I recently attended a piano concert in the town where I live.  The audience was generally an older crowd and I found myself observing the effects of aging on my fellow concert-goers as I listened to the beautiful music.

North America is blooming with “Boomers” and this little town is no different from many cities and towns with the older demographic outnumbering the young.  Some older people look amazing and appear to have boundless energy, while others look gray, tired, and suffer from a wide array of illnesses.  I’ve researched this phenomenon for many years and in my book Conscious Health I explain why good genes are not enough to keep us vitally healthy and active well into “old age.” If we take our health for granted without an appreciation for what our bodies require to keep us healthy, then we shouldn’t be surprised when degeneration of our physical and mental capacities begins to set in.

The negative and positive effects of our nutrition and lifestyle choices over the past 30 years become increasingly evident as we enter the middle decades of our lives.  Other factors such as environmental pollution and the management of hormonal changes also play large roles in how we fare as we age.

We’ve heard a lot about the need for a healthy diet in minimizing the risk of cancer and other disease states. However, understanding our body systems holistically, and knowing how our hormones are affected by the food we eat, is important if we are to remain healthy.

For example, many food products touted as ‘healthy’ contain estrogens and phytoestrogens. Excess estrogen, whether natural or synthetic, can upset the body’s critical hormonal balance.  For instance, soy products such as tofu, soy powder, and soy milk contain phytoestrogens which can create an imbalance of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone and a consequent disruption of the endocrine system. Among many generally unknown facts about soy you can read about in Conscious Health is the quoted statement that it is “estimated that an infant exclusively fed soy formula receives the estrogenic equivalent (based on body weight) of at least five birth control pills per day.” Research on these children as they grow up has found problems such as extreme emotional behavior, asthma, problems with immune systems, pituitary insufficiencies, thyroid disorders, and bowel irritations—mostly attributable to phytoestrogens in the soy formula.

Cows and sheep are injected with estrogen and growth hormones to make them heavier and fatter. Pesticides containing chemicals which act as hormone disrupters are sprayed on agricultural crops. And scientific research has also discovered that pesticide runoff has increased synthetic estrogen levels in our oceans and lakes, which act as hormone disrupters in fish and other wildlife—and so on up the food chain.

Hormones can be viewed as chemical messengers that work to maintain functional balance in the body. Ingesting estrogen or other hormones without sufficient understanding about how they may be affecting endocrine balance is dangerous. The sooner we revert to diets that are compatible to the human body, the more evident will be our enjoyment of health that is our birthright.

The human body was designed to produce the natural hormones it needs, but it can only do this from natural food components free of chemicals and excess processing. It has great difficulty coping with the wholesale chemical changes to our modern food fare.

Knowledge is power, but only if it is learned and applied. That is why I wrote Conscious Health—to provide people with knowledge of how the body was designed to operate, why it breaks down to disease, and what we can do to reverse that trend and live with health and vitality well into our advancing years.

Conscious Health, from Namaste Publishing, is a Nautilus award-winning book by Canadian health researcher Ron Garner and is available from this website.