Lifestyle Diseases Quotes

I was suffering from a profound disease called culture shock and a severe case of homesickness. My brain was exhausted trying to figure out a lifestyle and living standards that everyone took for granted and few bothered to explain.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

Don't let sickness, depression, and disease THUG YOU OUT. Eat healthier, think healthier, speak healthier, and more positively over your life. When you do so, you will soon begin to conquer your life and your health through new found empowerment- mind, body, and spirit.

The gift of the Sabbath must be treasured. Blessed are you who honour this day.

I personally don't like depressing subjects, people say, as if mortality is a lifestyle choice, disease and violence and sorrow a matter of taste.

A well-lived day is medicine unto itself.

This was my wake-up call. I opened my eyes to the depressing fact that there are other forces at work in medicine besides science. The U.S. health care system runs on a fee-for-service model in which doctors get paid for the pills and procedures they prescribe, rewarding quantity over quality. We don’t get reimbursed for time spent counseling our patients about the benefits of healthy eating. If doctors were instead paid for performance, there would be a financial incentive to treat the lifestyle causes of disease. Until the model of reimbursement changes, I don’t expect great changes in medical care or medical education.5

Regret is a lifestyle disease of equity investing.

What if you could start allowing your sensuality to permeate every aspect of whatever you're doing on a daily basis instead of compartmentalizing and isolating it from a majority of your daily affairs like it's some kind of an infectious disease?

We’re all familiar with the idea that lifestyle can be the cause of disease. What’s not common knowledge is that a change in lifestyle can also be the treatment and prevent us from getting sick in the first place.

Another one says she has asnap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried,though, about all these outbreaks of lifestyle diseases. I carry a reinforced ribbed condom at all times. One size fits all. But I have a feeling it's not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus.

Most anti-vaccine books claim that all shots are bad, the diseases aren't really anything to fear, and as long as you live a natural and healthy lifestyle, you don't have to worry. I think this is a very irresponsible approach to the vaccine issue. Vaccines are beneficial in ridding our population of both serious and nonserious diseases.

Obesity is not a disease. It is a lifestyle affliction. It is a symptom. It is a side-effect of poor habits and it can be reversed.

The real problem is not in losing the weight but in keeping it off for any meaningful length of time. Numerous sources show that almost every lifestyle intervention works for the first three to six months. But then the weight comes rolling back.

Our genes are a predisposition, but our genes are not our fate,” I wrote to him. “If they were, then you’d be a victim, but you’re not—you’re one of the most powerful people on the planet.

In 2011, an interesting milestone in human history was passed. For the first time, more people globally died from non-communicable diseases like heart failure, stroke and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined.1 We live in an age in which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle. We are in effect choosing how we shall die, albeit without much reflection or insight.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error,a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime. There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself,I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful. If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love: To Gaylene deceased To Ray deceased To Francy permanent psychosis To Kathy permanent brain damage To Jim deceased To Val massive permanent brain damage To Nancy permanent psychosis To Joanne permanent brain damage To Maren deceased To Nick deceased To Terry deceased To Dennis deceased To Phil permanent pancreatic damage To Sue permanent vascular damage To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage . . . and so forth. In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

We are the custodians of our bodies. We must take action to employ healthy lifestyle habits to prevent, reduce, and/or manage disease and illness.

The main weapons in the prevention and treatment of disease and human carelessness will probably always be food and exercise.

...it is entirely illogical to consider biology in dichotomous terms of genes and environment—all of biology is based on the continuous interaction of both.

For many people, a western lifestyle equates to living in a toxic home, working a toxic job, eating toxic food, being sick from your thirties onward and eventually dying from preventable disease.

The growing “epidemic” of stress, lifestyle diseases, and autoimmune diseases has no root cause according to mainstream medicine, yet that root cause seems simple to us: it’s really an epidemic of not loving the self.

Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life. The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances. I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances. It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve.

Each of the program’s four components—eat well, move more, stress less, and love more—has profound and dynamic beneficial effects on all of these shared mechanisms that cause us to get sick and enable us to heal. Because of this,

Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.

Many chronic symptoms and health conditions—such as fatigue, sleepiness, mood disorders, insomnia, gastroesophageal reflux disease, lipid disorders, high blood pressure, headaches (including migraines), gas, bloating, irritable bowel syndrome, joint inflammation, acne, and difficulty concentrating, to name a few—will improve on a ketogenic diet. Treating lifestyle conditions with lifestyle change such as this can make us a healthier and less drug-dependent country. – Jackie Eberstein

Dietary patterns are set at a very early age—somewhere between four and eight years old. The research shows that children who have established a healthy diet are healthier in the longer range and less likely to develop cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and obesity.

