There is a strange paradox at the heart of modern health. Never have people had greater access to medicine, technology, climate-controlled comfort, instant communication, and endless streams of information about wellbeing—and yet never have so many felt so tired, anxious, inflamed, disconnected, and unwell. Something fundamental has been misplaced in the march toward modernity. In our effort to improve life, we may have quietly stepped away from many of the conditions that made human life healthy in the first place.
We are creatures of earth, sunlight, wind, water, movement, and seasons. Every cell in the body was shaped under open skies. Human physiology evolved not in sealed rooms under artificial light, but outdoors—walking uneven ground, breathing living air, rising with dawn, resting with darkness, touched daily by sunlight, weather, plants, soil, and the countless subtle biological exchanges that happen between body and environment. The modern world has brought extraordinary convenience, but convenience often comes with invisible biological costs.
Many people now wake indoors, work indoors, travel enclosed in vehicles, exercise indoors, shop indoors, and spend evening hours bathed in blue light from screens before sleeping in air-conditioned rooms cut off from the rhythms of the natural world. The body, ancient in design though modern in setting, quietly pays attention to all of this. It registers light, darkness, temperature, movement, microbial exposure, air quality, and environmental texture in ways both conscious and unconscious. When these inputs become artificial, limited, or absent, health can begin to drift.
Sunlight is perhaps one of the clearest examples of “nature deficiency”. It has emerged as an important, if not THE most important nourishment. Natural sunlight helps regulate circadian rhythms—the internal biological clock that governs sleep, hormones, metabolism, immune function, and mood. Morning light exposure helps anchor healthy cortisol release, supports melatonin production later in the day, and improves sleep quality at night. Sunlight also stimulates vitamin D production, which influences bone health, immune resilience, inflammation control, muscle function, and even mental wellbeing.
Yet modern life has turned many people into near-permanent indoor dwellers, living under electric light while becoming starved of one of biology’s oldest medicines.
Fresh air is another forgotten nutrient. Outdoor air, especially in natural environments, often contains compounds released by trees and plants, beneficial airborne microbes, richer oxygen dynamics, and far fewer indoor pollutants than many homes and offices.
Research on forest exposure—sometimes called forest bathing (Japanese shinrin-yoku) —has shown reductions in stress hormones, improvements in mood, enhanced immune activity, and measurable calming effects on the nervous system. Time among trees appears to do more than relax the mind; it nourishes physiology itself.
Then there is movement—not exercise in the narrow modern sense of gym sessions and fitness routines, burpees and the like, but natural movement woven throughout daily life. Walking, stretching, bending, carrying, climbing, balancing, and simply being physically engaged with the world are profoundly regulating to metabolism, circulation, joints, muscles, lymphatic flow, and brain health. Human bodies were built for regular, varied movement, not prolonged sitting interrupted by brief bursts of exercise. Sedentary indoor life creates stagnation that the body interprets as dysfunction.
You may have heard the phrase: sitting is the new smoking.
Contact with nature also shapes the immune system in remarkable ways. Soil microbes, plant compounds, diverse environmental bacteria, and exposure to biodiverse outdoor ecosystems help educate and regulate immune responses. Some researchers believe the explosion in allergies, autoimmune disorders, and inflammatory illness may partly reflect immune systems raised in overly sanitized, biologically narrow environments. We have reduced our contact with the microbial richness that helped shape healthy immunity across human history. [The so-called Hygiene Hypothesis, which I utterly believe in).
Our bodies are an entire ecosystem and our obsession with sanitizing it leads to a collapse of a healthy system. I’m not advocating you turn up to the table with dirty hands and fingernails… well, maybe! (depends what you’ve been handling). But I remember as a kid on the farm; we’d wipe the cow shit off our hands just by rubbing them against our pants and ate our sandwiches with greenish fingers! (much to mother’s dismay) But I was never sick, except for the usual (measles, chicken pox, etc.)
Nature also heals something less measurable but equally important—the mind’s burden. The modern nervous system is overstimulated by noise, screens, speed, social pressure, information overload, and relentless artificial input. Nature offers something radically different: complexity without demand. A forest, coastline, meadow, or garden engages the senses gently rather than aggressively. The nervous system softens. Attention broadens. Thought slows. The body receives cues of safety. Blood pressure drops. Muscles unclench. Breathing deepens. The mind remembers another pace of being.
This is not romantic nostalgia. Actually it is biology.
What Can You Do?
The remedy does not require abandoning modern life or moving to a mountain cabin—though a cabin by a lake has undeniable charm. Healing can begin with small, deliberate acts of rewilding daily life. Step outside early and let morning light touch your eyes. Walk among trees. Open windows. Grow plants indoors and outdoors. Put bare feet on grass or sand if you enjoy it.
My advice? Eat food that comes from living soil rather than industrial chemistry. Spend time where birdsong replaces traffic noise. Let your skin feel weather. Watch a sunrise. Sit beneath a tree with no agenda. Allow yourself moments not optimized for productivity.
These are not luxuries. They are forms of nourishment. We really are suffering from a “nature deficiency.”
Modern health conversations often revolve around supplements, medications, lab tests, and complex interventions. Some are valuable. But alongside them sits a simpler truth: many people are deficient not only in nutrients, but in sunlight, fresh air, natural movement, microbial diversity, quiet, beauty, and contact with the living world.
Perhaps one of the great health frontiers of our time is not discovering something entirely new but remembering something very old—that human beings are not separate from nature. We are expressions of it.
And when we return, even briefly, to the rhythms and textures that shaped us, the body often responds with a quiet sigh of recognition, as if saying, Yes… this is what I remember.
What can I do during the workday to offset sitting all day?
Andrew Dorsey, MS, an Exercise Physiologist at The Mount Sinai Physiolab and Clinical Research Coordinator at Mount Sinai’s Department of Environmental Medicine, recommends to have about 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week.¹ That may seem like a lot, but it is manageable when you break it down. If you took three, five-minute breaks during a workday, five days a week, that’s 75 minutes. That’s already half of what you’re aiming for.
You can incorporate movement in short, simple ways:
• Get up from your desk, walk around, stretch, even walk in place. Just standing while you read something or take a phone call can help. It adds up over time.
• Hold a conversation or meeting standing up!
• Make the conscious decision to take the stairs, rather than the elevator, can make a difference. If you take the stairs once a week, that is a meaningful change. You don’t have to do it daily to see benefits.
Live better. Live longer!
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor
