Never Be Sick Again (5 page)

In America today, we are usually told—and believe—that illnesses like cancer, arthritis, dementia, osteoporosis, diabetes and heart disease are “diseases of aging,” but these chronic conditions are not the inevitable result of growing older. Rather, they are the inevitable result of living lifestyles that cannot support human health. In America today, these conditions are epidemic. Having achieved enormous advances in science and medicine, why are we experiencing the largest epidemic of chronic disease in human history?

As I studied patterns of health and disease, I made a profound discovery. I learned that disease does not just randomly happen; it occurs for specific reasons. We are not typically perfectly healthy until we “get” sick, nor does perfect health return once disease has run its course. Although we tend to perceive life this way, the distinctions between health and disease are far less black and white. Remember your cells. Only after massive numbers of cells malfunction or die do you begin to notice symptoms of disease. In other words, you are already sick before you “get sick.” People who are truly healthy do not “get sick.”

If you stop to consider what it might be like to live in good health to a ripe old age, everything begins to seem different. This potential for health can be described as
optimal
health, where your cells are functioning as well as they possibly can. This level of health is almost guaranteed to keep disease at bay.

A Poor Record

Very few Americans grow old in good health and die naturally from the aging process. Instead, we get sick and die from entirely preventable diseases such as cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Preventing these health problems is simple, and I will teach you how to do it, but first realize how dire our health problems really are.

The United States spends far more on health, in total and per capita, than any other nation in the world, but our overall health still ranks quite poorly. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the United States ranks thirty-seventh in overall health quality. It should serve as a wake-up call for all Americans when a third-world country like Oman spends only $334 per person per year on health and ranks eighth in the world, while the United States spends more than ten times that much and we are thirty-seventh. Considering what we spend on health care, shouldn't we be the healthiest nation on Earth? We are not.

People in their teens or early twenties should be at peak levels of health, right? Not in our society. Autopsies performed on accident victims of this age group in Los Angeles revealed that nearly 80 percent had early stages of heart disease; 15 percent had arteries that were more than half blocked. Had these young people survived, they would likely have been victims of a stroke or heart attack. They may have appeared healthy and lived normal lives, but they were definitely not healthy.

It's a matter of perspective.
Our own ill health does not stand
out when compared to our unhealthy friends and neighbors.
The allergies, the colds, the flu, the arthritis, the premature aging—all of these seem perfectly normal. Because it is so common in our society, we have come to believe that disease is an inevitable, natural, “normal” part of the aging process.

We mistake being able to function for being healthy. We perceive “sick” as being bedridden or housebound, and “healthy” as being able to go about our normal activities. Healthy does not merely mean being ambulatory and free of obvious disease symptoms.
Healthy means functioning at the
highest level that genetic capacity allows.
As in other areas of life, recognizing and admitting the problem is half the battle. Unfortunately, we are a sick population, growing sicker by the day and, worse yet, blind to our sickness.

According to recent estimates in medical journals, including the April 1999
Effective Clinical Practice,
three-fourths of the American population has a diagnosable chronic disease. We suffer from many health problems, and most of us take medications to deal with these problems. A 1997 national survey sponsored by
Parade
magazine found that about two-thirds of us regularly take prescription or over-the-counter drugs. This survey also reported that about two-thirds of Americans believe themselves to be in “good” or “excellent” health. My question to you is this: How is it possible to be in good health if you are taking medications and experiencing symptoms of sickness?

Even when statistical evidence is presented, many people fail to recognize their own sickness on a personal level. For example, most people with allergies don't think of themselves as having a chronic disease. Did you know that chronic allergic reactions tax the body and the immune system, making one much more susceptible to infections and other diseases? Allergies are a serious immune dysfunction disease, not just a benign inconvenience. Every allergic reaction does long-term damage to the body; allergies reduce overall quality of life and ultimately reduce longevity. Healthy people do not have allergies.

We think we're healthy, but we're not. At a seminar I was leading, a man stood up and talked about how he jogged every day and how healthy he was. A few pointed questions later, it was revealed that this man had diabetes—the seventh-leading cause of death in America! Some groups assert that we are now healthier and living longer, but that claim seems like propaganda to me. The incidence of virtually every chronic disease continues to increase, and the health of the American people is in a long-term downtrend. In 1996, the
Journal of the
American Medical Association
documented that 25 percent of Americans under age eighteen had at least one chronic disease. The disease rate increases to 45 percent between ages forty-five and sixty-five, and to 88 percent over age sixty-five.

Take diabetes, for example. In August 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced its most recent statistics on the increases in rates of diabetes. In 1980, 2 percent of newly diagnosed cases of adult-onset diabetes were in people under age nineteen. In 2000, that number was approaching a staggering 50 percent. Separately, in just eight years from 1990 to 1998, diabetes jumped 33 percent nationally and went up a whopping 70 percent among people ages thirty to thirty-nine. According to Dr. Frank Vinicor, the director of the CDC, “This kind of an increase in just eight years is almost unheard of.” The experts at the CDC cautioned that even these numbers understate the problem, because about one-third of American diabetics do not realize they have the disease.

Asthma is another example of how fast we are becoming sicker. The CDC reports that the number of Americans with asthma increased 61 percent between 1982 and 1994. Mortality from asthma increased 45 percent between 1985 and 1995. Asthma is now the leading cause of school absenteeism, and the death rate from asthma is increasing at a rate of 6 percent per year.

