logo
Our Products
About Us
Contact Us
Hello Sign In
Your Account
View
My Cart

How to Prevent Common Killer Diseases

Pin it
Eat healthy but still don’t feel well? You could be harming your nutrient intake with dangerous anti-nutrients. Read more about anti-nutrients and how to counteract their effects below.

If there was a simple way to prevent all diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, arthritis, and stroke would you do it? Studies indicate that to prevent many of the common preventable diseases that affect millions of Americans today, all you have to do is implement five simple principles of health. Read more about the five basic principles of health and how they can benefit you below.

Health is an important part of our lives, because if we do not have our health, we cannot enjoy life. Feeling sick and tired all the time can seriously interfere with life’s joys and experiences. Luckily, we now know that many of the common health issues that affect millions of people around the world are completely preventable.

In fact, many of the common diseases and health concerns that we see today are caused by poor lifestyle choices. By reversing these poor choices, we can directly control our health for the better. Strangely enough, there are just a few techniques for success that promote health throughout life. The changes are simple enough to make, and anyone dedicated to health will find the small sacrifices well worth it in the end. In general, it takes just five small health changes to make a huge difference in your overall health. Find out what you need to do to prevent common illnesses and diseases below:

The Five Pillars of Good Health

You know that you should be eating healthy foods and exercising, but even though those two principles are simple enough to follow, millions of people still do not eat right or exercise regularly. However, in addition to diet and exercise, there are three other factors that can work to improve your health from the inside out.

According to health research, the five basic pillars of health are:

  • Diet
  • Exercise
  • Sunlight
  • Hydration
  • Sleep

When put together, it almost seems like our bodies are similar to plants. However, if any one of these key ingredients are missing, our health rapidly declines. Read more about how each pillar of health can have a big effect on your total health below:

Sleep is Vital to Lifelong Health

According to numerous studies on sleep and health, even just an hour’s difference in sleep can make a huge difference in your lifelong wellbeing in areas such as weight, mood, concentration, and sexual health. According to current scientific evidence, your sleep habits can affect your life in the following ways:

Overall Health: Numerous studies have linked a good night’s sleep with positive influences on heart attack risk, diabetes, obesity, and even heart disease risk. Years of bad sleep increase these risks dramatically. However, in one study cited by Web MD, study participants saw negative health effects after just four days of poor sleep. 30 percent of study participants showed pre-diabetic blood glucose levels at the end of the study, even though they were perfectly healthy four days earlier.

Reduced Injury Risk: Sleep deprivation has effects on your physical health as well as mental health. If you are groggy during the day you are more likely to cause accidents or even get into car crashes. Some studies estimate that up to one-fifth of all auto accidents are related to drowsy driving.

Reduced Pain: When you get enough sleep, your pain tolerance goes up. When you do not get enough sleep, you are more likely to suffer from aches and pains throughout the day and feel more pain from everyday health issues. In some cases, simply getting enough sleep can eliminate the need for over-the-counter pain medication.

Improved Mood: A lot of people who do not get enough sleep are irritable and cranky. Studies show that this irritability is related to the body’s inability to regulate emotion when it is tired. When you are exhausted, you are a lot more likely to react strongly to negative emotions, which can have serious consequences for relationships and in the workplace.

Weight Control: When you sleep enough, your body produces more leptin. Leptin helps control appetite, which means that if you are not sleeping enough, you are eating more. This could be because your body tries to compensate for sleep energy with food energy. The production of cortisol, the stress hormone also linked with weight gain, also goes up when you do not get enough sleep.

Brain Power: When you don’t get enough sleep, you feel drowsy and have a harder time thinking. Your memory is also much worse when you do not get enough sleep. Over time, this can lead to chronic impairment in both mental function and memory. One study even found that when your brain is sleep-deprived, you are more likely to create false memories.

Immune System: Your sleep habits can affect how often you get sick both with minor illnesses and more serious conditions. In one study, researchers monitored 150 people for two weeks and exposed them to a cold virus. The people who got less than seven hours of sleep a night were three times more likely to catch a cold. Over time, an increase in infection rate could lead to more wear and tear on the body that could hasten mortality.

How to Sleep Enough

How do you know if you are getting enough sleep? The National Sleep Foundation states that the average adult should get between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night. If you are yawning during the day, nodding off during a meeting, if you wake feeling groggy, have a hard time “waking up” in the morning, or always need an alarm clock to wake up, then you are probably not sleeping enough. Creating an atmosphere that boosts sleep quality (such as by keeping the room dark and cool and removing all electronic devices) will improve your sleep health even further.

Vitamin D is the Miracle Vitamin

Vitamin D is one of the most powerful vitamins (actually a hormone) in the body. Vitamin D boosts the immune system, fights common health problems like obesity, asthma, heart disease, arthritis, depression, Crohn’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.

In addition to the benefits of vitamin D, sun exposure also has been shown in some studies to benefit the body outside of vitamin D production. Researchers are not sure how sunlight benefits the body, but they do know that regular sun exposure is the best form of vitamin D for health.

