Health Myth: I Feel Healthy, It Won't Happen To Me

There is nothing wrong with feeling healthy. It sure is better than feeling bad! 

However, feeling healthy and actually being healthy can be two very different things.

Your body can stand up to quite a bit of stress and mistreatment. But sometimes, there's no warning before critical illness or sudden death.

Here's some of what you could be facing if you consume the Standard American Diet and don't change anything:

• Men now have a 48 percent chance of getting cancer during their lifetime and women have a 38 percent risk.

• In 1900, 5 percent of the U.S. population died of heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Today, 72 percent of us will die from any combination of these diseases.

• In the last 20 years, despite "the war on cancer" and billions of dollars spent on research, cancer has moved from the number eight killer of Americans to the number two killer.

• For the last two years, the number one cause of death in people under the age of thirty in the U.S. has been cancer.

• Seventy-five years ago, there were no pediatric oncologists (children's cancer specialists) because there was not a need.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says diabetes has increased by 70 percent in 30 to 39 year olds - and the epidemic is also affecting our children.

• Cancer kills more children than any other disease - more than asthma, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and AIDS, combined.

• The average 4 year-old already has some plaque build-up in his arteries.

You may be telling yourself that there is nothing you can do. That having poor health as you get older is based on genetics and luck, that it is inevitable. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

You can turn back the clock and make sure that you do not become another health statistic. All it takes is a little education and application.