A warning is definitely needed for the western world, particularly people who eat in grocery stores and restaurants. Do you know someone like that?
Like the aristocrats of ancient Rome, many Americans literally eat themselves to an untimely death. I feel that with a little basic knowledge, backed by statistics and cutting-edge research in health and science, people can take a few simple steps and put their odds of living a longer, healthier life back in their favor. There are 8 main diseases that have been sweeping the earth since the 1940s. All of them were virtually unknown at the turn of the 20th century.
I started doing some of my own research, because I am one of those 77 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 who is aging rapidly and I want to preserve my health for as long as possible.
There is a lot of conflicting information available, which is why many people are confused about what to do to maintain their health. I’ve heard people say things like: “there’s so much contradiction out there, who knows what else to believe – I’ll eat what I want and take my chances.”
Unbelievably, some of the so-called studies I read about were funded by the very industries that were directly affected by the results! For example, how seriously do we take a study on the effects of pesticide use when it is funded by a pesticide manufacturing company? Or how about a study on the effects of dairy products on patients with asthma and allergies that was funded by the Dairy Council of America?
I call this “junk” science. They start with a proposition to prove and then find a way to manipulate the data to prove it! I decided to look at the science and only rate studies where the funding source was not connected to a stakeholder.
Also, I began studying people who were healthy and who perhaps had overcome personal illnesses through holistic healing or natural remedies, people who had experienced definitive and verifiable results (like me), using alternative medicine. There has always been something about our “drugs and surgery” approach to health care that never made sense to me. During my research I found a large number of people who supported the idea that good health results from the right choices regarding food, nutrition, water, exercise, and rest. Using a combination of carefully filtered scientific studies, stories, and good common sense, I found that if the body is given these five elements in the proper form and amount, the body can solve almost any problem.
Most of us assume that we are living longer, because longevity statistics have increased in the last 100 years. But the sad truth is that because these 8 diseases are growing so fast, we actually live less… but take longer to die. Our technology keeps us alive longer, but we sacrifice quality of life in the process. Can there really be dignity when our elders spend months or even years in a vegetative state hooked to a machine?
What about the economic impact of this trend?
I used to think that normal aging was the same for everyone. You have one of the eight deadly diseases and then you slowly die. Imagine my surprise when I learned that heart disease, the leading cause of death for Americans, is a relatively new disease! The first modern cases were reported in 1912, and even then they were extremely rare. Today, heart disease kills four times as many American women each year as breast cancer. For 300,000 people each year, the first and only symptom of heart disease is sudden death. How did it go from almost non-existent to the number one spot?
What about cancer? Only 3% of us died of cancer a hundred years ago. Today, almost 30% of us will succumb to it. The 1909 edition of the standard US textbook, Principles and Practice of Medicine, devoted only 15 pages to cancer. Breast and prostate cancers were not even mentioned; colon cancer received 2 lines. In contrast, the 1994 edition of Principles of Internal Medicine devoted 174 pages to this condition.
Stroke, which killed very few people a hundred years ago, is the third deadly disease among Americans today.
Alzheimer’s was not even diagnosed until 1907. Today, 40% of those over the age of 85 have it.
Diabetes has increased 600% in the last generation alone. Each year, diabetes kills more than twice as many American women as breast cancer.
More than 40 million Americans suffer from some type of arthritis or osteoporosis. Ask any American woman what disease she fears most and she’ll probably tell you it’s breast cancer. However, hip fractures kill more women than cancers of the breast, cervix, and uterus combined.
Finally, there are autoimmune disorders such as chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr virus, lupus, fibromyalgia, and AIDS. I lump them into one big category, and this group is growing like wildfire in the US right now. Twenty years ago, they didn’t even have names for most of these things and many of them were dismissed by doctors as psychosematics. But the harsh symptoms of these autoimmune disorders are wreaking havoc on the health of tens of thousands of Americans and, in the case of AIDS, are killing people at an alarming rate.
Obviously, something has gone terribly wrong here, and it happened in our lifetime. But we are acting as if all these diseases are just a part of the normal aging process! Not so! There is nothing normal or natural about degenerative diseases. We have become convinced that it is normal as a way of dealing with the terrible new reality of sickness and disease in the modern world.
Many of these deaths are totally unnecessary.
And that is the tragedy. When a plane crashes and a few hundred people are killed, it’s front page news for days. But when a million people die of heart disease or half a million die of cancer, you’d think there would be more protests. It’s the equivalent of a crowded jumbo jet crashing every hour of every day of every month for an entire year, year after year.
How long do you plan to live? At what age? 70? 80? 90? 100+? What do you think is reasonable? Now take that number and add an additional 10 healthy years to it. What if you could live to be 100 and beyond without the pain and disease that most people think comes with old age?
Today, the average person lives to be around 76 years old. That’s 79 for women and 72 for men. But in certain areas of the world centenarians are common. We have only recently begun to discover why.
Today, the risk of dying from anything before the age of 40 is actually very small. But after 40 you enter the zone of the 8 deadly diseases. How deadly are they? They kill over 80% of us, which is sad because most of the time they are preventable.
In short, food, nutrition, water, exercise, and rest are the keys to enjoying the highest level of optimal health many years after we thought possible.
See you at my 100th birthday party, will you be there?