Real Medicine is Lifestyle Medicine
Recently I’ve been working on a community health initiative and I’m really excited to share some of what I’ve seen and learned and recommend the program that has led to amazing results in many of my patients.
It addresses almost all chronic diseases caused by our modern diet and lifestyle including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, dementia, high blood pressure, autoimmune disease, allergies, and more.
It also boosts immune system function, preventing most upper respiratory infections like coughs, colds, flu, sinusitis, ear infections, sore throats, and laryngitis and if you do get one it dramatically shortens the duration.
It eliminates minor complaints that many have grown used to and consider a normal part of getting older like digestive problems, reflux, bloating, constipation, headaches, fatigue, skin problems, and mental fog.
It improves mental functioning so you no longer forget where you put your keys why you came into a room or what word you wanted to say, increases energy, improves mood, balances hormones, and restores healthy sexual functioning.
Almost universally everyone who has tried it has had remarkable results within days to weeks.
But first, you may be thinking I don’t have any real issues or the ones I have are under control with my medications. Giraffes can help explain why that would be false.
The Giraffe’s Neck
French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) is famous for postulating that giraffes once had short necks and evolved to have very long ones because each generation stretched their necks a bit farther than the last to reach the leaves a bit higher up in the trees.
For a long time, this idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was thought ridiculous. In the last few decades, epigenetic theories have revived some of the long-dead ideas of Lamarckian evolution.
Unfortunately we now know that if you are living the standard american life then your modern diet and lifestyle are producing epigenetic changes, which are like notes attached to your genetic code, turning off good genes and turning on bad ones, that eventually lead to chronic disease development in nearly everyone by shortening their healthspan and lifespan.
And even if you don’t develop any serious long-standing chronic disease in your lifetime your epigenetic changes will be passed on to your children set them up for a much higher risk of chronic disease by decreasing their genetic resilience.
And even if your kids develop healthy habits and manage to salvage their own health, they will still pass on your epigenetic changes to your grandchildren, so they begin life at a disadvantage.
So instead of passing on something beneficial like a longer neck, you may be passing on a big disadvantage at least two generations down the line.
What Works?
Pharmaceutical band-aids are not much help with this. If you have any chronic or recurring problems managed by pharmaceuticals, they are most likely not doing much to benefit you or actively harming you and setting you up for further problems. This sounds far-fetched, even like quackery, but is in fact mainstream medical consensus, which we showed in part one.
Currently 60% of Americans have a chronic disease and 40% have more than two. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that eliminating just three risk factors, poor diet, inactivity, and smoking, would prevent 80% of all heart disease and stroke; 80% of type 2 diabetes; and 40% of all cancers.
What if we expanded our focus to every aspect of diet and lifestyle – a complete overhaul? I’m convinced for good reasons that nearly any chronic disease can be reversed in an ideal patient under ideal circumstances. Maybe that’s too much to ask for most, but any amount of change can bring significant benefits, and the more you see the more you are motivated to change.
So physicians know that lifestyle modification can prevent most chronic diseases, they just don’t know how to convince you and they don’t have the time. From personal experience, it takes between 30 minutes to two hours to even begin to convince someone to change their lifestyle, by explaining why they’re sick and how to get better.
The Power Of Lifestyle Overhaul
A patient with both long-standing type 2 diabetes and advanced heart disease with a 90% blockage in the main artery was unable to walk across the road without feeling tired and heaviness in the chest. Within about 10 days of starting this plan, he was walking an hour a day and was off his diabetes medicine with blood sugar readings better than they had been while on the medicine.
A young lady with chronic seizures was unhappy with the side effects of her anti-seizure medications and had been trying for a long time to taper off them, but each time seizures would resume until she started this diet and lifestyle plan. She came off the medications within a month and had a follow-up EEG which showed the area of the brain that had been producing seizure activity was now producing completely normal electrical activity.
An elderly lady had Sheehan’s Syndrome, AKA post-partum pituitary necrosis – meaning her pituitary gland, which controls the release of multiple hormones, had been damaged after delivering a baby requiring life-long hormone replacement therapy. After being on this program a few weeks she stopped all her hormone replacements.
An elderly man with advanced osteoarthritis could hardly get up and was on 4 medications including pain killers and came off of them all within 10 days and was able to get up and walk around by himself with great energy and speed, without using his two canes.
Many diabetics tapered down or stopped their medications. Many patients who were overweight rapidly began to lose pounds. Even a few patients with early to end-stage cancer, some of whom were told they had not much longer to live, utilized a modified version of this program with intense fresh juicing protocols, without any conventional therapy and reversed all signs of their disease.
Some of the results were to be expected while others are unheard of and hard to explain, but I have seen them with my own eyes.
It seems that the body naturally heals, even from chronic long standing degenerative diseases, if you remove what is causing damage and provide even a close to ideal environment.
Why It Works
The underlying principles are nothing new, but have been streamlined into a doable plan for the modern age and are based on the idea that chronic diseases of civilization are preventable and reversible by optimizing our diet and lifestyle.
All creatures are perfectly designed for their environments as they evolved in sync with their surroundings. Animals do not develop degenerative diseases in their natural environments and neither does mankind.
There are many areas of the world where people live to their 80s, 90s and beyond with little or no degenerative disease following their ancestral diets and lifestyles. When injured they heal quickly and well instead of developing chronic aches and pains.
So our problems are almost universally due to a mismatch between our bodies and our environment. Taking the principles underlying traditional health we can generalize a plan that will keep modern people in industrial settings healthy.
The program is based on age-old principles of health and healing that have recently been given new life in the form of Lifestyle Medicine and Functional Medicine, disciplines populated by thousands of conventionally trained doctors and healers who grew tired of just managing their patients’ symptoms while they progressively worsened.
The esteemed Cleveland Clinic opened the doors to its own Functional Medicine clinic in 2014. Former President Bill Clinton transformed his own health with the help of the head of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional medicine and now espouses this approach.
Thousands of people the world over have reversed their chronic illnesses. And the basis of 90+% of the benefit is simply optimizing diet and lifestyle.
The particular plan my patients used is based on traditional diet and lifestyle principles confirmed by modern science.
It works by restoring the body to optimal function by focusing on seven key areas:
1. removing harmful substances and toxins as much as possible,
2. supporting the body detox systems to deal with unavoidable environmental toxins like pollution,
3. providing optimal nutrition in the form of naturally occurring vitamins and minerals from whole foods,
4. providing adequate sunlight for immune function, neurotransmitter formation, and vitamin D formation,
5. getting adequate exercise and rest,
6. managing stress and,
7. optimizing social connection. and,
In part 3, A Template For Optimal Health, I’ll give you the details.