Today’s headlines are full of urgencies: International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde is saying, “Act now” to save the fragile global economic recovery. A Lancet report proclaims that fully half of United States adults will be obese by 2030 if we don't act now. There's a hurricane bearing down on the Northeast seaboard and authorities are saying "act now" to prepare for the worst. In today’s post, I would like to explore how our human spirit can choose to respond to a health urgency by taking immediate action, and thereby cure disease almost overnight.

A few months ago, I posted something on Facebook about the coming diabetes epidemic along with some advice about preventing it. A friend and ex-colleague Gary wrote me back with the plaintive words, “Wish I knew this 10 years ago. Was diagnosed with diabetes last week.” He is Chief Operating Officer of a multinational corporation headquartered in Florida, and displayed the classic middle-age spread of the sedentary executive.

I messaged back, “We need to talk. If it's Type 2, I'm convinced that you can beat it with diet. Lots of resources I've run across. Simple start: go paleo/raw as seriously as you can. Check out the "Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days" and/or "Raw for Life" videos...”

A couple of days later, he messaged, “ Watched ‘Simply Raw’ and feel compelled to learn more about how to create the raw diet,” to which I replied, “The whole paleo diet thing is a fairly easy mental model: just imagine what our hunter/gatherer ancestors could've eaten and limit your intake to that -- nuts, plants, meat. And spend more time hunting and gathering and less sitting in front of a computer screen. Michael Pollan has condensed it down to 7 words: Eat Food (that your grandmother would've recognized). Mostly plants. Not too much. You're enough like me that I know you'll view the journey you're setting out on now as an entertaining and fascinating challenge. Enjoy!”

About a week later, Gary messaged back, “Started measuring on a regular basis and have gone from original blood sugar of 290 down to 180 after a week of diet. Not enough testing to detect a trend yet. Blood sugar has not measured above 190 in the last 2 days and has been as low as 75 before dinner yesterday.”

And after religiously following a raw diet and eating a handful of nuts instead of hamburgers and fries for lunch, Gary sent me the following official blood test results clearly indicating that, after about two months, he had soundly beaten back his diabetes and was well on the way to a drug-free recovery. 

He still eats mostly raw, continues to lose weight, and now enjoys 30-mile 2-hour Sunday afternoon bicycle adventures around his central Florida homestead instead of sitting in front of the TV. After making that one fateful decision to explore how changing his diet and lifestyle might in turn improve his diabetes, Gary has well and truly gotten rid of a disease that, not so long ago, the traditional medical community would have simply “managed” via drugs for the rest of his (shortened) life. Given Gary’s genetic history, I now expect him to live long and prosper.

To me, the essence of this story centers on Gary’s original decision to take personal control of his health immediately when confronted with a health crisis. I know that I was raised to believe that when I "get sick," I should go to the doctor or hospital and hand responsibility for my sickness off to those experts, where they will make it all better. And that’s still a valid course of action for acute diseases like, say, a staph infection. But for the chronic diseases of our generation -- the top killers like heart disease, diabetes, even cancer (witness Kris Carr) -- we must acknowledge our personal role in their prevalence. If you are headed down a known deadly pathway and get a wake-up call like Gary did, you owe it to yourself to stop for a moment, reach out beyond your 7-minute doctor visits to your friends, family, and, yes, the Internet, and ask yourself if there’s maybe something you can do to arrest your decline and go for the gold of not just satisfactory but optimal health. 

It is people like Gary who demonstrate how the choices we make enable us to triumph over adversity.

During a conversation yesterday with my mother, who at age 87 is still going strong, she commented how sad it was to hear that our generation is shaping up to be the first to have a decreased lifespan from our parents. Moreover, it's not just Americans who are at risk of living shorter lives than our parents -- a study reported in the Washington Post last week was headlined, "Nearly 350 million people worldwide are diabetic, experts report cases haven't yet peaked." This uptick in diabetes and its precursor Metabolic Syndrome have the potential to decrease average life spans by 10% or greater. And, at least for the 90% of the diabetes cases that are Type 2, these are preventable diseases caused by unhealthy lifestyles -- the world is simply getting fatter! So for an increasing number of us, the longevity train has already left the station and we missed it.

