A warning is definitely needed for the Western world, particularly for people eating food out of grocery stores and restaurants. Know anyone like that?
Like the aristocrats of ancient Rome, many Americans are literally eating themselves to an early death. I feel that with a little bit of basic knowledge, supported by statistics and research from the cutting edge of health and science, people can take some simple steps and put the odds of living a longer healthier life back in their favor. There are 8 major diseases that have been sweeping the land since the 1940's. All of them were virtually unheard of at the turn of the 20th century.
I started to do some of my own research, because I am one of those 77 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964, that is quickly aging & I want to preserve my health as long as possible.
There is a lot of contradictory information available, which is why so 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 to believe anymore--I'll just eat what I want and take my chances".
Incredibly, some of the so-called studies I read were funded by the very industries that were directly affected by the results! For example, how serious 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 asthma and allergy patients that was funded by the Dairy Council of America?
I call this "junk" science. They start out with a proposition to prove, and then they find a way to manipulate the data in order to prove it! I decided to sift through the science and only qualify studies where the funding source was disconnected from an interested party.
In addition, I started studying people who were healthy themselves and maybe had overcome personal illness through holistic healing or natural remedies, people who had experienced definite, 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 huge number of people that supported the idea that good health resulted from right choices with regard to food, nutrition, water, exercise and rest. Using a combination of carefully filtered scientific studies, stories, and good old common sense, I found that if the body is given those five elements in the proper form and amount, the body can solve almost any problem.
Most of us assume we are living longer, because the longevity stats have gone way up in the last 100 years. But the sad truth is that because these 8 diseases are growing so fast, we are actually living shorter...but taking longer to die. Our technology keeps us alive longer, but we sacrifice the quality of life in the process. Can there really be dignity when our elderly spend months or even years in a vegetative state hooked up to a machine?
What about the economic impact of this trend?
I used to think that normal aging was the same for everybody. You get one of the eight deadly diseases, and then you slowly die. Imagine my surprise when I learned that heart disease, the number one killer of Americans, is a relatively new disease! The first modern cases were reported in 1912, and even then it was 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 U.S. textbook, Principles and Practice of Medicine, devoted only 15 pages to cancer. Breast and prostate cancers received no mention; colon cancer received 2 lines. In contrast, the 1994 edition of Principles of Internal Medicine devoted 174 pages to this affliction.
Stroke, which killed only a very few people a hundred years ago, is today the number three deadly disease killer of Americans.
Alzheimer's wasn't even diagnosed until 1907. Today, 40% of those over 85 are suffering from it.
Diabetes has increased 600% in just the last generation. Each year, Diabetes kills more than twice as many American women as breast cancer.
Over 40 million Americans suffer with some form of Arthritis or Osteoporosis. Ask any American woman what disease she fears most and she'll probably say breast cancer. Yet hip fractures kill more women than cancers of the breast, cervix and uterus combined.
Finally, there are the auto immune disorders like 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. 20 years ago, they didn't even have names for most of this stuff and many of them were written off by doctors as psycho-sematic. But the harsh symptoms of these auto-immune disorders are currently 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's happened in our lifetime. But we're acting as if all of these diseases are just a part of the normal aging process! Not so! There is nothing normal or natural about degenerative disease. We have convinced ourselves 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's the tragedy. When a plane crashes and a few hundred people die, it makes the front page news for days. But when a million people die of heart disease or a half a million die of cancer, you'd think there'd be more of an outcry. It's the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing every single hour of every single day of every single month for an entire year, year after year.
How long do you plan on living? To what age? 70? 80? 90? 100+? What do you think is reasonable? Now, take that figure and add 10 extra healthy years to it. What if you could live to 100 and beyond without the pain and disease that most people think comes with old age?
Today the average person lives to about 76. That's 79 for women and 72 for men. But in certain areas of the world centenarians are common. We have only lately started to uncover why.
Today, the risk of dying of any thing before you are 40 is really very small. But starting at 40, you enter the zone of the 8 deadly diseases. How deadly are they? They kill more than 80% of us, which is sad because the majority of the time they are preventable.
In summary food, nutrition, water, exercise and rest are the keys to enjoying the highest level of optimum health for many years after we thought possible.
See you at my hundredth birthday party, will you be there?
Sherrie Chastain
Holistic Healing Health Care Consultant
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