The Building Blocks of Health––A New Guide to Healthy Living

To prevent disability and disease at older ages, healthy living habits should begin in childhood. Unfortunately, too many aspects of the lifestyle of children and teens are unhealthy. They have health behaviors related to nutrition, obesity, use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, and lack of physical activity that, if continued, will lead to illness and early deaths. There is an authoritative new book, The Building Blocks of Health––How to Optimize Wellness with a Lifestyle Checklist,  that provides the health-preserving information pediatricians would tell their patients––if only they had enough time to provide good counseling about an optimally healthy lifestyle. It is a book to help teens and to help parents and other caregivers learn healthy living habits that they can exemplify and educate their children about.

The behaviors described in The Building Blocks of Health are highly effective in restoring and maintaining health. Our bodies have a remarkable power to heal when we stop the biological damage caused by our unhealthy lifestyle.

In The Building Blocks of Health, preventive medicine expert J. Joseph Speidel, MD, MPH, describes why most of us have a lifestyle that harms our health. He documents that by following his Lifestyle Checklist, we can put in place the Building Blocks of Health and reverse 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 adopt and stick to the behaviors needed to become and stay healthy.                                                   

Many books on health focus on a single topic such as nutrition or heart disease but The Building Blocks of Health documents why you can’t rely on doing just one thing, like getting a lot of exercise, or avoiding just one risky behavior, like not smoking, to get and stay healthy.  Multiple factors are at work to make us sick or keep us healthy. 

Each of the book’s 16 chapters focuses on an important health-related topic. The book provides the reader with the information needed to choose optimally healthy whole-food plant-based nutrition; guidance on how to reverse and avoid overweight and obesity; a description of beneficial and harmful vitamins and other dietary supplements; how to prevent heart attacks and stroke; how to prevent cancer; and how to avoid Alzheimer disease and other causes of dementia. The book emphasizes the benefits of exercise and other forms of physical activity and explains how to avoid COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. Additional chapters cover stress and mental health, osteoporosis, sexual and reproductive health, environmental toxins, and other topics, including the benefits of sleep, preserving eyesight, preserving hearing, and accident prevention.

Parents and teens should read this book because almost all of us have an unhealthy lifestyle that makes us ill and contributes to early deaths. The behaviors described in The Building Blocks of Health are highly effective in restoring and maintaining health. Our bodies have a remarkable power to heal when we stop the biological damage caused by our unhealthy lifestyle.

The book is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Building-Blocks-Health-Lifestyle-Checklist-ebook/dp/B08RC3XRCY/.

Dr. Speidel also has a M-W-F blog at https://jjspeidel.com/ that is based on the book.

Note: This timely topic presents opinions and ideas and is intended to provide helpful general information, and is not for the purpose of rendering advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions that are presented are not in any way a substitute for the advice and care of the reader's own physician or other medical professional based on the reader's own individual conditions, symptoms, or concerns. If the reader needs personal medical, health, dietary, exercise, or other assistance or advice, the reader should consult a physician and/or other qualified health professionals. Catalyst for Children specifically disclaims all responsibility for any injury, damage, or loss that the reader may incur as a direct or indirect consequence of following any directions or suggestions given in this report or participating in any programs described in this report. For additional information, please consult the book: The Building Blocks of Health––How to Optimize Your Health with a Lifestyle Checklist by J. Joseph Speidel MD, MPH, available in print or downloaded at Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble and elsewhere.

Back to top