metabolic coherence - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

Modern nutrition science has often reduced food to its macronutrient content and calories, overlooking its role as an ecological signal and symbolic interface between body, mind, and biosphere. This white paper proposes a regenerative reframing of health and disease through the dynamic and recursive relationships between food composition, microbiome composition, and body composition. Drawing upon current research in nutritional biochemistry, gut ecology, fascia science, psychoneuroimmunology, and symbolic systems biology, we explore how food not only nourishes but encodes, how microbes translate meaning into metabolism, and how the human form itself is a reflection of relational coherence or systemic breakdown.

By mapping these interdependent layers, we argue for a transition from symptom-based, reductionist paradigms to coherence-first models of regenerative health — where the healing process begins with recognizing food as a medium of communication, microbiota as ecological interpreters, and the body as a living record of attunement or alienation. We conclude with clinical and policy implications that integrate nutrition, microbial health, social determinants, and symbolic literacy into a unified framework for restoring systemic resilience.

This white paper proposes that internal medicine — grounded in the art of diagnosis, coherence restoration, and life-value discernment — offers a powerful prototype for the regeneration of human systems at every scale. Drawing from the legacy of Hippocrates, Avicenna, and John McMurtry, and integrating the multi-dimensional frameworks of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and emerging sciences of coherence, we present a model of Integral Regeneration that connects clinical practice to planetary design.

Through the lens of life-value onto-axiology, mitophagic renewal, and the recurring patterns of 1, 3, and 7, we frame health not merely as the absence of disease, but as the presence of systemic coherence across bodies, cultures, ecologies, and institutions.

We introduce a diagnostic and design grammar capable of scaling from the mitochondrion to the polis — offering clinicians, educators, policymakers, and system architects a new epistemology of care. The paper culminates in the articulation of a New Hippocratic Oath, expanded for an era of planetary breakdown and reconstitution. This is both a call and a blueprint for those who would steward the next phase of civilizational healing — rooted in life, aligned with grace, and committed to coherence.