The HumanaNatura System
You may know about HumanaNatura already through our website or use of our Personal Health Program. If not, this section provides a brief overview of our science-based approach to natural health enhancement.
HumanaNatura begins from the science of human life and health in nature, and offers a complete and open-ended system for natural fitness and quality of life. HumanaNatura’s natural health system utilizes four integrated techniques, which combine to foster revolutionary new health awareness and practical realization of our potential for progressive and transformative natural health and vitality.
HumanaNatura is a cooperative organization, supporting and supported by a global network of natural health practitioners and advocates. Together, HumanaNatura members form a growing worldwide health movement, encouraging new health understanding and our modern transition to health-based life.
HumanaNatura’s natural health system
In the HumanaNatura system, four specific natural health techniques – Natural Eating, Natural Exercise, Natural Living, and Natural Communities – are combined to form a complete and open-ended approach to natural health enhancement.
This approach begins with our Personal Health Program and works to fulfill HumanaNatura’s ideal of progressive natural health,which can be defined as human life continually seeking and realizing new levels or states of health and vitality.
As mentioned in the Introduction to this program, we encourage use of our four health techniques in individuals through the progressive development and fulfillment of a Natural Life Plan. In our Personal health Program, the creation and regular updating of a Natural Life Plan is accomplished via a repeating seven-step process, one explained in the Natural Living section of the program.
In our Community Health Program, the process that underlies the development of an individual Natural Life Plan has been adapted to the more complex work of progressive improvement in community health conditions. In this effort, our goal has been to create a comparable outcome – in this case, ongoing and compounding group-level learning and action toward improved health and quality of life conditions across a community or network of communities.
As a natural phenomenon, human community health conditions are increasingly well-understood by health and social scientists, and now can be reliably measured through fairly straightforward metrics or measurements. These metrics include measures of longevity, morbidity, engagement, life satisfaction, quality of life, and economic and environmental sustainability. In our Community Health Program, progress toward these metrics is realized via the five-step development, implementation, and ongoing progression of a Community Health Agenda, which again is more complex than but analogous to an individual-level Natural Life Plan.
HumanaNatura’s focus on creating health-promotion plans, whether for individuals or whole communities, ultimately aims to improve what we call the health landscape of our lives and larger environments – via our goal of informed, conscious, continuous, and what often are synergistic steps toward new levels of health. In principle, this progressive process of health enhancement involves the systematic removal of health limiters and parallel development of new health enablers in our individual or community health landscape.
In promoting progressive health in individuals or whole communities, HumanaNatura’s natural health system uses science in two principal ways. The first use of science is to reground or rebuild our understanding of natural health generally and natural human health specifically. This new natural health paradigm is explained at length in our Personal Health Program, including discussion of important research themes related to the drivers and evolutionary dynamics of all health in nature. In this discussion, we place special emphasis on scientific models of human health as it occurred during the majority of our species history, when our ancestors lived directly in nature and with limited technology and agriculture.
This first use of science leads to startling and even revolutionary new ideas about our natural health and the essential natural health conditions and practices we require as human beings, today and in all times. The HumanaNatura paradigm further suggests that we must now actively re-create essential conditions of our natural past and better shape modern life today, if we are to be naturally healthy and well. In this new natural health perspective, modern life is recast as an evolved and less than optimal state – one strongly influenced and hampered by our immediate, ten thousand year-old history of agrarian civilization and its many incorrect ideas and assumptions about our human origins and natural needs for health and quality of life.
Building on these essential natural health insights, HumanaNatura’s second use of science investigates how required human natural health practices or techniques can be optimized and enhanced, and even how earlier natural limits on human life and health can be transcended in our modern age, allowing us to improve our health, fitness, and quality of life to unprecedented levels, and not just to original ones, in our time and for the future.
