A term inherited, not invented

The term physiological rights was not coined here. It appears in a 1979 address by Jean Mayer to the Société française de nutrition, published in the Annales de la nutrition et de l’alimentation (vol. 33, pp. 5–15), and represents perhaps the first notable use of the term in the scientific literature. Mayer argued that civil and political rights rest on a physiological foundation, and that recognising this foundation was a moral and political obligation. His list of physiological rights included access to clean air, water, adequate shelter, protection from excessive labour, sleep, and food. This project inherits that argument directly. The historical text can be consulted in the Resources section.

Refining the category

Closer examination reveals, however, that several of the conditions Mayer listed are better understood as environmental or social rights, ones that already have, however imperfectly, legal frameworks of their own. The right to adequate housing, to safe water, to protection from exploitative labour: these fall within the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, Articles 11 and 12). What remains without a juridical name, and without effective remedies, is the narrower category of rights concerning the internal parameters of the organism itself: the biochemical processes, hormonal balances, and nutrient levels that determine whether a body can actually function. This is what this project means by physiological rights in the strict sense.

What Mayer could not anticipate

Mayer was also writing at a moment when malnutrition meant, almost by definition, caloric insufficiency in conditions of poverty or famine. The paradigm of hidden hunger, the subclinical depletion of magnesium, thiamine, zinc, vitamin D and others in populations living in material abundance, had not yet emerged as a clinical and public health reality. We now know that physiological rights can be violated not only by scarcity, but under conditions of plenty: through ultra-processed diets, nutrient-depleted soils, and pharmaceutical interactions that gradually reduce the body’s reserves. These violations are further obscured by false negatives in standard clinical testing, by unfounded institutional declarations that a balanced diet is sufficient for the general population, and by the structural limitations of evidence-based medicine as applied to subclinical, multi-factorial deficiencies, for which randomised controlled trials neither exist nor should be expected to exist.

Making a right operative

This project remains within the tradition of positive rights that Mayer represented. The history of rights includes many instances in which a formally recognised right required further specification before it became operative. The right to vote required the secret ballot before it was real for those subject to domestic surveillance. The right to a fair trial required the right to appointed counsel before it was real for those without means. The right to housing required enforceable habitability standards before it was real for those exposed to lead or asbestos. In each case, the conditions of effective exercise had to be named and guaranteed before the right could function as a right.

Toward justiciability

Physiological rights are at a comparable stage. The internal parameters of the organism constitute a domain of rights that is implicit in existing human rights instruments but has not been named as such. This project works toward that recognition: defining the category, documenting the violations, and advancing the case for justiciability.