Starting around the end of World War II, our bodies have been under constant assault from modern chemical and agricultural practices. Each generation has gotten progressively sicker with chronic disease. We have ignored the good from our past and embraced convenience and progress without thinking about the long-term costs. The “Illness Continuum” graph shown below helps to summarize the loss of health and increase in chronic disease during the last 60 to 70 years.
The Illness Continuum
Figure 1.1 – Each generation is now sicker than the one that preceded it. We can change our fate by optimizing our genes andenvironment, or we will suffer even more chronic disease.
What is next for our society if this trend continues? Are we going to sit back
and do nothing, or are we going to educate ourselves and rebuild a stronger foundation and home? Right now, it doesn’t look good for our children’s chances to be healthy. Unless we take charge and teach ourselves
how to create health naturally by honoring our genetics and optimizing our lifestyles, our children will experience less health and well-being than their parents. This isn’t just my opinion; researchers are also sounding the alarm.
For the past 10 years, Harvard researcher Dr. David S. Ludwig has been warning that the obesity epidemic will lead to a significant reduction in lifespan for children today compared to their parents. As a result of obe- sity, toxins, genetically altered foods, and physical inactivity, the current generation of children are living with diseases such as stroke, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—childhood health issues that were unheard of just a few decades ago. This is the mother of all wake-up calls! The antidote to this problem is the same solution you will hear over and over in this book: To optimize our health, we must optimize our genes, and that means creat- ing healthy environments and supporting the methylation cycle. I promise you if we all did enough of that, the world would change.