of healthy, psychologically stable, and many long-lived people.
Why do some people endure the greatest life crises, severe wars, and famines apparently without lasting damage—while others are literally destroyed by them, during and especially after? That is precisely the definition of resilience: the ability of people to endure difficult or catastrophic life events without permanent impairment.
Many factors play a role, for example:
The last point is fascinating.
Anyone wanting to take a journey through time should read "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price. In this work, dentist Price traveled the world to study whether isolated populations still living traditional lifestyles experienced as much tooth decay as we do in the West. Mind you, this was 100 years ago!
What was intended as a journey to gather information on dental health became, in effect, a journey into humanity's past. Price discovered not only that people in vastly different regions and eating different foods had dramatically less tooth decay than we do—he also found a general pattern of "degeneration" when people transitioned from traditional to modern diets. In short: people became more fragile and more prone to complaints.
For those of a sensitive disposition, Price's writing is not for the faint of heart. The language then was different: more forceful, more direct, without hedging or softening. We rarely see that kind of communication today.
Might the condition of a society's language reflect its physical and mental state? An intriguing thought. Because here too, we seem to be becoming progressively more fragile and more complaint-prone.
This is most evident in the ever-increasing fearmongering. Panic-mongering. Nowadays, new threats seem to lurk everywhere—ever notice? There are constantly new dangers to which we apparently are exposed. Even in advertisements, there is increasingly strong messaging that travelers must absolutely get vaccinated against every possible disease.
Better education and more information, or information overload and more anxiety?
We all live in different realities. You realize this immediately once you've experienced low testosterone and then suddenly swam in testosterone again:
The same goes for thyroid dysfunction. Funny van Dannen expressed this beautifully [source no longer available] twenty years ago:
"And always the dissatisfaction, bad mood, pain
Stomach, back, groin, even the heart
I thought of mad cow disease, year-round depression
But the blood tests showed—thyroid dysfunction"
The other verses are worth hearing, and sadly there is probably more truth in those lines than many realize—especially when you look at contemporary social phenomena.
In any case, we seem to have lost the inherent robustness of "non-domesticated people." They possess a kind of shrewdness, cleverness, and resilience that we today seem to have entirely forgotten.
Art De Vany, former economics professor, inventor of "Evolutionary Fitness," and soon to be 86, describes this perfectly in his publications:
"There is an experiment where you hang a rat from a wire and see how long it can hold on. The laboratory rat drops to the ground after a short time—the wild rat pulls itself up and disappears."
Resilience.
Among the Maasai, an indigenous people in East Africa, you find arteriosclerosis as severe as "in elderly US men."
For us, this is the cause of roughly every second death (heart attack, etc.)—but in their arteries, there are "very few complex lesions," and a compensatory widening of the arteries, so researchers conclude that "the Maasai are protected from arteriosclerosis through their physical fitness."
Resilience.
Among the Tsimané in the Bolivian rainforest, 70% of women are infected with roundworms—catastrophic consequences? Not at all. Instead, this infection results in "an elevated fertility rate and two additional children over a lifetime."
This too: a form of resilience.
Is this wonderful? Having a parasite in your gut and so on? No, of course not. But each of us will eventually collide with life more or less strongly, because to live means exactly that: to come into contact with life.
So it is not always just about possible dangers out in the world, in the unknown. It is not always just about the catastrophes invoked by disease, war, disaster, or infection. Often enough it comes down to this simple fact: how the body, as a second entity alongside the environment—which together determine our phenotype—reacts to these events.
On this point, Weston Price says in his book:
"Upon critical examination of these groups, there was noted a striking immunity to many of the diseases of the present day. This was only true, however, so long as these peoples were largely protected from the influence of modern civilization and were able to continue the use of foods which had been provided by the accumulated wisdom of the racial groups through the ages."
In other words, a decisive factor when it comes to resilience seems to be food. And here we see that every cultural group has a kind of traditional diet that keeps them healthy and confers upon them "a striking immunity."
Perhaps simply because food fundamentally shapes our hormones. See above.
Is that not a beautiful picture? A strong immunity against many of the aches and ailments of modern times.
Conversely, it is sobering to think briefly about the state of modern nutrition. The lack of resilience as a societal phenomenon is rooted largely in exactly this.
And that is a rather sad development.
