How to do your own research
All animals in nature live with UV exposure for most of the day, even in the shade. Skin cancer is virtually absent in nature. It turns out there are no good studies that prove sunscreen helps with skin cancer, and this is because UV light from the sun is not bad for us.
I’m not here to sell you anything but knowledge. Even so, when considering what I say in this book, don’t just blindly believe me. Question everything, and do your own research. It is for your own benefit to assure you know the truth behind any knowledge you come across.
The nature of science is that nothing is truly settled. Proper research methods are important if you want to do your own research, and a basic Google search reviewing the first results is not research. Ask the question “why?” each time you find an answer until you get to real evidence. This could take at least five whys. Don’t assume anyone else has done their own proper research, because many of them haven’t. Find the experts who have clearly dug to the deepest levels of “why?” themselves and haven’t assumed anything. Be wary if anyone is full of dogma or living with the results of other people’s thinking. You want to find primary sources of information; sources that haven’t been shared or repeated by others, which opens the door for misinterpretation or bias.
“If you thought before that science was certain —well, that is just an error on your part.” -Richard Feynman
I’ve written this book to be as easy to understand for as many people as possible while still providing critical details. I’ve limited the scientific complexity to make sure this information can be easily spread. You don’t need to memorize this science in order to optimize your health, but it can help you understand what’s going on in your body and help you know that what I’m talking about is real science. Skipping any of the brief science sections that are too intense for your liking is totally fine.
First Principles and Developing High-Quality Questions
A significant degree of my argument considers the difference between nature’s signals versus man-made signals using first principles. The concept of first principles states that we can draw conclusions from constraints or basic properties that cannot be deduced any further. First principles were described by Aristotle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” They avoid making assumptions by looking only at the most fundamental levels of reality.
For example, if you were to design a bike using first principles, you would avoid assuming anything based on what a current bike has. You’d ideally start from scratch, asking basic, essential questions before making decisions. When designing the bike, you could consider that it doesn’t even need a seat by asking the question: “Do you need to sit down on a bike?” which is how we will explore the ideas of certain signals being good or bad for us as humans.
Exploring Your Current Beliefs
If anything discussed in this book challenges your current beliefs, or challenges what common knowledge says, it’s a signal that you are approaching a new perspective you haven’t seen or considered yet. You may already have feelings about it despite not asking “why?” enough times. The wise take what they don’t initially believe and research it for themselves. Test what I’m sharing for yourself. Let curiosity guide you. It’s important to stay open to new ideas and evidence in life, always questioning your own biases and beliefs.
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing.” -C.S. Lewis
If at any point you think anything in this book feels like fake science, I encourage you to explore that feeling and where it comes from. Is it prior conditioning on that topic based on what you’ve seen or heard in the news? Have you just created an opinion about it without looking into the details or finding any primary sources on the topic?
These are natural reactions your brain has to ideas that are beyond your scope of current knowledge. It can manifest in something called the Dunning–Kruger effect, which you should look up and try your best to avoid if you seek genuine knowledge. Do some why-based research on the terms and ideas I present to educate yourself on them before possibly dismissing any ideas as voodoo magic or sounding too hippy-dippy.
Be Wary of Your Sources of Proof
Studies in labs are not needed to develop strong theories when we rely on the laws of physics and first principles, although it’s nice to test even the most sound ideas eventually. Albert Einstein predicted almost every law of physics we use today without doing a single experiment to prove them. It wasn’t until many years later that he was proven correct by others who designed advanced experiments to test his theories.
We do not need randomized control trials and complex experiments to know how humans are affected by the signals of nature, because our cells and biology all run on physics.
Physics is the study of nature. We can develop an understanding of what is happening at a quantum mechanics scale, which is the smallest level of physics, and translate those findings thermodynamically to make sense of them at the higher level of Newtonian physics that we are capable of perceiving. Don’t worry; we won’t get too complex with this. I will keep the ideas high level so you can’t get lost.
Every other month, someone is either telling you eggs are good for you or that they are bad because they are high in cholesterol and cause heart disease. This is largely an error with epidemiological studies, the most common type of study shown in the news. Epidemiological studies are essentially surveys, and as you can imagine, they are highly prone to bias. This can be seen in the results — over half of these survey studies are proven wrong when tested with the more accurate observation study method. That’s right; there is a higher chance that the results of an epidemiological study’s results being wrong than right.
Most higher-quality observational studies are only done by large companies due to the huge costs involved. Imagine paying enough people to do something exactly one way, and doing it for a long period of time, while controlling as many variables as possible. This is unbelievably expensive. Large companies spend the money to create these studies as evidence that their product is great and to sell more of it. Any study that shows their product is inferior would be counterproductive, and to the detriment of us all, is usually discarded.
Many studies can and are often engineered to get a desired outcome. Over eleven times more studies are done by Coca-Cola alone than the National Institute of Health annually, with similar stories across the board in the nutrition space. Most studies have also taken place without the variables of nature, under artificial light, and on mostly mice, which are nocturnal. You will see why this is significant later on, but in essence they have a completely different circadian rhythm than humans.
The best definitive evidence we can find for what the human body needs is threefold — physics, first principles, and high-quality anecdotes. After all, anecdotes that happen by word of mouth are what brought us all of our herbal and ancient medicine practices, like Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. My experience will act as the anecdotal evidence in this writing.
In the future, we may be able to fund quality research on topics that challenge the modern paradigm. The main issue with creating studies beyond funding is credibility — any one person can be written off as having invalid ideas. If an idea goes against common knowledge or against profits, it can be looked down upon and diminished.
We haven’t seen any massive revelations or disruptions to the status quo in science for several decades now, but University of Washington professor Gerald Pollack is leading an initiative to overcome these modern issues in science. He aims to, in essence, fund many teams of researchers to test intriguing hypotheses, versus one team at a time. This eliminates the possibility of results being shot down or scrutinized by the main institutions and those who stand to lose money from the results, like pharmaceutical companies. Check out and support his cause at: https://ivscience.org.
What to read next
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by Kendall Toerner
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