Anthropometry can be said to have started in mid-1800s when doctors were still very much in contact with ancient medicines whilst new paradigms they needed to understand were emerging. Aquilla di Giovanni, a doctor teaching at university of Bologna, created the first way of classifying people according to specific morphology. Since the 1600s, the idea of measuring and putting data together had been at the fore but it wasn’t until the 1800s that the classification of phrases, types, and evidence to back up findings came about. In 1890 di Giovanni published the text “The Morphology of Human Body” where he explained all the correlations between the structures of the body, body shapes and certain diseases. In modern anthropometry, it is known that every measurement has a specific ratio when harmony is maintained. Anthropometric measurements are thus used as markers of health and disease, not only on their own but one in relation to another.

It has been widely accepted that human conscious activity seems to be highly related to brain cortical activity, however conscious activity has been demonstrated anecdotally with minimal or nil activity via electroencephalography. Subconscious processes refer to all physiological functions that we do not consciously influence. They are autonomic in essence but can be highly disrupted by cognitive and cortical stress. Stress patterns always correspond to a specific amount of neurotransmitters and hormones released with the obvious effect on health, physiology and disease. Stress can be induced by unsuitable habits and incorrect patterning or functioning of the brain for certain individuals, thus influencing the organism and the expression of the phenotype through stress-related conditions.

Any organism requires a specific environment to survive or thrive. The expression of genes is triggered and associated with specific physical and biochemical stimuli. Temperature can be a trigger for functions that when decoded by genes will activate thermogenesis or heat dispersal. The function of skin pigments such as melanin also depends on how the environment, spanning generations, acted as a master control for genes that needed to adapt and produce more dark skin pigment when living at locations that induced more sun exposure.

Even living most of the day indoors or outdoors, or being part of a great family or living alone can trigger definite functions, such as oxytocin release, which may reduce anxiety and increase trust. Even your natural talents and career choices may influence certain genes to express and others to remain unexpressed.

“Chrono” means time and “Biology” means the study of life. Chronobiology creates a lifestyle according to specific changes which are innate in your body. This means we have an internal clock and this internal clock determines the production of hormones and, when coupled with exposure to light, it creates photoperiodism. The earth rotates so there is sun at midday and when the sun goes down at 6 o’clock for example, there is no more thermal emission, no more ultra violet and, so on. The rhythms are all driven by the fact that we are living on a sphere that rotates, and we have an internal adaptation system – our circadian clock – to try to adapt to these rhythms. The adaptation mechanism in our hypothalamus tries to predict and adapt the temporal rhythms, daily, weekly, seasonally, annually and so on, and coordinates all of our instinctual body clocks.

Ayurveda, or Ayurvedic Medicine, is a system of Hindu traditional medicine of Vedic origin which is native to the Indian sub-continent. Ayurveda is a Sanskrit word for life-knowledge. Literally defined, it is the compilation of the word “ayur” meaning “life” and “veda”, meaning “to know through experience”. In Ayurveda, the most important factor in determining pathology is how healthy the person is, in order to be able to defend themselves from any internal or external pathogens. Everything is based on how healthy the body is, and the health parameter to determine this measure of health is how pure or how clean the system is. As a result, a whole system for assessing the above was developed. Over thousands of years and countless experiments, Ayurveda grew to decide that most of the weaknesses in the body are caused by toxicity. The study of toxicity and how to make the body pure was one of the key components of Ayurveda – referring not only to the body, but both body and mind. The belief in Ayurveda was that achieving a pure mind was very important to achieving this state of internal coherence.