Biochemistry and the Soul

(the image is from the cover of The Manga Guide to Biochemistry.)

If we are “soulsteading”, what do we care about the body? Shouldn’t we, monk-like, ascend to the higher realms of the mind and leave the body behind? If we are philosophers, are we not practicing death, as Socrates argues in Phaedo? Why care about the body at all? Surely lifting weights and eating healthy are for meatheads and hippies, not for deep thinkers like us!

I have been studying up on my biochemistry, partly for my job as a strength and nutrition coach at Barbell Logic, but also for my own sake. I had a congenital thing that needed surgery to fix, but found some things in the scans that were worrisome. This got me looking into diet, health, the nature of the body, the nature of the drive to obesity in modern people, and dementia. I saw Casey Means on Tucker’s podcast. She reminded me of some things I already knew about agriculture and medicine, which would rather fix problems than prevent them. I think it was Mark Hyman who said the current plan for food and drug producers is to privatize the profit while socializing the costs–in other words, pushing food that is known to be profoundly unhealthy, pocketing the $, and letting the publicly funded medical system take care of the damage. Similar things happen in agriculture as anyone knows who reads Wendell Berry. I’ve been reading a lot since then. First Means’ book Good Energy, then several books by Robert Lustig: Metabolical and Fat Chance, largely about the addictive and obesogenic effects of sugar. I detoured into Thomas Seyfried’s work on whether cancer is a metabolic disease (TLDR: yeah, probably, and if I get cancer I’m going keto), and then poked into the writing of Dale Bredesen about treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. I read a study of a pilot test of his protocol to see if he was full of excrement. It didn’t seem like he was, so I am now deep down the Alzheimer’s rabbit hole.

Dr. Lustig says in his books and podcasts that he doesn’t think obesity is a choice, but that it has to do with bad biochemistry. As far as I can tell, his science is correct but his philosophy is a little bit off. Why write books arguing about ways to improve public health if there isn’t choice? It’s clear to me that there is such a thing as the will, and that humans can choose. But the field of possible choices can be constrained by biochemistry.

For example: if you eat sugar, specifically fructose, it causes fat to be deposited in the liver, which leads to insulin resistance, which leads to high levels of insulin in the blood, which down-regulates your leptin sensitivity, which means that you don’t feel full or satisfied after eating. You attempt to moderate your portions but experience cravings that make it very difficult. There is choice, but the biochemistry is stacked against you.

This leads to my main point: you have a duty to maximize your health because you are an embodied soul. The soul is the form of the body, the first actuality of a body capable of having life. No body, no soul! The soul may be immortal, as I believe, but you aren’t an angel. You are a bodily creature who can touch the realm of the angels, but only if your body is in order. If your biochemistry plays such a big role in your cravings and passions, you need to calm those down just to be capable of making good choices.

Bredesen argues that not only your ability to make choices, but your rationality itself depends on the good functioning of the physical organism. If you make the wrong choices, eat the wrong things, get exposed to the wrong toxins, your rationality could be suppressed. What good is a soul if you can’t think?

Care of the soul means care of the body.

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