Inquiry

Health As An Ability

written 10-2008 by David Rainoshek, MA, www.JuiceFeasting.com

My approach to nutrition and health is founded on the understanding that health is not a state so much as it is an ability.

Disease is a disorder or chaos in your system, and persons who are rarely sick have immune and detoxification systems that are able to take care of entropic entities that would otherwise create chaos/disorder in the human body (ultimately leading to disintegration). Those elements of chaos/disorder are heavy metals, industrial and agrochemicals, viruses, antagonistic bacteria, certain molds, yeasts, and fungi, annoying relatives, and radiation, to name some of the biggies.

Health is not the absence of disease so much as it is the ability of one’s system to create , maintian, and/or restore order in an environment that is fundamentally entropic (creating chaos).

If a holon has the strength, the ability, to maintain its structural integrity without being broken down or broken apart, that is health. Moreover, a sign of a healthy holon is one that is able to differentiate and integrate elements from the environment that will see to its continued structural integrity. In other words, a person in good health is able to take food from the environment and properly access and assimilate nutrients and create new organized structures and functions (organs and systems in the body).

Why is this important? Because the conventional view of health is simply the absence of disease, but this is an outcome, not a quality-ability of the human system. Health is not just an outcome, but an ability to create order, and the stronger that capacity, the healthier we are.

Looked at from the conventional view of health-as-absence-of-disease, one could argue that if a rock and a person were both exposed to the flu, and the person developed a flu, and the rock did not, that means the rock is healthier. This does not make sense. Therefore, health is an ability to create order, not simply order in and of itself.

Where this leads next is to a further definition of health, the ability of a holon to evolve. A holon that can maintain its integrity, or the status quo, is healthy, but a higher level of health-as-ablity is the capacity to create greater and greater levels of order. In this case we are looking at stages progressions of particular developmental lines, such as physical, psycho-sexual, moral, cognitive, aesthetic, and so on. One could stagnate at a third grade level education, develop no significant muscluature, and never learn to love more than oneself, but this would not be expressing this other important aspect of health the ability to evolve and transform, not merely translate or continue to function at the same developmental level indefinitely (also known as meso health).

So, to recap: the conventional view of health is simply the absence of disease, which would lead us to conclude that rocks are healthier than humans, and that health is merely a state rather than a living ability. Therefore, in an environment which is entropic - constantly moving into and creating chaos - health is the ability of a holon to create, restore, and maintain order. A higher sign of health beyond creating, restoring, and maintaining order is the ability to manifest higher levels of order, often through differentiation and integration, or reorganization at a higher level or capacity than previously realized.