If you don’t drink coffee, you should think about two to four cups a day. It can make you more alert, happier, and more productive. It might even make you live longer. Coffee can also make you more likely to exercise, and it contains beneficial antioxidants and other substances associated with decreased risk of stroke (especially in women), Parkinson’s disease, and dementia. Coffee is also associated with decreased risk of abnormal heart rhythms, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.12, 13 Any one of those benefits of coffee would be persuasive, but cumulatively they’re a no-brainer. An hour ago I considered doing some writing for this book, but I didn’t have the necessary energy or focus to sit down and start working. I did, however, have enough energy to fix myself a cup of coffee. A few sips into it, I was happier to be working than I would have been doing whatever lazy thing was my alternative. Coffee literally makes me enjoy work. No willpower needed. Coffee also allows you to manage your energy levels so you have the most when you need it. My experience is that coffee drinkers have higher highs and lower lows, energywise, than non–coffee drinkers, but that trade-off works. I can guarantee that my best thinking goes into my job, while saving my dull-brain hours for household chores and other simple tasks. The biggest downside of coffee is that once you get addicted to caffeine, you can get a “coffee headache” if you go too long without a cup. Luckily, coffee is one of the most abundant beverages on earth, so you rarely have to worry about being without it. Coffee costs money, takes time, gives you coffee breath, and makes you pee too often. It can also make you jittery and nervous if you have too much. But if success is your dream and operating at peak mental performance is something you want, coffee is a good bet. I highly recommend it. In fact, I recommend it so strongly that I literally feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t developed the habit.

It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped.

We have some very suggestive evidence that the use of pesticides and herbicides affects our mental function and brain physiology, including increasing the incidence of Parkinson’s disease up to seven times in those most heavily exposed to them. This is not exactly a surprise when we realize that pesticides are designed to be neurotoxic to the pests.

There’s a trillion-dollar healthcare industry that makes money off of chronic diseases that stem from poor lifestyle and uncontrolled stress. Causing

...no lifestyle program, superfood, supplement or exercise regime can guarantee optimal health or even the prevention of disease and illness.

Genes determine our risk for a disease, but our lifestyle and environment can either trigger or suppress those risks.

With the right kinds of energy, every disease is curable.

On the West Coast, unbeknownst to me, Dean Cornish had started down the same path with several earlier published studies showing the benefits of lifestyle change.

FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE: THE FUTURE My goal in medicine is to help provide a way to navigate and sort through health information based on an entirely new way of thinking about health and disease. I want to find the right treatment for each person, regardless of what that treatment might be. If a medicine is the best treatment, I will choose that; if a change in diet, supplements, herbs, or lifestyle works best, then I will choose that. We must learn to treat the person, not the disease; the system, not just the symptoms. This is personalized medicine, the medicine of the future.

But for many people, an even more motivating example than increasing blood flow to your brain and your heart can be found in The Game Changers, a powerful new documentary film produced by legendary filmmaker James Cameron

You can improve insulin sensitivity and reduce your risk of diabetes (not to mention all manner of brain diseases) simply by making lifestyle changes that melt that fat away. And if you add exercise to the dieting, you’ll stand to gain even bigger benefits.

This research supports the hypothesis that elevations of insulin and IGF will increase the risk of disease and shorten life, and so any diet or lifestyle that elevates insulin and makes IGF more available to the cells and tissues is likely to be detrimental.

The solution to losing weight is a whole foods, plant-based diet, coupled with a reasonable amount of exercise. It is a long-term lifestyle change, rather than a quick-fix fad, and it can provide sustained weight loss while minimizing risk of chronic disease.

For example, the latest studies are showing that lifestyle changes are often actually better than drugs and surgery in treating and even reversing many of the most prevalent chronic diseases, including stable coronary heart disease and early-stage prostate cancer.

These days the legacy newborn babies bring into the world with them isn’t a lack of nutrition, but the opposite. So they are not only being born into households where people eat more and exercise less, but have an innate and enhanced vulnerability to succumb to the diseases that poor lifestyles bring. It has been suggested that children growing up today will be the first in modern history to live shorter, less healthy lives than those of their parents. We aren’t just eating ourselves into early graves, it seems, but breeding children to jump in alongside us.

