Everything Is Connected: An Introduction

Introduction: Everything is Connected

• The author's mother was congratulated for having one of the largest babies in the hospital's history, weighing eleven pounds, nine ounces at birth.

• She struggled with her weight for years after, with her doctor advising her to "eat healthier".

• She was diagnosed with elevated blood pressure in her forties and prescribed an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor.

• In her fifties, she was diagnosed with high cholesterol (high triglycerides, low HDL, and high LDL cholesterol) and prescribed a statin.

• Statins are among the most prescribed drugs in U.S. history, with over 221 million prescriptions annually.

• She developed prediabetes in her sixties and was prescribed metformin, which is prescribed over 90 million times per year in the U.S.

• The author's mother experienced a deep pain in her belly and uncharacteristic fatigue at age seventy-one and was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and died thirteen days later.

• She was seeing five separate specialists prescribing five separate medications and was considered "healthy" compared to other women her age.

• The average American over sixty-five sees twenty-eight doctors and gets fourteen prescriptions per year.

• 18% of teens have fatty liver disease, about 30% are prediabetic, and over 40% are overweight or obese.

• Conditions such as obesity, acne, fatigue, depression, infertility, and high cholesterol are common among young adults today.

• 6 out of 10 adults are living with a chronic illness, and about 50% of Americans will deal with mental illness.

• 74% of adults are overweight or obese.

• Rates of cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, upper respiratory infections, and autoimmune conditions are increasing, while American life expectancy has been declining since 1860.

• Preventable lifestyle conditions account for 80% of modern human deaths.

• Depression, anxiety, acne, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, and other conditions are rooted in dysregulation.

Good Energy

• Improving health starts with understanding that the biggest lie in health care is that the root cause of illness is complicated.

• No animals in the wild suffer from widespread chronic disease.

• Good Energy is a single physiological phenomenon that can change everything about how you feel and function and is the core underlying physiological function, and determines your predilection to great mental and physical health or to poor health and disease.

• Good Energy, also known as metabolic health, refers to the set of cellular mechanisms that transform food into energy.

• When you lose the keys to Good Energy, organs, tissues, and glands start to struggle and fail.

• Any disease can arise as a result of the pressures that Good Energy is under.

• Metabolic processes have evolved with the environment, which has changed rapidly in recent decades, leading to an evolutionary mismatch.

• This mismatch tips normal metabolic function into dysfunction, resulting in Bad Energy.

• Cellular disturbances affect tissues, organs, and systems, influencing how you feel, think, function, look, age, and avoid chronic disease.

• Chronic health symptoms are a result of cells being beleaguered by how we live.

• Bad Energy leads to broken cells, broken organs, broken bodies, and pain.

• Different symptoms arise depending on the cell type experiencing Bad Energy, such as infertility in ovarian theca cells (PCOS) or erectile dysfunction/heart disease in blood vessel-lining cells.

• Bad Energy in the brain can manifest as depression, stroke, dementia, migraine, or chronic pain.

• These and many other conditions are linked to metabolic issues.

• Western medicine typically treats the organ-specific results of Bad Energy, not the Bad Energy itself.

• Addressing metabolic dysfunction is essential to improving the health of the population.

• Compared to a century ago, we consume more sugar (3,000% more fructose), work more sedentary jobs, sleep 25% less, and are exposed to over 80,000 synthetic chemicals.

• Industrialized life has a synergistic ability to attack the machinery inside cells that produce chemical energy, leading to cellular dysfunction.

• Indicators of brewing metabolic dysfunction include increasing waist size, suboptimal cholesterol levels, high fasting glucose, and elevated blood pressure.

• Metabolic dysfunction doesn't always show up everywhere at once and can vary based on cell types affected.

Waking Up

• The author was a strong advocate for modern healthcare, with credentials like a NIH internship at 16, president of a class at 18, thesis award at 21, med school class at 25, surgery resident at 26, and research awards at 30.

• Five years into surgical residency, the author encountered Sophia, a 52-year-old woman with recurrent sinus infections, difficulty breathing, and other health issues.

• Sophia's sinus issues were not resolved with medication, leading her to the author's department for surgery.

• The author relieved her chronic nasal inflammation but did nothing to cure the underlying causes or help with her other health conditions.

• He realized that patients were returning for follow-up sinus procedures and treatments for other diseases like diabetes, depression, and cancer.

• The author was not taught about the connection between inflammation and chronic diseases and felt an overwhelming need to understand why patients were sick in the first place.

• The author wanted to help patients out of the operating room and generate foundational health.

• He realized that incentives in the healthcare system led to managing disease rather than curing patients.

• Despite striving to reach the top of the medical field, the author saw that "the patients aren't getting better."

• The author quit his residency at OHSU to understand why people get sick and how to help them restore and sustain their health.

• The author believes that understanding and acting upon the science of Good Energy is essential for changing lives and preventing disease.