There is no reason in the world why over 75 percent of the American people should be suffering from degenerative and deficiency diseases. Disease never comes without a cause. If a person is sick and ailing it is because he has been doing something wrong. He needs an education in how to live a healthy life.
—Jay M. Hoffman, Ph.D., Hunza
Each person carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides in each patient a chance to go to work.
—Dr. Albert Schweitzer
The human body is designed to be healthy. So why are we experiencing an epidemic of chronic, degenerative disease and going broke trying to pay for it? Despite the trillions of dollars we have spent on medical research and health care, the incidence of chronic disease continues to increase. The body has built-in mechanisms to repair damage, optimize performance, and keep you fully functional—well into your hundreds. So why isn’t this happening? The truth is that our epidemic of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s, is something we have created by making mistakes. There is no excuse to continue to make these mistakes. We created this epidemic—we can uncreate it!
The Changes We Have Made
Never before in human history have so many health-related factors changed so rapidly and so completely. The basic nutritional, environmental, and behavioral dimensions of human existence have been altered severely and rapidly. Since the Industrial Revolution, and most especially during the past century, we have:
• Completely changed our diet.
• Created a toxic environment.
• Developed new patterns of behavior and lifestyle.
You cannot make so many fundamental changes and expect them to have no effect. We are now experiencing the results of these changes. Our way of life is completely different from the lives of even a century ago. In terms of a human life span, these changes have been made too slowly for us to notice, but from an evolutionary standpoint, they have come too rapidly for healthy adaptation by our bodies and minds.
Granted, in this millennium, most of us cannot grow our own food and harvest it when ripe, walk to our destinations, and avoid all the stresses of modern industrial society. However, by recognizing what contributed to the health of traditionally healthy people, combined with an understanding of the significant changes we have made to our own environments and lifestyles, we can learn how to compensate. We can learn how to make healthy choices while still living a modern way of life.
Here are some examples of how we are creating our problems and making ourselves sick.
Changes to Our Diet
• Fruit and vegetable plants are now grown with artificial fertilizers that produce more food per acre, but these foods are deficient in essential nutrients. Modern farming methods have led to depletion of minerals in the soil, which leads to mineral deficiency in us.
• Many foods are harvested before they are ripe to prevent spoilage during transportation and distribution. Premature harvesting does not allow food to reach its full nutritional maturity.
• The nutritional content of food deteriorates during storage, transportation, and distribution. Nutrition starts declining within hours of harvesting. In two days, the losses are significant, yet the average age of produce in a supermarket is two weeks. The average age of apples is ten months.
• Most of our food is processed in order to make it easier to store and consume. Processing depletes the nutritional content. Such foods include sugar, flour, pasta, bread, breakfast cereal, and other canned, bottled, 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.
Changes to Our Environment
• The farming of large single crops has created new and serious problems of insect infestations, creating the need for insecticides. Insecticides, along with the use of herbicides and fungicides, have made food production methods a significant contributor to our toxic environment and toxic 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 production from coal, oil, and gas is 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 thousands of man-made chemicals into our environment. These chemicals put toxic loads into our bodies, disrupt hormones, and interfere with neuroimmune defense and repair systems. Of the 100,000 chemicals in commerce today, barely 4,000 have been tested for safety and only a few dozen for interactive effects. Meanwhile, about 4,000 new chemicals are added each year.
• Electromagnetic pollution is damaging our health, but we aren’t paying attention because we can’t see it, smell it, or feel it.
Changes in Our Behavior and Lifestyle
• Movement is essential to health and life itself, yet we are the most sedentary people in history.
• Sunlight is like an essential nutrient, but most of us live and work indoors and don’t get enough.
• The body has its own biological clock that is essential to health. Our nocturnal lifestyles are upsetting that clock.
• The constant noise in our society is not only damaging our hearing, it is upsetting our normal biochemistry.
• Man-made sources of radiation, such as x-rays, are damaging our genes.
• Stressful lifestyles, with demands for performance run by the clock, are taking a toll.
An editorial by Joseph Scherger, M.D., in a 2000 Hippocrates edition said, “Lifestyle factors now loom as the leading cause of premature death.”
Most people expect to be sick at least one or more times each year, to have to cope with at least one serious illness by midlife, and in all likelihood, to die of one or several diseases by their eighties, if not sooner. Most people also think that poor health is mainly the result of bad luck or bad genes and that good health and longevity are a matter of good fortune. Nothing could be further from the truth.
