The Lifestyle Disease
What if we told you that the thing you’re most likely to die from, you could prevent? What if, odds were, someone knew what would kill you and had the information to stop it? What would you give for another 5, 10, 20, or even 30 years of life with your loved ones? This is the reality we are all facing.
Heart disease is the #1 killer in America, yet 80-90% of heart disease is preventable. That’s not hearsay. That’s straight from the CDC and NIH. Fact check anything you want here.
In fact, around 80% of all chronic illness is due to preventable lifestyle factors. For example, 50-80% of type 2 diabetes is preventable, while a variety of studies have shown 40-60+% of participants were able to reverse their type 2 diabetes through intensive lifestyle changes (e.g. weight loss, diet, and exercise).
Here’s another crazy one! 40-50% of cancers and cancer related deaths are preventable through these modifiable lifestyle changes. Does that sound unbelievable? Am I straying from reality? Nope! That’s from the American Cancer Society. You know what’s even crazier? Only 5-10% of cancers are directly caused by inherited genetics.
Think about this: our leading causes of all deaths in the US are: heart disease, cancer, then accidents, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. And yes, even Alzheimer’s is largely influenced by the things we consume and the way that we live.
Most of the people suffering and dying around us, and many of us who are dying from these diseases, could simply take better control of our own health.
A sedentary lifestyle increases the risk of all-cause mortality by 30-50%. But only about 24% of Americans meet the federal guidelines for necessary physical activity. Even if they did, it doesn’t undo all of the other damage that we’re doing to ourselves.
Around 55% of our calories in the US come from ultra processed foods. We’re eating way more than we need, with the average American eating between 3,600 and 3,800 calories/day (as we mentioned the other day), and over 70% of us are overweight (about 40% of whom are obese). And obesity is one of the strongest predictors of these diseases we’re discussing.
It’s abundantly clear that this needs to be talked about, but even our medical health professionals aren’t talking about it! Well, we’re going to! Next time we’ll discuss what we can do if we want to avoid the unnecessary suffering associated with our unhealthy habits.