HumanaNatura’s four health techniques
HumanaNatura’s system of four natural health techniques is discussed in detail in our Personal Health Program and is briefly described here:
- Natural Eating - based on the science of our human ancestors’ life in nature of more than five million years, as well as important contemporary nutritional research findings related to optimal health and longevity, HumanaNatura’s technique of Natural Eating encourages a diet principally based on raw vegetables, consumption of healthy amounts and sources of cooked animal protein, and moderate fruit and nut intake. The approach advocates elimination from our diet of all agrarian and industrial-age foods – grains, cereals, beans, starchy plants, and non-fruit-sugars, including all processed foods that contain these items. HumanaNatura discourages the consumption of processed and fat-rich meats, in favor of lean meats, poultry, and fish.
- Natural Exercise - using the science of earlier human activity patterns in nature, as well as important modern exercise science principles, HumanaNatura advocates Natural Exercise to promote sufficient and efficient natural conditioning. Aimed at ensuring ongoing health and quality of life-enhancing personal fitness amidst modern life, HumanaNatura advocates the practices of daily walking or hiking and their supplementation with regular calisthenics workouts. Both components of our Natural Exercise technique are encouraged at personalized levels of intensity and intended as lifelong exercise practices. Our Natural Exercise technique seeks to fulfill four complementary physical fitness goals – aerobic conditioning, strengthening, improved flexibility, increased agility or coordination – and at least two psychological wellness goals – stress reduction and enhanced cognition.
- Natural Living - as our health improves through new and more natural approaches to eating and exercise, HumanaNatura next encourages the use of science for natural health enhancement in other areas of our lives, via the third HumanaNatura natural health technique of Natural Living. Natural Living involves the creation, implementation, and ongoing progression of a Natural Life Plan, using a repeating seven-step process and HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural living. This planning process is based on well-researched cognitive-behavioral techniques and seeks to make our individual choices progressively more informed, conscious, and health-affirming, while fostering an ongoing exploration of our personal opportunities for progressive well-being and quality of life. As suggested before, using evolutionary and contemporary well-being science, the technique of Natural Living encourages a reweighting of our attitudes and behaviors in favor of far healthier and more advantageous natural human “beta-cycle” patterns of life. This important behavioral model is discussed at length in the Natural Living section of our Personal Health Program and is foundational to the goals and structure of our Community Health Program.
- Health Communities - HumanaNatura’s fourth natural health technique involves promoting health awareness and new states of realized health in others – including people immediately around us, our communities, and global society. This final natural health technique in the HumanaNatura system, which we call Natural Communities and discuss in our Personal Health Program, helps us to fulfill and promote critical dimensions of our natural health that lie beyond our immediate personal concerns. The technique of Natural Communities encourages intrinsically-beneficial and health-affirming cooperation with others, as well as sustained work to improve the quality of the social environment around us all. The technique of Natural Communities thus allows people using the HumanaNatura system to explore essential beta-cycle dimensions of our natural health and natural life, while promoting action on contemporary health limiters and health enablers in the world. Within our Personal Health Program, the technique’s goal of cooperation for health can take many forms, and informally begins the process of systematic community health enhancement that is the scope our Community Health Program.
We mentioned before that the critical HumanaNatura practice of creating and developing a Natural Life Plan is introduced in the Natural Living section of HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program, but would like to underscore that this process for progressive health-based learning and action ultimately encompasses all four of our natural health techniques.
The scope of a Natural Life Plan for an individual is our complete life and health landscape as they exist at any moment in time. In a similar way, the Community Health Agenda for a group of people needs to consider all of the ways the community currently promotes and limits the health and well-being of its members, and even neighboring communities, and all of its opportunities for health-promoting change.
HumanaNatura’s ongoing process for creating and progressing an individual Natural Life Plan uses the following seven steps: 1) Assess our health landscape, 2) Envision more optimal life, 3) Describe our life as it is today, 4) Formulate our needed Natural Life Plan, 5) Review our Natural Life Plan, 6) Implement our Natural Life Plan, and 7) Evaluate our actions and their impacts on our health and quality of life. As you will see in the five-step process of our Community Health Program, this process parallels the creation of a Community Health Agenda in important ways.
