The Goal is Health

The Goal Is Health

As a chiropractor and health coach I routinely ask patients a few simple questions

Do you want to be healthy? Or, do you want to be sick?

How much do you value your health?

It’s a no-brainer! Everyone says they want to be healthy, and that they value their health.

And yet, so many of us are so sick; struggling with a host of daily symptoms, aches, pains, fatigue and stress, spending huge sums of money and innumerable hours and days of our lives in doctors' offices, hospitals and pharmacies, and even more time wrestling with insurance companies; living lives propped up on, and clouded by, a multi-pharmacy of lifetime medications. Not to mention, the time, money and effort spent caring for other sick family members. There are many reasons for this which I will expand upon in future blogs, but for now, let’s start at the beginning.

So, if everyone says they want to be healthy, and that they value their health, the real question is why are we so sick?

The bottom line is that we have lost sight, and understanding, of the real goal. How so?

What is your definition of health?

If you are like most of my patients, and the many health professionals I have asked, you are struggling with an answer to this simple, and most basic, question. I encourage you to ask others, especially your doctor.

The most common responses being:

1. the off the cuff answer: “feeling good.”

2. the dictionary answer: “the state of mental, physical and spiritual well being.”

3. the medical answer: “the absence of disease.”

None of these answers, least of all the medical one, define health. If anything, they describe some of the positive 'side-effects' of being healthy.

Lack of a clear definition almost certainly puts the goal out of reach. After all, one can 'feel good,' and be very unhealthy; a ticking time-bomb. The 'absence of disease,'..that merely indicates a sub-clinical condition, without overt symptoms, but not remotely robust health. Again, a ticking time bomb. 'A state of well being;' closer, but really only substitutes the words well being for health, and skirts the definition.

The more clearly a goal is defined and understood, the more likely it will be achieved.

Health is your body's innate capacity to maintain homeostasis (balance), and adapt to chemical, physical and emotional stressors that challenge that balance. Health, in other words, is your genetically hardwired set-point. You do not get healthy. You become sick. Disease is the absence of health!

Understanding this simple truth changes the paradigm. We can move away from our current failed disease-based , sickness care, so-called prevention oriented medical model as providers of health to a wellness model in which we nurture our innate capacity for health through informed and healthy daily lifestyle choices and actions.

After all, what's more important for, and will have a greater impact on, your health; worrying about your blood pressure, cholesterol, sugar and your weight, and taking a lifetime of multiple daily medications? Or, actively living a lifestyle that promotes health?

The question isn't so much; Do you want to be healthy? Or, do you value your health? as it is:

What are you WILLING TO DO, to change your life to nurture health verses create disease?

The Fountain of Youth

The Fountain of Youth

Almost every cell in your body is being continually regenerated, some at faster rates than others. The cells lining the stomach are replaced about every five days. The epidermis, or surface layer of skin cells, recycles about every two weeks. Red blood cells last about four months while liver cells are replaced every 300-500 days. Even the human skeleton renews itself about every ten years.

So, if the body is in a constant state of renewal, replacing old cells with new ones, that begs the questions; how and why do we age?

Theories of aging fall into two basic categories.

1. Programmed-based: which says that aging is a genetically regulated predetermined process, occurring on a fixed schedule.
2. Damage-based: which says that aging is the result continuous damage accumulation as a result of interaction with the environment, exposure.

In my opinion, these theories are not mutually exclusive, and both are at play in the aging process.

In essence, all living organisms are genetically programmed for three things: survival-growth and reproduction. After reproduction, and a period of nurturing of the progeny, nature has very little use for the aging. As humans, we are done physically growing and developing by the age of 25. Then, consistent with the programmed-based theory, we begin aging, the decline towards death.

The rate of aging is strongly influenced by our exposures, consistent with the damage-based theory. Consider the reproduction and replacement of cells analogous to photocopying. However, instead of making all copies from the original, we make each subsequent copy from the preceding copy. Along the way we lose some quality, resolution, create imperfections, and progressively degrade content from the original, with time and the number of copies made. Therefore, in our analogy, the rate of aging is directly related to the rate at which copies are made.

Again, in my opinion, programmed and damage-based aspects of aging also influence each other. Detrimental exposures (poor diet, smoking, sedentary lifestyle, environmental toxins, etc) may cause programmed aging to begin earlier, and accelerate the effects of damage-based aging. On the other hand, damage-based aging can, to a greater extent, be delayed and slowed by fewer detrimental exposures, especially when combined with more positive exposures (healthful diet, regular exercise, positive mental attitude, a life’s purpose, community, decreased stress, etc).

