Vitamins for the Dawn of the Anthropocene Age?

I’m a fan of various catch • clean • cook videos on YouTube.  I watch Deer Meat for Dinner, as Robert Arrington stuns an iguana with a pellet gun, skins the orange-green creature that resembles my son’s SiamoTyrannus action figure, then sautées the beast into an ingredient for a taco.  And I’ve watched many episodes of Wilderness Cooking, in which Almazan—an Azerbaijani shepherd—dispatches a wild turkey or a goat from his family’s herd as a prelude to an afternoon of roasting and smoking his catch inside a rustic, open-air tandoor.  In the background, one hears the calm chirping of birds and the burbling white noise of a mountain brook, as though the lunch of succulent roast goat had been filmed by Michelangelo Antonioni, the movie director who made existentialism cool in the 60’s.  

The music of the wind draws us into contemplation and fantasy.  

We watch as Almazan savours the finish of the matrix of tandoor flavours from the back of his teeth.  He implores us to join him with his signature thumbs up.

“Su-per,” he rasps.

After a meal of iguana pâté or spicy mutton offal, why would one need to take a vitamin?

The unfortunate answer is that these snippets of culinary adventure are, in a fundamental way, quite fictional.  I don’t mean to say that these videos are inauthentic in the manner of the cheaper forms of reality TV.  I like these shows.  They are quite authentic… as the last slivers of a pre-industrial world with its pre-industrial foods that no longer really exist.

Maybe some of you have heard the term Anthropocene.  It’s a reference to a geological age; and the International Commission on Stratigraphy as well as the International Union of Geological Sciences have for a number of years been pedantically wiffling and waffling whether to acknowledge that our current geological epoch on Planet Earth is essentially Anthropocene in nature.  The prefix Anthro- refers to something that is controlled or managed by people; not specific people—like the subset of nationalities represented by these geological societies—but humanity in general, whether through knowing or unknowing, specifically intended or foolishly oblivious conduct.  

Thus, the term Anthropocene Age describes a condition in which Man—by default—has become the primary, determinative and characterising force in all heretofore natural dynamics on Planet Earth. 

The Goo of the Future 

Thus, a million years from now as future archaeo-geologists dig deep into the ground to investigate our epoch, they will find clear evidence in the rocks—the stratigraphic geology of our age—that 21st Century Man along with his 8 billion friends had determined fundamentally the remnant chemical composition of our sliver of time and space on Planet Earth.  Our predominant influence on nature will have been written quite literally in every stone and granule of mineral from our epoch. 

That’s quite a lot to say; that human industry and commerce in which each and all of us are engaged—whether as consumers, facilitators, manufacturers, bureaucrats, lawyers, gig workers, essential service providers, first responders, doctors, nurses, customer service associates, graphic artists, influencers, pickers, packers, or simply drinkers of beer and soda—will forever mark a distinct layer of the geology of our planet for billions of years into the future.

What these future archaeo-geologists will find, of course, is the sticky goo left behind from our plastic.  The residual sands from our Age—pressure cooked into stone—will be plastic-coated from aeons of oceanic micro-plastic having beaten down onto our beaches, to be dried and compressed during future ice ages.  These scientists will also discover the gunky residue of de-composed TBHQ, the food additive used to make our donuts shine and our Twinkies glisten.  They’ll find, too, the leftover dust of the nano-particles used to blacken our tires and strengthen them against punctures, with splotches of the stuff congealed onto rocks or fused together with sediments.  And as they analyse the sparkly bits interspersed with what was once our soil, they’ll learn to their surprise that we had made it our habit to use glyphosate and a thousand ingenious pesticides—all of them derivatives of petroleum—to kill anything that had dared to grow, glimpse the sun, fly, buzz, crawl, slither or- heaven forbid! -procreate and pollinate across our endless rectangular hectares of genetically modified mono-crops of quasi-soy, golden rice and magic potatoes.

I imagine these archaeologists of the future writing long dissertations on how Anthropocene Man of the 21st Century had grown accustomed to the taste of BPA consumed with each slurp of New! Just for You soda pop, oblivious to the enhanced risk of early cognitive decline that could only be treated with pharmaceuticals that had cost, on average, 10,000 times the price of the soda pop that had set the stage for the expensive neurological condition.  That archaeologist will become famous for the snide comparisons he or she will make to how the Ancient Romans—who had arguably kicked off the eventual total industrialisation of the planet—had laced their wine with lead, forfeiting their wits, complexions and even their fertility for the chance to drink fermented grape juice protected from spoilage during the hot summer months by the poisonous white metal.  From edible lead to edible petroleum: Industrial Humans—this smarty pants archaeologist of the distant future will quip— were essentially bands of glue sniffers, childishly fond of chemical convenience and chemical exhilaration as well as the profits from dealing in these chemical experiences, but careless of health, reckless in their care for the planet, and knowingly ignorant of the long-term consequences of their addiction to toxins. 

