Updated December 30, 2014.

Disease prevention and keeping up with your health care and health screenings can be overwhelming. Everywhere you look, someone is telling you something different. Each day there is a new superfood or physical activity recommendation. The bookstore is filled with aisles of anti-aging books. All this makes health so complicated that many people just give up. Well, I’m here to tell you that disease prevention is not that hard.

Why Bother With Disease Prevention?

I hope that seems like a silly question to you, but there are a lot of people out there who don’t take the trouble to take care of their bodies. This drives me crazy. There are simple things that you can do to make yourself healthier and prevent a number of diseases. The great thing is that most of the disease prevention recommendations will also help you sleep better, have more energy and just plain feeling good. Meanwhile, you will potentially be preventing years of suffering, costly treatments and even a premature death.
If that is not enough motivation, then do it for the people who love and depend on you (and will have to take care of you if you get a chronic illness). If that is still not enough reason, then follow disease prevention guidelines to help the nation with the ongoing healthcare crisis. Many experts believe that we are in a healthcare crisis simply because we are an overweight, unhealthy nation to begin with that relies too heavily on modern medicine instead of healthy living principles.

Think of the cost savings if everyone followed these simple disease prevention guidelines.

Sorry to “pull out the big guns” to try to get you to pay attention to these guidelines, but it really does just get on my nerves that so many people are ignoring what we all know if healthy behavior. It is sad to see so much unnecessary disease and suffering. So what I’ve tried to do is boil down the disease prevention guidelines that are out there and include links to various resources to get you started. I recommend picking one of these 6 steps each week. Work on it for the whole week and get it as best you can, then move onto the next. Keep repeating the 6 week cycles until you have mastered each one.

This disease prevention checklist is based on the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s evaluation of the scientific literature on what health care, health screenings and healthy living guidelines really work. There is no source more authoritative than this. The problem is that the information just doesn’t get out there. Of course, you should talk with your doctor about these recommendations. Print this article and bring it with you and discuss each point. There may be additional things for you to do based on your family history, health condition and other factors. But this is a great starting place to navigating health care and disease prevention.

Click on the next page (page 2) to see the six steps....

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