Preventing Disease Is Up To You

We live in a society where preventing disease takes a back seat to treatment. Even with all the information available, the medical community shuns natural treatments. When it comes to your health you have to take matters into your own hands. You need to educate yourself about your options; you don’t have to rely on drug treatments for everything.

Don’t rest on your laurels until something bad happens. You need to take a preventative approach to your health. You need to be proactive to prevent disease from striking.

Preventing Disease Takes a Back Seat

Doctors rarely discuss preventative medicine in depth. Very few doctors sit down with their patients and help them work out a regimen of preventative medicine. There’s no money in healthy patients, so it’s in their best interest, as well as the pharmaceutical companies, to treat you after you’ve already acquired a disease.

While this may be a cynical view of the medical profession, it’s not all a conspiracy to make you unhealthy. To be fair, there’s just not enough time to sit down with a patient and go over a customized plan. This is especially true when there’s a waiting room full of ill patients waiting to see the doctor.

If you’re serious about preventing disease, you have to take control and educate yourself. You can certainly ask your doctor about his or her recommendations on how to address specific issues. However, you’re likely to just get very broad, generic answers and no details to back it up.

Instead of teaching you how to keep your immune system beefed up so that you won’t get sick, he or she simply waits. When you’ve come down with something, the doctor then whips out the Rx pad to write you a prescription for medication that deals with the symptoms.

Unfortunately, reliance on prescriptions has become commonplace. So much so that the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) issues warnings about overuse of certain medications. Antibiotics and pain killers come to mind.

While these prescribed medications serve their purpose, overuse can result in unintended consequences. Additionally, prescription drugs are expensive. Either you’re paying for them out-of-pocket or your insurance company is paying for them. Then the cost eventually comes out of your pocket through increased premiums.

How Food Helps in Preventing Disease

Imagine if you knew how to treat or even prevent coming down with the flu. You would save yourself trips to the doctor and you would lighten your doctor’s case load during the flu season. Not everyone will be as diligent as you.

The best way to treat and prevent disease is to start with the foods you eat. Healing your body from the inside out helps you develop cells that can battle diseases before they take root. Eat immune-boosting foods to keep you healthy and get appropriate screenings for disease.

There are also alternative and holistic measures you can take to create your own treatment and healing plan. A combination of natural and traditional disease prevention is a good plan.

To this end, there are many foods you can eat to help ward off diseases such as cancer. For example, you want to eat plenty of foods rich in antioxidants. But you also want to have cancer screenings to catch any disease that occurs.

If you develop the disease, you’ll probably embark on a journey to get the very best traditional medical treatment available to you. But you will also look for information about nutrition and other treatments that help heal cancer naturally.

You want to establish a solid foundation for good health before disease sets in. Consider adopting a lifestyle change using food to fuel and heal your body instead of for comfort. This means you have to look at the foods you eat and what needs to be eliminated. Then you need to determine what you can add for better health.

There are two steps to this process. First, get rid of the foods that are damaging your body from a cellular level. Second, start eating foods that help boost your body’s ability to survive and thrive.

Weed Out Foods & Substances Toxic to Your Body

We live in a culture where ingredients are added to our meals and processed foods in a way we’re rarely, if ever, aware of them. And, we’ve learned to turn to certain foods for comfort. We don’t view a doughnut as toxic but as something that brings us pleasure.

Let’s look at just a few of the culprits we should eliminate from our meals or, at the very least, use sparingly.

• MSG

You can find monosodium glutamate (also known as MSG) in many processed foods. You regularly find it in Chinese food. Processed meats as well as some canned foods like soups and vegetable also contain MSG. You need to read the labels before you purchase these foods.

MSG is an additive to food that can create a toxic reaction in your body. Some reactions include headaches, nausea, fatigue, chest pain and more. Not everyone reacts badly to MSG. But it’s best to avoid it even if you feel only mild discomfort after eating it.

• Salt

Salt is an ingredient that can damage your health. We’re routinely adding extra salt to our food sources, and this isn’t necessary. Almost all foods (even sweet ones) have salt in them.

The guidelines say that if you’re 50 or under, you should limit your salt intake to 2,300 milligrams per day. If you’re older than 50, you should slash it almost in half to 1,500 milligrams per day.

You should never stop using salt completely because your body needs salt. You’ll suffer from negative side effects just as you do when you’re consuming too much salt. You need just the right balance.

• Sugar

Sugar isn’t just found in sweets. It hides in many seemingly healthy foods such as low-fat and lite foods. Even some foods labeled whole grain are packed with grams of sugar. You have to be vigilant about what you consume.

According to reports, Americans typically eat 3 pounds of sugar per person per week. How does it affect your health? For one thing, sugar damages your immune system. Sugar also feeds cancer cells, contributes to obesity, diabetes, and increases your risk for heart disease.

• Gluten

One ingredient that many people have a negative health reaction to is gluten. Many health plans tout grains as a main staple of your meal plans. Unfortunately many grains contain gluten. If you are gluten intolerant it can cause you to have allergic reactions that complicate your health.

Adopt a Healthy Eating Plan for Preventing Disease

Unless you’re already suffering from a major medical disease, you should strive for a healthy, whole foods diet. This type of diet feeds your body the foods it needs to protect your organs and overall health.

Eating whole foods help your heart, help your weight, help your blood pressure, and much more. If you’re following this type of nutritional regimen, you’ll be helping other parts of your body as well. A whole foods diet consists of:

• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Whole Grains
• Nuts
• Seeds
• Legumes
• Beans

Want to make your meals more interesting? You can start by adding herbs, spices, and extra virgin olive oil when preparing your meals.

During the week you should eat healthy fish, poultry, and meat, preferably organic. Oh, and don’t forget the eggs! A whole foods meal plan will include whole grains. But that doesn’t mean you have to eat gluten-heavy grains. You can eat gluten-free grains like corn, quinoa, wild rice, millet, and buckwheat.

It’s not all that difficult to take control of your own health.  In fact, there are natural remedies to treat many common ailments. So I ask you… isn’t it better to prevent illness and disease before they take you by surprise and turn your life upside down? This is a decision only you can make.

Preventing disease may be a lifelong commitment but it’s worth the effort.