THE IMPERATIVE TO TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR HEALTH
A SNAPSHOT OF THE DISMAL OUTCOMES OF HEALTHCARE IN THE U.S.
In our modern world, the prevalence of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and autoimmune disorders has reached catastrophic levels that are now crippling our healthcare system so much so, that Medicare and Medicaid are expected to be bankrupt by 2026. These diseases not only reduce our quality of life but also place a tremendous burden on both the healthcare system and the patients finances that enter this system with so much hope. With bloated prices on every medical procedure available, if hospitalized with a chronic disease, patients often find their life savings evaporate very quickly in their “golden years.”
Despite having both the most sophisticated technology in medicine and the highest healthcare costs in the modern world, our healthcare system produces the most dismal outcomes, compared to every other developed nation. However, a growing body of evidence supports the idea that every one of these diseases are entirely linked to our lifestyle choices, diet, and exposure to countless environmental toxins found in: processed foods and beverages, cookware, clothing, bedding, carpet, and more. In short, we live on a bio-toxic planet and the best thing we can do for ourselves is to mitigate and minimize exposure, emphasizing the need for a different, proactive, preventative, and more holistic approach to health and well-being.
THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF HEALTH, DISEASE, AND LIFESTYLE CHOICES
Our health and the development of diseases are intricately interconnected with the choices we make in our daily lives. Both our minds and our bodies are the cumulative sum of everything we have chosen and continue to choose to stick in them. What we eat, how much we move, the quality of our sleep, and how we manage stress can significantly influence our risk of developing various health conditions. With respect to our physical well-being, the relationship between lifestyle choices and disease can be summarized as follows:
DIET:
What we feed ourselves is the single greatest predictor of the diseases we predispose ourselves to developing over the course of our lives.
Simply put, although the human body is made of roughly 20 elements and a few trace elements, a simpler way to think of it is, it is essentially made of only three things. The air we breathe (the atmosphere), water (the ocean), and the soil (in the form of fruits, vegetables, and plants we consume). In other words, the human body is simply a scoop of the earth held together by breath. Feed the body what it is made of and the odds of living a long, healthy, disease-free life, are definitely stacked in your favor.
Unfortunately, the Standard American Diet (which spells SAD, couldn’t resist) involves the daily consumption of products that are literally killing them in slow motion, taking years, if not decades, off their lives. For the first time ever lifespan expectancy has been decreasing for the last 4 years.
The food (or processed ‘food-like’ products) we consume has a profound impact on our health. Diets rich in fruits, vegetables, gluten-free whole grains can reduce the risk of chronic diseases, while diets high in processed foods, sugar, and unhealthy fats can dramatically increase that risk. In addition to actual “food” (fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed meats) grocery stores sell hyper-processed, chemically laden, toxic, and pro-inflammatory “food-like” products that are not only calorically rich, but virtually devoid of any nutrition whatsoever. As a result, we’ve created a society of sick people who are poisoning themselves daily, always hungry, obese, and severely malnourished, despite the fact that Americans consume more calories than any other nation.
Consider, the average grocery store houses over 2,000 synthetic chemicals in the processed foods they sell, none of which have ever been tested for safety by the FDA. Every time we choose to eat processed foods we are participating in an experiment with no one considering or researching the consequences.
It’s largely assumed by consumers that certainly some dedicated government agency is looking out for us making sure what we’re ingesting is safe, right? Nothing could be further from the truth.
Your health is entirely in your hands. The degree to which we educate ourselves about what we choose to eat is what will ultimately determine our overall quality of life. In short, what you feed yourself day to day will determine your health or lack thereof. No one outside of yourself is ensuring your safety or your health trajectory in the coming years or decades.
So, here’s the skinny on longevity and disease. You can build your body’s composite from the natural world that you are made of at an elemental level and an extension of, or have a body that is an amalgamation of products created by profiteering corporate conglomerates who have anything but your health as a concern.
Processed food companies knowingly poison the public for profit. This is not a matter of opinion though I really wish it was. This is very well documented. But because of food lobbying groups in Washington DC our government turns a blind eye, as there is far too much money to be made. There are countless chemicals found in our food that are banned in over 160 countries.
Most people are completely unaware that the CDC, the NIH, and the FDA (that were so vocal during the events of the last few years) are captured agencies, almost entirely funded, not by tax payer money, but by the very pharmaceutical, food, and chemical industry companies they are supposed to be regulating. I’m sure there’s no conflict of interest though, and they’re all working very hard to ensure our safety.
The decline of health in America in the last three decades is in no way a conundrum or medical mystery. We’ve known the cause of the dramatic rise in chronic diseases for years. So, you ask, what is it?
After years of ingesting a corporate sponsored, highly refined, sugar-laden, pro-inflammatory, immune suppressing, calorically rich, nutrient deficient, vacuum-sealed, irradiated, processed “food-like” product based diet, we eventually develop self-induced insulin resistance that leads to one of 8 sub-cellular, generally fatal, metabolic disorders. It’s important to note, none of which respond to any known medications, and all of which positively respond to nutrition and change in diet.
Baffled by how these diseases came about, the naive masses woefully ignorant of the facts, then seek the help of medical professionals, who have received no nutritional education whatsoever in pursuing their medical doctorate, as over 86% of medical schools have removed nutrition from the curriculum. Seeking to be healed from classically trained MD’s is literally the blind leading the blind. Neither party, the patients nor their doctors ever connect the dots in understanding that virtually every known disease begin in the gut - and more specifically, the liver. Not adequately trained to truly address the patient’s underlying issues, but rather taught to “see, diagnose, and prescribe” in a very well designed way to treat the symptoms, the frail and enfeebled masses begin their journey of being passed from specialist to specialist, never cured, only managed, as their declining health continues its downward spiral.
Despite popular belief, outside of acute care, (pain or trauma) there is no such thing as a pharmaceutical drug that cures any known disease. The pharmaceutical industry is a business model, that answers to investors on Wall Street with the burden of producing ROI for investors. Curing people doesn’t look good on quarterly reports. This precept is painfully outlined in the section below, WHERE DOES THE U.S. RANK IN HEALTHCARE?
What we call medicine in the United States is a “Disease Management” Business Model, masking symptoms with pharmaceutical drugs that block natural systems of the body, minimizing the individuals symptoms but never addressing the root cause of disease. This creates a codependent relationship between the end user (patients) and the “medical” providers BIG PHARMA, to create a never ending revenue stream. This is why we refer to the pharmaceutical model as the “practice” of medicine. The long-term use and intake of pharmaceuticals is not medicine in any capacity. Medicine is anything that elevates the body’s capacity to heal itself. By definition, pharmaceuticals don’t meet that standard in any way.
This is why Naturopathic and Functional Medicine practitioners stress the importance of using food (what the human body should be built of) as medicine, emphasizing whole, unprocessed, and nutrient-dense choices. 8 of the top 10 fatal diseases all have an etiology that begins with and are exacerbated by the consumption of processed foods. Conversely, as mentioned above, all ten fail to respond to any known medications, but all respond to and can be reverse through nothing more than changes in diet.
A few books I would really encourage my audience to read that can really expand on this subject are:
METABOLICAL by Dr. Robert Lustig
FOOD FIX by Dr. Mark Hyman
YOUNG FOREVER by Dr. Mark Hyman
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY:
Regular exercise is not only essential for maintaining a healthy weight but also for improving cardiovascular health, strengthening the immune system, and reducing the risk of chronic inflammation, which research in the last two decades has found to be the cause of essentially every known disease. It is one of the most powerful tools for disease prevention and management
Stress Management:
Chronic stress can contribute to a wide range of health problems, including cardiovascular disease, mental health disorders, and digestive issues. Mind-body techniques, such as meditation and yoga, are advocated by naturopathic and functional medicine doctors to help manage stress and promote overall well-being.
Sleep:
Quality sleep is essential for the body's repair and restoration processes. During sleep, our bodies, remove toxins, remove inflammation, and clears the brain of waste that can lead to mental-health issues, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease later in life. Poor sleep is associated with an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and the afore mentioned mental health issues. Lifestyle changes that promote good sleep hygiene are often recommended by holistic healthcare practitioners and can added to with supplements.
My personal remedy and recommendations for poor sleep include:
Capitalize upon the body’s circadian rhythm. Try to go to bed at, or close to the same time every night (weekends included)
No caffeine after noon
No snacks or large meals a minimum of 2 (preferably 3) hours before bedtime. When the body is involved in digestion, the energy sequestered from the body to digest the food, prevent the body from entering deep, restorative sleep, which is critical for the body to detoxify and recover.
To supplement: take a sleep stack of 200 mg of Magnesium, 1 - 3 grams of Inositol, and 2 - 3 grams of Glycine. This combination works wonders for insomnia and getting deep sleep.
Reishi Mushroom Tincture: Known to have over 20 health benefits including: Immune Health, Antidepressant, Cancer prevention, Liver repair, Skin Health, Seizure Prevention, Anti-Inflammatory, and Anti-Aging, I recommend it here as a Sleep Supplement which it is also known for. Deep sleep, aka “restorative sleep,” is paramount to one’s health. Without achieving deep, restorative sleep our bodies go into decline quickly. As someone with an OURA RING that monitors my sleep cycles, I can tell you, this is a game changer. I use an oral spray that goes under the tongue for quick absorption, right before bed. I go into really deep sleep with very vivid dreams using this as a supplement. I highly recommend this for those suffering with insomnia or who wake up a lot during the night.
Two companies I highly recommend purchasing from is:
Fungi Perfecti
Life Cykel
THE ROLE OF NATUROPATHIC & FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE
Naturopathic and functional medicine are two approaches to healthcare that delve deeper into understanding the root causes of diseases. They both emphasize the importance of treating the whole person, not just addressing symptoms.
Naturopathic Medicine:
Naturopathic doctors focus on identifying and treating the underlying causes of health issues. They use natural therapies, such as herbal medicine and nutritional counseling to support the body's innate healing abilities. Naturopathic medicine promotes the body's self-regulation and self-healing processes.
Functional Medicine:
Functional medicine practitioners investigate the interactions between an individual's genetics, lifestyle, diet, and environment. They use specialized testing to identify imbalances and dysfunctions in the body's systems. The goal is to restore balance and address the root causes of disease rather than just managing symptoms.
A Far More Comprehensive Approach:
The link between health, disease, diet, and lifestyle choices is undeniable and mountains of research are now revealing this connection. By making informed decisions about what we eat, how we move, how we manage stress, and how we rest, we can significantly impact our health and reduce the risk of chronic diseases.
Naturopathic and functional medicine practitioners play a crucial role in helping individuals understand the root causes of their health issues and develop personalized strategies to optimize well-being. Embracing a holistic and proactive approach to health, as opposed to a reactive approach when we find ourselves sick, empowers individuals to take control of their health and lead more vibrant and disease-free lives. But for many, traditional “allopathic” medicine (pharmaceutical approaches) are the only type of healthcare most are familiar with.
In my forthcoming eBook to be released in early 2024 to those Subscribing to the website, and subsequent blog posts on SHIFT ETHOS, I share with readers an entire world of profoundly effective alternative approaches to treating the “root” cause of disease and reclaiming our health, too many to list and expound upon in this book, that do not employ nor require the use of pharmaceutical drugs.
I invite you, the reader, on an investigative journey that will allow you to take far more control and responsibility for your own health than you ever thought you had, dramatically reducing the chance of ever developing a debilitating disease.
Arguably, the BEST first step you can take in taking control of your health, is the purchase of a yearly membership to FUNCTION HEATH - The first-ever membership to bring together your health history with over 100 lab tests to deliver actionable insights from top doctors. Just $499 per year and now FSA and HSA eligible.
If that sounds like a lot of money, I can tell you, I get a full-spectrum blood panel done twice a year just to track my health. Even with insurance covering a good portion of it, it still costs me $350 per test ($700/yr.). That’s just for the blood tests. That doesn’t include the initial and subsequent follow up doctor visits to review the results, nor are you provided a “plan of action” unless you’re seeing a naturopathic or functional medicine practitioner. MD’s a not permitted by the CDC to dispense advice on lifestyle habits or dietary preferences.
With Function Health your membership includes up to 5 Tests per year, an assigned functional medicine practitioner to provide guidance and target your approach to health, A.I. insights in creating a plan of action, dietary recommendation on specific foods to eat, as well as foods to avoid, to heal your specific health concerns, on demand access to lab results, access to advanced testing, results tracked over time, members not required to carry insurance, and a secure dashboard that viewed anytime. This is a Lifestyle Action Plan.
So, why take control of your health? There’s a reason I say it’s imperative.
I want to provide a brief history of our Managed Care Health Delivery System, that despite having the most expensive health care system in the modern world, the United States ranks dead of the 37 richest countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Developmet (OECD). We are the sickest population of people of all industrialized nations.
WHERE DOES THE U.S. RANK IN HEALTHCARE?
A Very Dismal Picture
I can’t paint the dismal picture I did above without providing evidence.
So? Here’s the evidence.
Where are we currently ranked in healthcare, as opposed to the rest of the world should be of paramount importance to each and every one of us. Simply put, though our healthcare system has been in free-fall for decades and is now in dire straits, collapsing under the weight of its own greed and profiteering on a very naive public. This creates a very bleak picture for the next generation if we don’t make immediate and systemic changes from the top down, especially in terms of our understanding of the correlation between nutrition (or lack thereof) and disease. Sadly, where we rank paints a very dismal picture of what we can expect in terms of ‘health’ outcomes from the treatment we seek from the one industry we hope will provide for us. The short of it??? The deck is not stacked in your favor.
The full report can be found here: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2021/aug/mirror-mirror-2021-reflecting-poorly
How the 11 Wealthiest Countries Rank on Performance
The top-performing countries overall are Norway, the Netherlands, and Australia (Exhibit 1).
The next three countries in the ranking — the U.K., Germany, and New Zealand — perform very similarly to one another (Exhibit 2). The U.S. ranks #11 — last. Exhibit 2 (next page) shows the extent to which the U.S. is an outlier: its performance falls well below the average of the other countries and far below the two countries ranked directly above it, Switzerland and Canada. In fact, the U.S. is such an outlier that we have calculated the average performance based on the other 10 countries, excluding the U.S. (see How We Measured Performance). The U.S. is last on all domains of performance except care process, on which it ranks #2.
Exhibit 3 shows that while spending as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) has increased in all countries, spending growth in the U.S. — by far the worst performer overall — has greatly exceeded growth in the other 10 nations. In 1980, high-income countries spent between 5 percent and 8 percent of GDP on health care. But as U.S. spending accelerated over the decades, the U.S. was spending a substantially larger share of its GDP on health care by 2019 than every other high-income country.
Exhibit 4 starkly shows just how much the U.S. is an outlier from the other nations when its performance as a health care system is compared to its spending as a share of GDP.
Just to add insult to injury here, consider the fact that in 2016, a study conducted by Harvard University, found the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States is Medical Malpractice/Medical Error. Medical error kills more Americans than morbid obesity and diabetes, combined. Only cancer and cardiovascular disease kills more people each year.
This study was so dismal that it was then followed up on by a John Hopkins University Study that provided even worse results, and as a consequence remained unpublished.
The picture this should paint is the imperative to take responsibility for one’s health because if one is not practicing “preventative maintenance” to prevent disease, the outcomes, once you seek help, are not promising. This is due in part, and I’m deliberately repeating myself, because pharmaceutical “medicine” is not actually “medicine.”
Again, real medicine is something that elevates the body’s ability to heal itself. Pharmaceutical drugs all work by blocking a cell receptor site, a biofeedback loop, an enzyme, a catalyst, a hormone, or a biochemical reaction in the body. The patients symptoms disappear, but we haven’t begun to address the underlying problems, the root cause, or the lifestyle choices that lead to the emergence of the symptoms.
That’s not to say ALL drugs are bad. To explain that, there’s healthcare before the rollout of “Managed Care” and healthcare, or the dramatic lack of, after. Again, outside of trauma and acute care, there’s simply no reason to be on any drug long term. Functional medicine and Naturopathic approaches to healing the body are far more reliable approaches . . . with no side effects.
THE “MANAGED CARE” HEALTHCARE DELIVERY SYSTEM
A Brief History and The Impact of Managed Care on the Healthcare System:
No one would argue that some of the most substantial scientific discoveries in the last 100 years have come in medicine but most of them were made in a time before the emergence of the “Managed Care” Healthcare Delivery System. The system we have today, has evolved into a corporate leviathan that answers to Wall Street and the system itself is collapsing under the weight of its own greed and responsibility to investors. This is now very well documented, thanks to the effort of whistleblowers and prominent physicians in the last 3 years bringing to the forefront the unprecedented industry collusion between medical journals, clinical studies with results that are essentially paid for and far from accurate, hiding results, manipulation of data, BIG PHARMA’s bankrolling of the CDC and the FDA, and on and on.
The faith we can afford to have in this system may be dubious at best.
Things weren’t always this way.