Clinics and Hospitals are courts where you get accused of allowing foreign nutrients to invade your immune system. You plead guilty of the xenophobic attacks and then get sentenced to medication for your life, not knowing that healer is the ground you stand on, grounds that breeds life.

I encourage my patients to do what it takes to normalize their blood pressure so they do not require medication. Prescribing medications for high blood pressure has the effect of giving someone a permission slip. Medication has a minimal effect in reducing heart attack occurrence in patients with high blood pressure because it does not remove the underlying problem (atherosclerosis), it just treats the symptom. Patients given medication now falsely believe they are protected, and they continue to follow the same disease-causing lifestyle that led to the problem to begin with, until the inevitable occurs—their first heart attack or stroke. Maybe if high blood pressure medications had never been invented, doctors would have been forced to teach healthful living and nutritional disease causation to their patients. It is possible that many more lives could have been saved.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years.

Milk consumption has already been identified as an aggravating factor in the acne “epidemic” among adolescents, and preliminary successes have been reported with reduced milk consumption. It is even more important that excessive milk consumption can promote diseases commonly associated with a Western lifestyle

we already know enough scientifically about our microbes and our bodies to enable us to alter our lifestyles, eating patterns and diets to suit our individual needs and improve our health. It is useful to think of your microbial community as your own garden that you are responsible for. We need to make sure the soil (your intestines) that the plants (your microbes) grow in is healthy, containing plenty of nutrients; and to stop weeds or poisonous plants (toxic or disease microbes) taking over we need to cultivate the widest variety of different plants and seeds possible. I will give you a clue how we do this. Diversity is the key.

A study published in 2004 in the leading British medical journal, The Lancet, followed thirty thousand men and women on six continents and found that changing your lifestyle could prevent at least 90 percent of all heart disease. Yet for every dollar spent on health care in America, ninety-five cents goes to treat a disease after it has occurred.

Our bread is not what it used to be. It is more of a Frankenfood, a by-product of industrial agriculture or “super-starch and super-gluten.” Combine that with the damage our guts have suffered from our diet, environment, lifestyle, and overuse of antibiotics, acid blockers, and anti-inflammatories, and you have the perfect storm for gluten intolerance.

the ketogenic diet was originally designed in the 1920s to help treat epilepsy, according to a report published in Epilepsia. It was proven to be an effective form of treatment, particularly for childhood epilepsy. Scientists soon discovered that its benefits extended beyond epilepsy treatment. It has also been found helpful in weight loss and the prevention of other diseases.

I predicted that, in order to live a vital life, prevent disease, or optimize the chance for disease remission, you would need: Healthy relationships, including a strong network of family, friends, loved ones, and colleagues A healthy, meaningful way to spend your days, whether you work outside the home or in it A healthy, fully expressed creative life that allows your soul to sing its song A healthy spiritual life, including a sense of connection to the sacred in life A healthy sexual life that allows you the freedom to express your erotic self and explore fantasies A healthy financial life, free of undue financial stress, which ensures that the essential needs of your body are met A healthy environment, free of toxins, natural-disaster hazards, radiation, and other unhealthy factors that threaten the health of the body A healthy mental and emotional life, characterized by optimism and happiness and free of fear, anxiety, depression, and other mental-health ailments A healthy lifestyle that supports the physical health of the body, such as good nutrition, regular exercise, adequate sleep, and avoidance of unhealthy addictions

DURING THE PAST TWO TO THREE DECADES, we have acquired substantial evidence that most chronic diseases in America can be partially attributed to bad nutrition. Expert government panels have said it, the surgeon general has said it and academic scientists have said it. More people die because of the way they eat than by tobacco use, accidents or any other lifestyle or environmental factor.

BODY - cultural tendency: maintain lifestyle; treat health problems with surgery and medication / Principle; prevent diseases and problems by aligning lifestyle to be in harmony with established, universally accepted principles of health. MIND - cultural tendency: watch television: ‘entertain me’ / Principles: read broadly and deeply, continuous education HEART - cultural tendency - use relationships with others to forward your personal, selfish interests / principle: deep, respectful listening and serving others brings greatest fulfilment and joy SPIRIT - cultural tendency - succumb to growing secularism and cynicism / principle - recognise that the source of our basic need for meaning and of the positive things we seek in life is principles - which natural laws I personally believe to have their source in God.

Epigenetic research reveals that our lifestyle choices—the foods we eat, the supplements we take, the exercise we pursue, and even the emotional content of our daily experiences—are all involved in orchestrating chemical reactions that activate or deactivate parts of our genome that will either code for outcomes that threaten health and pave the way for disease or create an internal environment conducive to longevity and disease resistance.

Some latent infections (parasites in particular) appear to stymie many people in the management of their autoimmune disease, even after fully adopting the recommendations in The Paleo Approach. This means that these infections cannot be outwitted by diet and lifestyle modifications alone. While this is addressed more in chapter 8, it is important to mention now that diet and lifestyle modifications will need to be implemented in conjunction with treatment for infections in order to see substantial results.

Eliminate these foods: • Sugar • Soda • Processed carbs • Trans fats • Processed meats • Excess vegetable oils Eat more of these foods: • Wild salmon • Berries and cherries • Grass-fed meat • Vegetables • Nuts • Beans • Dark chocolate • Garlic and turmeric • Pomegranate juice, green tea, and red wine • Extra-virgin olive oil Make these lifestyle changes to reduce stress: • Meditate or practice deep breathing • Express your emotions • Play • Cultivate intimacy and pleasure • And most of all . . . enjoy your life!

You need to take time to get alone with God, to get in a secret place with God and cry out to him. Don’t pray convenient prayers. Prayers that don’t move you won’t move him. They’ve got to be sacrificial prayers. They’ve got to be prayers that cost. They’ve got to affect how you think and how you feel. You pray and you say, ‘God, I don’t want to live knowing that a lifestyle of miracles is possible, that I could actually live like your Son Jesus lived, and yet not experience that. I don’t want to live another kind of a life. It’s the only way I can possibly be satisfied.’ And we cry out to God. We may have friends that have this disease or that disease, so we stand before the Lord, we lift up our voice and we go into that secret place with the Lord and we cry out to him. We bring the names of diseases or afflictions or problems. We bring them up before the Lord. And then when we are in public we look for people with problems. The real key for this thing is that in private you cry out to God and in public you take risk.   HEALINGS

WHY DID THE rise of agriculture launch the evolution of our crowd infectious diseases? One reason just mentioned is that agriculture sustains much higher human population densities than does the hunting-gathering lifestyle—on the average, 10 to 100 times higher. In addition, hunter-gatherers frequently shift camp and leave behind their own piles of feces with accumulated microbes and worm larvae. But farmers are sedentary and live amid their own sewage, thus providing microbes with a short path from one person’s body into another’s drinking water.

What makes the situation so outrageous is that the healthcare industry has traditionally encouraged the American public to be passive consumers—to wait for developing technologies and new drugs rather than to accept the role they play in the expression of their own health and the origin of disease. The research clearly indicates that when consumers take responsibility for their health and actively participate in lifestyle modifications and decision making, they usually don’t get as sick in the first place, and when they do get sick, they heal faster.

. You are overfed yet under-nourished. Your body needs specific nutrients to run properly or you will get mentally and physically sick. I’m talking about illnesses such as heart disease, some cancers, diabetes and depression, for starters. So, if you’re not eating the right foods—or your “toxic waste” is inhibiting nutrient absorption—your mind will constantly “scream” at your stomach to eat more. It does this in the form of cravings and hunger. Problem is, most people just eat more “nutrient-dead food” and your body continues to starve and cravings spiral out of control.

One of the key reasons that rates of dementia have fallen sharply since the 1970s is the advent of improved treatments for heart ailments. What’s good for the heart is actually very good for the brain. The steps you take to keep your heart arteries unclogged also keep brain arteries open. Cholesterol-lowering drugs have dramatically reduced coronary artery disease and are effective even in people who live sedentary lifestyles and eat foods that aren’t “heart healthy.” Statins, prescribed to lower cholesterol, have lately been shown to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in most people.

Weight Loss Versus Health Gain: "Forget the idea of 'losing' anything. Let that happen organically. Instead, focus only on adding the healthy habit of juicing into your system. Think only about the healthy changes you are integrating into your body and not so much about taking anything away. Now, this is more empowering position in which you put yourself. You are in charge of the adding, but you have no control of the subtracting. Let the weight loss be a natural result of the changes that you make and think in terms of adding health into your system instead. Juicing is one such addition.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years.

Yes, changing your lifestyle may seem impractical. It may seem impractical to give up meat and high-fat foods, but I wonder how practical it is to be 350 pounds and have Type 2 diabetes at the age of fifteen, like the girl mentioned at the start of this chapter. I wonder how practical it is to have a lifelong condition that can’t be cured by drugs or surgery; a condition that often leads to heart disease, stroke, blindness or amputation; a condition that might require you to inject insulin into your body every day for the rest of your life. Radically changing our diets may be “impractical,” but it might also be worth it.

