Dr. Joseph Mercola

It typically takes ten minutes to write out your most important goal... But those ten minutes make you exponentially more likely to meet that goal. And when your goal is health-related, achieving it can add years to your life and add dramatic quality to those years.

I am convinced that for the typical American, and maybe for you and many of your friends and family, the most important health step you can take is to stop drinking soda, sports drinks, or artificially flavored and sweetened waters and replace them with pure water.

The bacteria in your gut outnumber the human cells in your body ten to one.

What all this means is that when you remove processed foods, sugar, grains, and high-net-carb fuels from your diet, you essentially stress cancer cells by depriving them of their preferred metabolic food.

In recent years, scientists have come to realize that it’s not genetic mutations that cause cancer. We now know that mitochondrial damage happens first.

Sugar fans the flames of inflammation in your body, as it is a dirty fuel that was never intended to be our primary fuel. Using sugar for energy produces 30 to 40 percent more ROS [reactive oxygen species] than burning fat.

Fortunately, the key to slowing down the aging process is already in your hand—you simply need to stop eating more protein than your body requires for tissue repair. Reducing protein intake is so effective that it will likely become an even more visible component of anticancer and anti-aging dietary interventions in the future.

Your body was designed to be healthy without requiring a drug. Give it what it needs to thrive, and it will typically regenerate itself without any outside interventions. This innate restorative tendency is what I call ‘Effortless Healing.’

When you take one minute out of every fifteen to stand up or change positions while working at your desk, you’ll improve your bone health, burn more calories, work more muscles, and burn more fat—all of which likely lessen your risk of dying prematurely.

For the first time in human history, this generation will live a shorter time than their parents—and this is despite spending an estimated $2.9 trillion in 2013 on health care in the U.S. alone.

Ironically, to improve blood flow and body oxygenation, we need to breathe less, not more.

In simple terms, when you eat carbohydrates, your pancreas secretes insulin. And the more insulin you have in your blood, the more signals your body gets to store fat. In other words, by following the present dietary advice that was officially codified by the government in 1977, we as a nation have been doing the very things that cause us to gain weight and keep it on.

Reducing the time you sit each day is even more important than getting regular exercise.