Everyone knows someone that has been affected by cancer, which made up 30% of deaths, and then heart diseases and strokes which made up 25% of deaths in 2012. It takes a number of years for the data to be published but the trend is there. In the US, the causes are reversed with heart disease beating out cancer for the number one spot.
When you look back at the causes of death in the early 19th century, the three top killers were pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrheal disease.1 Now the killers are largely lifestyle diseases: cancer, heart disease and chronic lower respiratory diseases. This shift was caused by dramatic shifts in dietary patterns.
Or dietary patterns have caused our disease rates to soar but using food we can turn that around. There are many studies that show how just adding more fruits and vegetables to the diet can improve health dramatically. We are over fed and malnourished. We eat more calories than we need, we are obsessed with protein, and yet we are sicker than we have ever been?
Your body goes to bed each night and tries to repair any damage from what we eat, our environment, rebalancing our stress hormones, but we get back up each morning and bombard it with more damage all day long. We often don't sleep well so repairs are not happening as they should, then we eat fast foods because we are in a rush, we stimulate ourselves with coffee and energy drinks, and rarely eat unprocessed whole foods. We are all so rushed that we don't take time to sit and enjoy our foods in good company, we often eat at our desks. We drink from plastic bottles that expose our bodies to toxins and we rarely go out for a brisk walk to exercise and destress. We are not taking care of ourselves and it shows in our ever increasing rates of disease.
For those that are looking for the easiest way to prevent and reverse disease, it is a matter of starting to change your relationship with food. You can start today by eating one more piece of fruit than you had yesterday. Put an extra helping of green vegetables your choice on your plate at least once a day. Drink water instead of pop!! This one is huge, with major implications for your health.
There are so many things you can do to start improving your health today. We have all heard them before, take the stairs, drink more water, eliminate the sugar, eat more fruits and veggies and the problem is that these solutions are not sexy. They take time and effort and we want things easy. A pill, a magic supplement or vitamin is what we think is going to heal us. The power of drugs is all you need to reverse your heart disease or high blood pressure when the real power is in the foods you choose every day. In two weeks you can make massive changes to your arteries by just changing what you put past your lips.
Life should be worth living, and dying should not take 10 - 20 years of your living years. Health care is taking care to have health. Sick care is prolonging disease so it doesn't take you as quickly. Let me help you with your own health care plan.
Leah Kirin CNP
1. Omran AR. The epidemiologic transition. A theory of the epidemiology of population change. Milbank Mem Fund Q. 1971;49(4):509-38.