Understanding Conditional Truth
We live in an age of unbridled information — and much of it is conflicting. How do we know what is true, what is false, and why does it matter?
My personal focus is food and how it is grown. Here, the truth matters enormously. False information can make us sick or shorten our lives, while sound knowledge can help keep us healthy well into old age.
I grew up with Newtonian laws — taught as absolute truth — until Einstein revealed that these laws worked under certain conditions, making them incredibly useful but not universal.
The same applies to food. We may hear that bacon and eggs are unhealthy, yet we all know someone like Uncle Joe who ate bacon and eggs daily and lived energetically into his late eighties.
Rather than chase absolute truths, we should focus on what is practical, useful, and keeps us healthy.
I’ve always had a poor memory, but I learned early that if I truly understand basic principles, I don’t need to memorise endless facts — especially in a world drowning in information.
My interest lies in uncovering those basic principles that consistently work.
But before diving into that, let’s look at how our brains process information.
Managing Information Overload
We are bombarded with more facts than we can possibly analyse. Fortunately, evolution has equipped us with a way to cope. Call it dogma, prejudice, or a working model — I prefer the term mental picture.
From table manners to politics and religion, we all develop mental pictures of how the world works. These guide our decisions so we don’t need to rethink everything from scratch.
These mental pictures shape everything — simple habits like sleeping in on Sunday, or complex issues like climate change, diet, and whether bacon is good or bad for us.
They are deeply ingrained, and people rarely change them without a strong external force. In fact, people can be very clever at defending them. For example, if influential voices tell us repeatedly that fat is bad, we form a mental picture that fat is harmful.
But new science may show that certain vitamins are only fat-soluble. We may consume plenty of vitamins, but without the right fats our bodies cannot access them — and excess salt, for example, can block absorption of important minerals.
This mirrors Einstein showing that Newtonian laws were conditionally true, not universally.
We need vitamins and minerals (true), but simply flooding the body with them is only conditionally useful. We need balance — minerals, vitamins, and the necessary fats to access them.
Nowhere is conditional truth clearer than in the belief that overweight people should simply eat less and exercise more.
Eat Less and Exercise More: A Conditional Truth
One fact is clear: fat stored in the wrong places is harmful. Science firmly links misplaced fat to diabetes. Initially, insulin resistance appears — which affects many people but often causes no immediate symptoms.
But once the liver fills with fat and the pancreas becomes overloaded, insulin production drops and serious diabetes develops.
Experts often advise eating less fat and fewer calories, arguing that carbohydrates easily convert to fat.
This is conditionally true. Some people reverse diabetes with extreme diets that force the body to burn fat aggressively.
But it misses an essential point. Throughout history there have been overweight people who are not diabetic and live active, healthy lives. And many who attempt extreme diets end up gaining more weight later, as if the body is trying to protect itself from future starvation.
The issue is not that “eat less, exercise more” is wrong — nor that “eat more, exercise less” is right. It’s that both perspectives are conditional truths.
Across all these discussions, a common theme emerges: the body is regulated by an intelligent control system, deeply connected to our gut biology.
Do we fully understand this system? No. We understand hormones like ghrelin and leptin, but they are only messengers. We don’t yet know how the control system interprets information and decides what to do.
Throughout these pages, I ask two key questions:
1. Does it fit the known facts?
2. Is it useful?
