About HumanaNatura
HumanaNatura was founded by the natural health advocate Mark Lundegren as a resource for people to better understand our opportunity for increased health, fitness, and quality of life through new, scientifically-derived natural health techniques.
HumanaNatura offers two natural health programs: 1) our seven-part Personal Health Program, designed to explain the HumanaNatura approach and transform individual health and fitness, and 2) our comprehensive eight-part Community Health Program, which guides the restructuring of local and regional communities for greater health and quality of life promotion.
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| Learn About Our Natural Health System |
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In HumanaNatura’s programs, four natural health techniques – Natural Eating, Natural Exercise, Natural Living, and Natural Communities – are combined to form a complete, integrated, and open-ended system of natural health promotion. The approach seeks to fulfill HumanaNatura’s ideal of progressive health-based life, which we define as the continual pursuit of new individual and community health and natural harmony.
Today, through our network of natural health practitioners and advocates, HumanaNatura is a growing worldwide voice for healthier life, working to advance new health awareness in individuals and communities, and promote the revolutionary modern transition to health-based living. Our work reaches countries and communities around the world, rich and poor alike.
HumanaNatura’s natural health education and advocacy efforts foster important new health understanding and a transformative rethinking of human well-being and quality of life in our time. Our natural health techniques highlight modern science’s potential to enable new human health and more compelling forms of natural life amid advanced civilization – life based on and seeking the progressive expression of our health.
To encourage practical action toward this modern health potential, HumanaNatura advocates the development and fulfillment of personal Natural Life Plans and cooperative Community Health Agendas. As you will learn through our natural health programs, HumanaNatura Natural Life Plans and Community Health Agendas aim to improve the health landscape of our individual lives, larger communities, and global society, specifically encouraging the use of science in pragmatic and continuous steps toward increasing levels of health.
In principle, all HumanaNatura personal plans and health agendas seek to systematically eliminate health limiters and foster new health enablers, in a compounding process of learning and action that is transformative, synergistic, and open-ended. By continuously seeking new health and self-awareness and thought the increasing use of our four natural health techniques, the HumanaNatura system proves remarkably powerful and transformative, remaking our individual lives and shared possibilities for the future.
Our diverse worldwide community
To give you a better feel for the global health movement that is HumanaNatura, we can tell you that our members live on every continent and come from most countries. We represent every race and are equally comprised of women and men. HumanaNatura members are young and old, and every age between. We are a diverse community, and yet, there are some common things about us too.
Most of us came to HumanaNatura during a search for greater health, well-being, and personal harmony in our lives. Many of us questioned the values and priorities implicit in daily life today, in cultures around the world, which often seem to limit and even actively undermine our health, freedom, and quality of life.
People frequently come to HumanaNatura believing that new levels of health and well-being are available through a closer connection to nature and natural life, even if the steps we must take to achieve this connection are unclear or misunderstood. A large portion of our members first come to HumanaNatura physically fit already, while others reach us with seemingly intractable chronic health problems they have been unable to adequately understand or correct.
In addition to a common interest in improved personal health and quality of life, HumanaNatura members also share a commitment to actively utilize, explore, and promote the ideas and techniques contained in our natural health programs. Through our four scientifically-derived natural health techniques, HumanaNatura members progressively develop their health and quality of life – enriching and strengthening their lives, remaking their priorities and goals for the future, and impacting the health and well-being of others.
As a practitioner community dedicated to health-based life and more cooperative approaches to our modern communities, HumanaNatura members work to support one another in our pursuit of greater health and well-being, and help others to gain new appreciation of the life-transforming opportunities available to us through greater health awareness and new expression of our natural life.
How HumanaNatura defines "natural health"
A good way to quickly understand HumanaNatura – including our foundational ideas and overall approach to achieving progressive natural health and well-being – is to consider the term natural health, which is used in a variety of ways today. For us, these uses often misinterpret or obscure the true foundations and nature of our health.
For some people, natural health is thought of somewhat simply, as life favoring the use of natural or unadulterated materials. In these cases, natural health promotion is often understood as the general avoidance of compounds not found in nature. This can include the foods we eat, personal care and home products, clothing, and even medical treatments. Frequently, in this view, there is an accompanying sense that natural compounds are broadly healthy for us and should be encouraged. While some of us take and act on this definition quite stridently, many today view these ideas with caution or ambivalence, and question them as an optimal approach to life and health today.
Many people of course think of our natural health more broadly and actively than this. In these cases, natural health promotion is often seen as the intentional avoidance of harmful synthetic compounds or the deliberate use of specific natural and organic compounds in health promotion and therapy. These techniques and therapies can involve encouraging our natural metabolism, providing relief from symptoms of compromised health, or mitigating unhealthy aspects of modern life.
