American Health

American Health includes several different areas — all of which are inextricably interwoven with one another.

• Physical Health
• Medical Care
• Economic Health
• Environmental Health

This page presents a summary. Detailed posts are in the Health Systems category.

Physical Health

America’s nutritional environment causes serious problems to those who don’t have the education needed to avoid the worst of the toxins. Here, the nutritional systems and physiological responses that produce obesity and diabetes are outlined.

The Obesity System

The Diabetes System

Medical Care

The education of doctors should be a concern of every American. Because right now, they educational facilities they use are paid for largely by drug companies. As a result:

• Doctors get little or no education in nutrition and nutritional remedies.
• They are not exposed to chiropractic or naturopathic treatments.
  • Those treatments should often be the first choice in any situation that is not immediately life-threatening, or for which immediate medical action is required to prevent long-term damage, for the simple reason that such remedies are free of side-effects.
  • A medical drug, by the very way the term is defined, is a poison that kills something. At times, that is just what you need. But the accompanying list of possible side-effects can be quite long and scary.
• They prescribe drugs at the drop of a hat, regardless of long-term consequences.
  • I once asked a teammate who happened to be a doctor, “How you can prescribe drugs that have severe adverse consequences down the road?”. His response: “When those problems appear, we’ll prescribe other drugs to treat them!”
  • In other words, every patient is seen as “cash cow”. You solve the immediate problem with a fast-acting drug. When new problems appear, you prescribe another drug for them.
  • That’s how average American’s taking a boat-load of pills every day, and spend a fortune doing it!

Economic Health

The economic health of the average American depends on several factors:

• A good job
• Affordable health care
• Staying healthy
  • Even more important than good “health care” is to avoid it by staying healthy!
  • As noted in the Medical Care section above, drugs are expensive. So are doctors. And hospitals.
  • For a couple of decades now, a million people a year have been dropping out of the middle class — mostly because of medical expenses.
• An affordable education
  • By and large, educated people earn more, stay healthier, and live longer.
  • Partly, it’s because they are exposed to important sources of information, and learn to listen to them (rather than assuming that they way they grew up is absolutely the right way to live.)
  • In addition, the more education that people have, the more they “learn how to learn”, so they are more open to nutritional advice, for example, and retain the information better.
• Early childhood nutrition
  • Which produces more alert and energetic children who learn more.
• Opportunity
  • Clearly ability needs an opportunity to express itself. For society, discrimination based on race, color, or sex is bad, because it denies so many people the opportunity to improve their lives — and to benefit society, in the bargain. (So when it comes to opposing discrimination, don’t do it because it’s the right thing to do. Do it because you’re intelligently selfish.)
  • From the standpoint of health, if you don’t have the opportunity to improve your station in life, there is less incentive to stay healthy, and more incentive to “drown your sorrows”, instead.

Environmental Health

If we can avoid polluting the air and water, that’s a big start! But we also need to care for our agricultural health by putting important minerals back into the soil — because those trace elements are vital for human health.

Agricultural Health

A plant can grow with only three ingredients– nitrogen, potash, and phosphorus — the ingredients found in commercial fertilizers. The problem is that we evolved on foods that contained a large number of trace elements — elements that were bound to the plant by microbes in the soil. We need those trace elements to stay healthy, as they are often the catalysts for important chemical operations in the human body.

Each crop taken from the soil removes some of minerals. Decades of commercial-fertilizer use has depleted many soils until they are nearly mineral-free. That’s one reason that organic foods are so much better. (Another reason is that they taste better. Apparently our taste buds are quite adept at recognizing trace minerals in our foods!)

But there is one additional step in the process by which trace minerals are bound to plants. It turns out that microbes in the soil are needed to bind the minerals. Once bound, the plant can take them up. No microbes, no minerals — even if they are in the soil.

So how do you get a good collection of microbes in the soil? The best way is with no-till farming. In other words, you don’t till the soil — digging it up, exposing the microbes to air, and killing them. When that’s possible, you get a tremendously rich, live soil which, when composted, produces abundantly healthy foods.

Learn More

View detailed posts in the Health Systems category. (This full category/subcategory URL is the more desirable way to get there, but it may not work.)