It’s Not Diet, It’s NUTRITION; It’s Not A Program, It’s a LIFESTYLE

We try to promote healthy habits at Family Care Centers.

Especially if you have issues with weight, or blood pressure, or cholesterol, you’ve probably heard us recommend changes in diet and exercise:

• Reduce your intake of saturated fats
• REALLY cut back on your starchy carbs, and up your intake of colorful fruits and vegetables
• Exercise more regularly, at least 3 times a week
• Get the down to a healthy body weight

These recommendations are key, and if you can adopt them, a good many of your health woes will either disappear, throttle way back, or not occur to begin with.

But if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it…and Big Pharma would be out of a job.

Here’s a link to a related website, to help you stick it to ‘em, and get healthier in the process:

An Apple A Day…To Keep Big Pharma Away

Mark’s Daily Apple is one of my favorites. Mark Sisson updates his blog on a regular basis, with an easy to read and accessible writing style. Most of his posts pertain to nutritional choices, with a heavy bias towards minimizing carbs, and increasing your intake of anti-oxidant rich veggies and fruits, and non-hormonally laden meats. His Primal Blueprint and Primal Eating Plan articles outline his core approach: an overall lifestyle of sensible activity, clean nutritional choices, and adequate recovery and stress reduction.

The “primal” or “paleo” approach focuses on choices that should complement the way human beings are made. We’ve only been couch potatoes, cubicle dwellers, and drive everywhere folks for the past century or so — for the vast majority of human history, we’ve been active walkers, occasionally kicking it into high gear to run, fight, build, or otherwise really work, and eating mainly lean proteins (with occasional healthy fats) and low-starch vegetables and the occasional low-sugar fruit. Grains — what most of our meals are often based on — became widespread with agriculture, which is only a few thousand years old, at best.

Mark’s site does NOT advocate a return to dwelling in caves, however. We live in the modern world, but can make healthier nutritional and activity choices than the ones that are routinely made for us. Sisson clearly states the reasoning behind his recommendations, so you can consider them for yourself.

Although I don’t entirely agree with his feelings about statin drugs to lower cholesterol (read, “Big Pharma conspiracy”), it’s hard to find fault with his basic recommendations, which parallel the Top 4 I mentioned at the beginning of this article. You could do a lot worse than to jumpstart your quest for health with his articles as food for thought, so to speak.