Did nature get it wrong?
When my college-aged son told me he wanted to spend a semester studying abroad, I told him he should go join up with an aboriginal tribe in Tanzania to learn what healthy living looks like. He wouldn’t be the first to pursue this knowledge — I’ve read a biohacker’s account of such a trip, and even CNN covered a British professor’s experience embedded with the Hadza tribe. Unfortunately, my son’s college offers study abroad in only Spain, England, and Italy. Tanzania will have to wait.
One of the remarkable features of indigenous peoples is their consistently perfect teeth. They have never: seen a dentist, had expensive orthodontia work, brushed with fluoridated toothpaste, or consumed municipal tap water. In his book Breath, author James Nestor explained how these tribes achieve oral health without modern medicine:
- Extended breastfeeding creates chewing and sucking stress
- Young people early on must masticate meat, wild roots, and undomesticated vegetables
- A culture of nasal breathing exists in tribes across continents; adults train their children to breathe through their noses even before they’re old enough to talk
Only in the era of industrialized agriculture have our crooked teeth and deformed mouths become normalized.
A key premise of modern medicine, particularly preventive medicine, is that nature got it wrong. We use statins to reduce cholesterol — the building block of cell membranes. We tap an armory of drugs to address psychological problems — caused by nutrient deficiencies and lifestyles that destroy the gut. And of course we pump children full of: formaldehyde, E. Coli, mercury, aluminum hydroxide, the toxic and carcinogenic sterilizing agent betapropiolactone, monkey kidney cells, fetal bovine serum, and pig DNA — in order to purify them with vaccines.
Among all childhood vaccines, the least controversial is the injection of vitamin K, which is done within six hours of birth. Post-COVID, however, more parents are getting bold and telling hospitals no to vitamin K. Moms and dads have opened their eyes to a possible link to leukemia, suspect preservatives, and they want to avoid pain for their baby. Regardless, the CDC asserts that the vitamin K shot is needed for blood to clot normally. The agency says that babies’ low levels of vitamin K can lead to serious bleeding problems.
Did nature get birth wrong?
I read an interesting article recently explaining that nature didn’t underpower vitamin K in infants, but rather doctors are doing birth incorrectly. Nature has fully prepared the baby for bleeding problems by filling the umbilical cord with stem cells, which are supposed to flow back into the baby and repair any damage. In the hospital, however, obstetricians clamp the umbilical cord far too soon, preventing nature from taking its course.
But is the natural path always best? What about antibiotics?
Antibiotics are a lifesaver, a medical advance that radically improved the trajectory of our species. Still, they come with harsh side effects and should be used only as a last resort. Here’s a recipe for fermented garlic honey, a traditional natural remedy that has worked for centuries as an antibiotic against a range of bacteria including salmonella, staphylococcus aureus, and streptococcus pneumonia:
- Get a bulb of garlic and remove the peels of the cloves
- Lightly smash them and let sit on counter
- Get a clean sterile mason jar
- Fill it with garlic cloves
- Pour raw honey in until almost full
- Push garlic cloves below honey’s surface
- Leave the lid of the mason jar slightly loose (but covered) and let it sit somewhere dark and dry for a month
If you use the human body in the way it was designed, nature will give you a solution.