About
James Autio
Founder of
bionetworth.com

An Unparalleled Seminar Experience...
Why Can’t You Physically Do at 65 What You Did at 20?

More about
bionetworth




Building Your bionetworth

In the digital age, any problem—whether real or imagined—can be solved by technological alchemy: just transform natural resources into man-made resources, sand into computer chips, molecules into drugs, and genes into designer life forms. At least that is the assumption—but how true is it and how wise is it?

There was a time not long ago when humans, as well as other primates such as baboons, orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, ate mostly plant matter and expended quite a bit of energy in the process. This was, of course, before the control of fire and the invention of the spear, clock, and language—and half a blink before Pentium, Prozac, and Big Mac. Indeed, man, with his large, but not large enough cerebrum, chose to make his existence easier and safer: he put his faith—all of it—in technology. The goal of technology is to reduce the physical work and risk required for mankind to survive to zero. This decision, way back before cave paintings, dictates your quality of life and your choices today. But why should technological prowess affect biological function? To answer that, you need to understand what you really are—that is, from a biological perspective.

First things first: there are actually two dimensions of you. The first dimension of you is the abstract you, a fabrication of the mind, what you call your identity, what you believe you are as an individual and what you believe is your role in society. For example: Bob, 32 years old, accountant, lives in the suburbs of Detroit, nice 401(k), husband, father of two, drives a 2000 BMW, and so on. "Bob" isn’t really you. Unfortunately, the behavior to support the abstract you has great impact on the other, real you, your alter ego. The second you—the real you—is your biological self. Most of us have forgotten about our biological selves or else live in denial of its existence with the one big exception of how it looks, and, of course, when it doesn’t work properly, such as in illness or disease. Much time and money is spent on making our bodies look a certain way or on managing disease, but very little time or money is spent on making our bodies function according to their original intent. Ironically, if these roles were reversed, then we would look spectacular and disease would be scarce!

What is this biological self and what does it demand from me? Your biological self is your complete collection of DNA, which comprises the human genome, and, of course, its physical projection: your body. Your biological self has a hidden agenda that you must become aware of: survival, reproduction, and programmed death. That’s it, period—everything else you believe is important in your other, abstract life is merely a diversion from more pressing matters commanded by your biological self. Your biological self goes about its business by constantly interpreting its environment, internally and externally, through a broad range of signals and receptors of signals. Some of these signals are temperature, sunlight, bird chirps, flower scents, insulin, adrenaline, growth hormone, body movement, and concentrations of various amino acids, electrolytes, and chemical messengers. The list goes on and on. Receptors of signals include your eyes, ears, skin, and other senses along with all the trillions of receptors internally that cover every cell in your body and, of course, the ten-trillion interconnections in your brain. How all of these signal pathways are organized to create intelligence, emotion and your body-mind is still a mystery.

Your genome has definite expectations of you, and a life resonating of bionetworth depends on meeting these expectations. In fact, the more expectations you meet, the better you are going to feel and perform. The two most important expectations are: (1) expending significant amounts of energy on a daily basis searching for food and surviving; and (2) consuming food that is at least recognizable by the human genome (the human genome cannot decipher pizza and most fast food as food in an ecologic, symbiotic, indigenous sense, these mutant foods only fend off starvation until something more reasonable comes along). Our lifestyle was as simple as elementary physics: matter into energy and back again. Visualize a natural feedback loop that just happens to be the cycle of life. But in today’s tachyonic, complicated world, this is hard work; people today would call this alien toil a "waste of time." However, if you just met these two expectations, then your odds of falling prey to today’s most feared diseases would vanish into thin air. Diseases are like shadows—the light, not the darkness, controls their presence.

All organisms attempt to maintain an internal, dynamic balance independent of their external environment; this balancing act is called homeostasis. In natural environments, an organism is confronted with change from potentially many different angles. The genome—relying on the organism’s vast network of signal pathways—has the capacity to recognize and respond to an enormous spectrum of potential stresses: this is called adaptive response. But there is a limit to how much, how fast, and what kinds of stresses an organism can adapt to. In other words, there is an elasticity of adaptive response that cannot be violated: if this elasticity is exceeded, then an organism will perish, or, in extreme cases, an entire species or ecosystem will become extinct. Unfortunately, there’s a problem—technology throws a monkey wrench into natural process. Technology and biology have an extraordinarily antagonistic relationship. The impact of technology on your biology is measured by the deviation, or divergence, from your genome’s expectations: unchecked technological divergence challenges your capacity to respond to stress. While this magnitude of stress occasionally occurs under natural circumstances, under the artificial circumstances forced by technological divergence, an organism can face such foreign, overwhelming stresses that the phenomenon called adaptive inertia rears its ugly head.

