Personalized Medicine—and more money for the healthcare industry

Posted on 11/07/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

Price is no object when it comes to convenient fixes for our bad habits.

As reported by a recent WSJ article (link below), the high tech, pie-in-the-sky solution to our health problems continues to attract the news. Meanwhile, a far more powerful, and amazingly inexpensive solution for up to 80% of our health issues—continues to be ignored by the media. It begins with the simple concept of consuming the right fuel for our species.

Now, after 641 consecutive days of blogging on this topic, I am reminded of one that I posted about 200 blogs ago (See link below). It was about the absurd behavior of putting the wrong fuel, lubricant and coolant in your brand new $80,000 Mercedes. An excerpt:

2012 Mercedes SL550 Roadster. Like all automobiles, your brand new Mercedes needs fuel, coolant, motor oil, and air in order to run. The air takes care of itself, but you have to decide how to handle the other three. But, instead of using the kinds of products recommended by the manufacturer, you want to be different.

For fuel. Instead of premium gasoline, you choose a mixture of regular gasoline, kerosene, turpentine and paint thinner.

For coolant. You choose a mixture of Gator Aid and cow’s milk.

For motor oil. Instead of the high tech synthetic recommended by MB, you buy a few cases of 10 w 30 at Sam’s Club and decide that you’ll make it last longer by adding only four quarts to your engine instead of the recommended five. 

You’re thinking that no one would be that stupid, right? Yet, the vast majority of Americans are being even more stupid. They’re putting the wrong FUEL in their bodies. And unlike a fancy new car, we only get one body per customer. We can’t trade it in for a new one when this one breaks down—we’re stuck with just one body for our entire lives.

Meanwhile, back to the madness of modern medicine. The latest story (11-1-12) in the Wall Street Journal—featured news about the famous Genomes project that everyone thinks will enable them to continue with their poor habits while getting cured by the magic of genetics. The article began:

In a major step toward an era of personalized medicine, researchers reported Wednesday that they have sequenced the complete DNA material of more than 1,000 people from 14 population groups in Europe, Africa, East Asia and the Americas.

The report from the $120 million 1000 Genomes Project involved 700 scientists from laboratories in the U.S., Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria and Kenya, among others. Their results, published in Nature, offer the closest look yet at the differences in humankind’s biological instruction set, documenting how myriad rare mutations may underpin many diseases and set the people of one locale apart from another in ways that shape their health.

The Bottom Line. What they never tell us about personalized medicine is that it will be incredibly expensive and will not be nearly as effective as simply eating the right food for our species in the first place. They also never tell us the truth about sustainability:

Even if cow’s milk, pig flesh, sea creatures and chicken eggs were the best possible fuel for our human bodies, there simply is not enough land or water on the planet to sustain that horribly wasteful diet for very much longer.

Whole, plant-based foods for humans is a WIN-WIN for all concerned: the humans, our fellow Earthlings and the longterm ability of planet Earth to sustain life as we know it. (This is my consecutive daily blog #641.)

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Activism & Leadership | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Learning from the “dairies to berries” project in Finland…

Posted on 11/06/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

…about how “real” dietary guidelines can work in the USA

Cow’s milk & other dairy products promote disease. So let’s have less dairy farms.

Last week, Dr. Michael Greger posted a video (see below) that inspired this blog. He started out by asking why we even care what the official U.S. dietary guidelines are? The answer was that they actually can work—if they are based on the truth about nutrition.

He then illustrated his point by telling a well-researched story about what happened in Finland once they got serious about reducing the causes of heart disease for the general public. One such effort was called the “Berry Project,” and was designed to help farmers convert from dairy farming to berry farming. From dairies to berries, if you will.

Berries promote health…so the Fins converted “dairies to berries.”

The project produced incredibly remarkable results—reducing cardiac death by 80% and other death causes by 45%—throughout the entire country. Dr. Greger explains all of this in the 2-minute video shown here.

