Life is a gamble, and right now, chances are that the odds are very
much stacked against you. The contamination in the air you breathe, the
water you drink, and the highly processed and additive-filled foods you
eat all combine to work against you. Add to that the likelihood of
years of lack of proper diet and exercise, lack of proper sleep, the
side-effects from taking too many medications, the failure of modern
medicine to properly treat and cure disease, and perhaps even your
heredity, and the odds can appear to be very long indeed. The good news is that you can turn those odds back in your favor no matter how old
you are, no matter what your physical condition is, no matter what your
heredity is and no matter how many years you have neglected to live a
healthy life.

As anybody knows, nothing is 100%, and life is no
exception. However, it is pretty easy to see that the odds are pretty
strong that you will ultimately face ill health and live a shorter life
than otherwise might be the case if you continue to let an unhealthy
lifestyle keep stacking the deck against you. On the other hand, if you
follow the advice in this simple series of articles, you can turn the
odds very much in favor of living a much longer, healthier and happier
life.

Before we look at how you can give yourself the best
chances for good health and a long life, it would be a good idea to
understand just what we have done, and what has been done to us, to
cheat us out of the healthy and happy years we could have. My own
education was an eye-opener and hopefully will also be one for you.

In the Beginning – An Eye-Opening Journey

Somewhere
around the time I reached my mid-forties I finally began to come face
to face with the reality of my own mortality. All of my friends were
getting older, many of them were bothered by various health problems
and several were beginning to carry around quite a little satchel
filled with bottles of medications that they took daily. As for myself, I know that I seemed to look the
same every day in the mirror (except for certain Mondays after I had
spent the weekend acting like I still was young and immortal), but when
I looked at pictures taken a decade or so ago, the difference was
pretty obvious. And I knew that I wasn't quite as fast and lively as I
was in my 20's and 30's. So, I reluctantly had to admit that chances
were pretty good that I wasn't going to stay young and live forever,
and when I thought about all the bad habits in such areas as lifestyle,
diet, exercise and sleep, I really began to be concerned about what I
might be able to do to live as long and as healthy of a life as I
could. I began to research health and aging,
looking for ways to have more energy and vitality, live longer, and
avoid or conquer the diseases and physical conditions that are common
in our later years.

When I began my journey and started looking
into subjects like anti-aging and disease prevention, I expected to
find most of the answers I sought in modern science and medicine.
Although I had a certain amount of respect for folk medicine and the
tradition of natural cures,
I was pretty much one of those "real drugs for real cures" kind of
people who thought that the answer to any health problem was best found
in modern medical facilities and on the shelves of modern pharmacies. I
thought that for the most part, folk cures and natural remedies were
pretty much superstition and unsupported myth. If I became ill enough
to seek help, my first and only thought was to go see a licensed modern
medical doctor and get the latest wonder drug for my illness. As for
so-called alternative medicines, whether it was called naturopathic,
homeopathic, folk or Chinese medicine, well, I gave that about as much
consideration as I would snake oil or the eye of a newt, or tongue of a
toad - no witches brew or old wives tales medicine for me! I found out
that I was terribly mistaken!

First, the bad news: our medicine has fooled us & our government has failed us.

The more I checked into modern medicine, the world pharmaceutical giants and regulatory agencies like the FDA, the more worried and disillusioned I became. I wondered why the death rate of cancer and heart disease was virtually unchanged for several decades, why so many drugs were being recalled because of serious, even fatal, side effects.
And I kept reading about natural remedies that seemed to be much more
effective without serious side effects for many forms of cancers and
other diseases when all modern medicine had to offer was long term
treatments with little odds of success and horrible, debilitating side
effects. Then one day I came upon the following statement from former
FDA Commissioner Dr. Herbert Ley:

"The thing that bugs me is
that people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn't. What the FDA is
doing and what the public thinks it's doing are as different as night
and day."

As if that wasn't disturbing enough, I then read the
results from one of the FDA's own studies released in December 2004
(only after a freedom of information request resulted in the study
finally being released two years after it was completed). According to
the study, fully two-thirds of the very scientists that the FDA used to
determine if drugs were safe stated that they lacked faith in the FDA's
ability to determine drug safety. And one out of five of them admitted
that they had been pressured to approve drugs that they felt were
unsafe. What was going on here?

