​Notice how the change of seasons seems to trigger illness. Traveling across time zones can do the same. We are like finely tuned machines and even small stresses can increase our vulnerability. Disease results from an imbalance with our physical and social environment.
 
We become vulnerable to organ failure, mental dysfunction, loss of vitality, cancer, infection, and even death when stressed. Cattle that are gathered into feed lots or shipped often succumb to shipping fever, a deadly viral and bacterial infection. Baby elephants offered the best of food and conditions will die without social contact. Infants not lovingly handled are immunologically weak and suffer emotionally. Plants grown on nutrient-depleted soils are attacked by pests and weed competition. Creatures, organs, tissues, and cells are tuned for specific conditions. When this tuning is disrupted, balance is lost and disease takes root.
 
People today commonly see disease as something that strikes us from the outside. But disease is not an attack. It is the body's reaction to the stress that is usually caused by some life choice we have made. If we are weak nutritionally, physically, mentally, metabolically—out of tune with our physical and social environment—we will not endure stress, and disease is the result. We are to blame for making ourselves the fructuous soil for disease to take root and flourish. Cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and even infectious diseases do not suddenly appear out of nowhere to inflict hapless souls. The potential for disease is always there. We change it from potentiality to actuality by the choices we make.
 
That is the reality, but it is not what modern medicine promotes and its consumers want to hear. An easily identifiable enemy is more commercially viable. It opens the door for surveillance (lab tests) and weapons (drugs, antibiotics, and surgery). If the public can be led to believe we are at war with disease, there is no limit to the medico-military budget that can be justified. Additionally, people would rather think in terms of disinfecting doorknobs and getting vaccinated than changing their habits.
 
We also cannot assume that apparent health is real health. The World Health Organization has even admitted that health is not the absence of disease. This is because any rational investigation of the facts proves that disease can, for a time, coexist with seemingly normal function. Serious organ disease begins small and undetected, only to manifest itself after the majority of the reserve of the organ has been lost. For example, a large percentage of the kidney and liver can be destroyed with little outward evidence of disease. The body is marvelously capable of adaptation and resistance, but only to a degree. When the stress continues, the body exhausts its ability to compensate and adapt. Breakdown—disease—results.
 
Recall from a previous chapter the young vigorous soldiers who were killed in battle. Upon autopsy, their hearts were found to have the beginnings of heart disease normally only associated with older men. They had passed the military physicals, endured boot camp, and faced the rigors of war. The atheromatous swellings (plaques) on the interior of their coronary (heart) vessels were the result of an improper diet that began in their infancy. The resiliency of youth masked the problem and permitted the young men to function normally even though the heart muscle was not receiving optimal blood flow.
 
But such adaptation—margin for error—has definite limits. If a correction is not made in the lifestyle choice that is causing the stress to the body and its organs, disease becomes manifest. When the outward symptoms of the disease finally do appear, we do not suddenly 'get' a disease. If the soldiers had survived war and had a heart attack in their later years, the cause would not have been high cholesterol detected when they were 50. It would not have been from not having a yearly physical, not being diligent in taking an aspirin a day, or faithfully consuming cholesterol medication. The cause was a nutritional stressor that began way back in early youth resulting in the slow growth of the lesions in the coronary vessels. In other words, disease is self-induced. We are not victims other than of ourselves.

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​If we wait until symptoms of illness appear and then attempt repair or make the appropriate life alterations, we may be too late. This is not to say that there is no hope—even in advanced illness. But if we understand that illness is the end product of the incubation of a pattern of improper living, the earlier we make changes the better. Obesity in the young will increase the risk of heart disease by almost fourfold, but there may be no overt signs of heart disease through decades of early life. It takes as much as four years after changing the diet to natural foods to convert tissues assaulted from unhealthy oxidized and hydrogenated fats to their healthy fatty acid form. Cancer usually incubates in the body for twenty to thirty years before becoming manifest.
 
Obviously the time to do something about disease is before symptoms ever appear, during the window of opportunity the body affords us. We must do the hardest thing of all: put a lot of effort into staying healthy when we are healthy. If we don't, we are putting ourselves in the position of having to solve a problem at the end of the problem. That is not living life as if thinking matters.
 
This then brings us to a basic truth: health is best served by prevention, not attempted cure. The problem is, when we are apparently well it is difficult to work at fixing what doesn't seem to be broken. After all, what is prevented if there is no disease? So prevention seems boring because when it's done well nothing happens. It isn't nearly as spectacular as getting a ride in an ambulance, staying in a $2000-per-night hospital room while a fleet of medical technocrats poke, prod, and dote over us, and then being whisked off to have a heart transplant or a section of the colon removed. Unless that's the kind of excitement we are looking for, then we better begin doing the boring thing now. It's a matter of pay now or pay dearly later. The best way to think of prevention is this way: If we are not right now doing something to create health, we are causing disease.
 
Prevention is such an incredibly worthy, even ethical, pursuit. It's a crime to our very being not to engage in it. The dysfunction, pain, inconvenience, and economic damage from disease so dwarfs the relatively small requirements to build and maintain health that it is insanity not to pursue health now. Even Pasteur (credited with the germ theory of disease) reflected, "Whenever I meditate on disease, I never think of finding a remedy for it, but rather a means of preventing it."
 
Good food, joining a health club, and learning how to properly care for ourselves can cost some money and time. Unfortunately, when we are well it seems like we are paying for nothing. We have no problem spending money on cures or wasting time in a hospital bed. We spend without limit on dying but little for living. This mindset is reinforced—even forced—by medical insurance that does not pay for prevention, and a government that prefers to entitle disease care rather than health care. So we continue to chase but never catch.
 
The word prevention is perverted when it is attached to such things as lab tests, mammograms, prostate screening, check-ups, lumpectomies, and medications. Finding a disease and attempting to then treat it is not prevention. That's like saying a police report describing how you ran a red light, and a body shop that repairs your smashed vehicle, prevents a car accident.
 
The medical community cannot help with true prevention because they are brainwashed into the mechanistic view of the body. They can do only what they are trained to do: name diseases, treat symptoms, and attempt repair. Furthermore, people think they have a manufacturer's warranty. If things go wrong it's someone else's problem and all it will take is money and an expert to make things all better.
 
For doctors to help patients with true prevention would require teaching and counseling. But that requires a deeper philosophical understanding of the body at its most fundamental level—who humans are, where we came from, and our place in the world. But doctors are no longer philosophers (as they were long ago), but rather materialistic technicians, mechanics, and machine operators. Most know no more about the deeper philosophical issues of life than the average welder or gardener does.
 
People are thus deceived into thinking that health is about being a dutiful consumer and paying for early detection and symptom removal. Health, an honorable thing that people can only do to themselves, is profaned to a mere purchasing decision. It's crazy stuff.
 
Don't go along with the craziness. Health is not consumerism. It is the wisdom of self-management and the foresight to do the hard things now that will bring dividends later.
 
For starters:
 
1. Eat foods you were designed to eat
2. Exercise and work hard so you deserve to eat
3. Get outside in nature
4. Drink clean water and breathe fresh air
5. Sleep plenty
6. Question all dogmas
7. Hug somebody