How your body actually works — from first principles, in plain language. A growing series that traces the real causes of modern disease, and hands you the means to see them for yourself.
Much of modern chronic illness — type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, a great deal of heart disease, and more — is treated as a collection of separate, unlucky conditions, each with its own specialist and its own drug. But trace them far enough upstream and they often share a single root. Understand that root, and a surprising amount starts to make sense at once.
That's what this series is for: to show you how the body actually works underneath the diagnoses, in plain language, from the ground up.
Received wisdom hands you conclusions — fat is bad, this is chronic, manage it forever. First-principles thinking does something different: it hands you the machine, and lets you reason up from what is actually true about how the body works.
Do that honestly, and something happens. You can't un-see it.
So every piece in this series asks the same four plain questions of a condition and the drugs used against it — the questions a curious person would ask if they refused to just be told:
Ask those four of almost anything, and you have something no authority can hand you and no headline can take away: a way of seeing that works far beyond any single disease.
If you read one thing here, read this. Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver, high blood pressure and more are usually treated as separate illnesses — separate specialists, separate drugs. This piece shows they're often one fire, surfacing in different places: insulin resistance, the most profitable disease nobody is testing for. Every other piece on this site is a room; this one is the house.
Read The Invisible Fire →Once you've seen the fire, the obvious question is: how do you put it out? This is the practical map the whole series builds toward — what to measure, what to change (concretely), what to realistically expect, and how to do it all safely alongside any medication you take. The drugs were always bailing water. This is turning off the tap.
Read Putting Out the Fire →The series is written for anyone curious enough to look. Start at the beginning — the foundation everything else builds on.
How everyday food — bread, rice, pasta, potatoes — becomes disease, and why the drugs manage the problem while food can address it. An interactive piece you can play with: flood the bloodstream, watch the doorman break, then turn it off.
What metformin, the newer glucose drugs, and the weight-loss injections actually do — which marker each one manages, and what turning off the flood does that none of them can. Includes a drug simulator: apply each medicine and watch what it does to the flood.
More pieces are on the way — each taking the same honest look at a condition and the drugs used to manage it, always aimed at the cause rather than the number.
Some pieces here aren't about a condition at all — they hand you a way of reading health claims, or an understanding of the body, that the disease pieces then lean on. Read these and the rest lands deeper.
"Cuts your risk in half!" — what that actually means. Drag a hundred little figures and watch the same "25%" mean everything or almost nothing, depending on your real risk. The one question that sees through nearly any drug, screening test, or health headline.
Not sludge in a pipe — one of the most essential molecules your body owns, which it makes on purpose and guards with care. What cholesterol really does, why "good" and "bad" is a cartoon, and the honest question about plaque. The ground you need before anyone talks statins.
They genuinely help after a heart attack — and the same headline sells them to millions who gain almost nothing. Why they block the cholesterol enzyme at the wrong end while insulin keeps switching it on, what they cost (CoQ10, a real rise in diabetes), and the fire the drug never measures. Honest, and conceded where it's due.
Insulin is a salt hormone: it tells your kidneys to hold on to sodium, and where salt goes, water and pressure follow. Why so much high blood pressure is quietly metabolic, what the tablets really do, and why cutting carbs can drop your pressure within days — a good problem that needs your doctor. Insulin and aldosterone, two hands on the same rope.
Some readers want the whole mechanism — the pathways, the studies, the references, the honest grading of what's established versus what's still emerging. Deeper, fully-referenced companion pieces, written at a clinical level, sit behind the accessible ones.
Nothing here is asking for your faith. A fact you're told can be un-told by the next expert; a mechanism you genuinely understand — and then watch happen in your own body — is yours for good.
You're carrying the only laboratory that matters.
So read these pieces the way they're meant: not as instructions to obey, but as a machine to understand and then check. Ask your body. It's the one authority that can't lie to you.