Natural Health Tutorial

Introducing the Natural Health position on wellness:

• Lesson #1-The Two Basic Choices
• Lesson #2-Living for the moment
• Lesson #3-The Prevention of Lifestyle Diseases
• Lesson #4-Proof & Benefits
• Lesson #5-Health versus Medicine

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Lesson #1-The Two Basic Choices

Everyone has the same two basic choices to choose from. Either you believe in living for the moment, or you believe in improving your health now in anticipation of the coming winter-of-life. If you truly believe in prevention and healthy lifestyles then it is entirely up to you to put your beliefs into action, NOW.

Health is a journey, not a destination. It is a battle that you will have to fight every minute of your life.

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Lesson #2-Living for the Moment

Lifestyle diseases, or degenerative diseases, are a result of an inappropriate relationship of people with their environment. The onset of these degenerative diseases is insidious, they take years to develop, and once encountered do not lend themselves easily to cure.

Modern science through improved sanitation, vaccination, and antibiotics, and medical attention has eliminated the threat of death from most infectious diseases. This means that death from heart disease and cancer are now the primary causes of death for the older adult.

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Lesson #3-The Prevention of Lifestyle Diseases

A collection of lifestyle effects and environmental factors accumulate over the years and develop into lifestyle diseases.

Modifiable risk factors are about what you, as an older adult, can do to avoid dying from a lifestyle disease, as you age. If you were to list the modifiable risk factors for each lifestyle disease you would find a lot of overlap. What is a risk factor for one disease, is often a risk factor for many different lifestyle diseases.

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Lesson #4-Proof & Benefits

Making changes in your lifestyle works! You will benefit by maintaining the highest quality of life for as long as possible. Living a healthy lifestyle for between two and five years can result in many additional years of disability free life.

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Lesson #5-Health versus Medicine

Health is about living your life. "Life is stress and stress is life." Experiencing aches, pain, and sickness is just a normal part of being alive. Life is not a sickness as conventional medicine would like us all to believe. The choice is yours. Learn to deal with common problems as a challenge of life, or hide from reality by turning to your doctor for help every time you face one of life's ordinary challenges. Healthy people choose to learn, to heal, and to find their own way through the normal vicissitudes of life.

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Lesson #1 Continued-the Two Basic Choices

"You gotta work at living. Any stupid person can die. Dying is easy. You've got to eat right, think right, train right. Fitness is a full time job." -- Jack LaLanne

Everyone has the same two basic choices to choose from. The Natural Health Perspective uses the Grasshopper and the Ant childhood fable to illustrate this point.

Recall the Grasshopper and the Ant, childhood fable.

An Ant works hard in the heat all summer, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks he is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper with no food or shelter dies out in the cold.

Recall the mind set of the Grasshopper: "This is such a lovely time of year. I cannot understand why everyone else is working. They should follow my example and have a good time."

Then recall the seventeenth-century mind set of the Ant: "Since you sang all summer, you may as well dance all winter to the tune you sang all summer."

The moral of this childhood fable is that the winter-of-life will come to all. Everyone is born with the same two basic choices. Put off working on improving your health long enough and one day it will indeed be too late to start.

Either you believe like the Grasshopper does in living for the moment, or you are like an Ant who believes in working on their health now in anticipation of the coming winter-of-life. The moral of this lesson is that you must be true to yourself. Never overlook the fact that improving your own personal health will take work that only you can do.

Either you believe in prevention and healthy lifestyles, or you don't.

If you truly believe in prevention and healthy lifestyles then it is entirely up to you to put your belief into action. So, the time is always now to start doing something about your own personal health.

Health is a journey, not a destination. It is a battle that you will have to fight every minute of your life.

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Natural Health and Wellness through Healthy Living

Lesson #2 Continued-Living for the Moment

Is living for the moment necessarily bad for your health? Or, perhaps is living for the moment in this century any worst for your health than living in a prior century would have been?

Lifestyle diseases, or degenerative diseases, are a result of an inappropriate relationship of people with their environment. The onset of these degenerative diseases is insidious, they take years to develop, and once encountered do not lend themselves easily to cure.

Do lifestyle diseases really exist? There are two basic lines of evidence that support the existence of lifestyle diseases: (1)the international variation in cancer rates, and (2)death statistics in the United States.

A recent research paper published in the prestigious Lancet beautifully articulated the international variation in cancer rates argument that evidences the existence of lifestyle diseases.