All you need to do to confirm that we in fact live in the Anthropocene epoch is open your refrigerator door.  

The Anthropocene is 21st Century reality.  It’s been our reality, actually, for quite some time.

Sumerian Cuisine

Deer Meat for Dinner and Wilderness Cooking, though authentic enough and very enjoyable to watch, are works of romantic fiction.  The snakehead fish or iguana at the wrong end of Robert’s gun or hook has lived its life in a ditch or other artificial tributary that abuts agricultural fields and busy highways polluted with a cocktail of herbicidal / pesticide-rich agro-chemical runoff, re-suspended tire nano-dust fallen to ground, PM2.5 in solution in water that when ingested goes into solution in blood, and a whole host of other toxins.  Almazan’s wilderness kitchen with its beautifully authentic tandoor that looks like its been there since the Sumerians is located in the mountains of the Caucasus, where the rainfall originates from the evaporated waters of the Caspian Sea, which are heavily polluted from decades of oil exploration, oil refining, oil cracking, oil derivative synthesis, oil leaking, oil shipping, oil piping and oil accidents.  

The pre-industrial world that is the literary mise-en-scène of Deer Meat for Dinner and Wilderness Cooking no longer exists.  

The illusion that we have somehow managed to preserve truly untainted corners of the pre-industrial past—free and clean from the chemical and toxic hazards of the rest of our industrial world—is the story line of these YouTube mini-dramas.  We watch these videos from the 34th floor of our condo tower, with the sound of police cars, buses and ambulances dulled by our thick curtains; and, we are amazed and deeply reassured—even consoled—to see that True Wild Nature exists somewhere out there, still ripe and ready to be eaten.  

But I believe this story line to be just that; a story merely, pulling at our hearts with the power of nostalgia such that the still unforgotten past of bees and honeysuckle, of fireflies and mid-summer twilight clouds and confuses our perception of the present, delaying our acceptance of reality.

Terra-Forming is Easy  

The geologists and stratigraphers will reach their accord soon enough.  When they pound the rubber stamp onto the documents that certify the proper name for our epoch in time, they may even back date the starting point of this Age of Man, because the leading academics argue that we’ve been living in the Anthropocene for several thousand years already.  

Reality has taken rather too long to be realised.

If we accept that the Anthropocene Epoch has begun, we should recognise that we now live in an engineered environment.  Apparently, we’ve been terra-forming our planet, just like in Avatar; and, whether we are the colonists or the invaded can be confusing.  After all, collaborators to conquest often suffer an identity crisis of this sort.

Who knew?  

The sort of engineering we’re experiencing may be reckless, but it is engineered nonetheless because we have replaced very complex natural dynamics with industrial technologies in a way that rapidly alters the planetary ecology.  The core of the problem when considering personal and family health is this: the normal physiological adaptive processes that allow living things to maintain homeostasis—meaning biological stability despite changed living conditions—were never intended to operate at techno-industrial velocities.  This acceleration of environmental change is one of the reasons that we need vaccines delivered to us far more frequently than in the past.  On our engineered planet it should be expected that we will need to engineer our bodies in ways that we once left entirely to natural processes and our innate adaptive capacities.  This could potentially approach a condition of desperation once we begin to observe the expected tipping points that characterise the eventual response pattern of natural systems to the accumulation of synthetic dynamics.

The pre-Anthropocene ages were different.

Our skin gained or lost melanin during the course of tens of thousands of years as we migrated back and forth from Africa.  Or our respiratory efficiencies rose slowly as we migrated from valleys to mountain plateaus over a few hundred years.  But it’s impossible to adapt genetically when an urban planner suddenly changes the bus route so that the number 16 double-decker heading downtown stops 76 times a day at the corner of your street, increasing your family’s daily consumption of diesel exhaust, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur oxides and PM2.5 dust from the squealing brake pads.  And how will your body respond when a power plant five kilometres from your front door switches from natural gas to the burning of heavy oil that emits fumes similar to coal, though with lower volumes of large particles?  

Is a genetic adaptation, however slow, even possible as a defence against a toxic load of this kind?  Mammalian species are disappearing regularly during the course of our 6th Mass Extinction, which is one of the prime dynamics of the Anthropocene Epoch.  People are mammals, too; and so…. I’ll let you do the math.

21st Century Pollution

Homeo-stasis is health.  

Disease is dynamic.  

For instance, you eat yoghurt with billions and billions of bacteria.  Your body immediately achieves a détente and equilibrium with the parasitic bacteria.  The bacteria consume soluble fibres in your gut but then excrete short-chain fatty acids that feed you.  You are adapted and therefore homeostatic.  All of life seems to be a collective of diverse frenemies with whom we, over the course of aeons, have negotiated in order to achieve a condition of balanced power and grudging symbiosis.

