Despite spending a significant amount of our GDP on health care, America consistently ranks near last in developed nations when it comes to health outcomes. With increasing rates of obesity, childhood food allergies, asthma, and autism spectrum disorder, there’s an urgent need to reverse these trends. To do that, we must shift our focus from health care to health itself. Creating more health is the most effective way to reduce healthcare costs, maintain a strong workforce, and reduce the disease-related drag on our economy.
Choices make all the difference
As a clinical professor of medicine, I see patients in a clinic created specifically for complex chronic diseases. When patients first come to us, they often take more than 20 medications, costing thousands of dollars a month. Many people blame illness on their genes and think there’s nothing they can do besides taking more pills. However, 70% to 90% of the risk of developing high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer is due to just three things: diet quality, physical activity level, and smoking status.
Our diet and lifestyle choices have far more power in determining our health than our DNA does. Changing public policies around commodity and food supports to improve the overall quality of what we eat would be a slow and contentious process. However, we don’t have to wait for public policy to change to make a difference in our individual health or the health of our children. Our everyday choices speak to our genes, turning them on and off, and changing how your cells run the chemistry of life. Poor choices shift a healthy, disease-resistant body into an inflamed, sickly, disease-prone one.
Creating health
Disease begins with broken biochemistry, and for most Americans, their broken biochemistry begins with a diet filled with sugar and white flour and relatively devoid of vegetables. Eating the 150 pounds of sugar and 130 pounds of white flour that the average American consumes each year activates disease-promoting genes. Minimal vegetable intake silences health-promoting genes, leading to declining health.
During World War II, Americans self-provisioned their food with “victory gardens” so our industries could focus on the war effort. Up to one-third of all American vegetables produced during that time came from such gardens. We need victory gardens once more, this time to defeat the epidemic of chronic disease. We could replace urban blight with urban farms, as they have in Detroit, Atlanta, and Oakland—all of which are among the top ten worst “food deserts” in the United States, areas with poor access to fruits and vegetables.
If we returned to cooking meals at home, replacing sugar and white flour with vegetables, our health as individuals, families, and as a nation would improve dramatically. That’s because cells in bodies fed this way conduct the chemistry of life more accurately, repairing the body and restoring our ability to resist and even reverse the disease.
The impact of diet and lifestyle changes
This isn’t just theory. I’ve seen it countless times in our clinics: when patients drop sugar and white flour and instead eat six to nine cups of vegetables a day, their blood pressures and blood sugars normalize, pain fades away, brain fog dissipates, and mood improves. I see people who look and feel ten years younger than when they first came to us. Even autoimmune symptoms fade away. Many patients can stop taking medication after medication, including immune-suppression drugs. They begin thriving again.
In short, when people adopt a diet and lifestyle designed specifically for optimal cell function, their health steadily improves—and their healthcare costs steadily decline. Although policy changes to improve access to healthcare are essential, the top causes of death and disability are driven by diet quality, smoking status, and physical activity level. We must create more health.
The real solution to our healthcare crisis is changing our individual (and collective) behavior so that our health (and our country’s health) steadily improves, leading to less need for drugs, procedures, and time away from work. As a medical professional, I am committed to teaching my medical students, resident physicians, patients, and anyone else who will listen about the importance of our choices in determining the state of our health.