"In many [western] countries, peoples’ diet changed substantially in the second half of the twentieth century, generally with increases in consumption of meat, dairy products, vegetable oils, fruit juice, and alcoholic beverages, and decreases in consumption of starchy staple foods such as bread, potatoes, rice, and maize flour. Other aspects of lifestyle also changed, notably, large reductions in physical activity and large increases in the prevalence of obesity."

"It was noted in the 1970s that people in many western countries had diets high in animal products, fat, and sugar, and high rates of cancers of the colorectum, breast, prostate, endometrium, and lung; by contrast, individuals in developing countries usually had diets that were based on one or two starchy staple foods, with low intakes of animal products, fat, and sugar, and low rates of these cancers."

"These observations suggest that the diets [or lifestyle] of different populations might partly determine their rates of cancer, and the basis for this hypothesis was strengthened by results of studies showing that people who migrate from one country to another generally acquire the cancer rates of the new host country, suggesting that environmental [or lifestyle factors] rather than genetic factors are the key determinants of the international variation in cancer rates."

Key TJ, Allen NE, Spencer EA.
The effect of diet on risk of cancer.
Lancet. 2002 Sep 14;360(9336):861-8. Review. PMID: 12243933

An analysis of the death statistics of the United States reveals some interesting facts that tend to support the existence of the lifestyle diseases.

In 1900, the top three causes of death in the United States were pneumonia / influenza, tuberculosis, and diarrhea/enteritis. Back then communicable diseases accounted for about 60 percent of all deaths. In 1900, heart disease and cancer were ranked number #4 and #8 respectively. Since the 1940's, most deaths pass the age of 45 in the United States have resulted from heart disease, cancer, and other degenerative diseases. And, by the late 1990's, lifestyle or degenerative diseases accounted for more than 60 percent of all deaths.

In 1900, the top three causes of death were from communicable diseases. Since the 1940's, most deaths pass the age of 45 have come from a completely different category of disease called lifestyle diseases. Until the present era, sudden onset caused death due to infections, malignancies, injuries, poisonings, and war. The persons inflicted had no role to play in their occurrence. These Sudden Onset conditions lend themselves to a quick fix curative effort.

National Center for Health Statistics,
National Office of Vital Statistics, 1947
for the year 1900 (page 67), for the year 1938 (page 55).

Obviously, you have to die of something. Modern science through improved sanitation, vaccination, and antibiotics, and medical attention has eliminated the threat of death from most infectious diseases. This means that death from heart disease and cancer are now the primary causes of death for the older adult. The question now becomes a question of death at what age? In eighteenth-century England, chimney sweeps died in great numbers from scrotal cancer that was then called soot wart. Everybody naturally has to die of something, but lifestyle diseases take people before their time. Too many people are dying relatively young from Heart Disease and Cancer and other Lifestyle Diseases in modern times.

The choice is yours: Die young now or at a ripe old age.

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Lesson #3 Continued-The Prevention of Lifestyle Diseases?

While allopathic medicine is the most effective system for acute medical and surgical emergencies, it has only a limited ability to change the course of many serious lifestyle or degenerative diseases. A collection of lifestyle effects and environmental factors accumulate over the years and develop into lifestyle diseases. They are different from other diseases because they are potentially preventable.

This lesson on modifiable risk factors is about what you, as an older adult, can do to avoid dying from a degenerative disease, as you age. If you were to list the modifiable risk factors for each lifestyle disease you would find a lot of overlap. What is a risk factor for one disease, is often a risk factor for many different lifestyle diseases. So, it makes more sense simply to list the risk factors once that are responsible for the lifestyle diseases as a group than to repeatedly list a risk factor like smoking over and over again.

Modifiable Risk Factors for the top ten causes of death past the age of 45

• Air and Water Pollution,
• Dietary Excesses,
  • fat (mainly saturated and heat treated polyunsaturated oils)
  • protein (has a diuretic effect and increases the workload of the digestive system)
  • caloric intake (often called "undernutrition")
  • added sugar and salt
  • alcohol
• Excess Sunlight and Radiation,
• High Cholesterol / Hypertension / Chronic Inflammation,
• Obesity,
• Occupational Chemicals,
• Poor Nutrition,
• Sedentary Lifestyle,
• Smoking, and
• Excessive Stress.

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Lesson #4 Continued-Proof & Benefits

QUESTION: Does Prevention really work?

ANSWER: Making changes in your lifestyle works!

A study in the July 9, 2001 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, published by the American Medical Association, provided the scientific proof. This study shows that populations that follow what they describe as healthy behaviors do live profoundly longer -- up to five and even ten years longer than those who do not. Most of those years are disability-free.

Gary E. Fraser, David J. Shavlik.
Ten Years of Life: Is It a Matter of Choice?
Arch Intern Med. 2001;161:1645-1652.

