Maintaining Your Health on Mackinac
Knowledge About Good Health Leads To Making Positive Choices
By Yvan Silva, M.D.

Dr. Silva is a professor of surgery at Wayne State University and a resident of Woodbluff on Mackinac Island.

Your good health is your most important asset. Day to day, you don't dwell on it. You're busy with everything else, job, family, all the things you want to do, and things you must get done. Then, when serious illness strikes you or someone close to you, everything else becomes trivial. Power, wealth, success, all the achievements - there's nothing you can trade for well-being.

The human body is a marvelous complex of sophisticated organ systems working together. Your body sustains and processes the work of billions of living cells, each system dedicated to specific functions. As surely as you did not get to choose your parents, you did inherit from them a variety of genetic, familial, and racial characteristics, some good and some not so good. The good will work to your advantage. You can, in this day and age, learn to modify the adverse ones, through lifestyle, through preventive medicine, and when needed, through proper and timely medical treatment. There truly is a lot you can do singlehandedly to maintain and to improve to your advantage, both the quality of your life and your longevity. You can start now, as young or as old as you are, and if you think it's kind of late, or even too late, you're wrong. Research has proven that you can indeed reverse the deterioration, and even the damage, of many organs and body systems.

The best way to live is to learn and to put this learning to good personal use. The biggest problem is not having all the facts, in proper order and in rel- evant context.

The subject of nutrition remains ever popular and ever changing. Besides the diets that come and go, every now and then, what seem like popular fads come along. Take, for example, the advice that we should drink six to eight glasses of water a day. That five to seven small servings of fruits and vegetables eaten daily can, over a period of time, prevent cardiovascular disease. The food we eat is abundant in vitamins. Yet, many people take vitamins, supplements, minerals, and trace elements that range from beneficial to risky. What is the safest way to deal with all of this? What about fat in the daily diet - both types, saturated fats and unsaturated fats? What's the difference? The amount of carbohydrates and proteins and fat are significant, and especially the proportions relative to the overall number of calories you're taking in daily. What you must know about "fast foods" is as important as: "You are what you eat." What about the calories you burn? There's no question that you can achieve better health through better nutrition. You can benefit immensely by changing your eating habits, if you need to. But you must know how to do it. This is not about dieting. That does not work, but healthy eating does.

Exercise is really like a wonder drug. It can be an exhaustion antidote, instead of exhausting you. It can tone up your musculoskeletal system and make you feel good. If you include an aerobic component, you can strengthen your heart and lungs. How can you come up with your own daily program? Should you, even if you're a senior, strengthen yourself with weight training? If you are elderly, can you prevent falls and broken bones, by improving your fitness status and your ability to balance? How often and for how long should you exercise?

What's the latest on cholesterol? This has been around for many years. When should you have your levels checked? How often? Lower it to normal by eating right, and daily exercise. Medications? What's available to safely lower cholesterol? What are triglycerides? What is hypertension, really? When does a blood pressure reading mean hypertension? When is blood sugar a problem? What about sodium?

When will you quit smoking? It is no longer the question of why. The time is now. Now. The arguments about weight gain, added stress, possible heart attack, and family members smoking to a ripe old age don't work anymore. How should you quit - cold turkey, nicotine patches, hypnosis, acupuncture? There are many ways. What will work for you?

If you will use alcohol, how much? How often? How will it affect your health? Your social behavior? Get you in trouble with the law? When must you say no?

It is said that if you refuse to accept that there is stress in your daily life, you're refusing to accept reality. We need to assess the elements that cause stress in our lives, and deal with them. Coping with stress is essential for well-being, for health, and for productivity. There is a "mental edge" to physical fitness.

These and many other issues are important to us, on a daily basis and over the long haul. Working on these issues will help you make choices that improve your health through your lifetime.