Multiple Parts that Lead to the Sum

Last month we took a look at our tendency for nutrition reductionism, which we defined as simply looking at food for what individual nutrients it has to offer. For example, bread is a carb, oranges are Vitamin C, milk is calcium, etc. This month, I’d like to expand our working definition of reductionism to a very common approach to disease and medical interventions for the purpose of healing.

What therapy or medication comes to mind when I mention cancer? Elevated cholesterol? Type 2 diabetes? The common cold? Or dandruff? If you thought of chemotherapy, a statin medication, Metformin, zinc or vitamin C, and Head & Shoulders shampoo, you would get a 100 percent correct score on my little reductionism quiz.

Our approach to sickness and disease has been heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, which, as the saying goes, provides a pill for every ill. What a sense of relief and security to think that a single answer exists to provide the help we need! However, the truth is that it’s just not that simple. If you thought that nutrition was beginning to get too complicated after my last post, well, you haven’t seen anything yet. The human body is incredibly more complex. So many intertwined moving parts are simultaneously involved in every single function of the human body. On top of that, numerous hits from different directions can overwhelm our body’s efforts to maintain health—two people can both be obese or have type 2 diabetes, for example, and yet have different factors that contributed to its development.  

One way of simplifying the concept is to think of our state of health as a bucket. Perhaps our bucket was clean and empty when we were born. We were in perfect health. Sadly, the average infant born today has been exposed to too many environmental chemicals in utero, and are born with a toxic burden in their bucket.

Throughout life we may experience different traumas and exposures, have poor lifestyles, or live in unfavorable environments, and all that gets dumped in our bucket. How well we can take care of each item in our bucket affects at which point it gets too heavy, or starts to overflow, and we experience symptoms of imbalance. We’re “off.” We feel sick or develop a disease.

Of course, this analogy is too simple to take in everything that needs to be considered, yet it still makes the point and provides an illustration we can all understand. If multiple hits compounded bring about a diseased state, then doesn’t it make sense that we address them with various approaches or treatments, rather than as a single entity?

We’ll be taking a look at this idea again next month.