For HumanaNatura, the potential and effectiveness of such natural health therapies is a legitimate domain for scientific inquiry, but in practice this second definition to natural health often suffers in important ways. Many so-called natural health programs and therapies in our time are not scientifically-based and can be indifferent to or selective with available scientific research, especially when objective findings do not support advocated techniques and therapies. As with the first definition, the term natural health is sometimes weakened and obscured when approached in this way.
HumanaNatura seeks to correct and overcome imprecise and less desirable approaches to the critical topic of our natural health, by advocating scientifically-based natural health information and techniques, and insisting that their application provide clear and lasting changes to our health and quality of life. HumanaNatura’s definition of natural health differs from overly-narrow and insufficiently-rigorous ones in important ways, with critical consequences for individuals, communities, public health officials and policy-makers, and our global society.
HumanaNatura’s ideas regarding natural health – which underlie each of our four health techniques – are based on an interdisciplinary set of transformative scientific discoveries and models of health, ones principally developed in the last thirty years but incorporating essential insights from evolutionary theory. Because much of this science is still quite new, many of HumanaNatura’s ideas about natural health promotion may be very different than what you have been exposed to before, and perhaps will be counterintuitive and uncertain at first.
Here is how HumanaNatura defines natural health:
Natural health is the state of all successfully adapted natural life – it is an organic harmony achieved through natural selection that normally occurs in evolved niches in the larger environment and thus brings with it natural species-specific requirements.
We would encourage you to take a few minutes to consider this definition, and perhaps discuss it with others. In practice, it is deceptively simple, since it leads to a rich and quite specific natural health model for human beings.
Because we have evolved out of our long evolutionary niche in wild nature and now have lived for centuries without adequate understanding of this earlier niche – including its natural health-promoting features and our resulting states of natural harmony and fitness – pursuing natural health today, amidst advanced civilization, inevitably is a process that involves science and change, including new techniques to restore and then can augment the earlier work of nature and our organic evolution.
This use of science to better understand and express our natural health amid modern life includes first better explaining how health is created and maintained in nature, in humans and other forms of life, and then exploring how this natural process might be utilized and enhanced to encourage new health and vitality in our individual lives, communities, and global society today. In our new setting of advanced civilization and human life apart from our earlier natural niche, the pursuit of our natural health is now inevitably a deliberate and progressive practice of creating more optimal health-promoting conditions, using science to explore and promote new health and well-being in individuals, and more sustainable and adaptive conditions in our communities.
As we suggested, the implications of this new and perhaps unfamiliar definition of natural health are far-reaching and even profound in practice, both in our lives and for our global society. HumanaNatura’s definition of natural health involves startling new conclusions about how we once lived as a species, how we can live in our time, and about how people might live in future times.
If you would like to examine your own understanding of some of HumanaNatura’s key ideas about our natural health, you can take the HumanaNatura Health Quiz. The quiz takes just a minute or two, and the answers will acquaint you with several important principles and a few common misconceptions about our natural health. Simply go to the Health Quiz page to take the quiz.
Our common natural origins
To underscore the new and revolutionary quality of HumanaNatura’s scientifically-based orientation toward our natural health, we would add that there is at least one other attribute that all HumanaNatura members share, regardless of where they live or which natural health techniques they have brought into their lives. This attribute is also equally shared by you and all other people visiting our website and learning about our transformative natural health techniques.
The shared attribute we have in mind is our shared human ancestry, our common humanity and common human origin in nature. As you may know already, modern genetics has confirmed what had been hypothesized by scientists for over a century: all people alive today are related to one another by a shared natural origin and are the product of an ancient process of natural evolution from simpler human and pre-human species.
There’s more. Scientists can now reliably trace our universally-shared ancestors to a distinct cluster of more advanced and fully-modern Homo sapiens bands of people who first emerged in sub-Saharan Africa. Our ancestors, common to all people alive today, migrated across Africa and then out of Africa between 30,000 and 60,000 years ago – dominating other, less highly-evolved human bands and many other animal species in this migration, and eventually creating the first true human settlements.
Whatever your race, nationality, gender, social group, or interests and aptitudes today, you share an identical origin and most of your genes with all other people today. Each of us is recently descended from a common and quite specific human ancestry. Together, we form a new branch of our human lineage, a branch that is young in evolutionary terms and has distinct advantages over earlier forms of human life. And each of us, with our quite specific and shared modern human lineage, are the products of the same larger process of natural evolution on earth, with its inherent quality of promoting natural health within niches in the environment.
This use of new scientific knowledge about our human past in nature is the starting point for HumanaNatura’s simple but ground-breaking and transformative approach to natural health promotion. Our use of modern science is how we have begun to demystify and better understand our natural health and the modern practice of its progressive enhancement, via a new paradigm that corrects and then greatly expands the idea of what it means for us to be naturally healthy and well in advanced society.