With few exceptions, poor health is a matter of choice. But most of the time, we don’t know we are choosing to be sick because no one ever told us that. If someone did tell us, we didn’t believe it; our health-nut cousin told us not to eat sugar, but what did she know? Unfortunately, many young people today are sick because of the poor choices that their parents and even grandparents made. Disease is not like a meteorite falling out of the sky and hitting us over the head. We make ourselves sick by making bad choices. Conversely, we get healthy and stay healthy by making good choices.
Most people think that they are healthy as long as they are able to function normally. Few people know what optimal health actually feels like. This level of health, with its disease-free boundless energy, vitality, and mental clarity, is rarely experienced in our modern, industrialized society. Perhaps that’s why hardly anyone accepts the notion that a vigorous and healthy life beyond 100 years is within reach. In reality, that kind of long, healthy life is what we should all expect. We know this because communities of people around the world have traditionally achieved this level of health.
A Poor Record
Very few of us are growing old in good health and dying naturally of old age. Instead, we get sick and die from entirely preventable diseases such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes.
The United States spends far more on health, in total and per capita, than any other nation. Yet the World Health Organization ranks the United States only thirty-seventh in overall health. Given that the United States spends more than anyone else, shouldn’t it be the healthiest nation on Earth? Do you suppose the fact that the Standard American Diet will not support healthy life, even in rats, could be a factor?
People in their teens or early twenties should be at peak levels of health, but that’s not what’s happening. The majority of our young people are sick with allergies, asthma, attention deficit, autism, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other diseases. Autopsies performed on accident victims of this age group reveal that nearly 80 percent have early stages of heart disease, and 15 percent have arteries that are more than half blocked. These young people thought they were healthy; they appeared to be healthy; they lived normal lives; but they were definitely not healthy.
Immigrants to the United States are, on average, healthier and live longer than the general population, largely because they tend to adhere to their traditional diets. The second generation, however, tends to adopt the processed-food American diet, and their health suffers.
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 disease is so common, we have come to believe that it 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. But being healthy is far more than being free of obvious disease symptoms. Healthy means that all of your cells are functioning at the highest level that genetic capacity allows. Ask yourself: Are you truly healthy with all of your cells and systems working as they should, or are you just not obviously sick?
Unfortunately, we are a sick population, growing sicker by the day and, worse yet, blind to our sickness. Here are some realities:
• More than three out of four Americans have a diagnosable chronic disease.
• More than two out of three regularly take prescription or over-the-counter drugs.
• More than three out of four people over age sixty regularly take two
or more prescription drugs.
• One out of four children under age eighteen already has at least one chronic disease.
Despite all this, two out of three Americans believe themselves to be in “good” or “excellent” health. How can you think you are in good or excellent health when you are taking medications and experiencing symptoms of disease? It’s because disease is so common; we think disease is health so long as we can keep functioning. As long as we continue to think that disease is health, improving health becomes difficult. If you lack vitality or have other bothersome symptoms, you are not healthy, and if you have a diagnosable disease, you are definitely not healthy.
For example, most people with allergies don’t think of themselves as having a chronic immune dysfunction disease; they think of allergies as an inconvenience in an otherwise healthy body. But chronic allergic reactions accelerate the aging process, tax the body and the immune system, and make you much more susceptible to infections and other diseases. Allergies are not just a benign inconvenience; they are a serious immune disorder. Every allergic reaction does long-term damage to the body, reducing longevity. Healthy people do not have allergies.
We are in a state of denial. Some people assert that we are now healthier and living longer, but that claim is medical industry propaganda. The incidence of virtually every chronic disease continues to increase, and the health of the American people is in a long-term downtrend.
The Colossal Failure of Modern Medicine
Our epidemic of chronic disease is the result of the fundamental changes we have made in our diet, environment, and lifestyle, but another dimension to our problems is the colossal failure of conventional medicine to provide meaningful health care. In fact, medical intervention has become the leading cause of death in the United States.
Conventional medicine excels at trauma care and crisis intervention. However, that is only 10 to 15 percent of medicine. The other 85 to 90 percent doesn’t work. It is completely inadequate for dealing with chronic and degenerative disease because it has little to no basis in science. It doesn’t even meet the basic requirements of logic and common sense in the light of what is known scientifically. For chronic conditions, conventional medicine is not only ineffective, it does more harm than good.
