Primal Prevention

  • primal prevention
  • An early warning
    • Bringing together social epidemiology and epigenetics
    • Chronic stress indirectly harms society's health
  • trying and explain with examples
    • Three examples
    • Our duty
  • The Global Threat
    • Danger of “common sense” arguments
    • ​From children’s play to adult games
    • ​Life’s thermodynamics
    • "We shall overcome!"
  • So what?
    • What we have learnt
    • People have the power
    • ​A few things to ponder
  • Glossary
  • Bibliography and comments
  • Contact for your comment

Version française


Primal Prevention

Avoiding risks of lifelong health impairments in your offspring by taking it on yourselves, throughout its primal period , to escape chronic stress.


The crux of the practice

Young adults in a competitive, unequal society may be at a loss to escape societal stress throughout the 21-month primal period of the child they're about to conceive. In the absence of social laws aimed at helping these "new parents" meet the challenge, they have no choice but to call on third-type kin caregiving, even borrow money or raise funds.
Meanwhile, it's hard to understand how public-health professionals and politicians, in communities anxious to check the continuous rise in health-care costs, may still behave as if they ignored the distant early warning from an exploding new biological knowledge.

What it's all about

While it has long been recognized that social skills are developed during early childhood [1], epigenetics makes it now evident that the most critical period really starts at conception. It's indeed from our very conception that an adequate humoral-tactile-affective environment is paramount to the building of our personality and health. Observations in humans  [2, 3, 4, 5] – as well as in other primates and mammals [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]  – indicate that any chronic stress parents may endure during their offspring's primal period of life would deteriorate this environment, with possibly lifelong, heavy consequences.

​What it will change

Disquieting social-epidemiology observations in unequal, modern societies will have to be re-interpreted as reflecting the delayed consequences of unfavorable epigenetic impacts on people during their primal lives.

Privileged  young people willing to take a career break during their child’s primal period [11] might the first sign of a major cultural blind spot being doomed to disappearance. But sooner or later, whatever their revenue, education and culture, citizen will have to be given the choice of such a prevention .
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