Health Restoration and Chronic Disease

This story is finally getting some coverage.  The fact is that eliminating or at least minimizing the impact of five diseases that happen to be chronic in their nature will have a hugely positive economic effect.  I recently showed us some back of the envelope calculations for cigarette smoking that demonstrated exactly the same thing.

My own thoughts have led me to the idea of establishing a completely new movement based on the concept of health restoration.  That is the actual crux of the matter.  Chronic disease barely affects the young and productive but weakens those in their prime years of productivity.  This is the same group that needs to organize them selves around the idea of health restoration.

What has given me encouragement is that we can attack it on that basis instead of attempting to cure anything.  There are three critical conditions that clearly contribute to the loss of good health that we already understand and know how to deal with.  There are also a number of other conditions separately indicated that can and will also be tackled once the first three are brought under control.

Those three conditions are:

1                    Obesity or chronic over eating

2                    Chronic Vitimin C deficiency

3                    Chronic Vitimin D deficiency

I would also be inclined to add coenzyme and condriten to the mix as we no longer get sufficient flesh connective tissue in our diets particularly if we prefer .a vegetarian diet.

Vitimin C and Vitimin D are easily supplemented today in large doses.  I have gone as high as 15,000 mg of C and 5000 mg of D which showed to be too high.  However you get the idea. The recommended doses are grossly inadequate.  Too much lets you know and you cut back to no negative effect.

The real problem has been obesity and sorry folks that includes just about everyone except the young and the lucky ten percent of the population.  This I have shown to be readily resolved with the Arclein diet (google my blog).  Using this approach I have dropped to been realistically around fifteen pounds overweight from an initial forty five pounds overweight.

This diet is trouble free to maintain.  The reason for that is that you have to make exactly one decision on two days of the week.  You wake up and decide this is a fast day and then proceed to eat nothing until the evening.  At that point you have realistically been fasting for at least eight to ten hours.  Adding another twelve hours takes you easily to eight o’clock in the evening at which point one can break the fast with a shot of protein and you have comfortably fasted twenty plus hours. 

The main idea is to allow the small intestine to completely void itself and rest for at least half a day.  One can drink sugared tea if energy problems bother you as that never reaches the small intestine.  It is this way that we seem to avoid demanding hunger pangs.

All other diets are demanding regimens that are difficult to sustain and thus fail.  This instead is simple and combined with good eating will allow the body to reorder itself toward a healthy weight.

In my own case I have fallen to a weight level under the normal maintenance level I usually got to with other regimens.  At this point I suspect the excess circulatory system is disappearing and I will plausibly see another decline before Christmas.  The decline curve has not shown any sign of bottoming yet although I am also around fifteen pounds away.  Most reassuring is that I know that my body cannot put the weight back on because it is simply not getting more than enough to support the present level or less.

           

Chronic disease to cost $47 trillion by 2030, WEF says

By Alan Mozes, HealthDay

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/medical/story/2011-09-19/Chronic-disease-to-cost-47-trillion-by-2030-WEF-says/50466138/1

Updated 09/19/2011 3:29 PM

Unless current health trends are reversed, five common, non-infectious diseases -- cancer, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease and mental health problems -- will cost the world $47 trillion in treatment costs and lost wages.

Experts note that this health trend is occurring not only in poorer nations but also in the developed world, which has hardly proven immune to non-communicable diseases.

Matt Houston, AP

Experts note that this health trend is occurring not only in poorer nations but also in the developed world, which has hardly proven immune to non-communicable diseases.

That's the conclusion of a new report, "The Global Economic Burden of Non-communicable Diseases," released by the World Economic Forum before the start Monday of a two-day United Nations summit on non-communicable diseases, CBS News reported.

"Until now, we've been unable to put a figure on what the World Health Organization (WHO) calls the 'world's biggest killers.' This study shows that families, countries and economies are losing people in their most productive years. The numbers indicate that non-communicable diseases have the potential to not only bankrupt health systems but to also put a brake on the global economy. Tackling this issue calls for joint action by all actors of the public and private sectors," Olivier Raynaud, senior director of health at the World Economic Forum, said in a news release.

The World Health Organization offered several steps that could help avert the impact of these chronic, non-communicable diseases. They include alcohol and tobacco taxes, smoke-free environments, and public-service campaigns to get people to cut down on their consumption of salt and trans fats. The organization said countries that have implemented such programs have already seen a "marked reduction" in the incidence of disease and deaths, CBS News reported.

These "non-communicable diseases" (NCDs) are now the leading cause of death worldwide by a wide margin. That's why health experts and leaders from 193 nations are meeting at the United Nations in New York City to discuss strategies to lower the death toll.

"This will be the first time that the U.N. has actually focused on the major killer of most people," said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, and a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta.

"We need this," he added. "We need a chronic disease movement. We need to drive attention toward overall health. Because cancer, for example, kills more people in the world than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined."

As analyzed in a report issued last week by the World Health Organization, non-infectious diseases are responsible for roughly 36 million fatalities worldwide every year. The loss in terms of life-years and productivity is staggering, since about 9 million of these deaths occur among men and women under the age of 60.

According to Dr. Gordon Tomaselli, president of the American Heart Association, "if current trends continue, well before the middle of this century [non-communicable diseases] will be responsible for more than three-quarters of the deaths around the world."

Heart disease currently accounts for the lion's share of these deaths, with WHO saying that 48 percent of non-communicable disease fatalities are attributable to cardiac illness. A little more than one in five non-communicable disease deaths are due to cancer, while respiratory illness is linked to slightly more than one in 10 fatalities. These are followed by diabetes, which claims the lives of 3 percent of non-communicable disease patients.

Poorer countries are often hardest hit by such diseases, the report noted, and by some measures their citizens bear a three times greater risk for dying from a non-communicable disease before the age of 60, compared with residents of richer nations.

"And the impact of the growing prevalence of non-communicable diseases is not only on the medical health, but the economic health of all nations, in direct care costs and that of lost productivity," Tomaselli said

Experts note that this health trend is occurring not only in poorer nations but also in the developed world, which has hardly proven immune to non-communicable diseases.

The WHO report found, for example, that non-communicable diseases account for 87 percent of all deaths in the United States. Not coincidentally, the United States is increasingly weighted down by an obesity epidemic, a largely inactive population (with a 43 percent sedentary rate), a 16 percent smoking rate, and markedly rising blood pressure and glucose levels.

Solving problems like that are the U.N. summit's main goal: to identify those steps that countries can take to promote healthful behaviors, blunting the impact of non-communicable diseases.

"This summit is a once-in-a-generation opportunity," the American Diabetes Association (ADA) said in a statement.

In fact, it's only the second time the U.N. has taken up a health issue -- the first, in 2001, created the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The ADA noted that non-communicable diseases share many preventable risk factors, such as poor diet, insufficient exercise habits, smoking and alcohol abuse.

The ADA said those attending the upcoming summit will be shooting to achieve an ambitious but tangible goal: to curtail unhealthful behaviors and shave 25 percent off the global death rate from non-communicable diseases by 2025.

But Brawley emphasized that the U.N. effort to reach such goals will aim to build on existing public health initiatives, rather than usurp them.

"This is not a disease Olympics," he said. "And we are not in a competition. So the summit's aim is to focus the world on overall health. Not to the exclusion of infectious disease, but with the inclusion of non-infectious disease."