Today we'll concentrate upon one of the greatest health principles  ever discovered: the Seven Golden Rules of Health. However, to put things in perspective, let’s quickly touch upon the evils of recent history: that evil monstrosity called Obamacare  which has just passed the senate.   Now the two legislative branches will attempt to create a more evil combo between them sometime after the new year begins. What’s wrong with this picture? 

1.                  It completely ignores the single most valuable piece of health care advice ever given “First do no harm.”               

2.                  It completely ignores the most valuable health research results ever achieved (the Lester Breslow ten-year UCLA study of vigorous older people) and Rajjpuut’s 7 Golden Rules of health that were extracted from it.

3.                  Trillions of dollars of new taxes will now be added over the coming years.

4.                  No program to return Americans to fitness, health and better quality lives.

5.                  Brand new federal bureaucracy established.

6.                  Lying assumptions were required to get the bill “approved” by the CBO.

7.                  Huge corrupt buyouts of individual senators were required to get the votes to pass it.

8.                                                It does nothing to address the underlying health care mess financial mess in the country.

9.                                                It does everything to exacerbate the country’s present financial ills and unemployment problem.

10.              Of Rajjpuut’s 44 points needing reform, Obamacare only addresses one (infant mortality) and does not address them well but avoids the key issues because of the liberal agenda of the proposers.

1. 11.                                            It keeps the inept FDA in place and doing sloppy business as usual.
2. 12.                                            It allows the politicians on both sides of the aisle to pretend that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (the three grand GSBs “government spending boondoggles created by the left) have not bankrupted the country and that they do not right now owe $98 TRillion in debt and obligations that cannot be paid.
3. 13.                                            It allows them to create another entitlement entity based upon promises that will NOT be kept such as the cuts in Medicare and the cuts to physicians and hospitals written into the bill – promises they will not keep as history tell us unerringly.
4. 14.                             It creates another “set-aside” entity from which the left can rob the country by refusing to honor the “iron-clad” set aside provisions as they’ve already bankrupted us with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
5. 15.                            It has made a constant liar of Mr. Obama who promised to air the process of CNN; to have the most transparent and open administration in history; and to seek full bi-partisanship on all legislation.
6. 16.                                            It adds another level of power and control (now adding 16% of the economy) to the already too massive federal government and moving us more surely to abject Marxist -style socialism.
7. 17.                                            The bill and the process it was achieved under are all unconstitutional.
8. 18.                                            The bill has a provision for establishing oversight committees for Medicare that, as set up presently, would not allow itself to ever be abolished (perhaps the most heinous part of an heinous process and heinous bit of legislation).
9. 19.                                            No one yet has read or understood the ramifications of the house or senate bills finally passed.

Let us now return to happier subjects:   Interested in adding 35 years of high quality living to your lifespan? 

Here's how, and here's WOW!** 

If anything beside the spendthrifts in Washington, D.C., can derail the American Dream, it's the ever increasing cost of health care both to the nation at large and to the individual. Roughly 77% of the price of a new American automobile is tied up in employee salary and benefits, especially health care. This is why it’s so difficult to compete with foreign automobile offerings. This health issue then is of great national interest; but in a very real sense, good health is a very personal matter . . . as the "Spider Man" movies remind us: "With great power comes great responsibility," and you, the individual, certainly wield immense power in the battle for your own health, fitness, longevity and in avoiding high health care costs.  Dr. Lester Breslow of the UCLA School of Public Health  while unveiling the outcome of a multi-year study of vigorous oldsters  summed those results up succinctly: “The daily habits of people have a great deal more to do with what makes them sick and when they die than all the influences of medicine.” Dr. Nedra Belloc of the California Health Department, working with Breslow, added, "In our study, the men who reported that they engaged in active sports had the lowest mortality -- just half that experienced by men who reported they only sometimes gardened or exercised."

While working as a health educator for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas in 1976, Rajjpuut read about a recently-completed long-range study of vigorous, hardy older people. The gist of it all came to this: the University of California (Los Angeles campus) extracted seven lifestyle practices that vigorous, hardy senior citizens tended to share as a group. As for the study results, here's what those salubrious old folks had in common:

The Seven Golden Rules of Health

1. Eat a large healthy breakfast daily

2. Regularly eat 3-4 smaller meals daily

3. Maintain a healthy normal weight

4. Avoid tobacco and drug use (minimize over-the-counter remedies)

5. Drink alcohol extremely moderately

6. Sleep 7-8 hours nightly

7. Practice regular vigorous exercise

The "magic" from the study came when UCLA extrapolated their finding out into the general populace. They discovered that if they took two men, one aged 55 years old and the other 20 and compared their lifestyles . . . if the 20 year old practiced 0-1 of the "Seven Golden Rules" and the 55 year old practiced 6-7 of them: the two men had the exact same life expectancy. That is, it would be absolutely no surprise at all if they both dropped dead on the same day, say 28.2 years in the future. I'm not sure what that means to you, but the 35 years difference between the two men is my personal definition of "quality of life." Understand this as you’ve understood nothing more deeply before: the synergistic wallop of obeying at least six of the seven rules can mean up to 35 years of quality life added to your existence – now ain’t that something?