Most people do not get enough vitamin D in their blood because our society is built around an indoor lifestyle. Experts recommend a vitamin D blood level of about 50 ng/ml, if possible. You usually cannot obtain these levels without going outside regularly (for more than an hour a day in fun sunlight).

However, some vitamin D3 supplements can provide the extra boost required to improve your health. According to Medical News Today, vitamin D protects your health in the following ways:

Benefits of Vitamin D

 

  • Keeps the immune system strong
  • Regulates insulin levels
  • Supports heart health
  • Boosts lung function
  • Deters the spread and growth of cancer cells
  • Keeps bones and teeth healthy
  • Provides balance in the brain and nervous system

 


Hydration Essential for Optimal Health

Water is essential for your health, but if you drink the wrong kind of water, you could be damaging your health in unknown ways. Our water today contains thousands of contaminants from pollution, manufacturing, fertilizer, animal waste, human waste, medications, chemicals, and thousands of other items. Our water filtration systems do not remove all of these contaminants from water.

The only way to ensure perfectly clean water is to filter it yourself using a carbon block filter or another high-quality filtration system. When you drink clean water, you provide the following benefits to your body:

Improved Brain Function

Water is important to brain health. One study found that when study participants did not drink water for 24 hours, their brains shrank by as much as two years of aging. However, when they regained hydration, their brains went back to normal levels. Cognitive studies have found that when a person is thirsty, their brains function 14 percent less efficiently. Thirsty study participants are less able to concentrate on tasks or complete complex brain tests. In addition to performance, dehydration over a period of several months or years can have a direct effect on memory, mood, and emotion control.

Improved Weight Loss Efforts

Water can help you lose weight by boosting metabolism and by making you feel fuller for longer. In one study, when study participants drank half a liter of water, their metabolic rate increased by 30 percent for an hour after drinking the water. This study is not suggesting that you chug water all day long to boost your metabolism (if you are over-hydrated you can also cause serious problems in the body), but keeping hydrated can definitely improve your weight loss efforts.

Boosted Immune System

Keeping hydrated can help benefit the immune system. Water is responsible for carrying oxygen to all of the cells and tissues in your body. If you drink enough water, then you are allowing your body to work more efficiently to fight off invaders.

Diet is the Foundation for a Healthy Life

In the health community, there is a formula for optimal health known as the 80 20 rule. This theory is the idea that 80 percent of your health efforts should come from food while 20 percent come from exercise. What you eat plays the biggest role in your overall health. When you eat a healthy diet, you provide your body with the tools it needs to operate more efficiently in fighting disease.

Experts have debated for years about what should be included in a healthy diet, but almost everyone agrees that real, natural foods are best. Organic produce and pasture-raised meat are ideal for any diet, but even if you do not make the choice to eat organic food, you are still better off if you stick to the following eating plan:

Healthy Eating Plan
  •  Do not eat trans fats
  • Eat fried foods rarely
  • Avoid processed foods
  • Eat a lot of vegetables
  • Eat healthy protein from eggs, fish, beef, pork, and poultry
  • Eat fruit in moderation
  • Drink sugary beverages rarely
  • Avoid added sugars (even from plant sources)
  • Avoid artificial sugars
  • Stay away from artificial dyes
  • Eat grain and gluten in moderation
  • Eat dairy in moderation
  • Purchase real foods rather than processed foods

Exercise Can Prevent Disease

The average person spends at least 12 hours a day sitting, and about 6 to 9 hours sleeping. This leaves only about three hours a day where you are walking around. Some people may move even less than that. Over 10,000 studies have found that sitting for extended periods is extremely bad for your health. Sitting alone can increase risks for common diseases such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and total mortality. Unfortunately, these studies have also found that regular exercise for less than an hour a day is not enough to offset the increased risks of sitting.

Most fitness experts recommend that you walk around about 10,000 steps a day, and if you spread this out throughout the day you may find that you are sitting a lot less than you were before. If you have an office job, you may want to consider switching to a standing desk or simply walking around the office while you make phone calls or engaging in some other form of regular exercise at work. Even if you can’t make any changes at work, you can be more mindful of how you spend your leisure time. These studies show just how important exercise is. Even just 30 minutes of exercise a day can help improve health and reduce your health risks.

Regular exercise is more beneficial than spurts of exercise, such as when you train for a race for several months then do zero exercise for the next six months. Any steps you can take to improve your fitness level are beneficial for overall health.

Five Steps is All it Takes for a Healthy Life

These five simple steps are all you need to take to reduce your risk for hundreds of common diseases. With the right foundation of diet, exercise, hydration, vitamin D, and sleep, your body is prepared to find off all invaders from the inside out. It may seem easier to eat a donut and sit on the couch today, but over a period of several years, bad habits will lead to dangerous health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and even cancer. By taking these five simple steps today and every day in the future, you will ensure that you stay as healthy as possible throughout life.

Sources


http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2091327

http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/9-reasons-to-sleep-more

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/161618.php

[+] Show All
Next Article: Thyroid Health | How to Boost T3 and T4 Levels