Deconstructing The Concept Of "Chronic" In Health-Related Issues.
What does a chronic health condition really entail?
Historically, the word “chronic” has been used to describe diseases that last “a long time”. It originally came from the Greek word “khronos”, from which we get words that are used to describe situations that have a time factor involved, and that’s where we get words such as “chronicle” and “chronology” from - the root word “chronos”.
And of course, we have chronic diseases, which appear to be increasing in terms of who it affects and its spread throughout the world. These aren’t contagious, so they don’t spread from person to person.
But… more and more people are dying from them. Diseases such as heart disease and cancer are major killers worldwide, and people who do have such problems do succumb to them with an extremely low quality of life towards the end of their life on earth.
Because such illnesses are chronic and are chronically affecting the body, we can see a few ideas emerging:
There is something wrong in the body somewhere, which somehow cannot be resolved from within.
Current healthcare methods are unable to resolve that problem- otherwise the one who manages to create a cure for cancer would become a billionaire overnight.
That “something wrong” in the body has been persisting for ages, and that isn’t something that is being addressed by healthcare.
The problem, then, is that this underlying issue isn’t being treated appropriately, and therefore the chronic condition will continue to persist.
Because let’s say I get a splinter in my finger while I’m doing some woodwork one day.
If I don’t extract that splinter from my finger, but all I do is to put a plaster (Band-Aid in Americanese) on top of it, will that splinter magically disappear on its own?
No, it wouldn’t.
But I’d feel that symptom of pain in that finger, as long as the splinter remains lodged in there.
Would taking a painkiller help with the problem?
No, it would only mask the symptom of pain by dulling it:
And the next problem is that all these health issues are highly complex and follow through a multistep cascade of biochemical signalling processes.
If we were to look at the mechanism behind the development of heart disease, for instance, we’d see that there are so many different things that can go wrong simultaneously.
For example,
The oxidation of low density lipoproteins (LDL), which can be brought about by the accumulation of these said lipoproteins.
The activity of the macrophages in eliminating excess LDL and turning into foam cells (and that’s where the immune system gets involved).
The containment of the foam cells in an atherosclerotic plaque that is then sealed off by a collagen layer.
The death of some of these foam cells, which create a necrotic and pro-inflammatory environment, which stimulates the foam cells to produce more matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) enzymes to digest through the collagen cap.
The pro-inflammatory environment, which promotes clotting.
So now, let’s assume that the cholesterol accumulation in the body was really a problem.
There are a few ways to address that issue. For example, we could work on increasing dietary fibre consumption to promote faecal matter elimination, because that’s how the waste cholesterol gets dumped out of the body…
Or we could look at reducing cholesterol synthesis from within the body - that’s where and how statins work.
And we can then see what happens with statin consumption - can blood cholesterol levels be kept in control?
For the most part, yes.
But what happens if one’s faecal matter elimination is still bad? After all, it is estimated that 16% of the world’s population suffers from constipation.
Our intestines are responsible for transporting food from our stomach, converting it to faecal matter and then sending it out to the toilet bowl. They are lined with semi-permeable membranes.
If the intestines weren’t semi-permeable, we wouldn’t be able to absorb the nutrients from the food that we eat.
The problem, then, is that when the faecal matter stays in the intestines for too long.
A sponge is semi-permeable and can absorb water.
What would happen to a dry sponge when you put it in a puddle of water?
It gets wet because it absorbs the water.
Our liver processes cholesterol into bile salts and dumps it out into the intestines for elimination via the faecal matter. What would happen if the bile salts stay in the intestines for too long, as it is in the case of mild to moderate constipation?
The bile salts get re-absorbed back into the blood.
In that case, what would happen if we were to be chronically constipated?
We’d be re-absorbing all these bile salts back into the blood.
Which then leads to an accumulation of bile salts in the liver, which then kicks off an entire chronic oxidation issue, which can then lead into the oxidation of LDL particles:
Statins don’t provide any form of resolution towards that issue.
Neither do statins address the function of the immune system’s macrophages in gobbling up excess LDL.
So the end result is that we have a chronic issue, but we’re using a drug to target some other fragmented aspect of that chronic issue. As a result, when the root cause of the chronic issue isn’t addressed, what do you think would happen to the issue?
It would remain chronic, wouldn’t it?
Would that bring about a resolution to the problem, you reckon?
And that’s why we have to be eating right - our diet is, after all, one of the most important factors in supporting our health. Other factors do include our sleep quality, our stress management and our exercise frequency/intensity.
But it isn’t easy to make overnight changes to our stress management or our sleep quality. And we might have a ton of inertia when it comes to getting fit and active again. However, we can almost instantaneously make changes to what we’re feeding ourselves. Here are 10 Nutrients That Support A Healthy Heart.
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