What does adaptive inertia mean and what are its consequences? Depending on the weakest link, adaptive inertia can manifest mentally, emotionally, or physically on the organismic level. But it doesn’t stop there and it isn’t limited to biology or psychology—sociology and ecology are also fair game. On the species level, for example, consider a virus outbreak resulting in an epidemic. On the ecological level, there can be massive habitat destruction resulting in a chain reaction of species extinctions, like in the Amazon rainforest. Everyone—and every local or global ecosystem—has a limited capacity for change, which is followed by a trigger point that leads to organizational decomposition. There are concrete limits to maintaining order and when these limits are exceeded disorder—entropy—ensues: one too many snowflakes can trigger an avalanche. This phenomenon is reflected throughout nature—from electron to cell to planet to cosmos.

Now let’s link these concepts together. Technological impact is measured by the degree of divergence from the genome’s expectations: unchecked technological divergence challenges the elasticity of adaptive response to the point of adaptive inertia. In other words, the pathway leading from harmony to adaptive inertia is the underlying cause of most common diseases: these diseases and conditions include cancer, stroke, hypertension, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, obesity, and osteoporosis. These diseases, without symptoms for years or decades, begin right out of kindergarten simply because the genome’s two principle expectations are ignored by your abstract self. Once again, they are: (1) expending energy (meaning paying the true cost of living); and (2) consuming a phytonutrient-rich, plant-based diet. Having a pizza delivered is an example of violating both of these expectations simultaneously. As you can expect, quality of life is in adaptive inertia’s crosshairs: the greater the technological divergence, the greater the odds of internal imbalances emerging as dark shadows. The moral: if you make your biological self a stranger in a strange land, watch out.

Admittedly, you have some advantages over your ancestors if you care to capitalize on them. Your ancestors only lived to be 25 or 40 or so primarily because of three problems: predation, starvation, and infection—take those three problems away along with infant mortality and the lifespans of your ancestors are nipping at your heels. Modern medicine preaches that you are better off today because you will exist to be 83.34 years old. Doesn’t that prove that man has a higher quality of life and is happier today? Isn’t 83.34 greater than 30, thus glorifying our present approach to managed disease care? No. That addresses quantity, not quality: do you think that life is the absence of death? If you don’t feel alive, then are you really alive? The scope of the well-being equation must span the entire health gamut: not just sick or not-sick, but sick, not-sick, and optimal health. Modern medicine and the Western medical model are designed to prevent your death by manipulating shadow, not to prevent disease by focusing light; modern medicine is not concerned that your quality of life is meager for 83.34 years, or, soon to be, 120.41 years.

Quality of life has nothing to do with expected lifespan—and nothing to do with modern medicine. You have to agree that existence—the absence of death, a mere flickering shadow of your bottled-up potential—is nothing to boast about. Being incarcerated in a decrepit, corpulent body for 83.34 years is a life sentence and a death sentence all rolled into one.

Quality of life, from your biological self’s perspective, is the acquisition and maintenance of high levels of functional capacity. In other words, the process of day-to-day life is to promote biological preservation by doing behaviors that maintain high levels of functional capacity. Functional capacity is not limited to strength, endurance, and flexibility; it also includes the optimal function of all internal organ systems. The sum of your functional capacities equals your bionetworth. The mission of your biological self is to maintain high levels of functional capacity instead of allowing functional capacities to waste away, which is called atrophy. Without paying the cost of living, atrophy is an automatic and default outcome—this leads to biological bankruptcy.

Financial assets—green backs, real estate, the NASDAQ—have minor relevance if you are biologically bankrupt. For proof, wouldn’t you trade all your financial assets for quality of life the instant you felt your endgame coming? How much would you pay for your diabetes to disappear? How much is another five years of high bionetworth worth? Isn’t there a much greater need for a bionetworth planner—at any age—than a financial planner? After all, the best thing to save for old age is yourself. Increasing your bionetworth is not just about exercise, diet, personal trainers, and doctors, it is about a life-long strategy of building and managing your biological assets, assets that literally wither away due to your steadfast preoccupation with your abstract life. To manage these assets, a new understanding of what we are and how we work is mandated: increasing our bionetworth is the new mantra.

So, why is the average American’s bionetworth nearly bankrupt? There is a titanic conflict of interest between your genome’s expectations and technology’s relentless pursuit of "perfection." Technology brought you the spear, trap, hunting, and the control of fire. That changed the food supply from a phytonutrient-rich, plant-based diet to a foreign, animal-based diet, crippling the delicate, symbiotic relationship between fermentable fiber and the 100-trillion bacteria in your gut, voiding any prospect of optimal biological function, while sowing fertile grounds for adaptive inertia. Pretending to be a carnivore sets you up as a disease foundry. Indeed, early man was already a certified, divergent technologist—why follow in his foolish shadow? This has immediate relevance in today’s histrionic diet-carousel: if a diet guru claims that high protein fare is good for you, watch out. Sooner rather than later, someone will dig up your skull—with its ghostly pair of blackened, sunken, shadowy orbits—and write a tragedy about your ills.

Technology also brought you the automobile, airplane, and electric power. That changed your daily energy expenditure from extensive to nil. Beyond that, the shift from a low protein/fat/caloric intake to a higher one coupled to a radical drop in energy expenditure precipitated a tectonic shift in the genome’s interpretation of its environment. Under perceived conditions of low reproductive prospects, the genome expresses genes that preserve the body until better conditions arise. However, under perceived conditions of high odds of reproductive prospects, senescence is accelerated. Nature is programmed to convert your body to fertilizer the moment She gets the message that your services are no longer needed. Available energy to the organism is the principle driver of this primeval switch. A high calorie fare coupled to sitting on your hindquarters dramatically increases your odds of an early and miserable checkout.

Technology throughout history has connected the dots along the path of least resistance—and the next couple dots are already in the pipeline. Without question, technology will eventually achieve its goal of reducing the physical work required for mankind to survive to zero. Meanwhile, your alter ego—your biological self, sadly abandoned in its own, estranged, parallel universe—is incrementally pushed to the brink of adaptive inertia, a bleak state of affairs culminating in a myriad of recently popular diseases. These disease conditions are physical manifestations of imbalances, imbalances that are devilishly spawned in technology’s crucible: the biological consequences come to roost as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, dementia, depression, and—heaven forbid—"generalized anxiety disorder" or other innovative "syndromes" of unknown precedent.

Sooner or later, technology will bring you everything you want, but at a cost of everything you need: the biological consequences of technological divergence create the need for medical heroics. You know how that works: sand into computer chips, molecules into drugs, and genes into designer life forms—a clever means of morphing one shadow into another while robbing Peter to pay Paul.

But let’s imagine the following scenario. Let’s imagine that you won’t be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, starvation isn’t on the radar screen, and infection isn’t fatal. Physically, you pay the cost of living through intelligently designed physical activity. You defy agribusiness’ food pyramid scheme and eat a diet composed of mostly raw plant matter and much less of the three anti-food groups: dairy, grains, and meat. You live in a modest home with few material distractions. You are minimally exposed to noise, air, or water pollution, pesticides, herbicides, electromagnetic noise, plastics, concrete, steel, traffic jams, being on hold, information overload, computer viruses, or anything else nature ignorantly forgot. After all, less busy work, more introspection, and dynamic balance between mind and body are music to the soul and its subtle, resonant energies.

Now let’s imagine what it all means. Shadows—and modern medicine as you know it—would disappear. The planet’s ecosystem—in concert with your genome—would work according to expectations. Elasticity of adaptive response would not be beyond the red line. Financial net worth and bionetworth would be prioritized and placed in their proper perspective. Your lifestyle would automatically give you an enormous bionetworth. Indeed, mankind, once again, after a seemingly infinite stupor, would reconnect to nature and be given back one of human nature’s most extraordinary gifts and values: a consciousness of well-being.

Consciousness of well-being? Now what does that mean? It sounds so trendy, so new age. But it’s not: it’s actually ancient—it predates language. Possessing a consciousness of well-being is an absolutely essential component of quality of life at the highest level. It means that you feel alive, perhaps for the first time since you were a kid; that you are constantly aware of and experience continuous joy from your newly rejuvenated condition of vibrant, biological fitness; that you have the energy, courage, and motivation to do whatever you want; it is the difference between merely climbing a mountain at the age of 30 and climbing a mountain at the age of 85—and having it be the grandest experience of your life. This is all possible, but it’s up to you. Are you ready to build a nest egg for your biological self?

Site, GUI, and Flash intro: Designed and Produced by Rose Irelan - roses@san.rr.com
Site Architecture, Site Production, and Graphic art by Richard Carter - inview@pacbell.net
Programming and consultation by Frankie Thompson - frankie@webwareetc.ws

©2004 Bionetworth, Inc. All Rights Reserved