His point at the end was that the USA has now become the world leader in heart disease—due in part to our nation’s failure to adopt real, health-promoting dietary guidelines. Just think what would happen if we followed Finland’s lead and told all our citizens how to promote health with their food choices.

Dr. Michael Greger — on Nutritionfacts.org

What about businesses? If our government won’t publish those real guidelines, then maybe the CEOs of America can tackle our crippling healthcare problem with a different approach. The CEOs of all large businesses have a powerful financial incentive for their employees to be healthy—and that incentive keeps getting more powerful.

An integral part of helping employees become healthy is for the business leaders to invest in health-promoting dietary education for everyone who works for them. By publishing real dietary guidelines within the business, the employees will be able to hear this “controversial” information from someone they trust—their senior management team that has an incentive for them to be healthy.

Election day and my consecutive daily blog #640—with numerals from our most pivotal swing state, OHIO.

The Bottom Line. More reasons for success in businesses. In addition to publishing the real dietary guidelines, I can think of five more reasons why the plant-based food component of “corporate wellness” has great chances for success:

  1. Education. Paid for by the company and delivered on company time.
  2. Leadership. Senior executives who are strongly emphasizing the crucial importance of a healthy diet when it comes to promoting health.
  3. Peer Support. All interested employees can be assigned to small teams for 3 to 5 people and will provide help, support and follow up for each other. They will be accountable to individuals in their workplace—other than their bosses.
  4. Incentives. The senior leaders are always in a position to make it attractive to adopt a healthier diet. These incentives can be financial and/or they can offer recognition or special privileges for people who get healthy.
  5. GREEN. Almost all companies have a green initiative these days—and want to be considered GREEN by the public. By publicizing the fact that eating whole plants is by far the single most powerful step that we all can take to preserve our environment and conserve our finite limited natural resources—the company can be a true leader in this important arena.

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Corporate Wellness, Food Policy | 1 Comment

A look at the cost of health care PIE—in the USA

Posted on 11/05/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

According to KaiserEDU.org (See link below), there are three primary drivers of healthcare cost increases in recent years:

Technology and prescription drugs — Some analysts state that the availability of more expensive, state-of-the-art medical technologies and drugs fuels health care spending for development costs and because they generate demand for more intense, costly services even if they are not necessarily cost-effective.

Rise in chronic diseases – It is estimated that health care costs for chronic disease treatment account for over 75% of national health expenditures. In particular, there has been tremendous focus on the rise in rates of overweight and obesity and their contribution to chronic illnesses and health care spending.  The changing nature of illness has sparked a renewed interest in the possible role for prevention to help control costs. 

Administrative costs – At least 7% of health care expenditures are estimated to go toward for the administrative costs of government health care programs and the net cost of private insurance.

Leveraging the simple concept of maximizing the percent of your calories from whole, plant-based foods

The good news. The one bit of good news in all of the above is highlighted in green—a renewed interest in prevention. But the problem is that what the industry calls prevention is not prevention at all. It’s just early detection of disease. It amounts to nothing more than a convenient way for the physicians and pharmaceuticals to recruit new customers for their products and services.

Nowhere in the entire website was there a single mention of the importance of teaching people how to take charge of their health with their food choices—a move that would greatly reduce the costs in all three of the “driving categories” listed above. Want to know why? Like all other members of our healthcare system, Kaiser gets a piece of the pie—and the bigger the pie, the more they get.

Here’s what that PIE looks like:

The Bottom Line. Every slice of the above $2.8 trillion pie (2012) could be trimmed by 70 to 80% with a nationwide shift to a whole foods, plant-based diet. Yet, not one person within the thousands of organizations represented above has a financial incentive for us to be healthy.

Therefore, the change will not come from within the system, but from outside. It will come from concerned leaders in business who have a powerful incentive to make their employees healthy.

Those rare few who choose to be first will be rewarded with a much more profitable enterprise. Eventually, those CEOs who choose not to instill a true “wellness culture” within their companies—will not be able to compete with those who do. (Consecutive daily blog #639)

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Corporate Wellness, Cost of Health Care | 1 Comment