Hindsight — Taking Responsibility for My Health
As I write this, I can’t help but think of the thousands and thousands of people who have suffered a debilitating stroke or other preventable illnesses of some sort, especially those that died and did not know that they could have reversed and possibly eliminated the diseases that took their life.
I believed that I was a victim of my stroke, diabetes and heart attack that resulted in open heart surgery. I thought that they were a result of heredity and my diseases were built into my genes. I thought I had no choice but to accept my illnesses and I had to learn to live with the outcome as bad as that seemed.
My mother died as a result of a stroke. She spent years in several nursing homes and never spoke another word after her first stroke. My father had several strokes and then finally succumbed to the cruelties of Alzheimer’s Disease. Many of my relatives died from heart disease and it all made sense, it must be heredity. That is what I have been taught throughout my school career and what I had believed most of my life. Their fate would eventually become my fate, or at least I thought that would be the case.
True, you inherit things like the color of your eyes, the curl or not in your hair, the color of your skin, et cetera, but I have discovered that things like your health are largely dependent on the choices you make by what you put into your body. Yes, there is some truth to the fact that if your parents were obese, chances are you will be obese, but that is true only if you duplicate their habits. If you eat like them and most of us eat just like our parents taught us (or let us), we will become just like them and in time will repeat a similar fate, something that I used to think was hereditary and my destiny.
We have learned to love the same foods, same snacks, same traditions, and we will more than likely develop the same shape, the same problems with our health and the same cause of death that they had unless we choose to do things differently. Please don’t blame your parents for this. They’ve had very little to do with this. They did what they did because they didn’t know what the outcome would be later in life. In fact they probably didn’t even think about it.
The effect of our diet on our health is something I used to think was hereditary and I have since learned that it is something that we can often change. We can improve our health by changing what we choose to put into our bodies! We don’t have to face the ailments our parents suffered with as they aged. It does not need to be like that.
It has been in our power all along to break this cycle of ”heredity” by not doing the things that have led to many diseases of our parents, such as replacing the things that have been proven to be bad for us with things proven to be good for us. I wrongly assumed that if it wasn’t good for you, the government would not allow it to be sold. After all, we pay taxes and part of that goes to test foods to insure proper nutrition, right? We have school breakfast and lunch programs to make sure our children have the nutrition to face the school day, right? Boy, was I sadly mistaken.
After many, many hours of research I have discovered that the government agencies that were formed to look out for our welfare, which began as a noble cause, has since been overtaken by representatives of corporate giants who’s main intent is to promote their product sales effecting their bottom line while making it look like they are taking care of you and your welfare as their primary goal.
A good example is our school food programs. They have turned into huge outlets for corporate food giants who advertise a continual indirect message to our children, “Buy this! It tastes good”. The more obvious message should be “Once a customer, always a customer”. You can’t blame the food manufacturer, they are just insuring future customers, an intelligent business practice.
What a better way to indoctrinate the next generation of consumers, after all, when they grow up, they will become that next generation of consumers making food choices for their families. Another example is how certain fast food chains constantly advertise to small children which can be summed up in one word, effective!
It is not the fault of the food companies. They are just promoting their products to increase their bottom line. That is only natural. The people that run these companies are only trying to do the best thing for the future of the companies bottom line, increase sales of their product and in doing so, they protect the jobs of an untold number of workers who depend on the company to support their families.
This book is not intended to alarm you, but we have been undergoing a slow and unnoticeable change in our diets since about the about time of the second world war. One that is no one’s direct fault, it has just developed over time and it is developing into one that has a drastic effect on our quality of life and has spilled over into our education system and the medical field.
If you were born in the middle of the last century, you have unwittingly witnessed the slow change in our food supply and didn’t realize it. Our food was produced by family run farms and from grower or producer to smaller family run grocery stores. Slowly the economies of scale have taken over as larger stores bought out smaller ones until now, there are no more mom and pop grocery stores anywhere and most of our food outlets have been reduced to only a handful of store mega chains per city. The same thing is happening to our food producers. More and more food is being produced by fewer and fewer farms and companies.
