[excerpt] An ever-increasing body of medical research is coming to the definite conclusion that the quality of your relationships with other people may be the single most important determinant of your health and longevity.
A few years ago, I received a letter from a woman in southern California. She wrote that she and her husband had for many years avidly followed a path of health. Their lifestyle, she believed, had been exemplary. They had practised yoga and meditated and neither of them had let a single bite of anything containing refined sugar pass their lips. They exercised regularly and never took any drugs, not even so much as an aspirin. They had been very happy together, she said, and had believed that by eating healthful foods and undertaking other sound health practices they would never fall ill.
But now she felt bitter, angry and cheated. In his fifties, her husband had developed cancer and died. What was the point, she lamented, of all their health diligence when this could still happen? Despondent and feeling betrayed, she had given up any semblance of health discipline and was stuffing herself with hamburgers, candy and the other unwholesome foods she had forgone for years. She no longer exercised and had gained more than 70 pounds in the three years since her husband’s death. She had developed diabetes and was overwhelmingly depressed.
Reading this woman’s letter, I felt sorrow. I felt sad for her loss of her husband, and sad for how depressed, despondent and bitter she had become. And I felt sad, too, that she and her husband had held the misguided belief that their diet and lifestyle could guarantee them everlasting health. There is something innocent and childlike about believing that if you eat only healthful foods and exercise enough, you will never become ill.
There is a part of all of us that would like to be able to follow some magic rule or obey some infallible authority and thereby be guaranteed freedom from all suffering. But life just doesn’t work that way. Life is far more unpredictable and far more mysterious.
I’ve known raw food aficionados who believe that all cooked food is unhealthful and who, when they become ill, blame it on the one piece of cooked food they’ve recently eaten. I’ve known zealous Atkins adherents who demonize carbs and then agonize because in a lapse of willpower they ate a baked potato. I’ve known people who believe that if they eat only pure food and take thousands of dollars worth of supplements, they will live indefinitely.
A good diet and exercise regimen is important and living healthfully can make a tremendous difference. But there are many other factors in our lives that also have great influence over our health. Someone may die of a skin cancer at age 50 that began as the result of a teenage sunburn. Some cancers, particularly breast, uterine, ovaria, and prostate cancers start in the womb, engendered in part by the food our mothers ate and the chemicals in their environments.
We live in a world that is becoming increasingly toxic and polluted. There are many environmental exposures over which we have no control. Some diseases occur whose origins are complete mysteries, descending on people seemingly out of the blue, no matter what their lifestyle. Others develop that are intimately linked to social factors such as poverty and dangerous working conditions. There are powerful forces in our world that are undermining relationships, forcing people to work insane hours and poisoning our air and water.
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