We teach our medical students to look at symptoms, give the symptoms a name, and then prescribe drugs to treat that so-called disease. These students learn nothing about health. Health is rarely even mentioned in most medical schools. Nor are they taught to look for or address the underlying causes of the problem being presented. Yet only by addressing causes can problems be solved. Treating symptoms with drugs solves nothing; it only makes the disease chronic and creates a host of new problems. New problems arise because prescription drugs work by poisoning the body. Drugs are toxins that block enzymes and receptors. They do nothing to cure disease; they merely suppress the symptoms, while their toxicity creates havoc, throwing the body’s chemistry into chaos.
Biochemical chaos is disease, and prescription drugs cause chaos. This is why medical intervention is a leading cause of disease and the leading cause of death. To obscure these inconvenient facts and the entirely new disease problems caused by drugs, our physicians don’t call these new problems “diseases”; they call them “side effects.” When you are sick, your body chemistry is abnormal. The only way to restore health is to restore normal chemistry. Drugs do exactly the opposite; their toxicity creates even more abnormalities and disease. To base an entire medical system on the use of toxic chemicals will go down in history as one of humankind’s greatest blunders.
Most people think of conventional medicine as the best that our science has to offer. Wrong! The real problem with medicine, and the reason it is so dysfunctional and dangerous and inflicts so much needless suffering, is because it has little basis in science. Everyone who has studied this matter has arrived at similar conclusions: about 85 percent of all medical procedures have no basis in science. Based on anecdotal evidence, they have never been proven by scientific method to be safe or effective.
We have the technology to travel to Mars, yet we have a system of medicine that is stuck in the seventeenth century. The origin of conventional medicine’s problems can be traced back to Isaac Newton and the seventeenth-century philosophers and scientists who saw the universe as a giant machine. As a result, physicians began to look at the human body as a machine, a grouping of separate parts and pieces, similar to a mechanical clock. By contrast, much older traditional Chinese medicine looks at the body as a complex energy system, with disease as disharmony in the system. This difference is critical because the body is not just a bunch of parts stuck together. You cannot treat one part and expect success.
It is astounding that while almost every other human endeavor, whether in the sciences, business, economics, or investment, has advanced to a whole-systems approach, medicine is stuck focusing on the parts. Disease is viewed as symptoms limited to a body part, separate from the body as a whole. The physician’s job is to treat the symptoms. But suppressing symptoms is not the same as eliminating the systemic causes of the symptoms. This mechanical view of the body works well if you have a broken bone. However, it doesn’t work at all if you have cancer or some other systemic disease. This is why data from the National Center for Health Statistics show that the cancer survival rate today is essentially the same as it was in 1950. No progress has been made, and no progress can be made as long as the focus remains on the tumor, the part, while ignoring the systemic process that created the tumor.
Meanwhile, modern science recognizes the body as a complex energy system and disease as an imbalance in the system. In fact, the human body is a battery-operated electronic device—far from a mechanical clock. Yet conventional medicine remains stuck in a mechanistic view. This is why, with each passing year, conventional medicine falls further behind the science, becoming more and more expensive, impotent, and irrelevant. In 2001 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that conventional medicine is now so far behind the science, it is no longer possible to bring it up to date. Conventional allopathic medicine needs to be discarded, and we need to start over with a new systems approach—one that focuses on the body as an energy system.
The Web of Life
Choosing health would be easy if only one factor were involved. However, no one factor determines our health. Rather, our state of health is the result of countless biological and behavioral interrelationships called the “web of life.” Unwittingly, we have been busy pulling this web apart through the fundamental changes we have made in our diet, our environment, and our lifestyle. Everything relates to everything else; making a change in one part of the web affects the rest of it.
We are learning that the systems that support life are more interdependent and delicately balanced than we ever realized. The web is as big and complex as the planet itself. No one fully understands how it all works. But the fact that we do not understand it thoroughly should not prevent us from using what we do know to protect and support our health right now.
Our health is deteriorating because we have screwed up big time. If you want to achieve a high level of health in today’s world, you need knowledge, commitment, and a willingness to make new choices. It can be done. None of us can revert to the life of our primitive ancestors, even if we wanted to, but you can, with a few changes in your diet and lifestyle, improve your health and quality of life. You just have to know what changes to make; you will learn what these are in the following chapters. Embracing the principles presented in this book will not only directly benefit you and your family, it will also help others wake up from a pharmacological trance and loosen the economic stranglehold of a failed healthcare system.