Re: David Simmons: The Eight Deadly Diseases pages 5-8

past,
there's also a chance it could kill them. No one wants to be responsible for standing idly by why others are
being killed!

Because I look at life like a mountain climb, I need to tell you that I know of at least eight huge boulders
tumbling down in your direction. Some of them may bounce harmlessly past you. But what you're about
to find out is the fact that the odds of getting picked off by one of these is rising fast. That's why it may
seem like I'm shouting at you at times in this testimony.

Folks, something has gone terribly wrong with our health.

Most of us assume we are living longer, because the longevity stats have gone way up in the last 100 years.
But the sad truth is that because these 8 diseases are growing so fast, we are actually living shorter...but
taking longer to die. Our technology keeps us alive longer, but we sacrifice the quality of life in the process.
Can there really be dignity when our elderly spend months or even years in a vegetative state hooked up to
a machine? And what about the economic impact?

I used to think that normal aging was the same for everybody. You get one of the eight deadly diseases,
and then you slowly die. Imagine my surprise when I learned that heart disease, the number one killer of
Americans, is a relatively new disease! The first modern cases of it were reported in 1912, and even then
it was extremely rare.[1] Today heart disease kills four times as many American women each year as
breast cancer [1a]. For 300,000 people each year, the first and only symptom of heart disease is sudden
death.

How did it go from almost non-existent to the number one spot? Hmmmmm. Makes you think doesn't it.

What about cancer? Only 3% of us died of cancer a hundred years ago. Today, almost 30% of us will
succumb to it.[2] The 1909 edition of the standard U.S. textbook, Principles and Practice of Medicine,[2a]
devoted only 15 pages to cancer. Breast and prostate cancers received no mention; colon cancer received
2 lines. In contrast, the 1994 edition of Principles of Internal Medicine devoted 174 pages to this affliction. [2b]

Stroke, which killed only a very few people a hundred years ago, is today the number three killer of Americans.

Alzheimer's wasn't even diagnosed until 1907. Today, 40% of those over 85 are suffering from it.[3]

Diabetes has increased 600% in just the last generation.[4] Each year, Diabetes kills more than twice as
many American women as breast cancer. [4a]

Over 40 million Americans suffer with some form of Arthritis or Osteoporosis. Ask any American woman
what disease she fears most and she'll probably say breast cancer. Yet hip fractures kill more women than
cancers of the breast, cervix and uterus combined. [4b]

Finally, there are the auto immune disorders like chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr virus, lupus,
fibromyalgia, and AIDS. I lump them into one big category, and this group is growing like wildfire in the US
right now. 20 years ago, they didn't even have names for most of this stuff and many of them were written
off by doctors as psycho-sematic. But the harsh symptoms of these auto-immune disorders are currently
wreaking havoc on the health of tens of thousands of Americans, and in the case of AIDS, are killing people
at an alarming rate.

Obviously, something has gone terribly wrong here, and it's happened in our lifetime. But we're acting as if
all of these diseases are just a part of the normal aging process! Not so! There is nothing normal or natural
about degenerative disease. We have convinced ourselves it is normal as a way of dealing with the terrible
new reality of sickness and disease in the modern world.

Many of these deaths are totally unnecessary.

And that's the tragedy. When a plane crashes and a few hundred people die, it makes the front page news
for days. But when a million people die of heart disease or a half a million die of cancer, you'd think there'd
be more of an outcry. It's the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing every single hour of every single
day of every single month for an entire year. Year after year. Pretty amazing isn't it?

Now, let me ask you: How long do you plan on living? To what age? 70? 80? 90? 100+?
What do you think is reasonable?

Now, take that figure and add 10 extra healthy years to it. What if you could live to 100 and beyond without
the pain and disease that most people think comes with old age? Is this possible?

Today the average person lives to about 76. That's 79 for women and 72 for men.[5] But in certain areas of
the world centenarians are common. We have only lately started to uncover why.

