8 ways to stay healthy....
Today's Post: Friday, 9-9-2011
There are many, many ways to stay healthy.
But I find these eight ways cover most of the best and most effective methods.
1. Avoid harmful foods and drinks.
2. Eat only foods that benefit you and your health – or at least do no harm.
3. Get regular exercise every week -- mostly doing the most beneficial kinds.
4. Take key supplements.
(For almost every one of the diseases that are in your family history or which millions of people now get or which will kill you if you get them, there are supplements known to prevent or help prevent those diseases.) Hopefully we will get to keep this one as it can add so much to your protection.
5. Avoid tobacco and its smoke.
(Even though they cause 30% of all cancers, some smokers escape cancer. But EVERY exposure to them begins to cause heart disease, damage your lungs, and increase your rate of aging. No one exposed to tobacco smoke escapes this harm! That includes light smokers, teen smokers, and babies exposed to second hand smoke.)
6. Practice some form of physical stress control most days.
(So far, tai chi looks to be the most effective and time efficient way to do this.)
7. Become a purposeful, playful, proactive, and prudent optimist.
(Such people make good things happen and avoid bad ones. Also learn ways to survive and overcome difficulties and bad times that happen anyway.)
8. Practice other key prevention steps. (Brush and floss your teeth and gums well every day. Always wear your seat belt. Get your key blood indicators checked so you don’t get harmed by a problem you could have fixed first. There are more. But those 3 are extremely protective.)
Covering these 8 will turn into a series since each one deserves its own post.
1. Avoid harmful foods and drinks.
Strategically this one should be very easy. For some people it can be effortless. And most people can learn to replace doing so with habits and foods and drinks that do the reverse—if they know why and work at it.’
But why isn’t always easy?
After all if you don’t want your hand to hurt, it should be a no brainer to stop hitting it with a hammer!
There are 3 reasons.
Many of the harmful foods and drinks were once traditional foods that were rarely consumed and were mostly made with health OK ingredients.
Many of them did not exist at all before about 100 years ago—or for the millions of years of human evolution before that.
But as they became cheaper to make, often by adding harmful ingredients that are cheaper or which increase shelf life, the companies making them made more money, spent a good bit on advertising and made a LOT more of them.
When that happened, people grew up consuming them. And almost all the people they know bought them and consumed them. Then it seemed normal; and people who didn’t seemed a bit odd.
In fact, to this day, over 80% of the shopping carts of people checking out at most supermarkets are still made up of ONLY these harmful foods and drinks.
Then too, few people knew or yet know even now why these foods and drinks were harmful and still are or just how dreadfully bad for you they are if you consume them every week or several times a day for most of your life.
But if you learn what these foods and drinks and ingredients are and make a focused and consistent effort to avoid them and eat more natural foods and drink much less harmful drinks only, you get startlingly beneficial results.
Within a year or two of doing this, you will be less fat.
Depending on how badly you were doing on this strategy before and how long you were doing it, this could be from 10 to 100 pounds of fat within a year or two or three.
Best of all, since you are still eating all the OK or good for you foods and drinks that you are hungry for, you have virtually no extra hunger. In fact, many people doing this will be LESS hungry!
But what diseases do you avoid?
Wow! What a list of those there are!
Heart disease and heart attacks. Strokes. Type 2 diabetes. Vascular Dementia. Alzheimer’s Disease, High Blood Pressure, and increased aging, and Much higher medical bills -- including drugs it is often expensive or obnoxious or even actually harmful to take, to name just a few.
What are these foods and drinks? If you have read this blog long, you can list them as well as I can.
All soft drinks, virtually all pre-made & packaged snacks, desserts, and commercial baked goods, including most breads, belong on this list.
Farmed fish. For many reasons, but the very high level of pollutants contained in farmed fish being most important, virtually all farmed fish belong on this list.
So does the fat in meat from grain fed animals.
Are there any guidelines to avoiding these things?
Yes indeed there are?
a) One author suggested, “Does it grow that way?”
Oranges grow. Green beans grow. How about donuts, potato chips, or soft drinks? Nope. Never happen.
So that’s one way.
(Often organic produce has more nutrients and is safer to eat than conventional produce.)
b) Michael Pollan and the Paleolithic or caveman diet people often go by
This related set of questions:
“Did people eat or drink this over 100, or over 10,000, years ago? “ – and, if they did, “Does this particular food or drink contain things it would not have contained then?
Similarly, “Was the animal this food is from eating from the food sources it evolved to eat? Or has it been stuffed with things it never ate before on its own?
c) Then there is the long list of food ingredients we now know are harmful to ever consume in some cases or that are unsafe to consume more than a few times a month.
If you can find out or read a label, here’s a long list of ingredients to NOT eat or drink. They either cause disease or are fattening. Often they are both.
(This post is already likely to be continued over several posts as it is becoming so long. So in this post I’ll leave out why to avoid these ingredients. But if a food or drink has ANY of these ingredients, your best choice is to take a pass every single time or at least only consume it a few times a month or a year.)
Hydrogenated oils and the trans fats they contain.
