Doctor's don't know jack.

Okay, they know a lot about disease, and treating disease, but not one lick about health, and keeping someone healthy. I was at a medical staff picnic last weekend, and the potluck menu included a bucket of KFC, two Pizza Hut slabs, white bread sandwiches, and if you were there, you would have seen a toddler being given sips of beer. All the food tastes good, but the stuff is toxic to your health.

The vast majority of diseases in America and its outcroppings like Saipan are "lifestyle" diseases -- heart disease, diabetes, cancer. You get that stuff because of the way you live -- eat high fat foods and live a sedentary point and click lifestyle. The way to determine where a country is on a developmental scale is to look at their diseases. Developing countries deal with infectious disease. People die of things like measles, influenza, etc. When they reach a level of affluence where they can afford high-fat foods and a higher percentage of animal products, then they begin to experience diabetes and heart disease.

In medical school we had exactly one day of lecture on nutrition. But this is the key to treating almost every disease that we face. Even if you don't exercise much, if you eat well, you'll do well. All the new fangled drugs to treat high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, are really just a testament to the failure of American medicine and preventive health. Our new dialysis center is a beautiful building that is a monument to the failure of our system to prevent diabetes.

The hard part about preventive medicine is that you require people to make changes before anything goes wrong. They have to realize that the morsel of fat they're about to put into their mouths won't cause problems now, but will lead to a rotten life later.

In reality, it's pretty simple stuff. You gotta stop eating garbage (and honestly, almost everything you eat falls into the category of garbage). You can turn your life around in a matter of weeks. Pick up a copy of Eat to Live. It will change your life. By reading it, you'll likely know more about nutrition and health maintenance than 95% of the doctors you'll ever meet. But don't just read it. Knowledge isn't enough. You have to take action.

Let me know if you need help. If you want to lose weight or improve your health, Eat to Live is the path. I usually help my patients lose about 20 pounds within 10 weeks. I lost 30 pounds in 12 weeks and got down to my high-school weight. That was three years ago, and I've kept it off.