There is a storm brewing in America. It has the power to ruin lives directly and indirectly. The storm will wreak more havoc than any natural disaster in history. The name of the storm is not a common name like Katrina. This storm’s name is called “America’s Health Care Crisis.” The early signs are already here. Just consider these facts:
• Every 30 seconds, someone in the United States files bankruptcy due to a serious health problem.
• According to a Harvard University study, 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings in the United States are the direct result of medical expenses.
• Health care spending in the U.S. is more than $1.8 TRILLION!
• In 2003, the U.S. spent 15.3% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health care.
• Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in the U.S. have risen five times faster than workers’ earnings since 2000.
• Experts predict retiring elderly couples will need a conservative $200,000 to pay for basic medical services and most experts agree that the number is probably closer to $300,000.
With the cost of services going up, the demand for those services is also increasing. Consider the following:
• Cancer rates have exploded from 1 death in 20 in 1910 to 1 death in 3 in 2006.
• Diabetes Type 2 (adult onset) has exploded by 600% in just the last generation.
• Heart Disease deaths went from obscurity in the early 1900’s to the #2 killer in America.
• Stroke moved from obscurity to the #3 killer and the #1 cause of disability in the US.
• Auto-immune disorders like Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia have become commonplace.
Why is this happening? What could be the common link? Many experts believe it is what we eat. Not just the types of food and how they are prepared, but the actual nutritional content. Over a 10-year period, the potassium level in oats and buckwheat dropped by two-thirds. That means you need to eat three bowls of oatmeal to get the same potassium as one bowl gave you just ten years ago. Think about you and your children - over the last ten years you and they have eaten the same amounts of food but with much less nutritional content. In the fifty years between the 1940s and the 1990s, nutrient values for protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and ascorbic acid declined in at least 43 garden crops.
What’s the answer? What can we do to add nutrition back into our diets and our bodies? What can we do to keep from spending all our savings on medical bills? How can we continue to enjoy an active lifestyle well into our senior years?
The answer is simple: Supplement.
Even the FDA, along with a growing number of nutritionists and medical experts agree that nutritional supplementation is the key to leading a healthy and fit life. Read why more and more people are being proactive about improving their health and at the same time they are fighting the effects of aging. I encourage you to examine the nutritional content of your current diet. You can definitely look and feel better with proper nutrition.
As we get older, many of us start taking more and more medications. Consider that while Americans comprise only five percent of the entire world’s population, we consume ONE-HALF OF ALL the prescription drugs manufactured WORLD WIDE! That is more than 3 billion prescriptions each year. Prescription drug expenses are the fastest growing health care costs increasing by more than 15% each year since 1998.
The pharmaceutical industry has done a great job at convincing people that drugs are intended to cure disease. But if prescription drugs were the answer to health, why aren’t we the healthiest nation on Earth? In spite of all the drugs, the physicians, and the hospitals, Americans are getting heavier; the rate of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are rising; and we have one of the highest infant death rates in the world.
We need to transition from our over-reliance on drugs and believing that taking a pill is the ’solution’ to finding and treating what caused the disease in the first place. It is certainly fair to say that traditional medicine can do amazing things - especially in treating trauma and infectious disease. But for promoting health, traditional medicine is ineffective and extraordinarily expensive.
Many in the wellness industry work very hard spreading the word that it is much better (and cheaper!) to prevent disease than to treat it after it occurs. Preventing disease and fighting the effects of aging are two of the primary reasons why many people take supplements and how they become proactive about improving their health. By putting yourself into a state of optimal health, you feel better, have more energy, and increase the quality of your life.