Further studies by other groups have shown that when it comes to changes made before age 42, once the individual starts to practice the Seven Golden Rules . . . within eight years most of the harm from the prior twenty years of a dissipate lifestyle is gone. That means, for example, quit smoking and follow the seven golden rules for eight years, and it's almost as if you've never smoked a day in your life. Benefits from lifestyle changes after age 42, were less consistent but still quite significant.

A few comments are in order. Buckling seatbelts was a fairly new idea at the time of the study. If an eighth and ninth golden rule are needed which I would add from my experience as a health educator, they would be:

8. Buckle-up in moving vehicles and always observe proper caution around machinery

9. Avoid highly processed foods and fried foods and eat some high-fiber food daily

Rule #5 "Drink alcohol extremely moderately" deserves some discussion. After a brief flirtation with boozing as a youngster, Rajjpuut rarely consumes a six-pack a month these days, so that's what he practices and preach. However, in the actual study the amount of liquor mentioned was "averaging slightly less than one beer or glass of wine per day." Over the years since the study, much has been made of the value of red wine in the diet. All this implies that a little bit of alcohol is preferable to none at all. If there is one area of the study that he would put in question it would be that conclusion. Here's his "take" on the matter. The trouble with saying that teetotalers are less healthy than extremely moderate drinkers comes in two areas: A) a whole lot of teetotalers are reformed alcoholics who in many cases regrettably did great damage to their health prior to quitting drinking altogether and presumably shortened their probable life spans in the process. It is my intuition that IF the study had eliminated this effect from former alcoholics in its study, their fifth rule might have been modified: "Rule #5 "Drink alcohol extremely moderately or not at all." Additionally, from experience Rajjpuut suspects that there are "overly pious personalities" out there who don't drink and resent everybody in the world who does . . . and in fact they deeply resent almost everybody in the world for any number of reasons. If they were removed from the rolls of non-drinkers, he's sure the non-drinkers would have averaged a longer life also. So his last addition to the Golden Rules of Health is:

Rule #6 7/8 Have a sense of humor, relax

If on top of all this great advice, the individual, let us call him "Bill" takes charge of his own health and finds a health-conscious (rather than disease-oriented) doctor "muy simpatico" who believes that the purpose of wise medicine is to keep people hale-healthy and out of his office . . . and if Bill always seeks at least a second opinion in considering serious health care matters, then he and his doctors are part of the solution to the health care mess rather than part of problem. If every company had a full roster of employees like Bill then health care costs and costs across the board would drop markedly starting now.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

**The first time Ol’ Rajjpuut put up the “Here’s how and here’s WOW” subhead he didn’t notice that WOW were the initials of “Word of Wisdom” which is something a Mormon friend told him about roughly four decades ago.   In any case, for simple healthy lifestyles the whole state of Utah seems to be showing the nation what behaviors are wisest and what’s not and the individuals there are averaging longer, healthier and more vigorous lives as a result.

Rajjpuut Does It Better: 

A Workable Health Care

Alternative:   Part XIII

            Last time out in Part XII of this health care series, Rajjpuut reiterated that the FDA was the most dangerous part of the American health care system. The FDA needs to be either eliminated totally or completely revamped and made 100% accountable. The AMA and individual nurses, doctors and hospitals can do much to eliminate iatrogenic incidents but the FDA is the big iatrogenic killer. If a drug kills people, or harms people: the FDA bigwigs need to be fired and perhaps even fined or better yet imprisoned. The CDC, on the other hand (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta) was put forward by Rajjpuut as a big part of the answer to our problems as far as cost, as far as countering the nation’s big killer diseases and increasing the quality of Americans’ lives.

            In a nutshell Rajjpuut, the ol’ health educator, has created a plan that works because it does virtually everything the opposite of how the health care system has worked up to now. Instead of concentrating 95% of our resources, time, talent, money and effort on stage four: discovering a disease and treating it which is the most costly and least effective (from the patient’s point of view) way to practice medicine, Rajjpuut advocates entering the system at the health education and preventions stage, stage one. As mentioned last time the biggest single thing to educate people about were the Seven Golden Rules of Health and the 35 extra quality years that they can mean for the individual. Follow this link and see the bottom of the page for the foot note info about this amazing knowledge :

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2009/07/18/a_far_better_health_care_alternative_part_xii.thtml

            How exactly it would all work is covered in blog XII of the series, but here’s an example of attacking probably the single biggest problem but also illustrating the entangled nature of the health care mess. Let’s look at morbid obesity; obesity; and the disease and silent killer that often accompanies them both: diabetes. When it comes to older Americans, which now means the baby boomer generation and those who were born before them, 20% of them suffer from diabetes and pre-diabetes is noticeable in another sixty million older Americans. 

