|
May 27, 2009
The Best Way To Prevent Disease Is To Promote Your Health
 In the medical or allopathic model of ‘health’, the focus is on the diagnosis and treatment of disease. There is very little attention paid to the promotion of health. This is a major crack in the foundation of pursuing a path to being healthy because being healthy is not the absence of disease – it’s actually the opposite: Disease is the absence of health.
So, instead of looking at ‘disease prevention’ as our strategy for achieving health, let’s call it health promotion. That’s the goal: to avoid developing a condition or disease by promoting health. This seemingly subtle difference has profound significance when our actionable lifestyle behaviors are taken into consideration.
Unrecognizable Lifestyles
Compared to our genetic ancestors whom were rarely afflicted with the chronic and degenerative diseases that have become the norm today, our lifestyles are literally unrecognizable to what would be considered genetically congruent.
As a result, we as a species within the animal kingdom, have fallen victim to overwhelming toxicity and deficiency. Toxicity of environmental and food chemicals which bio-accumulate in our tissues causing cellular dysfunction and ultimately disease; and the deficiency of essential and optimal nutrients and the required movement or exercise necessary for healthy functioning cells and bodies which combined result in this extraordinarily ‘sick’ culture we now live in. Additionally, it’s created an overwhelming financial and societal burden we now euphemistically call ‘health care’.
With the Industrial Revolution of the 1800′s and the Chemical Revolution of post-World War II in the mid-1900′s, man has deviated so significantly from the way we are physiologically supposed to live that our lifestyles have become unrecognizable to that of what our genetic blueprint demands. Virtually every disease present today (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, inflammatory diseases, asthma, allergies, autism, senile dementia, etc.), are reflective of this lifestyle deviation (remember, eat, move and think). It is important to note as well that nearly all these disease processes are associated with each other; obesity, heart disease and diabetes go hand in hand; obesity and cancer are clearly associated with one another, etc.
“Dietary behavior has been identified as one of the most important modifiable determinants of cancer risk. Evidence suggests that the cancer-protective effects of an person’s diet may reflect the combined effects of various vitamins, minerals, and other bioactive components such as flavonoids, isothiocyanates, and/or allium compounds rather than from the effect of a single ingredient.” Davis CD Nutritional Interactions: Credentialing of Molecular Targets for Cancer Prevention Experimental Biology and Medicine 2007; 232:176-183. [view abstract]
Cancer provides a good illustration for this and it invokes the greatest fear for most people. Worse, people commonly think that cancer strikes randomly or due to genetics, or simply bad luck.
The truth tells a different story. First and foremost it is critical to understand that cancer is a reflection, or an indication of physiologic dysfunction; it is not, contrary to popular belief, an inherited or genetic problem. It is, as you will read below, for lack of a better term, first a lifestyle behavior disease and second, has environmental exposure as an additional causal factor.
“When studying primitive hunter-gatherer cultures as well as present day developing nations, …cancer of the lung, bowel, breast and prostate are virtually absent. Diet is one of the most important lifestyle factors and has been estimated to account for up to 80% of cancers of the large bowel, breast, and prostate.”Cummings JH, et al. Diet and the prevention of cancer. British Medical Journal 1998; 317:1636-1640. [view abstract].
Why do we find cancer virtually absent in primitive cultures and in many developing nations? Because the people of those primitive or less modern cultures live (meaning how they eat, move and think) in ways that are congruent with human genetic requirements. Lack of exercise or sedentary lifestyle is the other significant causal agent in cancer.
“Diet is a significant environmental factor in the overall cancer process and can exacerbate or interfere with carcinogenesis.” Martin KR, Targeting Apoptosis with Dietary Bioactive Agents. Experimental Biology and Medicine 2006; 231:117-129. [view article]
Exercise and Disease Prevention [read now]
Common Health Myths [read now]
Eating Well – Healthy Recipes For Your Family:
|
