Blueprint for Health: Our Default State
Inside you is a blueprint for health. It is your inheritance as a human being. Your body is designed to be lean, fit, and capable. It is built to adapt and thrive when given natural inputs. We are meant to move at a low level of cardiovascular output for many hours each day—walking, with occasional bursts of speed, sprinting, and some sustained running. We are also designed to lift and carry heavy things daily. Nutritionally, we are designed to eat real food: animal protein such as meat and organs as the foundation, along with fats from the meat or from raw or fermented dairy, plus fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, spices, and occasional honey. The closer our diet, movement, and lifestyle mirror these ancestral patterns, the healthier we become.
This happens because we possess genes fine-tuned across thousands of generations to produce health. The greatest challenge we face today is that our modern lifestyle is fundamentally at odds with those genes.
Epigenetics reveals that gene expression is not fixed but shaped by environmental inputs. Imagine your genes—the entire genome—as a DJ mixing board filled with a multitude of possibilities. Your actions and the stimuli you expose your genes to act as the DJ, toggling switches on and off. Your health is the resulting music. We carry many genes that can be expressed or suppressed depending on the choices we make. To enjoy better health, we must provide better, more ancestrally aligned inputs.
Though many of us desire health, we often misunderstand it. We see health merely as the absence of disease—a desired end state rather than a dynamic process. When we adopt a vitalistic framework, health becomes the default: the natural expression of physiology that leaves you capable of adapting and thriving. This perspective helps you notice when small daily decisions begin pulling you away from that state. Poor sleep, poor diet, inadequate movement, spinal subluxations, or emotional and spiritual stress all disrupt your physiology. They push you into poor adaptation, reduce your ability to overcome challenges, and gradually lead you toward disease.
Disease, therefore, is an anti-process—continued maladaptation that deviates from our natural, healthful state and produces negative outcomes. Even in cases of overwhelming trauma, such as a major car accident, the healthier and more resilient you were beforehand, the better your chances of survival and recovery.
How can you apply this to your life? What choices will you make today to align with your body’s innate drive to thrive? I hope you will explore more of my writing and videos as you continue your health journey.
Adapt and thrive,
Dr. Matt McNeill
