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When Carlos was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 28, it didn’t make sense. He ate well, worked out, swam, ran, biked, and took vitamins regularly. He didn’t smoke, drink, or party. “He was the healthiest person I knew,” tearful friends recounted at his wake.

But he had hotdogs and sausages for breakfast every day of his life.

In an age when being healthy only means you aren’t sick, people tend to take health for granted. “I’ll worry about that when I’m fifty,” a friend of mine once said. “In the meantime, I’ll have fun.” Now there’s nothing wrong with having fun, but that’s impossible if you’re a fifteen-year-old with bone cancer, or an eight-year-old with bronchitis.

“They’re getting younger and younger,” says Dr. Omar Arabia, nutritional oncologist and founder of the Center for Homeopathy and Wholistic Health. He says it’s because young people today are exposed to toxins earlier than most of us ever were. With ten million fastfood chains and a wide variety of processed food within our reach, it’s not surprising cancer is fast becoming as common in young people as an asthma attack. And our parents, who ate fresh fish, tomatoes, and gulay-bukid long before the microwave was invented, are only getting sick now.

But it’s not as though cancer, diabetes, leukemia and other heavy-duty diseases are all the MTV generation has to deal with. Chronic colds, ear infections, upper respiratory infections and diarrhea are so prevalent, we take them as a matter of course, a normal part of everyday life. In fact, we think that these disorders are what “healthy” people normally go through once in a while.

When can you actually say you’re truly healthy? New-age guru Deepak Chopra, author of Creating Health, defines it as “a natural state,” in short, what the human body was meant to be. Health is more than just the absence of disease. The World Health Organization even goes as far as saying health is “the state of perfect physical, mental, and social well-being.” Which means, even if you happen to be one of the lucky few who never gets a fever, you’re still not considered healthy if you’re stressed, depressed, or don’t have any friends.

The Natural Way to Health
While mental and social well-being is somewhat more difficult to achieve, physical health is much more within our own control. Directly related to something we can do, physical health is more easily obtained than wealth. And yet most of us are too busy chasing the almighty peso and getting sick while doing it. After all, when we do get sick, it’s simply a matter of popping a pill anyway.

Or is it?

The Pop-A-Pill Syndrome
It’s a way of life. Feeling drowsy? Caffeine. Dysmenorrhea? Aspirin or some kind of painkiller. Hyperacidity? Antacid. Constipation? Laxative. We are more than adept at obtaining quick and cheap relief from whatever keeps us from our daily routines…but what exactly do these drugs do?

In his book Spontaneous Healing, Dr. Andrew Weil expressed his alarm at the suppressive nature of conventional medicine today. “If you look at the names of most popular categories of drugs in use today, you will find that most of them begin with the prefix, ‘anti’,” Dr. Weil says. “We use antispasmodics and antihypertensives, antianxiety agents and antidepressants, antihistamines, antiarrhythmics, antitussives, antipyretics, and anti-inflammatories. This is truly antimdicine, or medicine that is, in essence, counteractive and suppressive.”

In many ways, it’s bad news. According to Weil, these drugs should only be used “on a short-term basis for the management of very severe conditions.” These pharmaceutical weapons are strong and toxic, and pill-popping is probably doing us more harm than good.

Consider paracetamol, taken by almost everyone for basic aches and pains or when you’re stuck at home with a slight temperature. And why not? It’s known as “the world’s safest pain reliever,” isn’t it? Well, not according to the Physician’s Drug Handbook. Paracetamol has 39 known adverse side effects, including, hemolytic anemia, hypoglycemia, urticaria, severe liver damage, and complications of the central nervous system. The upshot is there’s no such thing as a side effect; some effects are just less toxic than others.

“I like our pediatrician,” says Tisha, a housewife, “but all he really does is prescribe drugs, especially antibiotics.” To that, Dr. Weil has to say, “Frequent use of antibiotics can worsen the very problem it’s meant to alleviate, both by weakening immunity and by increasing the number and virulence of resistant germs. Antibiotics are powerful tools for containing susceptible infections but must be reserved for instances where they are really needed.”

Take the case of Frieda, a victim of chronic urinary tract infection for years. Her doctor prescribed one antibiotic after another, each one with a longer name and more expensive than the last. What was happening was the bacteria causing Frieda’s infection adapted to the old drug, becoming resistant to it. And that’s what happened to the next one.