Obesity is another increasing problem that we must face. Childhood obesity doubled from 1980 to 2000, and most children do not outgrow this problem. Childhood and teenage obesity affects lifelong health with a risk seven times higher for developing clogged arteries later in life. Did you know that more than one in five teenagers are overweight and that almost two of three adults are overweight or obese? Other diseases are increasing, too, including allergies, autoimmune disease, attention deficit disorders, birth defects and chronic fatigue. Cancer is now, after accidents, the leading cause of death for children, and cancer used to be rare in young people!

Would you believe that we have come to expect disease? That we believe in the certainty of sickness more than we believe in the certainty of wellness? That people expect to get sick to such a degree that they hold on to jobs they dislike, just to keep their health benefits? Talk about mixed-up priorities! We are accustomed to disease, and we expect it to occur. When we do get sick, we often feel victimized or helpless, as if struck by a bolt of lightning. We never think that we have done it to ourselves or that we might choose to do otherwise.

Leaving the Good Life

Our lifestyles have changed along with the evolution of what is broadly called “modern civilization.” Since the Industrial Revolution, changes have occurred in how we grow our foods, what kinds of food we consume, what we take into our bodies, the lifestyles we live and what we put into the environment. Many of these changes rob us of the nutrients our cells need in order to be healthy and expose us to toxins that interfere with normal cell function. An editorial by Joseph Scherger, M.D., in the January 2000
Hippocrates
said that “lifestyle factors now loom as the leading cause of premature death.”

As I began to discover the incredible health and longevity of certain healthy populations around the world and to look at how these people lived their lives, I began to understand the potential for health. In contrast to the historically healthy populations I will tell you about (such as the Hunzas in northeastern Pakistan and other groups, such as the Vilcabambans and Cuenca Indians in Ecuador), the average American is not doing well at all. We significantly compromise our health with nutritionally deficient diets, environmental toxins, sedentary lifestyles, chronic stress, bad habits such as smoking and drug use, and lack of positive emotions and meaningful relationships, not to mention the damaging outcomes of symptom management by modern medicine. In terms of deficiency and toxicity (the two causes of disease), here are examples of how lifestyle factors make us sick:

Nutrition Failures

• Fruit and vegetable plants are now grown with artificial fertilizers that produce more food per acre, but these foods are not nearly as rich in nutritional content. Use of artificial fertilizers has led to depletion of minerals in the soil because they do not add minerals to replace those being lost with each new crop. Soil depletion leads to nutritional deficiency in all of us.

• Since foods are not eaten fresh off of the plant, many must be harvested before they are ripe in order to prevent spoilage during transportation and distribution. This premature harvesting does not allow food to reach its full nutritional maturity, thereby contributing to nutritional deficiency.

• The nutritional content of the food then further deteriorates as the food ages during storage, transportation and distribution.

• Food is often processed, further depleting its nutritional content, in order to make it easier to store and consume. Among these foods are flour, pasta, bread, sugar, and canned and packaged foods.

• Cooked foods are also nutritionally inferior to raw ones, and most of the American diet consists of both processed and cooked foods.

Toxic Assaults

• The farming of large single crops has created new and serious problems of insect infestations, necessitating the use of insecticides. These insecticides, along with the use of herbicides and fungicides, have made food production methods a significant contributor to our toxic environment and food supply.

• The modern processed-food industry adds man-made preservatives, flavors, colors and other toxic chemicals to our foods. No one knows what the combination of all these chemicals is doing to our bodies.

• Energy demands, first for coal and now for gas and oil, are constantly polluting our environment.

• Virtually all of our industrial processes—from printing our daily newspapers to painting our homes and building cars and computers—have led to the introduction of tens of thousands of man-made chemicals into our environment, all of which put toxic loads into our bodies.

Over the past century or so, dramatic changes in diet and environment have created a society of nutritionally deficient and chemically toxic Americans. Virtually all of the food we can buy in a modern supermarket is nutritionally inferior to the foods our ancestors consumed. The purity of the air and water our ancestors enjoyed no longer exists. But all is not lost. Sources do exist today where we can find quality foods with high nutritional content. We can lower our daily toxic exposure, but first we need to learn where to look and how to take charge. What I found helpful was to study those people who have already shown us the way.

Small populations of people in remote areas around the world have shown us how simply meeting the body's needs along each of the six pathways can result in tremendous energy, stamina and lack of disease until age 120, 130 or even older. I will tell you more about these remarkable people, and I will also tell how the intrusions of “modern civilization” into those populations since the 1970s have robbed them of their stunning health and longevity.

Recognizing Our Potential

While 75 is considered a ripe old age in our modern society, traditionally healthy societies considered 75 more “middle age.” People in these societies rarely died before their 90s and commonly lived well into their 100s, reaching 120, 130 and older—free of disease. In March 1961, an article in the
Journal
of the American Medical Association
reported on evidence that men in Hunza lived to be 120 and even 140 years old. Hunza men and women over 100 exhibited robust energy, in striking contrast to the epidemic of fatigue in our society. These people lived simply and without doctors or hospitals, without nursing homes. In America today we spend $1.5 trillion a year on health care and tens of billions of dollars studying disease. What is it buying us? Certainly not a long, disease-free life. Here's an idea: Study health instead of disease!

So what is our potential for health? In his 1968 book
Hunza,
J. M. Hoffman, Ph.D., who had spent years studying the people of the remote Hunza Valley in the Himalayas, quoted prominent physicians and scientists, including the presidents of the American Medical Association and the International Association of Gerontology, as saying that humans should live to be 120 to 150 years old. Recent estimates in biology journals project human life expectancy to exceed 135 years. Even the Bible itself prophesizes a long life span: “[Man's] days shall be a hundred and twenty years” (Gen. 6:3). Long life is our birthright. We should live to be at least 120, in vigorous health, maintaining physical and mental acuity.