For those who are ready to climb aboard, however, in this post I'd like to comment about the only true longevity technique that has been scientifically proven to work, at least in mice -- calorie restriction. Some animal studies conducted over the past 20 years have shown up to a 40% increase in maximum life span. It seems to work at least a little no matter how late in life that it's started, with an example scenario being that a 30% reduction in calorie intake tends to increase remaining lifespan by a similar amount. So for instance, if your body usually needs 2,000 calories/day to maintain its optimal weight, reducing your caloric intake to 1,400/day starting at age 50 may add as much as 10 years to your life. 

Here's a quick synopsis from a recent blog post over at FlghtAging.com (which itself is a great resource and companion to this blog): "Aging is, in the broadest sense, the accumulation of damage to our cells and the molecular machinery that lies within. Calorie restriction appears, at the very least, to enhance cellular repair mechanisms. More repair means less accumulated damage, and thus a longer life expectancy. That, at least, appears to be the easily stated high level effect of a very complex and as yet not fully understood set of evolved metabolic processes present in most species - all of which are set in motion by the simple planned action of eating less while still obtaining optimal nutrition." Even more succinctly, it appears that mammalian bodies "slow down" their metabolism and its attendant aging during a famine, presumably to preserve the species. A more comprehensive treatment of the topic can be found in a 2001 blog post here, and there is a of course a Calorie Restriction Society chock full of information.

The problem for most of us, of course, is that if maintaining an optimal weight is hard, going the full CR route is damned near impossible. And even if you could, would you? Given a choice, would you rather enjoy another 20-30 years or go miserably hungry for 30-40 years? And if not hungry, always fighting, measuring, and figuring out how to insure proper nutrition in the face of possible anorexia? While some adherents of CR claim that your body gets used to it and its just a lifestyle choice, others report that they feel hungry most of the time. For myself, in spite of clear evidence that CR is the only scientifically-proven way to extend life, I just can't, or at least don't choose to, practice it. I have a hard enough time eating lower-calorie foods to keep my weight down and exercising to keep my metabolism up. Given the projections of exponential growth in life-extending technologies, my personal plan is to optimize my remaining lifespan while eagerly anticipating their impending arrival. No, I'm not at all sure that I'm not "fiddling while Rome (my body) burns down," but that's my honest choice for now.

I'll end this post with a 2008 MSNBC video report on calorie restriction. If you or anyone you know has personal experience with calorie restriction, please feel free to educate the rest of us via the Comments section here. 

If we accept the notion that our bodies might ultimately be repaired like cars, with parts replaced or even augmented as needed, perhaps with more modern, efficient counterparts in an unknown and indefinite future, then it makes sense to run and maintain them optimally now. At issue for most of us are the fully-loaded costs of doing that -- time, mental and physical energy, money. In this installment, I would like to survey the territory of the fuel that we give our physical bodies every day -- our diets. In my experience, getting this right is the cornerstone that must be laid before we begin to worry about supplementation, repair, medicine, and even physical exercise. I cannot profess to be nearly as serious a student of diet as my wife Dana (who I hope to one day wrangle into writing guest posts here), but I can at least summarize the key aspects of feeding our internal combustion engines properly, mostly by referencing the folks who I trust to tell the story plain and simple. You see, it’s really not all that complicated. Yet I don’t know of anyone besides Dana who gets, and keeps, it right all that often.

Back in the 90s, when the world wide web was just getting started, one of the rules of investing that I remember from an early version of The Motley Fool was to use any excess funds to get rid of bad debt, like credit cards, before even thinking about investing in stocks or bonds. Analogous rule for your body: stop eating crap. That generally means fast food, fried stuff, artificial stuff, processed stuff, non-organic stuff, most everything not on the fresh-food edges of the grocery store. If you need advice on how to do this, please review this short instructional video.