In our Personal Health Program, the HumanaNatura technique of Natural Living and its process of creating Natural Life Plans is informed by consideration of ten, scientifically-derived dimensions or aspects of natural human life. In keeping with our overall use of science, these dimensions are derived from both research and models from human evolutionary and anthropological science, as well as modern quality of life and well-being research.
HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural living are listed below and discussed in detail in our Personal Health Program:
HumanaNatura’s Ten Dimensions of Natural Living
- Autonomy
- Harmony
- Community
- Rhythm
- Intimacy
- Growth
- Movement
- Security
- Simplicity
- Nature
Based on the seven steps and ten dimensions contained in the technique of Natural Living – and the personal plans, actions, and evaluations they engender in the life of a HumanaNatura practitioner – the full process of creating a Natural Life Plan is repeated periodically, and even frequently at first, to improve and enhance the health and quality of our individual life.
In much the same way, HumanaNatura’s process for community health promotion seeks to progressively and systematically increase and transform the state of health and quality of life within entire communities. This systematic process uses HumanaNatura’s five-step community health promotion model, which forms the essential method and practical focus of our Community Health Program:
HumanaNatura’s Five Steps of Community Health Promotion
- Assess and verify community health conditions
- Identify and prioritize potential health actions
- Validate potential actions and build community consensus
- Design, implement, and monitor community health actions
- Assess actions for learning and to increase community support
In practice, these integrated techniques form a powerful, self-progressing, and open-ended process for community health promotion.
Our community health promotion model weaves together critical findings of health science, public health and public policy methods, and community and organizational leadership practices into a powerful new approach to community health advocacy. This approach includes situational analysis, consensus-building, targeted action, and ongoing learning – aimed at ensuring tangible and compounding cycles of community health promotion.
Included in HumanaNatura’s Community health Program is our Community Assessment Form, a data-driven spreadsheet tool that guides the work of assessing community health conditions and exploring options for change. Our Community Assessment Form contains over 100 objective community health benchmarks and allows for the quantitative scoring of a community’s health status against these key community health factors.
Transitioning to community health promotion
With this brief summary of the HumanaNatura natural health system and our four natural health techniques, we will now turn to the application of our progressive and open-ended natural health promotion model to the larger health landscapes that are whole communities and regional networks of communities. As we have suggested, this work is essential to fulfilling key dimensions of our individual natural health potential, infusing our lives with essential outward-focused dimensions and quality of life-enhancing beta-cycle dynamics, while practically improving health conditions around us for the future.
To make this transition and optimally prepare ourselves for learning and action amidst an extended discussion of community health, we would encourage you to now select a specific community to keep in mind as we review the many considerations and key steps involved in the practice of community health promotion. The community you select could be the one you live in now, the community you are originally from, or another that you know well. In any case, having a community in mind will serve as a learning aid, make our discussion more tangible, and perhaps help you to see new opportunities for improved health conditions and health-enhancing action in the world around you.
Whichever community you chose, we recommend that you use your selected community as a touchstone and learning aid, while you review and consider the ideas we will present regarding public health and community health promotion. Ideally, the community you chose will be one you can use not just to test our ideas against the reality of a specific community, but also a community where you will ultimately put our Community Health Program into practice and actively work to improve its state of health and quality life.
Once you decide on a community to use as your learning aid, and before continuing with this program, please take a few minutes to list out what you think are the 3-5 most “health-promoting” aspects of the community and then the 3-5 most “health-undermining” aspects of the community. Your own initial lists, which begin the process of more fully assessing your community’s health landscape, will help to make our discussion much more tangible and allow you to better integrate the theory and practice of community health promotion.
We also would encourage you to remain aware that this initial evaluation of your community’s top health enablers and health limiters may change as you complete your review of this program, and then again as you work with others to more fully analyze and actively promote new health conditions in the community. Still, your first informal community assessment may be an important milestone in your work as a community health advocate, marking the beginning of your personal effort to understand and deliberately advance health conditions and Natural Communities in the world around you.