I-Don’t-Care-itis

Posted on July 22, 2008

One of my favorite books is Steven G. Aldana’s The Culprit and the Cure: Why Lifestyle is the Culprit Behind America’s Poor Health and How Transforming that Lifestyle can be the Cure. In his book, Aldana has a chapter called “I-Don’t-Care-itis: The Most Common Health Problem in America.” Today I want to share some excerpts from this chapter.

“I-don’t-care-itis is a common condition in which an individual has no interest in adopting a healthy lifestyle.”¹

“Whenever the news media reports on a passenger jet that has experienced difficulties and crashed, it is almost always front-page news across America. What would the reaction be if seven fully loaded 747s crashed in a single day, killing all on board? What if this terrible tragedy were repeated every single day for an entire year? The total number of all these fatalities is still slightly less than the total number of deaths in the United States that are caused by cardiovascular disease each year.”²

“A common misconception is that [cardiovascular disease] is a man’s disease; however, women are more likely to die of a heart attack or a stroke than men are.”³

“Let’s suppose you really don’t care about your diet or physical activity level because you have seen the miraculous medical procedures that can be performed on people with chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular disease [...] This ‘fix me up, Doc’ attitude is very common; eat what you want, exercise only if you really want to, and, if you do have heart problems [or any chronic disease], just have the doctor fix you up.”⁴

“Preventing common chronic diseases and premature death later in life requires that you take action now, even though you have no symptoms of chronic diseases.”⁵

“When playing with fire, the limits of what we can and cannot do are quickly and painfully discovered; the pain associated with eating an extremely unhealthy diet is most often not experienced during the act. To the contrary, we very much enjoy unhealthy foods because they taste so good.”⁶

“Long-term epidemiological data shows that people who will increase their fruit and vegetable consumption from two servings a day to five servings a day can cut the risk of getting many types of cancer by half.”⁷

“Think long term when you thing about your health. Small investments in good nutrition and physical activity now will have a big payoff in the future.” ⁸

If more people would start caring about their health we could avoid many chronic diseases, or at least delay them until much later in life. We need to do something about our health now. If we don’t, we might just become another statistic.

Click here to check out The Culprit and the Cure from Amazon.

Steven G. Aldana, The Culprit and the Cure: Why Lifestyle is the Culprit Behind America’s Poor Health and How Transforming That Lifestyle Can be the Cure (Mapleton, UT: Maple Mountain Press, 2005), 142. [↩]
Ibid., 39. [↩]
Ibid., 39. [↩]
Ibid., 44. [↩]
Ibid., 35. [↩]
Ibid., 35. [↩]
Ibid., 43. [↩]
Ibid., 48. [↩]