femalenetwork.com

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?