It is also worth mentioning that several ailments are known to occur very frequently in conjunction with autoimmune disorders. They are: Cholangitis Chronic fatigue syndrome Eczema Fibromyalgia Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS); this occurs frequently in conjunction with autoimmune thyroid diseases These are not autoimmune diseases themselves (or at least have not been confirmed as such), but because of their association with autoimmune disease, they may indicate that an autoimmune disease is present. If you suffer from one of these conditions, it is a sign that it’s time to make diet and lifestyle changes to keep autoimmunity at bay.

study of thirty thousand elderly people in fifty-two countries found that switching to an overall healthy lifestyle—eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, not smoking, exercising moderately, and not drinking too much alcohol—lowered heart disease rates by approximately 50 percent.14 Reducing exposure to carcinogens, such as tobacco and sodium nitrite, have been shown to decrease the incidence of lung and stomach cancers, and it is likely (more evidence is needed) that lowering exposures to other known carcinogens, such as benzene and formaldehyde, will reduce the incidence of other cancers. Prevention really is the most powerful medicine, but we as a species consistently lack the political or psychological will to act preventively in our own best interests. It is worthwhile to ask to what extent efforts to treat the symptoms of common mismatch diseases have the effect of promoting dysevolution by taking attention and resources away from prevention. On an individual level, am I more likely to eat unhealthy foods and exercise insufficiently if I know I’ll have access to medical care to treat the symptoms of the diseases these choices cause many years later? More broadly within our society, is the money we allocate to treating diseases coming at the expense of money to prevent them?

Our deeply-rooted beliefs about the wholesomeness of milk and dairy products should be re-considered under careful, scientific evaluation. Given the tumor promotor effect of IGF-1, patients with tumorous disease should restrict consumption of milk and milk protein. The same applies to patients with coronary heart disease and with a family history of neurodegenerative disease. Milk consumption has already been identified as an aggravating factor in the acne “epidemic” among adolescents, and preliminary successes have been reported with reduced milk consumption. It is even more important that excessive milk consumption can promote diseases commonly associated with a Western lifestyle

If I were to make a list of focus for well-being, I would begin with lifestyle (the totality of one’s circumstance and how that is engaged, including job and relationships, and proximity to nature), attending to the physical functions correctly (posture, breathing, exercise, food, rest, etc.), consistent expression of your natural range of qualities, working and playing well and hard, and designing things so that you are doing what compels you. Obviously, you can’t give this list out as a prescription for physical problems and diseases, but then again, it is probably the correct prescription. If one were to follow it, any specific problem, even extreme, would almost certainly resolve itself.

Food isn’t just food, though. It’s comfort and memory. It’s family recipes and meals shared with friends. Food is a fulcrum of socializing and relationships, and now you don’t get to just show up to that. You have to think ahead and tell people your dietary needs and explain them again when they’re lunkheads about it or, worse, well-meaning, but very poor at understanding it. You’ll probably end up accidentally eating something that hurts you every once in a while, and going to a restaurant will sort of suck until you find places that have nice gluten-free options. It’s a big deal. It’s a disease that’s interrupted and fundamentally altered your lifestyle, impacted your relationships. It’s very valid to be upset about that.

One of my colleagues in Duke, Ralph Keeney, noted that America's top killer isn't cancer or heart disease, nor is it smoking or obesity. It's our inability to make smart choices and overcome our own self-destructive behaviours. Ralph estimates that about half of us will make a lifestyle decision that will ultimately lead us to an early grave. And as if this were not bad enough, it seems that the rate at which we make these deadly decisions is increasing at an alarming pace. I suspect that over the next few decades, real improvements in life expectancy and quality are less likely to be driven by medical technology than by improved decision making. Since focusing on long-term benefits is not our natural tendency, we need to more carefully examine the cases in which we repeatedly fail, and try to come up with some remedies for these situations. For an overweight movie loved, the key might be to enjoy watching a film while walking on the treadmill. The trick is to find the right behavioural antidote for each problem. By pairing something that we love with something that we dislike but that is good for us, we might be able to harness desire with outcome - and thus overcome some of the problems with self-control we face every day.