            Diabetes is a condition where blood sugar levels go out of control. The body uses the pancreas and its hormone insulin to control blood sugar. When the pancreas doesn’t product enough insulin or when the pancreas produces enough but the body can’t seem to use it effectively: diabetes results and it’s a killer and an incredible trouble-maker. It can blind you. It can cause you to lose limbs to amputation; it can cripple you and it can cause heart attacks and cancer and kill you. And, of course, it can dramatically limit the length and quality of your life. Most all of us are familiar with the specter of a diabetic victim needing to keep their insulin cold and taking their daily shot or shots of insulin. And insulin is a dangerous drug . . . it can kill you.   

            Diabetes can damage your very arteries, veins and capillaries, ruin your liver, and destroy your sex life. All this and the horrors mentioned in the previous paragraph are in large part preventable.

            For those who don’t understand what we’re talking about, Type I Diabetes is NOT what we’re talking about. Type I is genetic for the most part. We’re talking about Pre-diabetes and Type II or “adult onset diabetes” a condition that develops later in life and typically accompanies obesity. Sixty million Americans today are considered pre-diabetic and forty million have diabetes of one kind or another. We are also NOT talking about the form of diabetes that some pregnant women undergo, gestational diabetes, though the information revealed in this blog will presumably help the vast majority of women avoid gestational diabetes altogether. And we are not talking about any other diabetes complex, but just about adult onset diabetes and obesity . . . and especially about pre-diabetes and preventing all pre-diabetics from developing the full-blown disease.

            Adult onset diabetes is the perfect metaphor for what’s wrong with the American health care system. The disease is probably 99.999% preventable. Follow the seven golden rules and one American in 10,000 will become pre-diabetic and one in 100,000 will develop adult onset diabetes. The single most important steps are daily exercise; a good breakfast; several tiny meals; weight-control; and good nutrition . . . if you want to prevent the disease.

            Like virtually all of today’s drug culture, insulin and other drugs prescribed to diabetics do NOT cure anything. If you develop the disease, today’s medicine treats you with insulin every day for the rest of your life. You become a subscriber to a “palliative medicine,” that is a drug that “treats the symptoms” of the disease but can’t cure it. It’s expensive and as we’ve mentioned, insulin shock is a killer. Of course you could wait for a match and get a pancreas transplant, but those are rare and very seldom as effective as might be hoped and very, very expensive. All this danger can be removed by preventing the disease in the first place or undoing the disease if you are already diabetic or pre-diabetic. That involves with close doctor control, living the Seven Golden Rules of Health and good nutrition.

            If you want to prevent diabetes you have mostly to look at the waistline. Morbidly obese people are roughly 28 times more likely to develop diabetes and 150 times more likely to be pre-diabetic than someone who maintains a healthy normal weight. Those who are merely fat (obese) are about 11 times more likely to develop diabetes and about 54 times more likely to be pre-diabetic. Just starting mild exercise 40 minutes a day  (in extreme cases walking in a swimming pool is the very first exercise intervention most doctors will recommend), good nutrition and TIME will work virtual miracles.  What exact GOOD are we doing by these simple inexpensive steps? Check this out:

            Besides the desirability of preventing virtually all the human tragedy mentioned above, diabetes and obesity are extraordinarily expensive. Obesity is hard to detail solid numbers on, but diabetes costs rose 32% for treating adult onset diabetes between 2002 and 2007. Estimated diabetes expenditure today are $143 Billion in direct medical costs and $74 Billion in indirect costs (work loss, premature death, disability, etc.). This means that 11% of all health care money spent in the United States is associated with diabetes of one sort or another.

            Perhaps the most glaringly understated statistic in the whole health care mess is that diabetes is associated with 7% of American deaths. Most probably that number is more like 27% since diabetes contributes mightily to heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, cancers, etc. In the country with the most abundant presence of nutritious food, millions of fat Americans are also killing themselves with malnutrition. Add in a bit of fitness training to good nutrition and miracles are possible, however: The CDC statistics reveal that prevention, health education and safety education really does work.

• In the Diabetes Prevention Program study, lifestyle interventions reduced diabetes development in people at high risk by 58% over a three-year period -- and an even more impressive 71% in adults age 60 and older. In contrast, Metformin, the diabetes drug compared in one famous study to the lifestyle intervention, reduced diabetes risk only half as much, cost a lot, didn’t always work and carried with a whole host of side effects.

• Comprehensive foot care programs can reduce amputation rates by 45% to 85%.

• Blood pressure control reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke in people with diabetes by 33% to 50%, and the risk of microvascular complications (eye, kidney and nerve diseases) by approximately 33%.

