What Are the Foundations of Health?
When facing a complex chronic health or developmental condition, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that only something highly sophisticated—like stem cell therapy or a cutting-edge biologic drug—holds the key to healing. This is one of the most common misconceptions people encounter on their healing journey. After observing and documenting the stories of individuals who have truly recovered from chronic illness, we’ve found that it’s rarely an advanced therapy that makes the biggest difference. Instead, the most profound healing often comes when people fully commit to lifestyle changes that genuinely support and restore their health.
We call these lifestyle changes “health supports” because that’s exactly what they do. They help strengthen your health foundation and increase your overall resilience—your capacity to handle the many stressors that chip away at wellness, such as toxins, emotional stress, and environmental exposures.
What Are Health Supports?
We have evolved over millennia to be outdoors and to be moving, breathing clear air, eating real food and drinking clean water. Humans thrive in an environment where we’re connected to the soil and the earth and in which we operate or function according to natural circadian rhythms. We do best when we’re eating real food and have exposures to a multitude of microbes and to natural light like sunlight. Our health is built on these foundations.
Think of the way that humans evolved versus how we’re living today. We’re disconnected from so many of these natural rhythms, processes and exposures. However, there is a common mindset among people who are on a healing journey that if something is “simple” that it can’t be effective. Instead, many people falsely believe that:
- Because these health supports are so “simple”, they are not important.
- Because it is simple to go for a walk in nature, it couldn’t possibly help a body heal.
- Because drinking clean water isn’t complicated, it couldn’t possibly be essential to healing.
- Because movement is not sophisticated, it couldn’t possibly be what my child needs to heal.
The purpose of this article is to dispel some of these misconceptions.
Modern Humans Lack Basic Health Supports
Any of the topics covered in this article, such as sleep, breathing, movement, hydration and spending time in nature have always been a natural part of human society. Humans had access to these health-giving supports just by living and being. They didn’t have to consciously plan to “exercise” or be intentional about spending time in nature, because there was no alternative. They were just a part of what it meant to be a human.
In the modern world, however, things like spending time in natural settings and getting adequate sleep are no longer a feature of our lives, and thus we need to make a conscious effort to incorporate these things because they are vital to our health and wellbeing.
Supply the Health Supports Your Child’s Body Needs
When embarking on a healing journey, it is important to give your child’s body all of the foundational supports it needs to do the hard work of healing. This step is about preparing your child’s body for the journey. You can remove all the stressors from your child’s body, but if you don’t supply the critical health supports, the healing journey will be slower, and you may not see the progress you would like. Many of these health supports are free, low, cost and very simple. The changes you may need to make in your life to incorporate these health supports may not be *easy* but the closer you get to nature, the easier it will be. Here are some of the most important health supports that will benefit any child on a healing journey:
Eat a Clean, Nutritious, Bioindividual Diet with Real, Toxin-Free Food
Healing diets are a powerful way to feed molecular/metabolic machine and heal the gut, the seat of health. A healthy diet supports healthy digestion, detoxification and a robust microbiome. The microbiome is a critical piece of your child’s overall health and healthy food is the most powerful way to rebuild a damaged microbiome (a feature so common in our children today). While there are many types of healing diets and strategies for approaching diet, there are some foundational food principles that can turn food from a health stressor into a health support. Aim to eat:
- Whole, unprocessed foods
- Organic food (all food used to be organic before we started industrial farming!)
- Nutrient dense food
- A wide variety of foods including proteins, healthy fats (no seed oils!), and foods that provide adequate fiber
- Foods that do not trigger inflammatory reactions. If your child gets red cheeks or ears after eating certain foods, or complains of pains after eating, that is a clue that the food is causing inflammation.
Honor Nature and Your Place in It
Over the last hundred years or so, human beings have really severed their relationship with nature. As the world has modernized, we’ve increasingly moved away from the natural rhythms and natural environment that have been a foundational part of human life for millennia.
The human body needs to be in touch with nature in order to thrive. This means spending a good amount of time in nature, in natural sunlight (without sunscreen or sunglasses) and following natural rhythms like waking with the sun and being in dim to no light in the evenings. When you move into alignment with nature, healing becomes more effortless. Following are some ways to sync your child’s health with natural rhythms.
Get Restorative Sleep
In the modern world, we’ve lost touch with the importance of restorative, restful sleep. With artificial lights and nonstop screen-based entertainment available 24-7, we’ve deprioritized the importance of sleep.
Sleep is when your body repairs, detoxifies and restores itself. If your child is not sleeping well, they are not detoxing well, and they are not healing well. Learn more about how to help your child fall asleep and stay asleep here.
Proper Hydration
Another undervalued health foundation is hydration. It’s among the simplest things you can do to make sure all the “gears” are operating smoothly in the body. Make sure your child is getting adequate hydration The standard recommendation is to drink approximately half your body weight in ounces of water per day. It is critical that this water is filtered, unless you drink from a well and have tested that the drinking water to ensure it does not contain any contaminants.
Remember, hydration is not just about water going in, it can also be about how well our cells are utilizing that water. To ensure water actually gets into your cells (not just flushed out), you can add a pinch of sea salt or trace mineral drops to water, or pair water intake with potassium-rich foods like avocado, coconut water, or leafy greens.
Movement and Exercise
What’s the number-one way to reduce oxidative stress (damaging free radicals) and inflammation in the body? Exercise! The body is made to move, but in our modern world, we’ve changed our lifestyles so that much of our day is spent sitting. Being in a chair in a classroom or in front of something digital and sitting down all day is not allowing your body to do the natural things a body needs to do.
Some of the things that movement does for us includes:
- Moving lymph to drain toxins and cellular debris
- Increasing muscle strength, flexibility and resilience
- Oxygenating cells
- Burning excess glucose to stabilize blood sugars
- Improving mood and behavior
Final Thoughts
By incorporating these foundational health supports into your daily life, you are setting your child up for healing success. The changes you will see from adding in these supports may take time, and they may not be the only things your child needs, but they are a crucial part of any healing journey. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean it isn’t effective.
About Beth Lambert
Beth Lambert is a former healthcare consultant and teacher. As a consultant, she worked with pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostic and other health care companies to evaluate industry trends.
She is the author of A Compromised Generation: The Epidemic of Chronic Illness in America’s Children (Sentient Publications, 2010). She is also a co-author of Documenting Hope's Brain Under Attack: A Resource for Parents and Caregivers of Children with PANS, PANDAS, and Autoimmune Encephalitis. She is a co-author of Reversal of Autism Symptoms among Dizygotic Twins through a Personalized Lifestyle and Environmental Modification Approach: A Case Report and Review of the Literature, J. Pers. Med. 2024, 14(6), 641.
In 2009, Beth founded Documenting Hope and currently serves as Executive Director. Beth attended Oxford University, graduated from Williams College and holds a Masters Degree in American Studies from Fairfield University.
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