Health transformation is waiting now
If you are new to HumanaNatura or to modern evolutionary and health science in general, you are probably wondering if HumanaNatura’s four natural health techniques really can transform your health and quality of life as we have suggested, and exactly how the HumanaNatura system works. Let’s cover both topics next.
Because we are apt to underestimate or live with a limited sense of the depth and scale of prior historical changes imbedded in ourselves and the world around us, including their many important impacts on our natural health, HumanaNatura’s natural health and well-being techniques, and a commitment to the progressive pursuit of healthier life itself, prove unexpectedly transforming for most people.
HumanaNatura members and others using our natural health techniques regularly report dramatic changes in their physical health and fitness, unexpected improvements in their life satisfaction and sense of well-being, and new harmony in their daily outlook and orientation toward others and the world. Most report a much higher quality of life overall, and often a renewed and revitalized sense of purpose, focus, and natural connection and community in their lives.
If you want, you can review the Testimonials page to get a feel for the health and life transforming changes possible through the HumanaNatura program.
In practical terms, HumanaNatura’s natural health techniques first involve achieving greater understanding of and alignment with our long-evolved human living patterns in wild nature. By this, we mean ensuring that critical requirements from our pre-settled natural legacy are met in our modern lives today. Initially, this involves the way we eat and our general activity patterns, but then moves to our overall life structure and setting. The combined effect of this effort is to create conditions for a resurgence of our original natural health and the foundation for new and unprecedented human vitality and well-being in our modern lives today.
Importantly, the pursuit of natural health through the HumanaNatura system also includes augmenting or replacing aspects of prior civilized life, and even earlier natural foraging life, that prove limiting to health and quality of life amidst advanced technological society. This process of exploration, utilization, and re-thinking of elements from our human past reflects HumanaNatura’s scientifically-based, pragmatic, and ultimately progressive approach to natural health promotion.
To create motivating and realistic expectations as you begin to explore your own natural health potential through HumanaNatura, we should add that our Personal Health Program is intended as a lifelong and ongoing approach to your health and quality of life. In a similar way, our Community Health Program is intended to advance cooperative health conditions from any community setting and in a manner that is ultimately open-needed. Both HumanaNatura programs emphasize continuous, progressive, and compounding change toward the goal of new health in our lives and communities.
As we suggested before, this process is one of progressive health-based change – small, additive, and ongoing health-seeking adjustments and improvements – which set the stage for significant and even revolutionary changes to our health and quality of life, and to the communities in which we live.
Rapid change through small steps
You may wonder if small steps can lead to large and transformative changes in your health and quality of life potential. If informed by new and ongoing science, we assure you that they can and for three specific reasons.
One reason is that continuous practical action in the direction of greater health, even if modest at any point in time, naturally becomes a compounding, synergistic, and open-ended process. In the HumanaNatura system, health-based change both re-grounds our health and then builds on itself in an accelerating manner. Sustained progressive action rapidly leads to combining effects and unexpected shifts in the quality, focus, and health of our lives and communities.
A second reason this approach proves so powerful is that a strategy of persistent small steps allows for continuous learning and adjustment, so that our pursuit of new health is constantly refined and adjusted, and thereby greatly improved over time. Third, an emphasis on small steps facilitates rapid and increasingly skilled implementation of new health actions, which research suggest is the most reliable way to improve and create lasting change in our health and quality of life.
In total, as our health, health-awareness, and quality of life improve though progressive natural health efforts in the HumanaNatura system, we gradually develop new perspectives on our lives and related realizations of our potential for health and quality of life. We begin to see ourselves, our communities and social environment, and natural life around us in important new ways – particularly in terms of their impacts on our health and well-being. We thereby are able to foster increasing and better directed change in our lives and communities over time, and achieve new health-based progressivity that steadily but increasingly and remarkably remakes us and our health.
Because the HumanaNatura program encourages continual learning and action toward our health potential, it is often quite different in scope to different people at different times, and as often, different things to each of us at different points in our lives and exploration of our natural health. For some of us, HumanaNatura is a diet and exercise program that helps us achieve our optimal body weight and much higher levels of physical fitness.
For others, HumanaNatura offers support and inspiration as we work to break free of limiting beliefs and behaviors in our lives, and increasingly live in new, more powerful, and more fulfilling ways. For still others, HumanaNatura is an ongoing conversation about health-based life and natural harmony in our modern world – a place where natural health practitioners from around the world can gather to explore and promote our many opportunities for healthier communities and more progressive human life, today and for the future.
HumanaNatura program objectives
As we have discussed, HumanaNatura’s natural health programs are both practical and progressive in approach. They are based on new but now well-established scientific ideas about human life and health in nature, as well as other science-enabled opportunities for increased health, vitality, and quality of life in contemporary society.