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

There presently exist three recognized conceptualizations of the antisocial construct: antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), dissocial personality disorder in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10; World Health Organization, 1992), and psychopathy as formalized by Hare with the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003). A conundrum for therapists is that these conceptualizations are overlapping but not identical, emphasizing different symptom clusters. The DSM-5 emphasizes the overt conduct of the patient through a criteria set that includes criminal behavior, lying, reckless and impulsive behavior, aggression, and irresponsibility in the areas of work and finances. In contrast, the criteria set for dissocial personality disorder is less focused on conduct and includes a mixture of cognitive signs (e.g., a tendency to blame others, an attitude of irresponsibility), affective signs (e.g., callousness, inability to feel guilt, low frustration tolerance), and interpersonal signs (e.g., tendency to form relationships but not maintain them). The signs and symptoms of psychopathy are more complex and are an almost equal blend of the conduct and interpersonal/affective aspects of functioning. The two higher-order factors of the PCL-R reflect this blend. Factor 1, Interpersonal/Affective, includes signs such as superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulation, grandiosity, lack of remorse and empathy, and shallow affect. Factor 2, Lifestyle/Antisocial, includes thrill seeking, impulsivity, irresponsibility, varied criminal activity, and disinhibited behavior (Hare & Neumann, 2008). Psychopathy can be regarded as the most severe of the three disorders. Patients with psychopathy would be expected to also meet criteria for ASPD or dissocial personality disorder, but not everyone diagnosed with ASPD or dissocial personality disorder will have psychopathy (Hare, 1996; Ogloff, 2006). As noted by Ogloff (2006), the distinctions among the three antisocial conceptualizations are such that findings based on one diagnostic group are not necessarily applicable to the others and produce different prevalence rates in justice-involved populations. Adding a further layer of complexity, therapists will encounter patients who possess a mixture of features from all three diagnostic systems rather than a prototypical presentation of any one disorder.

The first step in retracing our way to health is to abandon our attachment to what is called positive thinking. Too many times in the course of palliative care work I sat with dejected people who expressed their bewilderment at having developed cancer. “I have always been a positive thinker,” one man in his late forties told me. “I have never given in to pessimistic thoughts. Why should I get cancer?” As an antidote to terminal optimism, I have recommended the power of negative thinking. “Tongue in cheek, of course,” I quickly add. “What I really believe in is the power of thinking.” As soon as we qualify the word thinking with the adjective positive, we exclude those parts of reality that strike us as “negative.” That is how most people who espouse positive thinking seem to operate. Genuine positive thinking begins by including all our reality. It is guided by the confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be. As Dr. Michael Kerr points out, compulsive optimism is one of the ways we bind our anxiety to avoid confronting it. That form of positive thinking is the coping mechanism of the hurt child. The adult who remains hurt without being aware of it makes this residual defence of the child into a life principle. The onset of symptoms or the diagnosis of a disease should prompt a two-pronged inquiry: what is this illness saying about the past and present, and what will help in the future? Many approaches focus only on the second half of that healing dyad without considering fully what led to the manifestation of illness in the first place. Such “positive” methods fill the bookshelves and the airwaves. In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively. Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism.” Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden. Even more fundamentally, not posing those questions is itself a source of stress. First, “positive thinking” is based on an unconscious belief that we are not strong enough to handle reality. Allowing this fear to dominate engenders a state of childhood apprehension. Whether or not the apprehension is conscious, it is a state of stress. Second, lack of essential information about ourselves and our situation is one of the major sources of stress and one of the potent activators of the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress response. Third, stress wanes as independent, autonomous control increases. One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything. Like a leaf blown by the wind, the driven person is controlled by forces more powerful than he is. His autonomous will is not engaged, even if he believes that he has “chosen” his stressed lifestyle and even if he enjoys his activities. The choices he makes are attached to invisible strings. He is still unable to say no, even if it is only to his own drivenness. When he finally wakes up, he shakes his head, Pinocchio-like, and says, “How foolish I was when I was a puppet.

It isn’t genes alone that determine our health destiny, but instead it’s our food and lifestyle choices. Genes do not control us, they respond to what we do!

This is also known as patient-centered health care, rather than disease-focused medicine, and it is a fundamental underpinning of functional medicine—a revolutionary new way to understand the underlying causes of disease and how our genes, our environment, and our lifestyle interact to determine health or disease.

When the microbiota of people living in Western cultures was analyzed in comparison with that of people living in rural settings who had hunter-gatherer–type lifestyles and with that of wild primates like chimpanzees, our gut microflora was found to be significantly lacking in terms of both richness and biodiversity.

what is at the root of lifestyle-related diseases and conditions like heart disease and stroke? Take one guess. Systemic inflammation.

