An Investment in Life and the Family Orchard

Now that we know the root cause of chronic illness, and we know that a government-sponsored health care bailout plan isn’t going to help in any way, shape, or form (let alone a private plan), let’s set out to make a plan for our own long-term recovery and health insurance (or rather, ensurance).

Let’s call it a health problem retirement plan, only it doesn’t have an IRA component. This is how to make it work for you:

Step 1: Gather all the health information you can about your relatives at least three generations back. Find out who is allergic to what, who has what disease, who has what deformity, and find out where THEIR problems came from.

Step 2: Find out who lived when, what their life was like, and any particular hardships they endured (Depression, WWI or II, Dust Bowl, etc). Things like famine and rationing lead directly to things like diabetes and obesity susceptibility in future generations. Stress is also encoded into DNA, and can explain things like OCD, nervousness, and/or hypertension.

Step 3: Now that you have all pertinent information about the preceding generations, you can go online and find out how we take care of these issues today, because chances are very good you will experience some sort of effect from their genetic coding (if you aren’t already). At the very least, you can consider yourself forewarned, and begin planning to make adjustments in your eating and lifestyle to combat the onset.

Step 4: DON’T BE STINGY WITH THIS INFORMATION—let your kids and grandkids know what’s coming down the pike, and how to avoid it or offset it without resorting to expensive and sometimes hard-to-get health insurance (by the time they grow up, this will certainly be a reality). The more they know about their past family health history, the easier it will be to avoid, offset, or decipher symptoms and treat with eating or lifestyle changes. Assemble a health scrapbook or CD-ROM if you have to, so it can be handed down for future generations to add their own health information to it.

Step 5: Be sure you and your future generation know about the epigenome and how it works—this is VITAL information that concerns them and their future offspring. Changes in eating and living NOW, and continuous modeling and maintenance of those changes throughout the generations, will have considerably positive outcome decades from now. There’s nothing like paying it forward, is there?

Step 6: Like regular investments, put your health problem retirement plan on auto-pilot, and encourage the rest of the family to do the same—this will mitigate any backsliding and make the process of changing easier. Then you and future generations get to sit back and be Armchair Health Millionaires, reaping tons of dividends for all eternity.

This is what I will call an investment in life. The Family Orchard is when the family tree sprouts more trees—nice, strong, healthy, and vibrant trees that will make the need for Medicare, SCHIP, health insurance, and large hospitals obsolete. All it takes is a little knowledge, information assembly, and appropriate changes to combat the pests that may live within your family tree now. Like retirement or college saving, this is a long-term plan (whose results you likely won’t be around to see), but the long-lasting benefits will be shared by your grandchildren’s grandchildren and their grandchildren, and that’s a much better legacy to leave them than money or property any day. Best of all, we can do this ourselves starting TODAY.

As a species, we’ve allowed ourselves to get messed up at the DNA level with short-term behavior patterns, and it’s time to clean up. Science and technology have given us the way to do the most effective job with little comparative effort and cost—we’d be absolute fools not to take advantage of this opportunity.

The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” never had truer meaning than when applied to familial health, DNA, and the epigenome. Remember this next time you take a breath, a pill, a bite, a drink, or a hit of something.