I began tracking media coverage of health and fitness when I was 12-years-old and gave a classroom current-events presentation about the newly discovered "fact" that eating fat causes heart disease. Of course we now know how close Ancel Keys was on that call.

I didn't give up, however, on the idea the empiricism is the way to go in evaluating health claims. I very much enjoy tracking developments in health science and fitness practice. I didn't go on to get advance training in the sciences; my training and orientation are humanities based. I happily subscribe to the British philosopher C. D. Broad's embrace of multiple sources or means of acquiring new knowledge, ranging from experiment to personal experience. In both cases, peer review is crucial. Knowledge claims must be evaluated by a community of the adequate.

Given the inseparability of body and mind, I likewise share Broad's appreciation for the roles of both Synopsis and Synthesis. "Synopsis is the deliberate viewing together of aspects of human experience which, for one reason or another, are generally kept apart by the plain man and even by the professional scientists or scholar. The object of synopsis is to try to find out how these various aspects are inter-related. Synthesis is the attempt to supply a coherent set of concepts and principles which cover satisfactorily all the regions of fact which have been viewed synoptically."

In short, because reality itself is integral, so must be our models and practices, our injunctions, our hypotheses, theories, experiments, and intuitions. The data of no legitimate knowledge domain can be arbitrarily excluded. This includes physics, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, psychology, sociology, religious studies, systems theory anthropology — short list. Not that these are categorically identical.

Sounds abstract, but these ideas animate my ongoing quest to understand what being a full-capacity human might involve.