The more I read and researched, the less willing I became with
unquestionably trusting modern medicine and modern drugs. At the same
time, I became more and more impressed with what I discovered about natural healing,
herbs and supplements. In hundreds of articles, testimonials, and
medical studies, I found that there are thousands of people all over
the world avoiding diseases, living longer and successfully beating
diseases through natural healing and alternative medicines with far
fewer side effects than conventional medicine. Why, I wondered, had
modern medicine not embraced this fact? Why did more people not know
about this? It seemed like to me that someone should be shouting from
the rooftops: "Cancer! AIDS! Hepatitis-C! Heart Disease! High
cholesterol! Stress! Stroke! Prostate disease! Kidney disease! You
don't have to die! You don't have to suffer! And you don't have to
spend an arm and a let!"

Soon, the answer became all too apparent: The largest single source of funding for medical schools is the trillion dollar world pharmaceutical industry.
Does anyone think that it is a coincidence that since early in the
twentieth century, modern medicine has taught our physicians to treat
disease by prescribing synthetic drugs – drugs made by the same people
who funded their medical schools? For years, modern medicine has been
taught to ignore natural cures and treatments, or else taught that
these such things don't work. The FDA has been co-opted into an agency
that serves primarily to protect the marketplace of the pharmaceutical
industry and suppress natural competition. Diet and natural herbs and supplements were not only ignored, they were suppressed, for the very simple reason that there was no profit in it!

Perhaps the most striking proof is the fact that it has taken modern medicine and doctors fully 40 years to finally admit that vitamins are beneficial! Yes, for four decades, they denied the obvious and
dismissed the idea of adding vitamins to our diets as worthless! Today,
as nutrition and natural healing are finally gaining wider acceptance
among the medical profession, the big international pharmaceutical
companies are fighting back by resisting alternate cures on one hand
while on the other hand spending hundreds of millions of dollars on
efforts to limit public access to vitamins and supplements. Their
tactics are obvious, limit the competition from natural medicine for as
long as possible, and then co-opt natural alternative by restricting
public access and bringing the herbs and vitamins under their control
so that they can drive up the price and keep their profits growing!

As
it is, no herb or natural treatment or remedy can be labeled or even
advertised legally as a cure or treatment. Think in terms of cancer,
for example. If someone had an herbal supplement where 90% of the
patients who took it became disease free, it still cannot be labeled or
advertised as a cure or even as a treatment, while a synthetic
lab-created chemical that kills more people than it cures can take out
full page advertisements in national magazines. And that is how the
public interest is protected from all of those dangerous herbs, which
result in maybe 50 deaths a year compared to 106,000 deaths per year
for properly prescribed medications that can be advertised as cures and
treatments. Not to mention the 2,000,000 serious drug reactions from
properly prescribed medications.

We would like to think
otherwise, but the almighty dollar, pound, frank, deutschemark and
ruble have dictated otherwise. To the big drug companies and the doctors that prescribe their medicines, our body is their
marketplace. And the only way for an industry to grow is to increase
the market. That simply cannot happen if too many diseases are cured;
in fact, it means just the opposite – diseases must increase! And that
is just what has happened: few cures and more side effects. Cure rates
for major diseases are virtually unchanged over the past 30 or more
years. Depending on the source, anywhere from 50-95% of modern drugs
have not only side effects, but serious side-effects.

Death from prescription drug side effects is now the fourth leading cause of death in the United States according to the medical industry itself (the AMA Journal) – and that doesn't include deaths that are reported to be
caused by the original disease that really were the result of drug
side-effects, or of miss-prescribed medications that are not reported
by doctors leery of malpractice suits and malpractice insurance premium increases (one survey found
that only 1 in 24 doctors would voluntarily report themselves in the
event of a patient dying of miss-prescribed medications). When all
factors are taken into consideration, improper medical treatment and prescription drugs are considered by some authorities as actually being the second leading cause of death in our country.

