Current science continues to show that the reason we stray from health and develop chronic disease is due to our environment, not our genes. Less than 1% of chronic diseases are truly genetic in nature. Essentially, this means that chronic diseases are preventable.
However, more than half of the American population has been diagnosed with a chronic disease and nearly 80% of all health care expenses (doctor visits, prescriptions, hospitalizations, etc.) are the result of these style conditions. of life.
This number is expected to increase astronomically in the coming years. In fact, many say that this single problem will bankrupt our nation. Interesting. This is particularly interesting as science tells us that this is completely preventable!
What are chronic diseases? The list includes conditions like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, infertility, autoimmune problems and disorders, Alzheimer’s, dementia, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, acid reflux, constipation, insomnia, decreased sex drive, etc.
With such a long list, it’s hard to imagine how we could prevent these conditions from developing in the first place. They seem so unrelated. To understand our role in preventing chronic disease, we must first have a simple understanding of how chronic disease develops as a result of our environment.
To explain how our lifestyle and environment relate to chronic disease, I’d like to share with you an image taught by Dr. James Chestnut, B.Ed., M.Sc.,DC,CCWP of The Wellness Practice at Victoria, BC. Imagine that when your life begins you are born in a pool of water. You have two items with you: inflatable water wings and an empty backpack.
Your wings of water have inflated for you, but they leak very slowly. The air in them is expected to last 120 years (the “healthy” human lifespan). As the air escapes from them, you have less time left. It’s called getting old! If there is no interference with these water wings, they will last you 120 years.
Every time you choose a lifestyle that is inconsistent with your innate genetic requirements for health, you add a “rock” to your backpack. Our blueprint for optimal health and function requires purity and sufficiency in the way we eat, move, and think. This means giving our bodies exactly what is required for optimal health (purity) and providing enough (sufficiency).
Nowhere in our plan for optimal function do we find substandard and toxic lifestyle choices. Toxicity and deficiency are incongruent with homeostatic cellular function. So it’s these poor, toxic choices that become the rocks in your backpack.
These rocks (stressors) can come from any area of lifestyle: poor nutritional choices, sedentary life, being overweight, chronic stress, unhealthy relationships, toxic drug use, not feeling loved or appreciated, excessive negative stimuli, having poor posture, smoking or smoke exposure, not spending enough time outdoors, etc.
Many of our poor and toxic lifestyle choices are the direct result of an “advanced” and industrialized society. It’s hard to argue that we’re “forward” in the area of health and wellness when we’re experiencing dramatic increases in chronic disease across all age groups, despite our “forward” efforts to treat these conditions.
The rocks sink us slowly. They have a cumulative effect on our health over the years. At first, we may not realize it. Eventually, we may realize that our everyday lives have become more stressful and more difficult. Often we are not even sure how or when this happened.
There isn’t a drug on the planet that can remove the rocks for you! That is why treating the symptoms, or the effects of these rocks, is not successful in terms of fixing the actual problem. Drugs, in fact, can become another toxic rock. (Just listen to the side effects of any commercial drug!) Removing body parts doesn’t work much better at solving the problem. We are not sinking for lack of drugs or too many body parts! The body is not ‘stupid’. You are displaying a perfectly normal physiological adaptation to an environmental stressor.
Rocks have another effect on the overall picture of your health. As more rocks are added to his backpack and he sinks ever lower, the pressure on his wings of water increases, forcing air to escape at a faster rate. You lose your years of life faster than originally planned… you age faster.
It is these incongruent lifestyle choices, or stressors, that are the catalyst for chronic disease. These poor, toxic choices result in what is known as our allostatic charge. A chronic allostatic load, the result of months and years of incongruent lifestyle choices, changes our gene expression, our cellular function, our physiology, our biology, our entire internal environment, and ultimately our expression of health. This is how chronic disease develops.
It becomes apparent that the way to restore health is to remove the rocks from his pack, thus reducing the pressure on his water wings!
Ultimately, this means reducing our toxic and deficient choices while increasing pure and sufficient choices. This changes our environment and changes the expression of our genetics. This is the science of Epigenetics: how our environment determines the expression of our genetic code.
Fortunately, science has shown us the model. We know which options move us towards health. We can fix the problem. Adopting a lifestyle similar to that of our earlier (and healthier) ancestors is the most successful way to meet our innate genetic requirements for health and well-being while preventing chronic disease.
Note: Again, concepts in this article are attributed to Dr. James Chestnut, B.Ed, M.Sc, DC, CCWP
