Current science continues to show that the reason we drift away from health and develop chronic disease is due to our environment and not our genes. Less than 1% of chronic diseases are truly genetic in nature. Essentially, this means that chronic diseases can be prevented.

Yet more than half of the American population has been diagnosed with a chronic disease and nearly 80% of all health care spending (doctor visits, prescriptions, hospitalizations, etc.) is the result of these lifestyle conditions. of life.

This number is expected to increase astronomically in the coming years. In fact, many say that this one problem will bankrupt our nation. Interesting. It 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 an extensive 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 shown by James Chestnut, MD, B.Ed., M.Sc.,DC,CCWP of The Wellness Practice at Victoria, B.C. 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 water wings have inflated for you, but they are leaking very slowly. The air in them is expected to last 120 years (the “healthy” human lifetime). 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 toxic and substandard lifestyle choices. Toxicity and deficiency are inconsistent with homeostatic cellular function. Therefore, it is these toxic and poor choices that become the rocks in your backpack.

These rocks (stressors) can come from any area of ​​lifestyle: poor nutritional choices, sedentary living, being overweight, chronic stress, unhealthy relationships, toxic drug use, not feeling loved or appreciated, excessive negative stimuli, poor posture, smoking or exposure to smoke, 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 is hard to argue that we are “advanced” in the area of ​​health and wellness when we are experiencing dramatic increases in chronic disease in all age groups, despite our “advanced” 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 daily lives have become more stressful and more difficult. Often we are not even sure how or when this happened.

There is no drug on the planet that can remove rocks for you! This 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 just 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 from lack of drugs or too many body parts! The body is not ‘stupid’. He is 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 deeper and deeper, the pressure on his water wings increases, forcing air to escape at a faster rate. You lose your years of life faster than originally anticipated…you age faster.

It is these incongruous lifestyle choices, or stressors, that are the catalyst for chronic disease. These toxic and poor choices result in what is known as our allostatic load. Chronic allostatic load, the result of months and years of incongruous lifestyle choices, changes our genetic 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 backpack, thus reducing the pressure on his water wings!

Ultimately, this means reducing our toxic and deficient options while increasing pure enough options. 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 what choices move us toward 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 wellness while preventing chronic disease.

Note: Again, concepts in this article are credited to Dr. James Chestnut, B.Ed, M.Sc, DC, CCWP