Further, one recent study found that older people with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived longer than those with fewer positive self-perceptions of aging. It is a landmark study that proves that attitude works with an expected payoff of 7.5 years.

"The effect of more positive self-perceptions of aging on survival is greater than the physiological measures of low systolic blood pressure and cholesterol, each of which of aging is also greater than the independent contribution of lower body mass index, no history of smoking, and a tendency to exercise; is associated with a longer life span of 4 years or less ... The survival advantage of more positive self-perceptions each of these factors has been found to contribute between 1 and 3 years of added life ..."

Levy BR, Slade MD, Kunkel SR, Kasl SV.
Longevity increased by positive self-perceptions of aging.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2002 Aug;83(2):261-70. PMID: 12150226

So, following prevention and healthy lifestyles can result in ten years of disability free life, rather than the three months in some hospital bed often claimed by the radio talk show host Dr. Dean Edell.

QUESTION: How much time is required to achieve significant health results?

ANSWER: Between two and five years is required to achieve significant health results.

"Subgrouping by length of mean follow up suggests that virtually all protection from cardiovascular events occurs in trials of at least two years' duration. ... Sustained change in dietary behaviour, promoted by long interventions, is probably necessary to achieve reduction in cardiovascular events ..."

Lee Hooper, Carolyn D Summerbell, Julian P T Higgins.
Dietary fat intake and prevention of cardiovascular disease.
BMJ 2001;322:757-763.

"We have observed in the Ornish Program that survival is even more pronounced at the five year mark. It takes months to remodel the coronaries and to stabilize plaque."

Richard E. Collins, MD.
Nice Review, Wrong Conclusion.
2 Apr 2001

QUESTION: What are the benefits of prevention and healthy lifestyles?

ANSWER: Maintaining the highest quality of life for as long as possible.

Healthy people are not sick. And, if you are not sick you will be spending less time in the hospital and visiting your physician. And, if you are spending less time dealing with your health care system you are spending less money on your health care (or you have a lesser need for health insurance).

So, if your were born with a genetic predisposition towards Alzheimer’s Disease following prevention and healthy lifestyles in your life will result in your maintaining the highest quality of life for as long as possible. It does not guarantee that you wont eventually come down with Alzheimer’s Disease.

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Lesson #5 Continued-Health versus Medicine

Health is about living the good life.

"Life is stress and stress is life." Throughout the ages people have been born, have died, and in between have lived in various stages of sickness and health. Experiencing aches, pain, and sickness is just a normal part of being alive. Normal human experiences are simply Mother Nature's way of reminding you that you are indeed still alive.

There is a growing tendency in our western culture to medicalize problems that are not medical and to pretend to understand a phenomena by merely giving them a technical sounding label. Life is not a sickness as conventional medicine would like us all to believe.

Medicine is about treating the sick.

Healthy people are not sick!

You don't need a string of advanced science degrees behind your name in order to know how to live the good life. You are not the first person to have faced the challenges of living. Others before you, have already solved most of these problems. Now, it is your turn. After all: "There is nothing new under the sun." |Ecclesiastes 1:9|

The WordSmith dictionary defines medicine as "the science of diagnosing and treating illness, disease, and injury." Since the times of the Greeks, conventional medicine has traditionally used the biomedical model. The biomedical model is unequivocally reductionist in its approach.

Reductionism claims that you can understand all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces will explain the whole.

The biomedical model treats disease as a pathology that occurs within the person. The doctor's function is to control the pathology, repair the body and restore health. The limitation of this model is that it excludes any psychological, social, or ecological factors. Thus, the problem with conventional medicine is that prevention clearly does not fit in with its biomedical model of reductionism. This explains why most physicians clearly do not like to treat anything that is not clearly pathological in nature.

Everyone must decide for themselves, if what they are experiencing is just an ordinary ailment of life or a major medical problem. And, whether or not you want your doctor to treat a risk factor as a disease.

"[The Internet and patients' empowerment] is shifting power from doctors back to people. People may increasingly take charge, more consciously weighing the costs and benefits of the 'medicalisation' of their lives. Armed with better information about the natural course of common conditions, they may more judiciously assess the real value of medicine's never ending regimen of tests and treatments."

Moynihan R, Smith R.
Too much medicine?
BMJ. 2002 Apr 13;324(7342):859-60. PMID: 11950716

The choice is yours. Learn to deal with common problems as a challenge of life, or hide from reality by turning to your doctor for help every time you face one of life's ordinary challenges. Healthy people choose to learn, to heal, and to find their own way through the Normal Vicissitudes of Life.

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