Action items to prevent heart disease, diabetes, & cancer....

Today's Post: Thursday, 9-15-2011

The current UN meeting on the worldwide crisis in disease and increased health care costs caused by preventable, non-communicable diseases has already released the information that 90% of the diseases and health care costs in the United States are caused by these diseases

This is a timely reminder to consider doing the things yourself that will help you escape these diseases and health care costs!

Consider these.

1. Sugar, refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, and, surprisingly, artificial sweeteners as well, each tend to cause blood sugar surges, lower your protective HDL and increase your harmful triglycerides. These effects tend to make you fat and cause heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

Cut your use of sugar in half. Eliminate any food or drink that contains refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, or artificial sweeteners.

Drink water, tea, coffee, or vegetable juice instead. Eat only 100 % whole grains or eat nonstarchy vegetables or beans instead of refined grains.

Extra benefit: If you have been eating and drinking a lot of these things, this can give you effortless fat loss. The extra fat will leave you; and you’ll NOT be hungrier.

2. The health benefits of the DASH II diet and the Mediterranean diet are very high. They help prevent all these diseases from Alzheimer’s disease to heart disease and high blood pressure. The combination of these two diets is likely the best diet to eat to stay healthy.

The two key things that seem to have the most health benefit are to eat lots nonstarchy vegetables and use only extra virgin olive oil or olive oil.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

a) Add one nonstarchy vegetable one time each day. Add one serving to your lunch or dinner. (Adding more than one a day each week can be faster than your body can adjust to it. So don’t add more than two a day the first week.)

Raw broccoli florets or cauliflower florets help prevent aggressive cancers. Tomato slices are also good for you and taste good. They too are nonstarchy. And there are dozens more nonstarchy vegetables you can try.

Nonstarchy vegetables have truly awesome health benefits and almost zero calories. So they combat diseases and help people avoid fat gain without extra hunger at the same time!

b) Get some mild tasting olive oil or extra virgin olive oil. Use that instead of all other oils or margarine. Use it instead of butter where you can. Where you can’t substitute olive oil for butter, use half as much butter.

(Be sure to never eat anything that contains hydrogenated oils or trans fats as they are proven heart attack starters.)

Using only olive oil increases your HDL, lowers your LDL, and lowers your level of chronic inflammation. Each of those effects protects your heart.

3. Exercise prevents disease, grows new brain cells, and slows aging. And, a surprisingly small amount gives you 40% of the health benefits of an ideal exercise program.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

Try doing some kind of strength training at home for just a few minutes first thing two mornings each week. Take one day off in between. This can range from doing 3 pushups from your knees and 5 half squats each time to 15 or 20 minutes using dumbbells for several exercises each time.

And, three or more days each week take a 15 to 20 minute walk or two 10 minute walks. Walk normally for most of it but trying a few bursts of walking really fast each time.

But get started with something you can do this week!

Once you can do just that much and keep doing it each week, you get 40 % of the health benefits of an ideal program. Of course, once you do that, you can add more if you have time.

4. Avoid tobacco smoke.

Yes, it produces 30 % of all cancers and 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancers. To be fair some smokers don’t get cancer.

NEWSFLASH: Tobacco smoke is horribly worse for you than that. And no one exposed to it escapes harm! (Unfortunately few smokers have any clue about the larger dangers from smoking.)

EVERY single exposure to tobacco smoke begins to deposit the plaque in your arteries that causes high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and erectile dysfunction. It also causes you have the lung power and breathing capacity of a MUCH older person. This is true even for teens and brand new smokers!

There’s more too!

Exposure to tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks in people who would have otherwise escaped them.

And second hand smoke harms the people who are exposed to it in all the same ways, including babies and small children.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

If you smoke, contact the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association and use their help to make a strong, focused, and determined effort to quit. Try the over the counter nicotine products if the nicotine craving gets too bad for you to handle. (Knowing the information above will make it easier for you than it is for most people trying to quit.)

If you smoke and decide not to quit, at least for the next week, make a very strong effort to never smoke in public or around your friends and family. See if you can protect the people around you from second hand smoke even if you keep smoking.

Also, if you are a doctor, for the next week, ask every patient if they smoke. For every one that does, hand them a copy of this information and PRESCRIBE in writing that they quit. Studies show this gets results. Most people respect doctors and often do as they are directed by their doctors.

5. There are supplements that help prevent these diseases as well.

Supplements are not always effective; but those that are can be more effective for prevention than drugs when several are taken in combination. Supplements usually have NO side effects. Even better, the ones with health benefits often protect several parts of your health at the same time!

Here’s an example.

Vitamin D3 has recently been found to help prevent many cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune diseases, and to build your bones better than taking calcium.

They found that’s true IF you take 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day. (This helps replace the over 10,000 iu a day people used to get from being out in the sun all day.)

Supplements are food concentrates or pure and consistent versions of folk remedies used safely for hundreds of years or are substances natural to the human body.

Thousands of Americans are preventing many of the most expensive diseases to treat by taking supplements.

Heart attacks, cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease can take over $50,000 each to treat.

Estimating that 30 % of the population takes supplements and at least a third of those or 10% are successfully preventing these diseases, if these supplements were suddenly unavailable nationwide, our health care costs would go up at least 10%.

For example, in 2009, New York City was estimated to have a population of 8,391,881. So it has about 8,400,000 now. If we estimate half of those are adults, that’s 4,200,000 adults. This means that if 10 % of these people who are preventing those diseases with supplements, New York has 420,000 people who are NOT getting these diseases.

The added health care costs each year that would be incurred in New York if everyone were no longer able to get these supplements would run to billions of dollars.

Incredibly, that will happen soon unless it is stopped.

The FDA has just proposed re-classifying almost all supplements as drugs and removing them from the market completely. Only the handful that drug companies successfully get to pass the tests that drugs pass would ever be available again. That would be as much as ten years from when they were removed and they would cost over 10 times as much as now.

Even worse, a simple registration process with the fees for random testing from each supplement company would allow the FDA to find and remove the small number of companies making supplements for weight loss, muscle building, or sexual restoration that contain dangerous drugs not listed on the label.

So consider doing this sometime you schedule now for some time this week.

Write both your US representative and Senator to demand of the FDA that they remove their proposal and use the kind of simple registration process instead that would help the FDA more quickly remove the real problems.

This will save the United States from billions of dollars of new health care costs each year that supplements are now preventing.