Have you ever watched an inquisitive child with a box of Lego? They can follow the instructions to build the pirate ship or the castle exactly as it appears on the box. But if you hand that same child a completed Lego structure, say a magnificent Lego ship you built yourself, you will notice something very primal. Something that resonates with nature itself. This little master builder does something entirely unexpected. He will take that ship you so carefully constructed, break it apart with joyful abandon, and use the individual bricks to build something entirely his own. A spaceship perhaps. Or a fantastical creature. A skyscraper that exists only in his imagination. Our bodies are exactly like that master builder. When we look at the digestion process, it is simple in its grand design. It looks at the food you eat as completed Lego structures. A work of art, yes, but not one with its own personal signature. Like that little child, the body gets down to disassembling the ...
We often hear a very simplistic story about sunlight and our skin. It goes like this: fair skin is a vitamin D-making machine, and dark skin is a shield against it. The narrative implies that if you are fair, you are lucky; you soak up that sunshine vitamin with ease. If you are dark, you are at a disadvantage, needing hours in the sun just to catch up. Could there be another way to look at it? What if this story misses the other side of the moon? Let us consider a different perspective, one that does not start with skin, but with a river. Imagine a hydroelectric power plant. Water rushes through a conduit and slams into a series of giant cogs, massive turbines. As the water transfers its kinetic energy, the cogs spin, generating electricity. But what happens to the water after it has hit those turbines? It has lost its force, its energy. It flows out the other side diminished, a gentler current that has already given its power to the grid. It is not as violent, as forceful, as eroding...