The same isn’t true of pollution.

You open your car window while driving along an expressway, just in time for an ageing diesel school bus to belch a black cloud of exhaust.  You inhale then cough.  Your eyes redden and water.  Your cheeks flush with several colours, from grey to red.  You breathe several more times, fumbling for the switch, before you’re able to close the window.  A few minutes later, you notice a lingering congestion in your chest.  Your mood has worsened.  You feel a mild fever coming on.  By the evening, your body is in a dynamic condition called a cold, which you’ve developed as a secondary consequence of pollution exposure.

Let’s forget about carbon dioxide for a moment, because Climate Change isn’t the main topic of this discussion.  Plants consume carbon dioxide, and so it’s true that there are natural mechanisms that help us cope with certain components of industrial emissions.  However, there are no living entities that consume nano-particles or the weird bio-agglomerates of pollen, PM2.5 and microbes that we currently breathe regularly in our urban environments.  Beyond carbon dioxide, there are many other pollutants that, since the 70’s, we’ve forgotten and ignored.  And the whole point of many agro-chemicals is that genetically un-modified plant life cannot tolerate them, let alone eat them as a sort of food.  

As a consequence of our tinkering, pollution has been evolving, growing stronger and more resilient even as we deny the existence of the toxic micro-nano clouds that are the spawn of our industriousness.

The cooperative détente we’ve reached with many varieties of potentially harmful bacteria and even viruses won’t be possible with these new toxic elements of our ecology.  The chemical matrix of pollutants beyond carbon dioxide are worse than the environmental frenemies with which we’ve slowly co-evolved for millions of years.

In too many ways, the environmental conditions of the Anthropocene are alien to our physiologies.

Innate Immunity Stretched to its Limits

At this stage, you’ll be pleased to learn that, even against air pollution from an ageing school bus, our bodies have some level of defence.  It’s called innate immunity.  Exposure to toxins will excite a number of innate immune responses intended to contain or purge the threat.  The most important is phagocytosis, in which cellular macrophages in skin and other epithelial tissue seek to physically consume and contain the particulate toxins, which are later voided and expelled by the body.  

It’s important to note that these innate immune responses are antioxidant intensive; and the antioxidants that are depleted most severely are the fat soluble ones, which I’ll describe as the Keto-Antioxidants.

Pollution exposure is highly oxidative as well as nitrosative.  And there are other toxic cascade processes that occur as well; some slow, some immediate.  Categorising pollution pathology can be perplexing; however, for the time being we’ll focus on the immunity effects of exposure to toxic pollutants.  It’s difficult to overemphasise the importance of keeping these clean-up capabilities of the innate immune system functioning as well as possible, because our innate immune capacities are regularly stretched beyond their limit.  

In fact, an immunity crisis has been building unchecked around the globe for decades.

Our repertoire of innate immune responses may have been sufficient in the pre-industrial age to help people cope with woodsmoke from, say, cooking a goat once a month in a tandoor; but, in our engineered and Anthropocene environment the intensity and complexity of exposure to pollution toxicity is exponentially greater.  Our bodies are overwhelmed.  Even when we think we’re avoiding pollution exposure and also take great care in the selection of the foods we eat—breaking that healthy routine only occasionally to eat a taco of roadside iguana—our exposure to toxins is persistent and cumulative.  The air in our cars as we drive our kids to school is laden with ozone, nitrous oxides, sulphur compounds, fine particulate matter, re-suspended nano-particles and weird bio-agglomerates of synthetic particles and pollen.  Add to this toxic load our likely exposure to mystery toxins such as the forever chemicals—the polyfluoroalkyl substances—and the micro-plastics in bottled water, then you begin to appreciate the degree of divergence between reality and the world as it’s depicted—not just on Deer Meat for Dinner and Wilderness Cooking—but in most commercial media intended to sell us food or bottled water or a freshly-squeezed orange juice.

But where is the evidence of this immunity crisis?

Well, it’s been written on our faces.

Atopic Dermatitis is the skin condition that often occurs in response to long-term exposure to air pollutants, including cigarette smoke.  Medical Researchers have been trying to find the collection of genetic sequences that permit some people to tolerate pollution exposure better than others.  They haven’t found it yet.  Frankly, I doubt whether they’ll ever find the magic DNA sequence that lets any subset of the human population breathe PM2.5 and nitrous oxides, let alone the new bioactive agglomerates.  We’ve been using oxygen for a long time, and most of us like breathing it in lieu of industrial emissions or bus exhaust.

