Nutrigenomics and Tonic Regimen; A Deep Dive Into Nutritional Individuality
This blog is part of a series; its original title was Heilkunst Basics : Grade Six
We’ve now made it to the end of the elementary school phase of our Heilkunst journey, where I’ll leave you with a couple of the more advanced concepts from this level. As you’ve seen from our progression so far, there is an evolution which takes us from the more general and generic forms of health advice and slowly brings us into concepts which are more and more applicable on the basis of our individuality. The two concepts I’ll introduce for your grade six curriculum are nutrigenomics, and tonic regimen.
Nutrigenomics is an emerging science, which sits at the meeting point between nutrition and genetics. The idea and promise of nutrigenomics is an ability to assess and measure the unique genetic blueprint of each individual, in terms of their specific predisposition to diseases, and a corresponding need to fine tune their nutritional needs to intake more or less of specific foods and nutrients. This phenomenon represents a more general movement from approaching health from the point of a survival mentality (ie getting just enough nutrition to keep our head above water) to a perspective of optimal or abundant health.
Where the blood or glandular type diet addresses your needs in a very general standpoint, the nutrigenomic approach takes it very far into the realm of the individual. The other aspect implied by this points out the possibility for our ability to access the deeper function of our resonance in order to have a moment-by-moment relationship with food and our constantly changing needs. The outer form of science (nutrigenomics), in this sense, is a mirror for the evolution of our inner resonance organ, which is the true centre of our intelligence.
The second part of the grade six curriculum is a concept called tonic regimen. This is made up of two terms you’ve come across before in my blogs (tonic and regimen), but the meaning of their use together isn’t necessarily easy to discern. Looking at the meaning of these two words separately, we have the tonic diseases, which represent the deeper, hidden forms of disease which form the roots of a patient’s expressed symptom picture. The term regimen you should be well familiar with, as the general realm of healthcare related to our lifestyle choices, including nutrition and exercise.
Our usual approach to regimen is one which is meant to be supportive — eating a balanced diet, for example, supports all of our life functions, and supplies us with everything that our body needs to function properly. Tonic regimen, on the other hand, involves the conscious ingestion of a food which would normally be considered to be detrimental to our health, but is being used specifically as a challenge to our system to overcome, and therefore strenghten us in the process. It’s reminiscent of the famous quote from Nietzsche who said “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. You can apply this same concept to any challenging experience we choose to confront, and not simply the ingestion of food which is challenging to digest.
Be very careful, however, to not take up this concept as a convenient excuse to eat whatever you feel like, and simply attributing it to your “tonic regimen”. This works best when there is a sufficiently good level of health to begin with, and the process is undertaken with a high level of conscious engagement. There are some extreme examples in the world of tonic regimen, such as Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Supersize Me, as well as Michel Lotitio’s entry into the Gusiness Book of World Records for consuming an entire Cesna plane!