Does this mean we have to live with pain, discomfort and fever? Of course not. But for more common afflictions such as colds and diarrhea, The Doctors Book of Home Remedies advises holding off on medications, and simply letting it pass. A dose of vitamin C will usually do the trick for a cold. And replenishing fluids will ease an attack of diarrhea.

For dysmenorrhea, cut out salty and sweet junk foods—these only make you feel bloated and sluggish. Stop caffeine, and don’t drink or smoke. Get some exercise or do some yoga stretching. And here’s the best remedy: Make love. “Sexual orgasm is great for relieving cramps,” says Dr. Lark. The vigorous muscle action moves blood and other fluids from congested organs, relieving pain.

For constipation, drink lots of fluids and eat more fiber. According to Dr. Edward R. Eichner, “regular exercise combats constipation by moving food through the bowels faster.” For headaches, again exercise is a key, but not if it’s severe. Sleep may alleviate the pain, particularly if you’re lying on your back, but don’t oversleep. Take deep breaths, use an ice pack or a hot shower. Give yourself a massage. And stop scrunching your face up. Smile.

If you suffer from urinary tract infections, drink lots of fluid. If your urine’s not clear, you’re not drinking enough. Take a dose of vitamin C; bacteria doesn’t thrive well in acidic environments. Urinate before and after sex, and wear cotton panties. Synthetic fibers tend to irritate the vaginal area.

Make the Change
You rush to work in the morning, munching a donut and downing a cup of coffee. At lunch, you throw back a double cheeseburger after which you gulp down a mega-vitamin with your can of diet soda. You think you’re fine. You may even feel like you have some of the “quality time” multivitamin commercials keep talking about, but are you really healthier in the end?

“You can’t have a lousy diet and gulp down a few vitamins and get the same effect,” says Dr. Joseph Hotchkiss in “Beyond Vitamins,” an article in Newsweek. This also holds true for antioxidants, whose popularity people are talking about without really knowing why. Antioxidants like vitamin E and beta-carotene are known for subduing “free radicals” which cause wrinkles, harden arteries, and turn normal cells into cancerous cells. But an antioxidant’s not going to help if you’re going to continue to live your beer-drinking, chain-smoking lives, even though your orange softdrink has beta-carotene in it.

If you really want to be healthy, yes, you can take your vitamins. But you have to turn your life around at the same time. That basically begins with your diet, which means no sugar substitutes or diet soda. Nor does it mean a bowl of fresh green salad slathered with creamy thousand island dressing, and topped with egg, bacon, and cheese.

It would be good to quit eating refined foods altogether—that basically means white bread and white sugar. Ever notice that when ants attack your sugar bowl, most of them die in it and you don’t have ants again for a while? The reason? Although the sugar is delicious, it’s not only non-nutritious, it’s highly toxic. According to Sir Jason Winters, author of The Perfect Cleanse, sugar broke down the health of the ants and destroyed their reproductive systems. It’s been proven in laboratory experiments. He says, “This is exactly what’s happening to the human race, but at a slower pace because our generations are many years, not weeks, as are the ants.”

Products like hot dogs, longganisa, tapa and tocino contain nitrites or salitre as preservatives. “Hot dogs are directly linked to leukemia and brain tumors in children,” the headline of the Gerson Newsletter reads, and Carlos would have lived if he knew. These days, what you don’t know can hurt you.

Human beings have exposed themselves to so many toxins that their bodies adapt and adapt until they no longer can. Do you know what happens when you feed monosodium glutamate (MSG or vetsin) to a dog? It dies. In the same manner, filling our bodies with the MSG found in most junk food, instant noodles, and almost everything in the supermarket will slowly but surely compromise the state of our health.

Have a carcinogen-free diet, which means eat “nothing boxed, bottled, or canned,” says Dr. Arabia. Impossible? More than 100 of his patients are doing that right now. Gina, 33, has tried to adopt this lifestyle because of a family history of cancer. “It takes a lot of planning, but it’s not as hard as it sounds. When I’ve run out of vegetables, I order food delivery, but instead of going for basic fastfood, I call a Filipino restaurant and order a vegetable dish like pinakbet or sinigang na bangus.” Cara, 29, who has had minor surgery for a benign cyst in her breast, has begun to make permanent changes in her life. “I use brown rice now instead of white. And I make sure to have a fresh fruit in the morning and one in the afternoon, as well as veggies at every meal, even if it’s just a raw carrot.” Nothing is impossible.

Make that change. Think of all the things you want to do in your life, because you want to live to be a hundred. Smile, pray, and love someone with all your heart. Listen to your mother, and do yourself and those you love a big favor: pursue your health the natural way.