Jeffrey Bland presents the Triage theory: when micronutrient levels drop, your body prioritizes immediate survival over long-term maintenance, pulling resources from DNA repair and immunity. This accelerates aging diseases like cancer and heart disease. The hypothesis is now being tested empirically.
I kept on wondering, why the hell is nature doing that? And then one day it hit me that that's exactly what nature wants. Animals have been running out of micronutrients through all of evolution. The minerals aren't spread evenly through the world. There are red soils with high iron and soils with low iron. There's soils with high selenium, soils with low selenium. And the vitamins aren't spread evenly through the world, and the essential fatty acids aren't spread evenly, and the essential amino acids aren't spreading. So what does an animal do when it's running out of magnesium, for example? Well, it turns out built into our metabolism is a way of dealing with all this. And I call it triage. Basically, what you're doing as the micronutrient gets lower and lower, at some point, what you do is you keep it in all the that are essential for survival, and you take it out of all the proteins that are more long term, the things that normally come with age. So DNA damage shows up as cancer in five or 10 years when you're going to die, that isn't important. And so what nature wants you to do is to survive. So maybe you can reproduce a bit. And anything long term gets thrown overboard, basically. And so your adaptive immunity goes out. Your mitochondria start putting out more oxygen radicals, you get more DNA damage and cancer, you get more heart disease. So basically, all the degenerative diseases of aging are accelerated by being short of micronutrients. This was just a theoretical idea, and we found some evidence in literature, and now we're proving it from many different directions. So proving an evolutionary idea.