Are vegetarian diets an effective alternative, or complement, to drugs and surgery? Although studies designed to answer this question are limited in number and small in size, their results are encouraging. In 1990, Dr. Dean Ornish demonstrated that a very low-fat vegetarian diet (less than 10 per cent calories from fat) and lifestyle changes (stress management, aerobic exercise, and group therapy) could not only slow the progression of atherosclerosis, but significantly reverse it. After one year, 82 per cent of the experimental group participants experienced regression of their disease, while in the control group the disease continued to progress. The control group followed a “heart healthy” diet commonly prescribed by physicians that provided less than 30 per cent calories from fat and less than 200 milligrams of cholesterol a day. Over the next four years, people in the experimental group continued to reverse their arterial damage, while those in the control group became steadily worse and had twice as many cardiac events. In 1999, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn reported on a twelve-year study of eleven patients following a very low-fat vegan diet, coupled with cholesterol-lowering medication. Approximately 70 per cent experienced reversal of their disease. In the eight years prior to the study, these patients experienced a total of forty-eight cardiac events, while in over a decade of the trial, only one non-compliant patient experienced an event.

The hypothesis was based on decades of eyewitness testimony from missionary and colonial physicians and two consistent observations: that these “diseases of civilization” were rare to nonexistent among isolated populations that lived traditional lifestyles and ate traditional diets, and that these diseases appeared in these populations only after they were exposed to Western foods—in particular, sugar, flour, white rice, and maybe beer.

If I could bottle the benefits of a healthy lifestyle in a pill, it would become a blockbuster drug.

human history was dominated by what Jared Diamond had called the “conditions of unpredictably alternating feast and famine that characterized the traditional human lifestyle.” Reasonable as this may seem, we have no evidence that food was ever any harder to come by for humans than for any other organisms on the planet, at least not until our ancestors began radically reshaping their environment ten thousand years ago, with the invention of agriculture.

concluded that at least 75 to 80 percent of cancers in the United States might be avoidable with appropriate changes in diet and lifestyle.

In the Forks Over Knives documentary, the filmmakers asked, is there a solution to chronic disease that is “so comprehensive, yet so straightforward, that it’s mind-boggling that more of us haven’t taken it seriously”? The answer, we believe, is an emphatic yes—with the solution, of course, being a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle. But don’t take our word for it. Dive in and experience the benefits for yourself!

Many people experience a range of emotions when finding out they have diabetes, including fear, sadness, guilt, and resentment. To deal with these feelings, they may deny the existence of the problem, trying not to think about it and hoping it will somehow just go away. They often continue to eat and behave just as they did before they received the diagnosis. They may forbid friends and family from commenting or admonishing them on their behavior. Not surprisingly, this behavior often leads to out-of-control blood sugars, and, depending on the length of the denial, damage to blood vessels or organs. When this damage comes to light, it is often accompanied by more fear, sadness, guilt, and resentment, which then makes the situation feel even more intolerable. This pattern is not uncommon in diabetes, and it is a cycle that keeps the person with diabetes stuck and unable to really manage their disease.

It is well known that onset of the disease is affected by lifestyle, yet even when the at-risk subjects were given information about their susceptibility, many did not adjust their fat intake or increase exercise or consult medical specialists to minimize their risk.

The most powerful medicine on the face of the Earth is not drug medications, dietary supplements, or invasive therapies; rather, it is a healthy lifestyle.

Depending on the toxin, the level of exposure, and the autoimmune disease, removing the offending chemical from the environment may or may not provide a benefit. In some cases, removing that trigger to autoimmune disease will enable a full recovery to take place. In other cases, the damage has been done, and removing the harmful substance will not promote healing. (That doesn’t mean you can’t recover; it just means that diet and lifestyle are even more important.)

Ayurveda is useful in any chronic illness. Coronary artery disease, rheumatoid arthritis or other inflammations. Bronchial asthma, obesity, type 2 diabetes. Because these are all linked to lifestyle”. 

❝ Design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution. Encouraged by glossy lifestyle magazines, and marketing departments, it’s become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible by means of colour, shape and surprise. It’s historic and idealistic purpose, to serve industry and the happy consuming masses at the same time, of conceiving things easier to make and better to live with, seems to have been side-tracked. The virus has already infected the everyday environment. The need for businesses to attract attention provides the perfect carrier for the disease. Design makes things seem special, and who wants normal if they can have special? And that’s the problem. What has grown naturally and unselfconsciously over the years cannot easily be replaced. The normality of a street of shops which has developed over time, offering various products and trades, is a delicate organism. Not that old things shouldn’t be replaced or that new things are bad, just that things which are designed to attract attention are usually unsatisfactory. There are better ways to design than putting a big effort into making something look special. Special is generally less useful than normal, and less rewarding in the long term. Special things demand attention for the wrong reasons, interrupting potentially good atmosphere with their awkward presence.

