What if we had a common language and approach to look at what’s needed to maintain or build health? Might this help turn around the largely preventable chronic and degenerative disease epidemic that threatens to break our health systems? ANH founder, Rob Verkerk, Ph.D., lays out his thoughts on a ‘unified theory of health’.
Listen to the audio version of this article:
THE TOPLINE
- Natural health is not “alternative” medicine—it is the foundational framework that supports resilience, energy production, immune balance, and long-term wellbeing in an increasingly toxic and stressful world.
- From ultra-processed food and chronic stress to environmental toxins and sedentary lifestyles, modern living creates evolutionary mismatches that mainstream medicine is poorly equipped to address.
- ANH’s proposed “unified theory of health” identifies four core biological factors that determine whether the body moves toward repair and vitality—or inflammation, degeneration, and chronic disease.
By Rob Verkerk, PhD., executive & scientific director, ANH
The wellness world is full of new tools: GLP-1 drugs, synthetic peptides, repurposed pharmaceuticals, methylene blue, high-dose synthetic vitamins, cold plunges, heat therapy, biohacking routines, and more. Some may have value in the right context. But none of them can do the deeper work if the body’s foundations are neglected.
That’s where natural health comes in.
Natural health isn’t simply about using “natural” products instead of drugs. It’s about understanding the human being as a living system—one shaped by biology, environment, lifestyle, psychology, culture, and personal agency. It asks a different question from conventional medicine. Not only: “What disease does this person have?” But also: “What conditions are allowing dysfunction to emerge in the first place?”
In my full article on ANH International, I explore whether we can move toward a unified theory of health. The idea is not to reduce human beings to a simplistic formula. Quite the opposite. It’s to offer a practical lens that helps both practitioners and individuals understand where to focus attention especially to maintain and build health in an increasingly complex health landscape. It’s about focusing much more on the body and mind’s needs for health, rather than it’s needs once it has become diseased—an approach that often leads to treatments only beginning late in the disease cycle.
We’ve identified at least 18 major influences on health, from diet, sleep, stress, physical activity, toxins, microbiome exposure, light, electromagnetic fields, social connection, economics, culture, healthcare access, information environments, and personal autonomy. In the scientific literature, these are often called “determinants” of health, but that term can be misleading. They do not determine outcomes by themselves. They influence the body’s physiology, psychology and behaviour and, in turn, affect the internal terrain.
That terrain is where health or disease ultimately manifests.
The ‘unified theory of health’ model focuses on four foundational factors:
- Energy — especially mitochondrial function, ATP production, redox balance, and metabolic flexibility, but includes bioelectric and bioelectromagnetic energy. Without enough energy in the system, maintenance and repair of the ‘operating system’ is simply not possible.
- Structure — including cell membranes, tissues, organs, the musculoskeletal system, barriers, and the overall physical integrity of the body. Structures of the body separate elements of nature and organize them in ways that create life. Integrity of these structures is a necessity of healthy life.
- Environmental information — the signals the body receives from food, light, microbes, toxins, relationships, stress, nature, and biological rhythms have a dramatic influence on the terrain of the body. This comprises information that may have positive or negative effects, leading to anabolic (building) or catabolic (breakdown) processes.
- Gene expression patterns — the way genes are switched on or off, and how they are expressed (epigenetically) in response to the internal and external environment ultimately determines the overall pattern of gene expression of an individual that in determines health outcomes.
Together, these four factors shape what I call the human terrain. When the terrain is resilient, coherent, connected, and adaptive, disease has a much harder time taking hold. When the terrain is depleted, inflamed, dysregulated, structurally compromised, or poorly informed by its environment, disease becomes far more likely.
We hope this model may be useful for practitioners from any modality, acting as a common language. A functional medicine doctor, chiropractor, nutrition professional, naturopath, acupuncturist, health coach, or integrative physician may use different tools, but all are ultimately trying to influence the same elements of the terrain. The model, we hope, offers a shared map.
It may also help patients and citizens. It reminds us that health is not readily created in a doctor’s office alone. It is built every day through the food we eat, the light we receive, the way we move, the sleep we protect, the relationships we cultivate, the toxins we avoid, the meaning we find, and the freedom we retain to make informed health choices.
Modern medicine is often brilliant in emergencies. But it is poorly designed to rebuild the foundations of health, resolve evolutionary mismatches, or address chronic disease at its roots. That’s why natural health matters now more than ever.
It gives us a way to move beyond symptom suppression and toward resilience, prevention, and human flourishing.
Read the full ANH International article here: Towards a unified theory of health—and why natural health matters more than ever