• Lowering blood pressure can reduce the decline in kidney function in people with early diabetic kidney disease 30% to 70%.

• Detecting and treating diabetic eye disease with laser therapy can reduce the development of severe vision loss by about 50% to 60%.

• Controlling LDL cholesterol can reduce cardiovascular complications by 20% to 50%.

DIETS, STARVATION, FASTING, and food fads DO NOT WORK, don’t do them

Highly processed food: if the food doesn’t even resemble the place it came from, don’t eat it.

Fried foods

Foods with high trans-fat content; partly hydrogenated foods

Sodas, sugary drinks, alcohol

Cigarettes and tobacco products in general

Drugs

Processed foods: canned and boxed and frozen foods with long lists of chemical ingredients

“Thick foods” such as gravies, cream sauces, dips

Heavily sugared foods and desserts

Eat complex carbohydrates only: such as brown rice, whole wheat, pumpernickel bread, shredded wheat

Eat all the green vegetables you want; all the apples you want; all the carrots you want

And all the yellow vegetables, except corn, you want. Eat all the red and green cabbage you want

Eat a boiled egg every day

Eat half a good sized potato twice weekly

Eat a banana and a half grapefruit every other day

Eat a big breakfast and 3-4 smaller meals daily

Use all the salsa you want on meats, rice, potatoes

Squeeze a lemon over your salad for a dressing

Eat a big and varied salad with tomatoes, greens, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, celery and sunflower seeds once daily

Eat a half-cup of yogurt daily

Concentrate on good, nutritious, fresh fruits and vegetables whenever in doubt

Use a good multi-vitamin

Drink a large glass of water 20 minutes prior to each meal

Exercise aerobically daily

Do light muscle-building exercises 3-4 times weekly

Good luck,

Live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

The Rajjpuut Health Care Plan: Part III

Honest, Fair, Emphasizes Responsibility,

Prevention and Health Education

http://rajjpuutsfolly.blogtownhall.com/2009/06/22/rajjpuut_health_care_plan_part_ii.thtml 

            As explained, rushing into a program, even a potentially excellent one, is to be avoided. Good management requires a methodical, studied approach in which each new part adds greatly to the whole rather than creating a bottleneck. Part I was an overview of exactly what’s important. Part II attacked the easiest and most fundamentally important part of the whole picture: elimination of unnecessary health care contact and creating a new role to efficiently manage entry into the system: the NHF or National Health Facilitator.

            Understanding anything, really understanding it, is a process that gradually brings more and more appreciation and satisfaction. In Part I we explained why Barak Obama was about the worst person in the world to create a health care proposal and why Rajjpuut’s profound expertise in communication, management, and health education made him an ideal person for creating this important program. We also showed ten key components of a satisfactory program: patient independence, patient responsibility, emphasis on prevention, health education starting at an early age, emphasis on quality of life, HMOs etc., the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and the AMA.

            In Part II we explained that one of the biggest cause of problems in health care delivery comes from unnecessary visits to the doctor’s office and especially unnecessary visits to the emergency room (ER). These unnecessary contacts are obviously very expensive (the last statistics I remember put a doctor’s office visit at roughly $42; an urgent care visit at $220 and an emergency room visit at $631; and our hypothetical call into an NHF (we’ll call him or her from here on out a “health facilitator”) somewhere between $10 and $15 an hour with typical calls lasting eight minutes; some calls only three-minutes long; and a few rare extended calls up to half an hour in length. Clearly, the more efficiently we can place the prospective patient in the system the better dollar-wise for all concerned. Step I in our process of building a health care system is the training of NHF’s.

            Why? A recent article about Canada’s nationalized (government provided) health care system adds more insight here: the median wait for cancer treatment there is seven weeks and for emergency room treatment the wait is nine hours. Taking this one step further, Rajjpuut will speculate that in Canada under their system perhaps 90% of the cancer patients receive their first treatment somewhere between four weeks and ten weeks after entering the system. Either figure is bad, but ten weeks is intolerable. Now let’s look at the Canadian ER figures which are more germane to our look at the NHF position. 

Clearly some of the people coming into the ER are dealt with within fifteen minutes, even within one minute in some cases and others, obviously the vast majority of others, sit around waiting in the ER area for seven to twelve hours. Obviously, if these were all “true emergencies” 90% of the Canadian ER patients would die or drop into comas. This is the role of the health facilitator: to wisely perform a sort of phone-triage. The real emergencies (poisoning, unconsciousness, blocked airway, severe bleeding, electrocution, drowning, severe allergic reactions,etc.##) are going to get looked at in 15 minutes, perhaps less, but the bottleneck can be dramatically eased and great amounts of money saved and frustration avoided. The intensive and profound training of the Health Facilitator is the most important and first step in the program.