People are just beginning to realize that they are no longer destined to suffer from diseases—or even minor ailments—that are caused by modern food and depleting lifestyles.

The goal of Look Ahead was to reduce heart disease, a common complication of diabetes. The study, conducted in sixteen clinical centers in the United States, assigned about five thousand adults with type 2 diabetes to either a low-fat diet with intensive lifestyle modification or to usual care. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013,33 was terminated prematurely for “futility.” Analysis by independent statisticians found no reduction of heart disease among participants assigned to the intensive low-fat diet, and no prospect of ever seeing such a benefit emerge.

The good news, as a senior scientist at the Center for Alzheimer’s Research entitled a review article, is that “Alzheimer’s Disease Is Incurable but Preventable.”61 Diet and lifestyle changes could potentially prevent millions of cases a year.62 How? There is an emerging consensus that “what is good for our hearts is also good for our heads,”63 because clogging of the arteries inside of the brain with atherosclerotic plaque is thought to play a pivotal role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.64 It is not surprising, then, that the dietary centerpiece of the 2014 “Dietary and Lifestyle Guidelines for the Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease,” published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, was: “Vegetables, legumes (beans, peas, and lentils), fruits, and whole grains should replace meats and dairy products as primary staples of the diet.”65

Type 2 diabetes has been called the “Black Death of the twenty-first century” in terms of its exponential spread around the world and its devastating health impacts. Instead of the bubonic plague, though, the pathological agents in obesity and type 2 diabetes are identified as “high-fat and high-calorie diets,” and instead of fleas and rodents, the causes are “advertisements and inducements to poor lifestyle.”1 More than twenty million Americans are currently diagnosed with diabetes, a tripling of cases since 1990.2 At this rate, the CDC predicts that one in three Americans will be diabetic by midcentury.3 Currently in the United States, diabetes causes about 50,000 cases of kidney failure, 75,000 lower extremity amputations, 650,000 cases of vision loss,4 and about 75,000 deaths every year.

Like many young doctors, I had received virtually no instruction in nutrition. Then, as now, medical schools focused almost exclusively on drugs and surgery, even though lifestyle causes most cases of heart disease and other chronic disabling conditions. In

The good news: Type 2 diabetes is almost always preventable, often treatable, and sometimes even reversible through diet and lifestyle changes.

With this in mind, the American Heart Association came up with “The Simple 7” factors that can lead to a healthier life: not smoking, not being overweight, being “very active” (defined as the equivalent of walking at least twenty-two minutes a day), eating healthier (for example, lots of fruits and vegetables), having below-average cholesterol, having normal blood pressure, and having normal blood sugar levels.27 The American Heart Association’s goal is to reduce heart-disease deaths by 20 percent by 2020.28 If more than 90 percent of heart attacks may be avoided with lifestyle changes,29 why so modest an aim?

physical activity level (PAL), the ratio of the energy you spend per day relative to the energy you would spend by resting in bed and doing absolutely nothing. PALs for male adults with clerical or administrative jobs that involve sitting all day long average 1.56 in developed countries and 1.61 in less developed countries; in contrast, PALs for workers involved in manufacturing or farming average 1.78 in developed countries and 1.86 in less developed countries.17 Hunter-gatherer PALs average 1.85, about the same as those of farmers or other people whose job requires them to be active.18 Therefore, the amount of energy a typical office worker spends being active on an average day has decreased by roughly 15 percent for many people in the last generation or two. Such a reduction is not trivial. If an average-sized male farmer or carpenter who spends approximately 3,000 calories per day suddenly switches to a sedentary lifestyle by retiring, his energy expenditure will decline by about 450 calories a day. Unless he compensates by eating a lot less or exercising more intensively, he’ll grow obese.

Leaving aside the fight over fats, other characteristics of modern lifestyles also differ from those of our ancestors in ways that contribute to atherosclerosis and heart disease. One of these is overconsumption of salt—the only rock we eat. Most hunter-gatherers get sufficient salt, about 1 to 2 grams a day, from meat, and they have few other natural sources of this mineral unless they live near the ocean.74 Today we have salt in overabundance; we use it to preserve food, and it tastes so good that many people consume more than 3 to 5 grams a day. Excess

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