Oils high in omega 6 such as corn, soy, safflower and to some extent canola oils.
Fats and oils from grain fed animals.
Excess salt.
MSG & related compounds.
High fructose corn syrup.
Other sugars high in fructose such as agave nectar or straight fructose by itself.
Excess sugar.
Artificial sugar.
Refined grains.
Many preservatives.
Mercury.
Lead.
Pesticides, Herbicides, and the genetically modified foods that build them into the structure of the food where they cannot be removed. (Most corn, soy, and canola plants and their oils today are made from genetically modified versions of the plant.)
Incredibly many foods and drinks contain ONLY ingredients on this list!
Soft drinks are prime example!
Today's Post: Friday, 9-9-2011
There are many, many ways to stay healthy.
But I find these eight ways cover most of the best and most effective methods.
1. Avoid harmful foods and drinks.
2. Eat only foods that benefit you and your health – or at least do no harm.
3. Get regular exercise every week -- mostly doing the most beneficial kinds.
4. Take key supplements.
(For almost every one of the diseases that are in your family history or which millions of people now get or which will kill you if you get them, there are supplements known to prevent or help prevent those diseases.) Hopefully we will get to keep this one as it can add so much to your protection.
5. Avoid tobacco and its smoke.
(Even though they cause 30% of all cancers, some smokers escape cancer. But EVERY exposure to them begins to cause heart disease, damage your lungs, and increase your rate of aging. No one exposed to tobacco smoke escapes this harm! That includes light smokers, teen smokers, and babies exposed to second hand smoke.)
6. Practice some form of physical stress control most days.
(So far, tai chi looks to be the most effective and time efficient way to do this.)
7. Become a purposeful, playful, proactive, and prudent optimist.
(Such people make good things happen and avoid bad ones. Also learn ways to survive and overcome difficulties and bad times that happen anyway.)
8. Practice other key prevention steps. (Brush and floss your teeth and gums well every day. Always wear your seat belt. Get your key blood indicators checked so you don’t get harmed by a problem you could have fixed first. There are more. But those 3 are extremely protective.)
Covering these 8 will turn into a series since each one deserves its own post.
1. Avoid harmful foods and drinks.
Strategically this one should be very easy. For some people it can be effortless. And most people can learn to replace doing so with habits and foods and drinks that do the reverse—if they know why and work at it.’
But why isn’t always easy?
After all if you don’t want your hand to hurt, it should be a no brainer to stop hitting it with a hammer!
There are 3 reasons.
Many of the harmful foods and drinks were once traditional foods that were rarely consumed and were mostly made with health OK ingredients.
Many of them did not exist at all before about 100 years ago—or for the millions of years of human evolution before that.
But as they became cheaper to make, often by adding harmful ingredients that are cheaper or which increase shelf life, the companies making them made more money, spent a good bit on advertising and made a LOT more of them.
When that happened, people grew up consuming them. And almost all the people they know bought them and consumed them. Then it seemed normal; and people who didn’t seemed a bit odd.
In fact, to this day, over 80% of the shopping carts of people checking out at most supermarkets are still made up of ONLY these harmful foods and drinks.
Then too, few people knew or yet know even now why these foods and drinks were harmful and still are or just how dreadfully bad for you they are if you consume them every week or several times a day for most of your life.
But if you learn what these foods and drinks and ingredients are and make a focused and consistent effort to avoid them and eat more natural foods and drink much less harmful drinks only, you get startlingly beneficial results.
Within a year or two of doing this, you will be less fat.
Depending on how badly you were doing on this strategy before and how long you were doing it, this could be from 10 to 100 pounds of fat within a year or two or three.
Best of all, since you are still eating all the OK or good for you foods and drinks that you are hungry for, you have virtually no extra hunger. In fact, many people doing this will be LESS hungry!
But what diseases do you avoid?
Wow! What a list of those there are!
Heart disease and heart attacks. Strokes. Type 2 diabetes. Vascular Dementia. Alzheimer’s Disease, High Blood Pressure, and increased aging, and Much higher medical bills -- including drugs it is often expensive or obnoxious or even actually harmful to take, to name just a few.
What are these foods and drinks? If you have read this blog long, you can list them as well as I can.
All soft drinks, virtually all pre-made & packaged snacks, desserts, and commercial baked goods, including most breads, belong on this list.
Farmed fish. For many reasons, but the very high level of pollutants contained in farmed fish being most important, virtually all farmed fish belong on this list.
So does the fat in meat from grain fed animals.
Are there any guidelines to avoiding these things?
Yes indeed there are?
a) One author suggested, “Does it grow that way?”
Oranges grow. Green beans grow. How about donuts, potato chips, or soft drinks? Nope. Never happen.
So that’s one way.
(Often organic produce has more nutrients and is safer to eat than conventional produce.)
b) Michael Pollan and the Paleolithic or caveman diet people often go by
This related set of questions:
“Did people eat or drink this over 100, or over 10,000, years ago? “ – and, if they did, “Does this particular food or drink contain things it would not have contained then?