It’s alarming that the incidence of Atopic Dermatitis and other autoimmune disorders is rising exponentially.  In South Korea, that trend began in the 1970’s after just a decade or so of rapid / rampant industrialisation.  By the 1990’s, the incidence of skin abnormality in the age cohort 6 to 12 had reached 75%.  Factoring in bureaucratic inefficiency in the testing of an entire population segment, the incidence rate in truth may have been closer to 100%, especially if one includes sub-clinical inflammation, dryness, reddening and other cosmetic niggles.

This explosion of autoimmune disorders should have been read as a warning to all of us that the natural limits of innate immunity had been stretched beyond their limit, leaving the planet vulnerable to new pathogens. Instead, we covered up these early signals of an impending global crisis by developing the cosmetic ritual knows as Glass Skin.

De-Hazing our Secret History of Pollution

One of the factors delaying the certification of our present reality as Anthropocene is likely the risk that, once we’ve officially recognised that we live in an inescapably engineered environment, more people and (some of) our governmental representatives will begin to study in excruciatingly precise scientific detail all the ways in which our food and water and, of course, soda pop have been tainted over the years.  There are immensely powerful corporate and financial interests that will be unhappy with the de-hazing and de-mystifying of how the planet has been engineered, especially over the past 150 years.

Although we’ve seen trends such as Organic Foods, Fair Trade and Free Range growing in popularity in recent years, we are still in the early days of a more fundamental reconsideration of food and fundamental fairness.  Once the battle lines have grown more firm—with taint-ers on one side and the taint-ees on the other—the controversy will blossom, especially if the lines of conflict have a distinct geographic, socio-economic or ethnic characteristic. 

Cristiano Ronaldo (a non-Anglophone citizen of the Southern Hemisphere) removing the can of sugar-laden Coca-Cola from his lectern was simply an early shot over the bow in a widening, intensifying battle.

Climate Change, of course, is an aspect of the Anthropocene.  However, for many, the concept of Climate Change must seem rather sterile and academic.  Climate Change is something happening far away in Antarctica, observed for us by a BBC helicopter pilot.  Climate Change has a pontificating quality.  Pollution, on the other hand, is easier to grasp.  It’s the foulness of the air, whether at home, in the car, or in our children’s schools.  Pollution is the collection of actual chemical toxins you can smell and taste that connects the engineered environment with personal and family health.  If you look, you’ll find evidence of the effects of pollution in the fine wrinkling and subtle mottling of your skin.  You’ll also find pollution symptomatology in the frailty of your bones and the pain in your joints.  

Yet, the distinction between Pollution and Climate Change is largely semantic.  It’s just that while Climate Change sounds like a matter to be dealt with by governments at the international level, or even like an asset that can be financialised by banks and hedge funds using complex derivatives, Pollution is very local, very personal and very easy to understand.

That ageing school bus with its noxious clouds of diesel smoke isn’t driving to Kyoto or Paris or Brussels to let you sign an international protocol on terra-forming.  It’s sitting there at the intersection just down the street from your house.  

This localisation and personalisation of these issues will be necessary to spur more people to take action, even if in simply taking greater care in the selection of foods.  The level of acrimony could rise when people appreciate suddenly that these academic issues were, in truth, related to their health and well-being.

Nomads, Then and Now

And now we can talk about food, diet and vitamins.  

The Paleo Diet is premised on the notion that all that we have to do to improve health is eat in the manner of our pre-agricultural Paleolithic ancestors from about 30,000 or so years ago.  There’s a lot that’s admirable in that notion.  The newly formed cities of the Early Neolithic—starting apparently some 12,000 years ago—were deeply unpopular because they were hotspots for the transmission of infectious diseases.  And probably some interplay between compromised immunity associated with less-healthy, grain-intensive, carb-focused diets along with increased population density intrinsic to cities (and so less social distancing) was the prime cause behind the immunity crisis of the Neolithic.  Returning to the conditions pre-dating the serial epidemics of the Neolithic would have sounded to many at the time like a great idea.  Clever people from the early Neolithic, not surprisingly, resisted leaving their dispersed nomadic or village lives to enter the bureaucratic social structures of cities.  

If you’re among the many who’ve left New York City (or similar megalopolis) for the suburbs and exurbs since 2020, you’ll have an instinctive understanding of this Neolithic attitude. 

Because of the Neolithic immunity crisis, forced conscription into city life proved necessary to achieve sufficient population density to fill out the labor requirements of luxurious Neolithic city life, reserved—of course—only for the powerful few.  (Urban Slavery and the health gap between the servers and the served has been around for quite a while, actually.)  The shift of dietary sourcing from hunting and gathering to agriculturally produced grains, in view of current science, certainly played some role in the decline of general health that made city life so deeply unpopular.  However, this shift in diet was simply one aspect of a more complex civilisational process that subordinated health to other bureaucratic interests, such as nation-building, conquest, technological development, etc.  

