​To begin our examination of life, there is no better place to start than with health. With it all things are possible, without it almost nothing is. But achieving health seems increasingly elusive and confusing. There are countless opinions and few if any of them work, as evidenced by perhaps the fastest growing industry in our country, modern medicine. (Don't get sidetracked here by the propaganda that we are healthier than ever and living longer today due to medical care. As you will see in the next section, those claims are especially rickety.)
 
Usually there is no easy answer to terribly important and complex subjects. Although health is most certainly such a subject, the answers to its dilemmas are remarkably simple—if we apply the SOLVER principles and are willing to step apart from the crowd.
 
Achieving and maintaining our best potential health first requires that we know what we are and where we came from. We need to consult our owner's manual. An automobile has the best chance of long life and optimal performance if the owner's manual is followed carefully. We will have long life and perform best if we follow our owner's manual.
 
The problem is that people do not follow the manual because they don't even know where it is or how to read it. So, let's put first things first and find the manual.
 
We don't have to go far in our search. Our manual lies safe and secure within each of us like a yolk in an egg. Our genetics is that manual. Encoded on the genes within each cell in the body is the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. To read this manual requires a short thinking journey.
 
First of all, let's understand where we are today in the perspective of time. Imagine that we could draw a line 550 miles long that represented the estimated history of life on Earth (3.5 billion years). The final inch of that line would be the time since the Industrial Revolution, about 200 years ago. That's when all this modernity we now find ourselves nestled within really got under full steam. Put another way, if we scaled down to one year the time that life has been on Earth, our modern industrial era would be less than two seconds

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Although we have grown up assuming fluorescent lights, polyester, and Froot Loops are normal, ours are totally unique circumstances from a genetic perspective. Clearly our genetic owner's manual instructs about the 550 miles, not the last inch. Sedentary living, diet pop, coffee, morning pep pills, noon tranquilizers, evening sedatives, oleomargarine, s'mores, four food groups (meaning a Big Mac with cheese, lettuce and tomato), and Tums are not in its pages. How could we believe there is no penalty to be paid for not following the manual and altering our environment to such an extent that today virtually no fat in any human body in North America does not contain DDT, polystyrene, or Dioxin?
 
Consider the owner's manual for fish. Fish genes are programmed to accept only specific environmental data, such as a life in water and a cuisine of smaller fish. If a fish is taken out of water and fed lasagna it will become dis-eased—flop, gasp, get sick, and die. Similarly, when we thumb our noses at our owner's manual and take ourselves out of the genetic context for which we were designed, we become dis-eased as well. We succumb to the adult-onset, chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease, cancer, arthritis, allergies, obesity, autoimmune disorders, dental deterioration, premature aging, infertility, and so on. This is our 'flopping' and 'gasping' from repudiating our owner's manual and living in a world for which we were not designed. Although such diseases may not become manifest until the later years of life, they begin as early as the womb. This makes it difficult to associate them with their true causes: lifestyle, food, and environmental changes—not inadequate penetration of healthcare.

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​This simple concept—that we are designed for nature—is extraordinarily enlightening and powerful despite its simplicity. Few grasp its full implications. Instead, we eat anything that tastes good and is in a pretty package. We live however we choose, believing modern medicine can repair whatever goes wrong.
 
This is the simple truth we must understand if we desire health: If things are not used according to the way they are designed, they fail and break. Our parents taught us the proper way to use our toys, and we all know enough to read instruction manuals. These same simple principles of paying attention to our owner's manual and living in the way we were designed provide the master keys to health.

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Our genes are an internal code for successfully navigating the external world. When we are born, our genes fully expect to be dropped onto the forest floor and to remain within that context for a lifetime. We should not confuse our origins just because we were born into this new synthetic world.
 
So what specifically does this mean we should do? Since 550 miles on the time line (minus about one inch) would represent living out in nature, we need to look to that model. It consists of clean air and water, sunshine hitting our skin, eating food as found in nature, expending considerable energy in obtaining it, finding shelter, and defending against predators. (More specific recommendations will be given in the following chapters.) That is the data our genes understand and thrive on.
 
Our genetic owner's manual does not accommodate so well this new 'better living through chemistry,' synthetic environment we have created in the last one inch of time: air conditioned plastic dwellings, polluted air, receiving almost no sunshine, exercising little, drinking polluted and chemically-treated municipal water, and eating a variety of fractionated, synthetically fortified, processed foods that are barely recognizable as having ever come from nature. We are, in effect, like fish out of water. We pay the price with loss of health. We gain health in direct proportion to the degree we edge our lives closer to the natural world.
 
Some, arguing in defense of Dr. Pepper, Cheetos, and twelve-position recliners, may say that by now we have adapted to this modern environment. But that cannot be. For one thing, sufficient time has not elapsed for our genetic makeup to change significantly. We are, in effect, in a genetic time warp because one inch is nothing compared to 550 miles.
 
Additionally, adaptation of the population would require that those with (miraculous) mutations making them suited to modern life produce more offspring than those succumbing to it. But that doesn't happen. The environmental changes to which we are subjecting ourselves are more subtle than a fish put out on land, so we usually survive just fine through the childbearing years. Thus, no natural selection and adaptation to the adult disease-causing modern world occurs.
 
This is an important caveat to modern living, so let me rephrase it for emphasis. Most believe that the genetic makeup of a population changes through selection of beneficial mutational differences. If diseases caused by modern living killed us before we reproduced, that would be one thing. If that were the case, only the fit—those who had unique genetic strength adapted to this new synthetic world—would survive and pass the trait on to offspring. There would then be a chance of changing the genetic makeup of the population to one more fit for our synthetic modern circumstances. But that's not the case because before we are culled out of the population by adult-degenerative diseases, we have already produced children carrying our disease-prone genetic makeup. (Actually it is not a fault in the genes, but rather a fault in the modern context to which we are subjecting them.) Thus, there can be no genetic adaptation to this new environment because, in effect, the unfit (all of us succumbing to modern degenerative disease) survive long enough to reproduce scions having the same vulnerabilities.
 
So there is every reason to be 'wrong' about the common 'right' assumption that we are evolving into the synthetic world we have created. As a population, we are genetically doomed to continue to reap the consequences of being out of proper genetic context—with no genetic hope of salvation.* Humans are not going to adapt to living on a couch or to Twinkies and Ritalin. If anything, we are devolving, as evidenced by increasing rates of infertility and the fact that today's children are expected to have a shorter lifespan than their parents.
 
The solution is not to hope that our genes change, but for us to change. We must understand our genetic heritage—follow our owner's manual—and make life choices appropriately. This simple truth allows us to begin on the road to optimal health and puts control of our health destiny where it belongs—squarely in our own hands.
 
*Although what are known as epigenetic environmental influences, such as diet, can modify the hereditable expression of genes, DNA remains unaltered. Methyl cofactors such as folate, vitamin B12, choline and betaine, as well as plant phytochemicals can attach to a gene and affect its expression. Although this helps prove that how we live and eat can affect our health and that of our progeny (if the changes occur in the sperm or eggs), it does not demonstrate that the underlying genome can be changed. DNA remains DNA, epigenetics just dictates what is or is not expressed