Sadly, my friends, if the following applies to a treatment or medication,

1. It works,

2. It's inexpensive,

3. Few, if any, negative side effects,

4. It's not patentable,

-
Odds are it will stay on the black list because no one is going to
spend a dime to prove its effectiveness or to prescribe it. Medicine is
a business. Cancer and other diseases are part of that business. The
FDA serves and protects the drug companies and the AMA from anyone with
an inexpensive and effective treatment for money making diseases.

At
this point I should probably add that I am not one of the conspiracy
nuts who believes that all of our doctors and our governments and big
medicine have joined together in a grand scheme to keep us from being
healthy. In fact, I think that the big majority of doctors are
dedicated, well meaning and hard working individuals. The failure of
modern medicine lies in the ways that modern medicine has been taught
and practiced, the way that alternative treatments and supplements have
been regulated, and the way that an unhealthy amount of greed on the
part of the drug companies have combined to rob us of the good health
that we might otherwise have.

Then there is the environment. Ever since the industrial revolution began, we have been pouring an increasing number and amount of toxic chemicals and waste into our air, our water and our food. In the beginning, much of the fault was due to lack of
knowledge of the chemicals we used as solvents, pesticides, paints,
fuels and any number of other products and industrial processes. Today,
that is no longer an excuse.

Despite the advances in modern
science that have identified the damage that the toxic chemicals
industry and fuel burning have wreaked on our environment, the process
to clean up the environment is woefully slow and industry resists
costly expenses to clean up at every step of the way, while the
government is often all too willing to drag it's feet and backtrack in
enforcing or passing regulations to protect us. The well-heeled
propaganda machine that serves industry and the politicians their money
contributes generously to may paint environmentalist as "tree huggers"
and radicals, but the scientific evidence is indisputable: the progress
of industry has come at a huge cost to the public.

Today, the
National Toxicology Program (NTP), part of the National Institutes of
Health, lists 246 agents in our environment which are either known to
cause cancer or reasonably expected to cause cancer, and many feel that
the number is tremendously overstated. For example, the Health Science
Institute tells us that the average glass of water contains 2000
carcinogens. And no matter which side of the environmental fence you
may be on, no one who hasn't lived with their head in the sand, is not
aware of the lead, arsenic and mercury that has been pouring into our
environment for over a century now.

Next, we have to factor in
the fact that over-farming and widespread use of pesticides and
chemical fertilizers have made the food we eat today much less healthy
than it was only a couple of generations ago. The same is true for the
foods we buy off the shelf in our local grocers. Over-processing has
removed much of the nutrients while harmful ingredients have been added
to increase shelf life and enhance flavor and texture. Combined with
America's love for fast food, our diet can no longer be counted on to
come anywhere close to giving us all the vitamins and nutrients that we
evolved to require, much less the ones needed to offset the damages
caused by pollution, additives and the sheer stress of modern life.

With so much bad news, is there hope? Fortunately, that answer is a resounding yes!

And then the good news - it's never too late!

When
you look at someone and say, "Doesn't he or she look young for their
age?" Or you remark that someone "sure has a lot of energy for their
age", what you are really seeing is someone who looks, acts and feels a
lot closer to what they should for their age than you do. Whether they
were blessed with good genetics, or more likely, have taken better care
of themselves, the real question is: how do you acquire the kind of
health and vitality and become the kind of person that people say the
same things about? And, most importantly, is it too late?

The good news is that it is not
too late - no matter what your age may be. Recent studies have shown
conclusively that people in their 40's, 50's, and 60's can change their
diet and lifestyle and undo most of the damage that a lifetime of
neglect has caused. That's right, a person who is obese, sedentary, has
high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoker's lungs, and other health
problems can essentially reverse those problems if they take action now
and virtually catch up to the same health and vitality of a person who
has spent their entire life eating right, exercising and living a
healthy lifestyle! Even people in their 70's, 80's and beyond can add
quality years to their lives by changing their diets and exercise. The
key is, no matter what your age, you should take action now,
because a neglected body in poor shape is a ticking time bomb that you
want to defuse before it really is too late. So, with everything to
gain and nothing to lose, let's get started!

Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/022971.html