The link is allostatic load, the amount of work/effort your body has to expend to maintain homeostasis, your set-point, and to keep you alive.

Allostatic load is a product of your genes and their response to environmental exposures. These exposures may have their roots in your grandmother’s and your mother’s health, at the time of pregnancy (epigenetics), and includes all of your lifetime, lifestyle habits.

The healthier you are, the less your body has to work to maintain homeostasis, the less the allostatic load, the slower the rate of photocopying, the slower the rate of aging. And, obviously, vice-versa with poor health

In addition, if disease creating lifestyle behaviors start in childhood, resulting in obesity and diabetes, for instance, than programmed-based aging may be triggered earlier and damaged-based aging will likely be more pronounced at younger ages.

Ultimately, your genes (25-30%) + your exposure (70-75%) = your state of health and your biologic age.

Therefore, THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IS HEALTH!

Systems Breakdown

SYSTEMS BREAKDOWN!

There was a fascinating story in the New York Times this week: Treating an Illness Is One Thing. What About a Patient With Many?

The title pretty much tells the story: that treating a patient with a single illness requiring one or multiple medications, is hard enough; filled with unknowns and uncertainties, as compounded by doctors’ time restraints and 15 minute appointments, paper work and insurance pressures. 

But, what about treating a patient with multiple morbidities (multiple health, multi-systems problems), seeing multiple specialists, with complicated histories and 17” thick patient files, taking a cocktail of 10 to 20, or more, medications per day, with the same doctors’ time restraints, 15 minute appointments, etc? 

How can doctors even begin to ascertain what is best for these patients;  what is helping, what is harming, the risks verses the benefits of all, or some, of the medications; the negative impact and/or interactions of one medication with another, etc.? 

The answer is; they can’t. 

Instead of treating people, they diagnose and treat each disease entity (co-morbidity) separately, chasing vital signs, so-to speak: trying to lower cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar, while at the same time battling osteoporosis, gastric reflux and depression. Doing it all with drugs that were never tested, or approved, for simultaneous usage let alone, in a population with multiple morbidities; drugs with significant individual side-effects and, all-too-often, dangerous, even lethal, consequences. 

These chronic degenerative diseases are, for the most part, not curable and barely manageable. By definition, they are chronic and progressive.

Ultimately, what even defines successful treatment; progressive disease and disability, and diminishing quality of life? Prolonged death? Most of the time the patients die, while on the medications for the problems being treated; or, as they say in doctor parlance; the treatment was a success, but the patient died. 

Shockingly, the article states how common these chronic diseases and their misguided treatments are: 

“Two-thirds of people over age 65, and almost three-quarters of people over 80, have multiple chronic health conditions, and 68% of Medicare spending goes to people who have five or more chronic diseases.”

You do not catch chronic diseases. Chronic diseases take decades of cumulative damage to develop. These multi-systems diseases begin with a lifetime of unhealthy habits starting in youth, with decades of declining health, leading to overt diseases that interfere with living and cut lives short. 

In essence, we are not living longer, we are dying longer. 

This is so common that we accept disease and disability as normal aging when, in fact, they are not.

The answer is too obvious for most to accept. You cannot get healthy by fighting disease. By then, for most, it is already too late. 

In fact, we never get healthy, we only become sick. 

Health is your body’s natural state, its’ most basic survival mechanism. Your body is always working to keep you alive by maintaining health (homeostasis), adapting as best it can, to the daily onslaught of toxins we eat, drink, breathe and apply to our bodies.

That people refuse to believe this is testimony to the power and effectiveness of the selling of sickness and the magic-bullet and hope of cure we have assigned to drugs. 

We instinctively know what we need to do be healthy. 

When I ask anyone to name three things they know that they can do to make themselves healthier: no one ever says they need more drugs or surgery. They all say “I can eat better, exercise more, and control my stress better.”  And when asked if doing those three things more consistently would make them sicker or healthier, they all say ‘healthier’. And when asked, why, they say ‘I don’t know.”  

The answer is: you are genetically programmed for health. If you give that genetic blueprint everything that it requires, in a pure and sufficient quantity, the inevitable result is improved health.

The answer is not in treating illness. It is in creating health.