In many ways, that complex civilisational process has continued, accumulated and accelerated to the present day. 

Subordinating health in order to enjoy access to a smartphone may seem like a reasonable trade-off, especially when those Doritos come in seven different flavours.  However, subordinating health in a way that theoretically brings forward your demise by a few years at some seemingly distant point in the quizzically far future is different from watching a stranger coughing on your subway car in the middle of a pandemic.  The sheltering sky of your illusory immortality can dissipate at such moments.  

You may feel your inner Nomad coming to life as you search Zillow on your smartphone for what’s available within your price range in Greenwich, where your neighbours would be happily financialising Climate Change.

Pastoral Rebellion

Pastoral rebelliousness among those who’ve yearned for a return to more Paleolithic lifestyles and diets (certainly available for delivery in Greenwich) didn’t arise for the first time in the 21st Century.  The first food rebels, as noted, were the nomads of the Neolithic who resisted conscription into the bread-addicted cities of Mesopotamia.  The Paleo Diet for these people wasn’t a book they had bought on Amazon.  It was the food they had eaten as children before being hijacked into city life, with its diet of one sugar-loaded sandwich after another.  In more recent times, the best known food rebels were the Luddites from 19th Century Britain who not only renounced technology but also attacked the systems of food distribution.  

Slow Food, Farm to Table, the Paleo Diet, the Carnivore Diet, the Keto Diet, Keto-Paleo, Atkins, the Mediterranean Diet, the South Beach Diet, Deer Meat for Dinner and Wilderness Cooking:  These are all examples of contemporary Pastoral, Nomadist Rebellion.  However, if the objective of Pastoral Rebellion in the 21st Century—as we dig into a grass-fed sirloin and certified organic broccoli side, our plate absolutely free of any magically modified potatoes—is to restore health to what was possible before the industrialisation of the planet, I would argue that the exercise can never achieve its ultimate objective any longer.  

A Paleolithic hunter-chef didn’t need to worry whether the bison whose liver he was roasting on his cooking stone had eaten grass treated with glyphosate.  And if it was fish on the fire, there was no concern about the Cesium-137 concentration in the waters from which that fish had emerged… just a few miles from Fukushima.  Our Age is the Anthropocene precisely because we have altered the chemical composition of the planet so completely that synthetics are now everywhere and in everything.

Even so, taking care in what one eats will, I believe, certainly improve health, though only relatively.  True amelioration of the health effects of chronic exposure to air pollution, depleted soil and plastified drinking water, however, will require more tightly focused methods.   

Food cannot be enough.

Beyond Vitamin C

In a nutshell, this is the argument for some forms of dietary supplements.

Since the 1970’s, pollution studies have warned that exposure to air toxins greatly increases oxidative and nitrosative stress, thus rapidly depleting reserves of antioxidants.  

The most popular antioxidant that comes to most people’s minds is Vitamin C.  There are undeniable health benefits associated with Vitamin C.  Linus Pauling, the Nobel laureate, took a lot of it, and towards the end of his life wished that he had taken even more. 

However, it isn’t a panacea. 

Its functions are specific rather than omnibus; and, some of those functions may be indirect, the most important of which may be in maintaining reserves of Vitamin E. In its topical form, Vitamin C may be acting simply as a dermal whitening agent, which may be objectionable on numerous grounds.  

Most importantly, it’s relevant to note that the anti-viral effects of Vitamin C seem to be quite vague and minimal.  The most recent clinical studies of Vitamin C as a treatment for Covid-19 have shown that even high doses (24g / day) delivered intravenously, have no observable impact on disease progression.  Also, the body doesn’t store Vitamin C, and therefore this isn’t the nutrient that suffers depletion after exposure to intense pollution.  Another very recent clinical study, this one published by The Journal of the American Medical Association, described the use of a combination of high-dose Vitamin C and Zinc in an ameliorative therapy for Covid-19 as an exercise in “futility”. That seems fairly conclusive, while no doubt sending an electric shock up the spines of those trading Orange Juice futures contracts. And one wonders whether the innate immune response—which is constantly at work and critically important in an episodic and unpredictable way—would depend upon a nutrient with no storage mechanism in mammalian physiology.

The first studies examining health and pollution exposure, out of Duke University, actually focused on Vitamin E, which is the fat soluble vitamin most frequently prescribed at fertility clinics around the world.  Vitamin E is very important in detoxifying the dangerous cyclic peroxides generated by both synthetic air pollution and naturally occurring volatile gases.  

Despite some likely general health benefits attributable to Vitamin C, ascorbic acid by itself plays no direct and indispensable role in the innate immune response, which is how the body attempts to mitigate exposure to environmental contaminants.  Studies from 2020 suggest that Vitamin C in combination with Quercitin may offer some synergistic benefits.  Also, there are some reports of a connection between Vitamin C and glutathione.  So, on balance we like Vitamin C, if only generally. 

