Be Healthy: Simple Guidelines for Lifelong Well-Being

Ed Dodge, MD

Stories from the United States and Africa by Ed Dodge, MD, MPH

You can be truly healthy! That’s the message this book emphasizes, but it doesn’t stop there. Be Healthy gives you clear guidelines to lifelong well-being. These guidelines are easy to understand. Besides providing solid information, Ed Dodge  gives you the nuts and bolts of how to put this information into practice.

Many people have health issues by the time they reach midlife, including problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and other disorders which affect the quality of their lives. This does not have to be the case. Health experts today agree that eighty percent or more of health problems such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes can be prevented.

The key to prevention is a healthy lifestyle. Lifestyle is powerful. Most people underestimate this power, but scientists now say that healthy lifestyles are the most effective way to prevent most chronic diseases. Simple, easy to accomplish changes are the best way to stop the epidemic of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, stroke and cancer flooding the globe today.

Even if we as a people applied only the simple practices of walking 30 minutes daily and eating six servings of fruit and veggies every day, we could dissolve our country’s health care crisis in less than a year. Our national health would be improved so much that our care system would no longer be in crisis mode. This won’t happen because most people have not caught this vision yet. When they truly grasp it, we will become a healthier nation.

Many lifestyle initiatives have been launched in the past decade by leading medical organizations. They include Harvard University’s Institute of Lifestyle Medicine, the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute, Northwestern University’s Center for Lifestyle Medicine and many others. In addition, the American, Australian, and European Colleges of Lifestyle Medicine have all been established in the past ten years.  More