Together, our personal and community health programs have five major objectives, each working to systematically transform us in a synergistic and open-ended practice of natural health development:
- Health Awareness – HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program begins by grounding us in an essential understanding of our natural health. This includes discussion of what natural health is, the sources and key dynamics of natural human health, how natural health is initially restored and then progressively increased in society today, natural limitations on our health and orientation that we can overcome, and the transformative opportunities that progressive natural health practices create in our lives and communities today.
- Natural Eating – the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program then explains the principles of a natural diet, creating the first experience and essential foundation for lifelong, progressive health-based life. This early focus on diet and the technique of Natural Eating allows you to realize near immediate health and fitness improvements, creates positive feedback and new personal momentum in your life, and enables you to more fully appreciate the transformational potential of HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program. With simple, sustained changes in your diet, you should expect to achieve surprising health improvements and new feelings of natural harmony in just a few weeks.
- Natural Exercise – once the foundation of Natural Eating is in place in our lives, HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program turns to the technique of Natural Exercise. This section of the program discusses what Natural Exercise is, why it is essential to human health and well-being, and how we can simply and enjoyably achieve natural conditioning throughout our lives, greatly improving our fitness, emotional health, and quality of life. You will learn how just a few minutes of Natural Exercise each day can work to restore and maintain high natural levels of physical fitness and emotional health in us, helping us to more deeply engage in our lives and connect with the larger world around us.
- Natural Living – as our personal health improves and life perspective begins to shift and become more heath-oriented through Natural Eating and Natural Exercise, our Personal Health Program next moves to the critical ideas that we use to structure and guide our daily lives, which we call the technique of Natural Living. In this important, far-reaching, and highly personalized part of the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program, we help you explore new ways to think about and pursue natural health and well-being across the totality of your life, including the many opportunities we each have to transform ourselves and the quality of our lives through changes in our perspectives, priorities, and personal choices. Natural Living encompasses the way we live and work each day, relationships with friends and family, and our narratives and larger alignment with others and the world.
- Community Outreach – when we begin the work of Natural Living, we are often already significantly strengthened and transformed as people, compared to when we first encountered the HumanaNatura natural health system. At this stage in our pursuit of natural health, we are normally much healthier and more fit than is typical for modern people. As importantly, our ideas about our health and even our lives have usually been expanded and enriched by new learning and experience. In the process of Natural Living, we typically make significant changes in the way we think about the world and live in it – enhancing our health and well-being, more directly fulfilling our potential for healthy life and natural harmony, and gaining the confidence to help others pursue their natural health. It is from this new and revitalized state of life that the HumanaNatura technique of Natural Communities begins. This work is discussed in the Our Future section of our Personal Health Program. It often starts informally and can take many forms, but with the common aim of supporting and reaching out to others around us in the spirit of our health. In time, our efforts at Natural Communities can grow to become the active promotion of health-based life in the modern world around us – ultimately fostering open-ended, mutually-beneficial, and increasing cycles of progressive community health. Our Community Health Program provides formal guidance and a flexible but structured approach specifically targeted community health and quality of life promotion. But the technique of Natural Communities – the focus on ensuring fulfillment of our health needs for natural cooperation with others and improved general health conditions today – can be pursued in ways.
By helping us to fulfill these five objectives, HumanaNatura’s programs and overall natural health system creates new personal gateways to the future for each of us. They are gateways that share common attributes and yet are deeply individualized and our own. Our personal gateways in turn lead us to new personal paths and more compelling life opportunities, created by and contributing to our increasing health and well-being, but always emerging in our own life circumstances and in ways that are uniquely our own. Our lives soon become far more satisfying and fulfilling, more dynamic and creative, and even more humane and integrated than we might have thought or imagined possible.
As you will learn through HumanaNatura’s programs, our natural health is also a shared gateway for all people, one that encompasses all our lives and leads to a new future of greater natural health and harmony for all people. This future is one where each of us can live more fully and cooperatively with others, and explore more deeply who we are as individuals and what we might become together, in communities and as an advanced global civilization, once we better dedicate ourselves to the progressive exploration and expression of our natural health and human vitality.
We invite you to begin using the HumanaNatura natural health system today, and to contact us through the Contact Us or Ask A Health Question pages whenever you have questions or issues you want to discuss. We are available if you need program support or guidance at any time, or if you simply want someone to speak in confidence as you consider the many ideas and challenges that come as we begin to pursue progressive natural health in our lives.
We also would enjoy welcoming you as the newest member of our growing global community and natural health movement, at whatever stage you are on the path to greater health and well-being. Simply visit our Join Us page for more information on becoming a member of HumanaNatura.