The Building Blocks of Health

Book excerpt: In The Building Blocks of Health--How to Optimize Your Health with a Lifestyle Checklist, preventive medicine expert J. Joseph Speidel, MD, MPH, describes why most Americans have a lifestyle that harms their health. He documents that by following his Lifestyle Checklist, we can put in place The Building Blocks of Health and reverse much of the lifestyle-related damage that leads to illness and premature death. It lays out the scientific basis of why adopting healthier ways of eating, exercising and living prevents disease, optimizes and maintains health. Readers will learn:?Why the lifestyle of 95% of Americans is unhealthy.?That a healthy lifestyle can prevent 90% of diabetes, 80% of heart disease, and nearly 50% of cancers.?That an optimal lifestyle can add 10 to 15 years to life.?That multiple behavioral factors are necessary to keep us healthy--they are the Building Blocks of Health.?How to use a Lifestyle Checklist to adopt and stick to the behaviors needed to be healthy. Many books on health focus on a single topic such as nutrition or heart disease but The Building Blocks of Health documents why you can't rely on doing just one thing, like getting a lot of exercise, or avoiding just one risky behavior, like not smoking, to get and stay healthy. Multiple factors are at work to make us sick or keep us healthy. Each of the book's 16 chapters focuses on an important health-related topic including healthy nutrition, weight control, exercise and preventing heart disease, cancer and dementia.Everyone should read this book because almost all of us have an unhealthy lifestyle that is making us ill and contributing to early deaths. Doctors will want to give this book to their patients because they usually do not have enough time to provide good counseling about an optimally healthy lifestyle. The behaviors described in The Building Blocks of Health are highly effective in restoring and maintaining health because our bodies have remarkable power to heal when we stop the biological damage caused by our unhealthy lifestyle.