Michael Pollan has written well and often about what we eat. His “Omnivore’s Dilemma” was a comprehensive look at the atrocities perpetrated by this country’s agribusiness conglomerates. But for a short primer that instantiates his delightful 7-word summary of what to eat -- “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” check out his book “Food Rules.”

Implicit in Mr. Pollan’s writing is the recognition that our bodies require a certain type of fuel that hasn’t changed much, if any, since we evolved back in the Paleolithic days. Our bodies were optimized to survive, indeed, to thrive, on what we could hunt and gather. We ate lean meat and whatever plant parts we could gather that didn’t kill us. We moved around a lot. Agriculture and its evolution into our present-day corn-based processed food culture didn’t happen for eons afterwards, and many scientists believe that our bodies, while tolerating grains and the glutens therein, are not optimized for them. You might refer to “The Paleo Diet” by Loren Cordain for the nitty-gritty on this line of thinking. In my and Dana’s experience, we simply feel better when we eat gluten-free. Allergies calm down, energy levels climb, skin improves, mental acuity sharpens.

To a scientist, observed facts trump beliefs every time. Happily, our bodies provide a remarkable feedback loop that enables us to test out dietary ideas like this in no time. You can test the efficacy of this sort of dietary change by simply cutting out everything white in your meals for a couple of weeks. No bread, no sugar, no pasta, no potatoes or fries or chips, no sweetened colored water, nothing that a caveman couldn’t have hunted or gathered to eat, raw as often as possible. Read the books and/or website to get the details, but try eating just meats and colorful vegetables for awhile and see how you feel. If you feel better, keep doing it; if it doesn’t make any difference, quit.

Yes, you can go much further into the notion of optimizing food as fuel. Raw diets are popular and remarkable in their healing potential. True story that just happened last month: a considerably younger executive friend was diagnosed with diabetes. We suggested that he watch the video “Simply Raw” that’s subtitled “Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days.” He did, tried it, and reported that his blood sugar had reverted substantially to normal, he lost about 20 pounds, and he was pronounced diabetes-free by his doctor a couple of months later. Your mileage may vary, of course, but the latest trends project that more than half of the US population will be diabetic or pre-diabetic by 2020. It makes sense to do what you can now.

And you can do much better, even when pressed for time and/or money. Dana and I enjoy watching Jamie Oliver, who is not only a brilliant UK showman but also a dead-serious believer that good food matters. On one of his shows (I don’t have the specific link), he called a pizza delivery service and ordered one, then set about making a pizza completely from scratch (including the dough) before a studio audience. He finished before the pizza delivery man arrived. His was better, cheaper, faster. Dana and I have discovered that it’s all that, plus vastly more satisfying, to make something at home from the week’s farmer’s market run than it ever is to run out for dinner.

One last thing: growing up, I was known as Robert “Cherry Pie” Wesson. My sweet tooth was legendary. So, like any addict, my own course with sweets is not one of moderation but of abstinence. It is an ongoing battle, but I bear witness to two oft-stated facts about controlling those late night ice cream cravings: 1) after about two weeks of no sugar in your diet, the cravings do indeed fade away; and 2) if I mindfully acknowledge the full and true effect that that chocolate chip cookie in front of me will have on my aging cells vs. the remembered momentary pleasure from their melting in my mouth, I usually vote against them. When sugar ruled my diet, I missed out on the subtleties of well-prepared veggies and greens. My youth was spent thinking “greens” meant that wilting leaf of iceberg lettuce on my hamburger, whereas now I can wax poetic about how the peppery nip of arugula compares to New Zealand spinach. That’s one of the pleasures of quantum aging -- discerning and enjoying minute subtleties that you never even knew existed in your younger days.