A Serious Cellular Conversation

Hello.  Allow me to introduce myself.  I’m a human cell.  You won’t recognize me because you’ve never seen me before. I’m normally about 1/10^th the diameter of a human hair.

I’ve blown myself up a couple of million times to be able to spend some time with you because, frankly, we need to talk.

I was floating along in your bloodstream a couple of weeks ago hauling my usual load of nutrients and oxygen for delivery – sort of a microscopic Fed Ex guy in a bright red truck – and I was chatting it up with a couple of my fellow red blood cells about how work seemed to be getting harder and harder.

Turns out, they were all feeling the same thing – tired, stressed, working overtime. So we pulled together some of our co-workers over in liver, pancreas, stomach, lungs – sort of a roundtable if you will – to see what they were feeling.  And it was unanimous. Everyone was feeling stressed out.

The consensus was that there is very little understanding and appreciation for what we do and that makes our work a lot harder.

So they elected me to come talk to you. We thought a little basic education might help us affect some changes that would allow us to do our job better.

Let me start by pointing out that there are about 38 ½ trillion of us in your body– that’s trillion with a “T”.  In miles, that’s equivalent to 414,000 trips to the sun.

We really haven’t changed in the last 3 ½ billion years – essentially most of us have a cell membrane, a nucleus,  cytoplasm, ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi vesicles, mitochondria plus some other stuff.  But that’s not what I’m here to talk about – you can Google all that.

Just know that whoever or whatever thought you up and put you all together did an amazing job of organizing something out of total chaos to make you into the most magnificent machine ever devised – an incredible 24×7 immune system that’s working it’s butt off to try to keep you healthy.

Unfortunately, you can’t imagine how tough that is these days.

We need some help!

I can’t stick around very long.  So, I’ll cut to the chase.

We feel we are being abused!  I’m here to ask you, on behalf of my 38 ½ trillion friends, to give us a break!

We’ve proven our ability to work effectively together to enable people to live a long and healthy life.  For instance, we recently helped a lady in Paris live to 122 ½ years – a new benchmark for longevity.  She was active right up to the end.

But, here in America, you choose to live only an average of 80 years  – 42 years short of that benchmark, only 65% of the full-life potential that we’ve already established. And there’s still this tendency to “live short and die long.”

What’s up with that?

Here’s my point.  We’ll perform for you if you will perform for us.  There is no magic here.  If you would like us to help you feel better, have more energy, rid you of invading toxins and viruses, corral our crazy cancer cousins, keep your brain and arteries unclogged, we can do it but we’ve got to have your help.

Just think for a moment.  You come home from a long, stressful day at work, throw down 3-4 pops, inhale a big meatloaf dinner and then do three hours of Lazy-boy and Netflix – well, we know we’re in for a very long night.

Honestly, there are days when it just gets to be too much and a lot of us just say screw it and check out early, leaving fewer of us to do the job.  Or, sometimes, because we are so tired and pissed off, we’ll just go rogue and morph into a cancer cell.

What’s the real score?

Hey, I’m just a single cell – don’t take my word for it.  Look at the scoreboard. After 100 years of hockey-stick growth of your lifespan, it’s now going backward; diabetes is out of control; heart disease still is the leading killer; 65% of American men are overweight, 25% are obese. Your own American Medical Association recently has announced that 50% of you reading this are either diabetic or pre-diabetic and 70% of you don’t know it.

What can I say?

Hey, I’ve got to get back to my glucose deliveries.  Let me leave you with a simple plan that’s a plea from all 38 ½ trillion of us.

• Bring us oxygen. That means you need to get off all my buddies in the back of your pants, get some exercise and get your heart rate up frequently.  We need that from you more than anything.
• We need good non-fatty nutrients, so that means stop eating crap!  Get on the veggies, fruit and whole grains. Please don’t believe this gibberish from McDonalds saying they are becoming nutrition conscious.
• Stop with all the sugar – the sodas, fruit juices, pastries? It’s killing us – and killing you. Sugar damages every one of us. Just stop!  Start reading the labels.  Know what’s natural sugar and what isn’t.  And just know that your food industry is playing tricks on you.  They have over 50 different words for refined sugar.
• We need you to stop pumping stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into the system because it’s hard for us to keep them from nicking your arteries and causing plaque buildup. So chill out and stop taking life and yourself so seriously.

That’s all I’ve got time for.  I really have to go. I think some of my customers are feeling a little shaky.

I hope you’ll take me, and this simple plan, seriously.

Look, we’ve been doing our thing successfully for 3 ½ billion years – you’ve been doing your western lifestyle thing for less than 100 years and it’s obviously not working.  So as I say goodbye, I’ll just rest my case on that.

Gotta run.  Good talking with you. Thanks for listening.

See ya back in your bloodstream!