However, the first priority in selecting a supplementation plan should be to address deficiencies rather than in achieving some hypothetical super-immune condition.  Let’s get to zero first, before pumping our ambitions higher. Correcting deficiency, thus, is clearly part of the Basics of caring for the hardware of one’s immune system.

The micro-nutrients that do support the innate immune defence against pollution exposure are the fat-soluble vitamins: A, E, D and K.  And not surprisingly, more people are likely to suffer deficiencies—whether chronically, acutely or seasonally–of these micro-nutrients than of Vitamin C.  And in most developed countries, food sources of Vitamin C are readily available year round such that best source of Vitamin C could be your blender rather than a more complex micro-liposomal concoction that wraps water-soluble Vitamin C in atomised fats.

It’s reassuring and comforting to think that Vitamin C, as a magic elixir, can help preserve health despite our addiction to sugar and our unavoidable habit of breathing pollution and eating accumulating quantities of agro-chemicals. Vitamin C is an Uber-abundant lifestyle, of rockets and Orange Juice, of Tang and truckloads of succulent fruits shipped to America by happy, obeisant peasants (all of them neighbours of Juan Valdez) from our vassal, Monroe Doctrine jungle states of the Far, Far South. And it would be just wonderful if Vitamin C could also strengthen us against vulnerability to Covid-19 and the other coming health risks of the 21st Century, thus putting off until a more distant day a reconsideration of how we should adapt to our new Anthropocene realities and the legacy of petroleum.

The problem is that Vitamin C is only vaguely and uncertainly beneficial rather than magical. To put it more neatly, Vitamin C has become a slick advertising fiction.

Keto-Immunity

Recent research from Yale Medical School indicates that Keto-Adaptation—thus eating adequate amounts of healthy fats while avoiding sugar and other carbohydrates—improves redox balance, which then boosts barrier and innate immune function.  Dr. Akiko Iwasaki and her team at Yale attributed the immune boost to super-production of γδ-T Cells, a type of immune cell active in innate immune responses.  Because the fat soluble micro-nutrients catalyse the production and maturation of immune cells, one plausible hypothesis is that increased consumption of healthy fats increases the bio-availability of the fat soluble micro-nutrients, thus spurring the super-production of immune cells.

If you haven’t heard about this sort of research, it may be because much of this variety of science has been suppressed for decades, at first during the course of Big Tobacco litigation but since then as well during significant bouts of litigation in connection with agro-chemicals.  The same corporatist “research” that attempted to prove that cigarette smoke did not harm health also had the consequence of supporting Big Oil’s position that pollution was good and necessary, with no adverse effects on environment or your immune system.  Armies of corporate litigation lawyers have erected a massive force field of cognitive dissonance that has elevated hypocrisy to fashion.

In this way, the simple observation that anyone might make that breathing polluted air or eating a donut topped with a petroleum derivative might not be especially healthy was converted into a conspiracy theory.  Instead of our noses and lungs, we were bamboozled into trusting—in a suspension of disbelief central to all fiction—the great literary effort that was the Marlboro Man, Virginia Slims, Kool Menthol and Exxon.

You are Not a Naked Mole Rat

Science isn’t very popular these days.  There are millions—maybe even billions—of armchair political pundits and off-the-cuff foreign affairs experts.  Take a taxi, and you’ll know that just about everyone should get a chance one day to be interviewed on 60 Minutes.  But science is thought to be more intimidating than other current affairs, I think for the wrong reasons.  Science has been relegated to a purely academic exercise without common-sense relevance to the lives of ordinary people and their children… riding in the backs of station wagons or SUV’s… with the window open… as we passed that ageing school bus belching thick black clouds of poisonous diesel exhaust.  

More people should be encouraged to offer their views on scientific issues and scientific methods, including the person working their gig job.  Sometimes people will get it all wrong, of course.  But sometimes a higher velocity of discussion will help to break down the orthodoxies that are wrong-headed, whether it’s a belief that the Sun orbits the earth, or that Vitamin C is the only supplement you’ll ever need.

Science is really just common sense.  Francis Bacon’s scientific method says that you should develop some theory about how a process works then test it against actual observation.  It’s the same sort of method that a cook would use to achieve a fluffier pancake: hypothesise, then test, fail the first time, re-hypothesise, test again, then buy an electric mixer.  If you want to call this process double-blind scientific experimentation later subject to peer review and confirmatory laboratory replication, go ahead.  But really, the idea has always been to replace mystery and superstition with the common-sense that results from careful, unbiased observation.

Let’s think for a moment about how we might take an observation concerning the interaction between environment and our physical condition to reach some practical solution that makes us healthier and happier in the context of the wide range of issues I’ve been discussing in this essay.

Let’s say it’s a very cold day in Washington, D.C. … in late April… with snow falling a bit farther north in Boston.  How do you respond to this strange weather?

When the weather turns cold on the cusp of Summer, intelligent people don’t wait a hundred thousand or a million years until their genomes adapt and evolve so as to provide them with a thick fur coat growing straight from their hair follicles.  Leave natural selection and slow evolution to the naked mole rate.  You, as a thinking human being, can adapt in other ways.  You should go online or visit a store (if it’s open) and buy a sweater and coat, maybe a nice muffler and some gloves as well.  

Pollution, too, is an environmental condition not unlike the weather.  In fact, precisely because pollution has altered the weather patterns of our planet, we call this general set of dynamic phenomena Climate Change; although, for reasons that George Orwell would appreciate, I think just calling it Pollution might be better. 

Just as we do with inappropriately cold weather, we should find sensible and intelligent ways to adapt to Climate Change and the strange pollution that serves as its catalyst.

When common-sense science indicates that exposure to pollutants—mostly in air, but also in food and water—depletes the Keto-Antioxidants, then we would recommend that you increase the consumption of the Keto-Antioxidants.  There are numerous health consequences associated with exposure to present-day pollution; however, the most relevant at the moment are likely the effects that compromise immunity.  

Keto-Antioxidant supplementation is a reasonable basic response to the depletion of those antioxidant reserves caused by chronic exposure to pollution and other contaminants.

Because air quality has improved in some of the posher cities of the developed world—such as New York and Tokyo—many 1st worlders presume that pollution isn’t much of a problem any longer, except as a justification for imposing on the people of less developed parts of the world restrictions and economic constraints that they would never tolerate for themselves.  The most polluted cities, after all, seem to be located in places like India and China, which have across many industries taken over the burden and muck of manufacturing.  However, a recent study from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health concluded that fully 20% of global deaths could be attributed to pollution, with that number not being appreciably better in places like the East Coast of North America, including one supposes Greenwich, CT.

When it comes to pollution exposure there’s bad and worse, with nowhere that we can describe as good.

Red Sky in Morning…

The recent Red Sky event in California should have clarified for all 1st worlders that, in the Anthropocene, natural disasters aren’t exactly natural any longer.  They are spooky and un-natural, even synthetically cinematic.  This is because the underlying causes of the Red Sky event were in fact synthetic, having been inadvertently engineered by rapid acceleration in the normal hydrologic cycle that left massive swathes of underbrush flammably dry. 

Strange weather events that never existed in the past are becoming a regular feature of urban experience around the world.  The most poignant example might be the sand storms of early Spring in South Korea, with clouds of smoke, dust, other weird pollution and their stowaway microbes flying across the Gobi Desert, then over Northeast China to land on South Korea.  The cause of this new weather event is rapid desertification across the ever-widening Gobi driven by Climate Change combined with inadvertent weather modification as the product of intense industrialisation across much of China.  

Thus, the Spring sand storms of South Korea have been engineered synthetically in a period of less than 15 years as the result of a bureaucratic decision to financialise the American economy while industrialising the Chinese economy.

In other words, the sci-fi sandstorms of South Korea are Anthropogenic, which should be no surprise in the Anthropocene Age.

Red Sky 2.0

One characteristic of weather is that it is cyclical and repetitive as a function of some set of variable dynamics.  Whether the Red Sky event will be repeated in California as a form of effectively engineered weather is uncertain.  Nonetheless, the problem is that a repeat (and 3-peat and 4-peat) of this engineered catastrophe is well within the domain of possibility, as borne out by recent forecasts of another severe summer heat wave in the American West in 2021.  In fact, this past weekend was the hottest on record across the whole of the United States. 

Although we are ourselves unable (and also largely unwilling) to unravel and analyse the science fiction of our skies, our children likely will understand better that the virtual reality on a digital screen need not be different in appearance to the synthesised reality of the sky we see, because both have been manufactured, engineered and so in some sense designed by Man.

With the Dawning of the Age of the Anthropocene—and the pollution that has made this great New Age possible—we need access to some reasonable set of countermeasures.  The larger issues of Climate Change, Renewable Energy and how and why Covid-19 began, we leave for another day.  The statement that Man now controls Nature isn’t equivalent to the statement that Nature is Dead.  What isn’t dead can be resuscitated after all, at least in certain locales and for the self-selected few accustomed to avoiding avoidable tragedy.  The first priority should be the management and optimisation of personal and family health, without which the time available to us to consider larger matters will likely be somewhat compressed.

Immunity Landscape

Even after 18 months of pandemic crisis—with much of that time spent in various stages of lockdown—most people remain woefully unaware of what immunity is and how immunity works.  We could talk about the three (or maybe four, or maybe five) levels of immunity—barrier, innate and adaptive (then microbiome and gestalt ecological equilibrium)—but I’d like to step back from even that level of detail.  

