A Healthy Lifestyle Should Start in Childhood
                                                                       
Parents should adopt a healthy lifestyle and help ensure that their children do too. Guidance for healthy habits can be found in the book, The Building Blocks of Health––How to Optimize Wellness with a Lifestyle Checklist. It is available in bookstores and at jjspeidel.com. In the book, preventive medicine expert J. Joseph Speidel, MD, MPH, describes why many children and adults have a lifestyle that harms their health. He documents why it is important to start in childhood to follow a Lifestyle Checklist. By doing so kids can put in place the Building Blocks of Health and avoid much of the lifestyle-related damage to health that leads to illness and premature death.

Based on more than 2000 articles from the medical literature, the book lays out the scientific basis of why adopting healthier ways of eating, exercising, and living prevents disease, optimizes, and maintains health.

Readers will learn:

• Why the lifestyle of 95% of Americans is unhealthy.
• That a healthy lifestyle can prevent 90% of diabetes, 80% of heart disease, and nearly 50% of cancers.
• That an optimal lifestyle can add 10 to 15 years to life.
• That multiple behavioral factors are necessary to keep us healthy––they are the Building Blocks of Health.
• How to use a Lifestyle Checklist to help kids and their parents adopt and stick to the behaviors needed to become and stay healthy.

What you have to do to get and stay healthy is maintain a normal weight; adopt a diet low in added sugar and saturated fat, and high in natural unrefined whole plant-based foods, (fruits, vegetables, legumes, soy and whole grains); get enough sleep and physical activity; manage stress; and avoid high risk behaviors like abuse of drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
 
And there is a climate link: The book explains why eating a healthy plant-based diet will help reduce emission of greenhouse gases and protect our climate.

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