I cannot emphasize enough the importance of prevention.
When it comes to prevention, the three main players we are working against are cardiovascular disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative disease. Outside of accidents and smoking-related diseases, these three chronic diseases are the leading causes of death in the United States. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases do not show up overnight and are immensely complicated and interwoven. But we can reduce risk of developing these diseases by addressing, as early as possible, the overlapping commonalities among them such as insulin resistance, hormone regulation, nutrient sufficiency, inflammatory control, oxidative burden, and an appropriate stress response.
Prevention is about understanding your deficiencies and susceptibilities. To put it another way, it is important to know where the leak in the system is located and patch it up before the ship sinks. There are ample predictive tools we can use such as symptoms, family history, targeted lab testing, wearable devices, and genetic markers to hedge our bet against disease occurrence.
Often we turn to three major institutions for our prevention needs: conventional health care, the niche wellness market, and the diet and fitness world. However, most approaches within medicine are reactionary, meaning they only have something to offer if you already have a disease consistent with western-based standards of care and there is a treatment protocol for that particular disease. As to the wellness sector, most of the service providers and content producers in this field are merely guessing at the proper therapeutics and supplementation but have no calculated way to tailor any of their suggestions to an individual’s unique needs. The diet and fitness world, too, is constantly bombarding the hungry public with generalized misinformation that fluctuates based on the latest fad or season.
The trick to succeeding at prevention is relatively straight forward. Employ a data driven strategy to find out what is wrong causally and make the appropriate change. The key is that you need a focused and reproducible approach backed by science and research.
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