In fact, let’s take the landscape view.  It’s the view that was suggested by three French biologists—Drs. Florence Abdallah, Lily Mijouin and Chantal Pichon—in their survey of recent research on the connection between skin health and immunity, titled Skin Immune Landscape: Inside and Outside the Organism, published in 2017.  In some sense, this landscape represents the hardware of immune response, while things like vaccines and periodic natural exposure to pathogens would amount to the software.  If you have time, we highly recommend that you take a look at this research survey, which adds a touch of poetry and a broad, human perspective to what is otherwise a very complex subject.

We agree with Abdallah, Mijouin and Pichon that the best way to think of immunity is as a condition of physiological equilibrium between an organism and its total environment.  Rather than a relationship between a single organism in its fight against a single pathogen, immunity in truth is a complex multi-variate characteristic of an entire system.  Immunity is how we maintain a healthy equilibrium within an environment that is chemically, electro-magnetically and physically challenging.  Also, we share this environment with several menageries and families of other life forms, the vast majority of which are microbial and potentially pathogenic.  

Similar to overused antibiotics that cause serious dysbiosis in the gut, our careless deployment of pollution, agro-chemicals and other toxic processes to eradicate—sometimes inadvertently but quite often intentionally and maliciously—various genera and species of life is, in reality, how we created the dysbiotic chaos of new pathogens around the world that we have begun to suffer.  

Although the geologists are currently in charge of giving our epoch a name, it should be apparent by now that we haven’t been engineering rocks.  We’ve been re-engineering life processes in ways that are so severe—as well as unprecedented across the entire 4.5 billion year history of our planet—that evidence of our shameful recklessness will be left in the rocks forever into the future. 

In context, it’s ironic that we laugh at the Ancient Romans for having stupidly eaten a bit of lead. 

Covid-19, whether engineered or wild, is a single event within a larger pattern of future risks.  (And what does wild really mean any longer?)  Before the pathogen crisis of Covid-19, there was a pre-existing immunity crisis that was global in scope.  This is not different from the vast areas of dry underbrush in the American West that pre-existed the flashes of lightning or discarded cigarette butts that eventually resulted in the bizarre Red Sky event.  The spark of new pathogens doesn’t ignite without a pre-existing landscape of weakened immunity.

The Nomad Rebels of the early Neolithic enjoyed more favourable ecological conditions than we suffer now.  Rather than chasing iguanas in ditches (if they could escape urban servitude) they were able to hunt for game across an ecology that was only lightly cultivated and nearly entirely free of fossil emissions.  Replicating the internal physiology of our hunter-chef ancestors while living in the weirdly polluted Anthropocene is going to require some additional work.  A Paleolithic or Nomadic diet in the 21st Century requires methods—specifically fat soluble vitamin supplements—that compensate for the regular depletion of Keto-Antioxidants caused by chronic chemical contamination and the other pollutants Man has deployed in our role as planetary steward.  

In order to replicate and complete the physiological condition that approximates Paleolithic health, supplementation of this sort is important in the 21st Century.

World’s First Full-Spectrum Keto-Antioxidant Supplement

As far as we are aware, there is only one other product that competes to any degree with our Immunity Basics: Fat Solubles Nos. 1 & 2, and this is Bulletproof’s ADK.  

Our supplements are far better.  

Bulletproof’s supplement is more expensive and lacks Vitamin E.  This omission is serious in our view, because Vitamin E is very important to antioxidant-intensive innate immune defences to pollution exposure.  Vitamin E when made bio-available with sufficient dosages of healthy fatty acids contributes to the detoxification of damaging cyclic peroxides while also promoting phagocytosis, which clears particulates.

By contrast to Bulletproof’s ADK, our Immunity Basics: Fat Solubles No.1 contains 100% RDA of Vitamin E and also 55 mg per serving of the E-IsoForm called Tocotrienol, which helps to preserve stores of glutathione.  Our Fat Solubles Nos. 1 & 2 together also provide a sufficient dosage of healthy fats—amounting to a Keto-Shot with Every Serving—which should free you from the chore of making a Keto-Coffee in the morning.  More importantly, this dosage of healthy fats is necessary to amplify the bio-availability of the fat soluble micro-nutrients.

Vitamin D is arguably the central fat soluble vitamin.  However, in truth, all of the fat soluble micronutrients work together.

Our Immunity Basics: Fat Solubles Nos. 1 & 2 provide a 2 month supply in every bottle, rather than the more meagre 1 month supply offered by Bulletproof.  Finally, we use many ingredients that are not only organic but also taste good… especially with iguana tacos.

Yours,

Trü-Sky

Singapore