The GAIA Theory

 The GAIA Theory

The similarities between our planet and our bodies are amazing, with profound implications for both.  

In the 1960’s James Lovelock proposed what has become known as the Gaia Theory.                                 

He defined Gaia as: 

a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.  

In short, that planet earth is a delicately balanced, self-regulating living system (ecosystem) striving for homeostasis (balance) to support life on the planet. 

This mirrors the definition of human health: our body’s genetically programmed capacity to maintain homeostasis, and its innate ability to adapt to chemical, physical and emotional stressors that challenge that balance. 

In short, our bodies are delicately balanced, self-regulating ecosystems, striving to maintain homeostasis (health) to support our life. 

“In a way, to be human before the modern industrial era was to be an environmentalist.” Man lived in awe of, and in harmony with, nature; respectful of its power and grateful for its life-sustaining bounty. The industrial revolution heralded man’s disconnect from nature and the balance that sustains it. In the process, and in our wake, we have depleted its resources and polluted, challenging Gaia’s homeostasis. 

Our planet is sick, and its temperature is rising. 

As the disconnect with our planet widened, so did the disconnect with our own bodies and our health. We have become poor stewards of both.  

What the industrial revolution has done to our planet the medical-pharmaceutical and processed food revolution has done to our bodies. 

We routinely and unthinkingly consume and pollute our bodies with drugs and chemically laden processed and artificial foods and apply a chemical orgy of personal body-care products while we drink polluted water and breathe polluted air. We have challenged our body’s ability to maintain its homeostasis and, as individuals and as a species, we are sick. 

What do you feel like when your temperature goes up 1 degree? Out of sorts? 2 degrees? Definitely not yourself. 3 degrees? Sick, and seeing your doctor. 4 degrees? Very sick, with medical interventions and possible hospital admissions.  5-6 degrees? Emergency measures are being implemented to lower the fever to save your life. 

The rising temperatures on our planet are having the same effects. 

As Native American Chief Seattle said: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” 

Or, as some graffiti I saw long ago said: “What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.”

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In our bodies every cell functions independently, interdependently and co-dependently. The same is true for all aspects of our planet. This is the concept of holism expressed in the Gaia Theory. 

But, how can we expect someone who eats chemical foods, smokes, lives a sedentary indoor life and routinely consumes drugs for what ails them; someone who has no respect for the delicate balance of their own ecosystem, to understand that the melting of the polar ice caps and the loss of species has implications for the planet’s ability to support life on earth? 

As author Micheal Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Nature's default is health. If we stop the devastation, and if it hasn’t gone too far, nature will restore the balance to support life on the planet. 

Make no mistake about it: the planet is not in peril. Life on the planet, as we know it, is. 

If you stop the devastation of your body with unnatural and toxic chemicals and give your body what needs in a pure and sufficient quantity, the inevitable result is improved health. 

To save life on our planet, we must first save ourselves.          

The GIFT of Health

The GIFT of Health

This is the time of year many people make resolutions and set goals for the coming year. Improved health is often at the top of the list.

Gym memberships routinely soar and diets change this time of year with the best of intentions. But by March, most of those memberships are no longer used and most people have relapsed back into their old eating habits. “There’s always next year.”

How many times have you said that you were going to lose weight, exercise more and eat better? "There's always next year."

What are you waiting for? To weigh more than you do now? To feel worse than you do now? Another diagnosis, more drugs or treatments? Next year?

Health is really quite simple and elegant.

Your body is genetically programmed for health. More precisely, it is genetically programmed for survival by maintaining homeostasis (balance), and adapting to chemical, physical and emotional stressors that challenge that balance.

The simple truth is: your body has certain specific genetic requirements to be healthy. If those requirements are met, in pure and sufficient quantity, and, if you stop poisoning yourself with toxic foods and chemicals, improved health is inevitable

The corollary to this is: the only thing that ever heals you, is you.

When you know and understand these truths, your life will change.

Health is mostly a matter of choice; how you choose to live your life; how you choose to think, what you choose to eat and how much exercise you choose to get; as strongly influenced, for better or worse, by the habits of the people you hang out with most, your family and friends.

It is all about making a solid commitment to yourself, to create good health by developing and consistently maintaining healthy habits.

There is no more magnificent or awe-inspiring creation and miracle than the human mind-body. There is no greater gift than your life and your health. Treat your body like the holiest and most sacred of temples, with the awe and respect it deserves, and it will serve you well.

Happy Holidays and good health in all your years!