Source for data: National Center for Health Statistics, 1996 http://www.cdc.gov/nchswww/datawh/statab/pubd.htm

The Danger Zone!

Today, the risk of dying of any thing before you are 40 is really very small. But starting at 40, you enter the
zone of the 8 deadly diseases. How deadly are they? They kill more than 80% of us.[6]
Can you guess what they are?

Heart Disease
Cancer
Stroke
Diabetes
Arthritis
Osteoporosis
Alzheimer's Disease
Auto-Immune Disease

These 8 deadly diseases will send millions of people to an early grave this year. Not thousands, but millions!

Here's the good news.

None of these diseases are inevitable. All of them can potentially be avoided or at least delayed - and in
some cases even reversed - by following a few simple steps that I'll share with you before we're done.
Because of this, more and more of us will be living healthy lives all the way to one hundred and beyond.

How about you? Do you want to live to 100? With the way trends are going, you may reach 100 whether
you want to or not. And that scares some people. We tend to think of old people as frail and sickly but
research on those who live to one hundred finds them "amazingly frisky" 84% function well, and 73% rate
their health as good to excellent. So what is their secret? As a group, they like to walk, they are rarely
overweight, and 5200 take extra vitamins and minerals daily.[7] If you want to join them, you'll have to
adopt many of the same habits. And one of your first goals is to avoid the deadly eight for as long as possible.

Know thy enemy!

There is an adage in war. Know thy enemy. Each of us is being stalked by eight mortal diseases. If we
don't want to be cut down early, we need to find out more about these diseases so we'll better understand
how to conquer them.

#1: Heart Disease

Heart disease kills a million people a year in North America alone, and millions more worldwide. It's an epidemic.
It's the equivalent of wiping out entire cities of people like San Diego or Sydney or Vancouver every year.
Year after year. Or to say it another way, somebody dies at least every 32 seconds from heart disease.[8]
But just what is it? It's not a disease you catch like a cold.

It's a disease you eat.

Improper diet causes a sludge called plaque to slowly clog up your arteries, stopping the flow of vital oxygen
and nutrients to your heart muscles. When your arteries finally plug up, you have a heart attack. This happens
to over 1.5 million people a year. For most of them, it's a total surprise. They had no idea their arteries were
clogged. 1/3 of them will die on the way to the hospital, with no second chance, no time to say goodbye.
[10]those who do survive suffer through expensive and painful therapies. These days, a coronary bypass surgery
costs between $25,000-$50,000.[11]

Sadly, the Centers for Disease Control stated in 1994 that only 18% of Americans over age 18 are free of
heart disease risk factors. Here they are: high blood cholesterol, smoking, overweight, diabetes, hypertension
and inactivity. [11a]

Each heart attack costs our health-care system at least $40,000. Heart disease is a $40 billion dollar industry
with bypass surgery and angioplasty among the most lucrative medical procedures.[11b]

And all of this expense and pain and death may be unnecessary.

So how can you decrease the risk of heart disease?

Are you ready for a shocker? About 80% of the human race have cholesterol levels below 150 and will never
have a heart attack. [11c] The Tarahumara Indians of Mexico and the Yanamomes of Brazil have average
cholesterol levels from 133-137. [11d] That should tell us something! We Americans need to rethink what
we're putting into our bodies.

Odds are, you probably already have some degree of heart disease. Heart disease starts early. By age 16,
young Americans already have some degree of blockage in the crucial arteries that supply the heart with
blood.[12] But, here's the good news: because of medical technology, we've made significant progress in
the war on heart disease. Since 1950, we've cut the death rate in half.

As Dr. Michael Colgan, world famous expert on nutrition, has said: "Do not fear cardiovascular disease.
It's the easiest of all man-made diseases to prevent, and even to reverse, if only you follow the right nutrition,
plus a little easy exercise to blow away the cobwebs." [13]

There are three components that the research suggests may aid in preventing heart disease:

1. Eat a diet high in fiber and low in saturated animal fats, dairy products are considered animal fats, even
Tweet