The Managed Care healthcare delivery system emerged in the United States in the mid-20th century. It was introduced as a way to control healthcare costs, improve the quality of care, and increase efficiency. However, over the years, it has faced considerable criticism for several negative impacts on the healthcare industry. Here's a brief history and some of the criticisms:
Emergence in the 20th Century: Though there is debate as to whether or not managed care was actually designed to improve healthcare or to simply commoditize it to profiteer on people when they’re at their most vulnerable point, discussion surrounding the infrastructure of the healthcare system and managed care began to gain popularity in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to ever rising healthcare costs. Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) and Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs) are some of the common forms of managed care organizations.
Cost Control: From the outset, one of the stated primary goals of managed care was to control healthcare costs. It aimed to achieve this by negotiating contracts with healthcare providers and controlling patient access to specialists or expensive treatments. While it did help slow down the rate of healthcare cost increases, it also led to limitations in the choice for both the healthcare providers offering services and the patients seeking those treatments and services.
Quality of Care: Managed care organizations introduced measures to “standardize” and improve the quality of healthcare delivery from a business perspective. However, critics argue that these measures often led to "cookie-cutter" medicine, where providers were incentivized to follow rigid protocols, potentially neglecting individual patient needs and preferences. Physicians immediately felt the impact of managed care, feeling largely stripped of the ability to treat the root cause of disease and instead approach medicine from a symptomatic focus because of the way coding and billing treatments was structured under the new managed care system.
Provider and Patient Dissatisfaction: Many healthcare providers have expressed frustration with the administrative burden and financial pressures imposed by managed care organizations. Patients, on the other hand, have at times found themselves limited in their choice of doctors and subjected to cumbersome prior authorization processes for specialist care.
Ethical Concerns: Some managed care practices, like "gag clauses" that restricted doctors from discussing certain treatment options with patients, has continued to raise ethical concerns. These clauses have since been banned in many states.
Narrow Networks: Managed care often utilizes "narrow networks" of providers to reduce costs. This can result in limited access to certain specialists, particularly in rural areas and prevents access to the most robust care available to the patients.
Fears of Under-Treatment: Critics argue that the profit-driven nature of managed care organizations can sometimes lead to under-treatment or denial of necessary care to save costs with the patient’s return to health being largely negated.
Bureaucracy: Managed care systems introduced complex administrative processes, including pre-authorization requirements, which added bureaucracy and paperwork to the healthcare system, diverting resources away from direct patient care. Medical assistants in any given office our burdened hours and hours of negotiations on the phone with insurance companies to gain authorization for the care, the physicians would like to provide. It’s a constant battle.
Shift to Value-Based Care: In response to some of these criticisms, there has been a growing movement in recent years shifting towards Functional Medicine, comprehensive Holistic Care, and Naturopathic value-based care models that focus on outcomes and patient satisfaction rather than just cost control and the management of symptoms, which is the promise and the peril of every pharmaceutical drug. They work in masking the patient’s symptoms, by blocking natural functions of the body but never addressing the causative factor leading to the disease state they claim to be addressing.
Managed care has evolved over the years, and it's important to note that not all its impacts have been negative. It has contributed to some cost containment and quality improvement in some cases. However, the negative impacts have led to ongoing debates about the best ways to balance cost control with the provision of high-quality, patient-centered care in the U.S. healthcare system.
With that said, in light of the current dilapidated state of affairs with respect to our healthcare system and its deplorable outcomes, it’s imperative that we be proactive with our health by choosing lifestyle habits that promote optimal health. Your health and wellness is entirely up to you because sadly, no one, especially with a pharmaceutical approach, is coming to save you.
As I often tell my son, “Dying isn’t hard. That’s the easy part and it’s over in an instant. It’s living with a debilitating disease for years on end with no quality of life. That’s hard.”
I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject and of course any questions you may have. Let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing from you.
Disclaimer:
I am not a medical doctor or a medical practitioner. I am not legally permitted to treat, cure, or heal disease. I can, however, provide educational content with respect to building and maintaining good health through nutrition, diet, and exercise.
Any information provided on this site is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you have read on this web site.
This website summarizes information on the role of nutrition, diet, and exercise in health, disease and wellness. Readers should be aware that knowledge of nutrition and medicine is constantly evolving. They are encouraged to frequently check the most current information available on preventive and therapeutic measures. It is your designated clinician’s responsibility, relying on their experience and knowledge of the patient, to determine the best course of action in providing care.
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