Open Future Health Blog

Your habits when you are in your 40's and 50's are the foundation for your good health and fitness at 85. Improved diet is the low cost alternative to extensive medical intervention later in life. The body has the ability to heal itself, if we treat it with respect. ANYBODY who adopts a healthy diet, at ANY AGE, will benefit, and as the months go by, those benefits will multiply.

DON'T start a new diet, Begin a New Education

A good friend told me two days ago that she had traveled overseas with Hugh Butler PhD., who had written a book about better health, called "The Take-Out Diet." Since then I've tracked him down, purchased his book and read more than half of it.

Mr Butler is right on target. His experience is similar to my own. He thought he was healthy, but approaching 60 his health began to decline. In particular his weight increased, and five years of effort to change that were ineffective. His family history indicated that he might live for a long time, but the last 8 to 10 years might be years of illness or dementia. Rather than just accept his health as it was, and call it old age coming on, he decided to investigate more.

Hugh Butler's training is in Agricultural Science, with a PhD in plant physiology and biochemistry. He has read hundreds of scientific papers and has written more than a few himself. He spent 12 years working as a biochemist. In his professional life he had migrated into statistics and change management, and these are skills he brings to an exploration of nutrition science.

It was very clear that the health knowledge in the news media and in the public mind was confused and unhelpful. Butler believed that science gave clear answers, and that there must be a consistent and clear scientific way to understand health and nutrition, that wasn't confused by marketing messages and propaganda.

The Take-Out Diet

In "The Take-Out Diet" Hugh Butler identifies a lot of good science. He makes clear statements about what is and is not scientifically proven. When he's finished there are a few things he recommends, and a lot of things that people commonly do that they should stop doing or avoid.

Butler says "Never go in a diet" because when you do that, you are telling yourself that one day you'll come off that diet. What we need to do is undertake and education. Education never stops. Further, your education should not be focused on weight loss, in fact forget about the scales, and forget about calories. Learn about real food, about metabolism, about how the body is controlled by hormones, and the meaning of the term homeostasis.

As your knowledge grows, how you need to change your life, the direction you will travel, will become crystal clear. Change as little as possible, change one thing at a time. Change only the one thing that will make the biggest difference now with the least effort. If these are part of your life, begin here; smoking, drug use, too much alcohol, excessive exercise, and vegetarian diets, all of which are clearly harmful to your health, as shown by scientific studies. You don't have to be clever to know that.

The title, The Take-Out Diet, refers to six things you need to take out of your life forever. Clue: the first one is sugar and it's substitutes. There are other things that you'll discover when the need arises. Meanwhile, find out what sugar and it's substitutes are, and try to take them out of your life.

In the next year, if you make four or five changes like that, your health will have improved considerably, even if your weight remains the same. All you need to do is understand the science, and unlearn some of the things that are today preventing you from being more healthy.

John Stephen Veitch
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