As Americans, we are excellent at fine tuning a process to maximize the profit for a given product. At the same time our food is changing, our medical profession is also looking at profits and understandably so. The cost of todays modern practice is astounding! Instead of the patient’s health being of primary importance, it has become profit that is of primary concern in many cases due to demands of today’s business world. What ever happened to the good old “family doctor” that took the necessary time to satisfy the patient (the doctor’s employer) of his or her diagnosis?
Today, in some cases, a doctor must only allot a few minutes with each patient in order to see the volume of patients necessary to meet the ever-growing list of demands required to make a modern practice work. A doctor must keep in mind that he must earn enough to cover all of the mandated obligations as well as malpractice insurance and all of the other government regulations not to mention his payroll, rent on his office, equipment costs and the list goes on and on.
The same thing has happened to our colleges that train our future doctors. Universities are continually looking for additional funding to support their ever increasing expenses and to fund their educational efforts. Over the years large pharmaceutical companies have been more than willing to “help” these providers of education with more and more grants.
Naturally they are hopeful that the money given sheds a “good light” on their products (prescription and nonprescription drugs). Favorable studies are highly published, unfavorable results are buried, after all, the company is in business to make a profit. The end result has been unintended bias toward the manufacturer in order to garner favor for future grants. The college wins with increased funding, the pharmaceutical manufacturer wins the consumer public relations effort with positive information about their products. In the end, we are the losers. All too often we are the recipients of half-truths or have just been plain misled in order to sell more of a particular company’s product to boost profit.
None of these things had been planned to happen, they just happened. The college was not to blame, they were just looking for additional funding to support the ever increasing cost of education. The pharmaceutical company was not to blame, they just wanted to do the best job they could selling the most they could. No one foresaw the outcome of the trickle down effect to our overall health. We didn’t realize what was happening to us over time and now it may seem to many of us that it is too late to change. Many of the past and recent scientific studies have shown that our diet is the problem. Nearly all of our illnesses and diseases have been avoidable all along if taken care of soon enough.
It is not the fault of most farmers, it is not the fault of most doctors, but rather what we have allowed to happen through our government agencies over time, all of which were started for good reasons “protecting the consumer” and slowly the agencies have been overrun with special interest groups. It is only natural that they are putting their interest first, their products and profits. That is why they are called special interest groups. Should it continue to be that way?
With a nearly fatal stroke, diabetes and a triple heart bypass in my history, I want you to know that there is hope for your future and you do not have to be a helpless victim like I thought I was. Your actions today have a direct effect on your health tomorrow and in the future. You must be made aware that you do have more control over your health than you have been taught to believe, especially what is learned through past and present educational systems and media advertisements, both for food and medicine.
A life threatening event like a stroke or heart problems may be so severe you will not live to change anything, so do not wait until it is too late! Some choose not to make any changes and do not believe they can do anything to effect their situation. They are happy to be alive due to life saving operations that they have had that prevented death. They are content that the doctor did nothing toward eliminating the cause of the problem. True, the operations that the doctors have performed may have saved the patient from death, but nothing was done about the cause of the problem such as reducing or eliminating the cause of the disease.
Most people understandably return to their prior diet after a major health event not knowing that there is any connection to their health problem and believing that their problems were hereditary. It is time we connected the dots. Our diet has a direct effect on our health. What you choose to eat does one of two things: promotes good health, fitness and increased longevity or promotes poor health, sickness, disease and premature death. Only you have the power to change your future health. What you do today will have a direct effect on your health and your blood work results are a good way to keep track of your progress over time. Don’t be afraid to take the first step. You will be amazed at the journey it will take you on! You will also be amazed at how fast it will happen. I was.
The purpose of this book is to show you that it is possible to change your outcome by what you do today. It works. I am living proof. You can reverse the effects of some strokes, I did. You can reverse and eliminate type 2 diabetes, I did. You can reverse heart disease, I did! You can as well! In fact, the more you research the healthful benefits of this way of eating, the more diseases that you will find that are not only preventable, but reversible! I now realized that had I not made the changes in my diet for the betterment of my health, I would most likely be dead by now.
Do something before it is to late. Death is permanent.
