Have you ever tweaked your back doing something trivial, like putting on your socks? Have you ever had a friend or co-worker overreact to something simple you did or said? Have you ever known someone who ate well, exercised, and appeared fit, but had a sudden heart attack or other significant health crisis? There are many things in life that appear to just happen. They seem like they come out of nowhere, make little sense, and leave you wondering how such a bad thing can happen so fast.
Modern humans have been on this planet for approximately 300,000 years. For almost all that time, what threatened human health was starvation, injury, and infection. Today, chronic illness is our worst enemy. Conditions like diabetes, heart disease, auto-immune conditions, depression, and cancer are super prevalent, yet were virtually non-existent in our ancestors. The rates of these chronic illnesses are mindboggling, with almost 80% of Americans struggling with at least one chronic illness and roughly 50% suffering with two or more. The chronic disease prevalence in children has risen to almost 30% in just the last twenty years.
If you are struggling with any type of health issue, and your head is spinning because you don’t know how something like this can show up out of the blue, odds are it has been building for some time. I believe the health crisis we are deeply embedded in right now is the result of our poor lifestyle choices and altered way of living over the past 100 years. Our increased exposure to toxic chemicals, drastic reduction in physical activity, massive increase in daily stress, and increased dependence on dangerous medications have been silently accumulating to a point when we have now reached a tipping point. Our bodies have done as well as they could, for as long as they could, but we’ve reached a point where is it simply too much. And the result is the chronic illness boom we are seeing today.
It is important to clarify this because when someone does get sick, is diagnosed with a chronic disease, or a new staggering medical statistic is revealed (such as 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese!), we look for the cause. We look for that one thing, that one behavior, exposure, or entity that is responsible. But it’s never just one thing.
While a bad car accident can end a life, a bone can be broken with a hard fall, and taking the wrong medication, or too much of it, can create abrupt health issues, most health problems are the result of long-term, ongoing poor choices and behaviors. Combine that with years of exposure to and ingestion of artificial sweeteners, coloring, and flavoring, synthetic additives and dyes, plastics, poor air quality, and foreign chemicals, and the result has to be increased sickness and disease.
Why are so many kids so sick? Is it their food? Lack of exercise? Stress? High amounts of screen time? It can be any of those, but it’s likely a combination of all of those. And… they are also inheriting a century of toxicity that we have passed on to them. They are now the sickest generation, not just because of how poor their lifestyles are now, but because they got what we passed down to them. Some of that toxicity was passed to us from our parents…and to them from their parents. We have reached a tipping point, where something that shouldn’t wreak such havoc does, not because that one thing is so bad, but because it comes on the heels of decades of badness before it.
Forty studies over the past five years showed toxic PFAS chemicals (the forever chemicals) in every umbilical cord blood sample. Researchers found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in the cord blood of ten newborns in a study done in 2004. These findings are eye opening and upsetting and show us that as these chemicals continue to accumulate, it’s no wonder we are so sick.
So… if it’s not one thing that has caused your problem, then it will unlikely be one thing that will fix it. You have to tackle your health problems (or any of life’s problems) in multiple ways. And undoing years, or even decades, of damage will not happen overnight.
When any of life’s problems, whether they are health-related, financial, work-related, or with your relationships, appear to have suddenly come on, it is more likely that the problem has been brewing for some time, and it has finally reached the tipping point. Don’t look for the cause, look for the causes, because there are most definitely multiple contributing factors. Doing a lot of things right, over an extended period of time, may seem to have little to no impact, but there is a tipping point on that side as well. So, don’t measure your progress after just one week or one month of making better choices. Though your healthy habits and behaviors may seem non-impactful in the short run, they are laying the groundwork for that positive tipping point that is coming soon.
Remember, a crisis does not happen after one bad meal, one missed workout, or one bad night’s sleep. And renewed health does not happen after one healthy meal, one good workout, or one night of deep sleep. Get started now to sway the momentum of that tipping point.