Similarly, “Was the animal this food is from eating from the food sources it evolved to eat? Or has it been stuffed with things it never ate before on its own?
c) Then there is the long list of food ingredients we now know are harmful to ever consume in some cases or that are unsafe to consume more than a few times a month.
If you can find out or read a label, here’s a long list of ingredients to NOT eat or drink. They either cause disease or are fattening. Often they are both.
(This post is already likely to be continued over several posts as it is becoming so long. So in this post I’ll leave out why to avoid these ingredients. But if a food or drink has ANY of these ingredients, your best choice is to take a pass every single time or at least only consume it a few times a month or a year.)
Hydrogenated oils and the trans fats they contain.
Oils high in omega 6 such as corn, soy, safflower and to some extent canola oils.
Fats and oils from grain fed animals.
Excess salt.
MSG & related compounds.
High fructose corn syrup.
Other sugars high in fructose such as agave nectar or straight fructose by itself.
Excess sugar.
Artificial sugar.
Refined grains.
Many preservatives.
Mercury.
Lead.
Pesticides, Herbicides, and the genetically modified foods that build them into the structure of the food where they cannot be removed. (Most corn, soy, and canola plants and their oils today are made from genetically modified versions of the plant.)
Incredibly many foods and drinks contain ONLY ingredients on this list!
Soft drinks are prime example!
Labels: 8 ways to stay healthy, how to avoid harmful foods and drinks, nearly effortless fat loss, nearly effortless weight loss, prevent most diseases
posted by David at 2:27 PM
3 Comments:
I agree with all that you have said and would like to add that to keep healthy you should have a positive attitude to life.
Mike,
Thanks!
A positive attitude DOES help!
At times it can empower people to do everything else in the other 7 ways to stay healthy.
Be sure to read our post on: "7. Become a purposeful, playful, proactive, and prudent optimist." when we do it.
If you:
believe and notice there are always good things in life.
believe they are permanent or always come back.
believe you can make good things happen and fix or escape bad things.
notice the good things that happen even on bad days.
are curious and easily interested and find ways to do things you enjoy often --
it makes life worth living; you are more likely to be proactive; & you are much more likely to do things to protect your health!
Yahoo posted a new article taken from care.com today on foods that are harmful that also make having a stroke more likely.
Here's information from that article that adds to today's post.
1. We already know that trans fats and hydrogenated oils are heart attack starter. This article also quotes research that they also help cause strokes where they are caused by a blood clot as heart attacks are.
The best amount of this junk to eat is none at all. Now you have two reasons to avoid trans fats and hydrogenated oils!
Most commercial baked goods should already be avoided since they are mostly made with refined grains and sugar or high fructose corn syrup which are bad for you.
But what I learned from this new article is that most commercial baked goods-- which rarely have labels to warn you--also have trans fats and hydrogenated oils in them!
That means that even for special occasions, you will be healthier if you avoid all commercial baked goods unless you deal with a specialty bakery that only makes health OK treats.
The best way is to only eat home made treats with only health OK or almost OK ingredients and use mild extra virgin olive oil or small amounts of real butter instead of trans fats and hydrogenated oils.
That way you both eat safer food and eat less of it since it takes extra time to make it at home.
Breaded fast food and restaurant food such as fried chicken and the fish and the chips at fish and chip places also have the same problem. So unless the place you are in makes a big deal of not using trans fats, it's best to take a pass on eating there.
2. The recent news that processed meats like cold cuts, hot dogs, pastrami, ham, bacon, and salami are harmful if eaten more than once a week total has extra support this article found.
It seems that the preservatives, sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite have been shown, researchers found to damage blood vessels, causing them to harden and narrow.
This helps cause high blood pressure. And it causes high chronic inflammation. And if you have too much bad LDL or high blood sugar stuck to your LDL, this builds up the plaque that hardens your arteries and narrows them.
3. We already list diet soft drinks as fattening. Since over half of Americans drinks them, that's most unfortunate. But new research also finds drinking diet soft drinks increases your stroke risk by 48%!
4. Similarly, many Americans eat a large serving of red meat every day. We've posted often that this is much more harmful since most people who do this eat fatty meat from grain fed animals.
We already know this helps cause inflammation and heart disease. It seems it also boosts stroke risk by 42%.
Eating meat from 3 times a month to twice a week and ONLY eating it from animals that are 100 % grass fed is far safer.
5. Some people are much more at risk from too much salt. Most people, who rarely eat vegetables other than potatoes or fresh fruit, are in the at risk group. So that makes the high salt content of restaurant food and canned foods and many packaged foods a health risk.
Many people don't yet know that restaurant food and canned foods are often too high in salt.
There are four solutions. Eat at restaurants that use a ligh hand on salt. Eat at better restaurants that do cost more; but eat at restaurants half as often. And, always read the labels on canned foods. If it has LOT of salt, buy a different kind that does not. Or, buy and eat that kind of canned food a third as often.
Hardly ever eat any packaged snacks or desserts at all.
Too much salt is just one of the several ingredients in these that fatten you and harm your health.
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