5 Ways Functional Medicine Can Transform Your Health

And this is what health care should be all about, because the bottom line is that we're in this together. We need to dump dieting and focus on getting healthy and nourishing our bodies with delicious food medicine. So in honor of health, unity, and progress, here are five ways functional medicine really kicks ass:

Whether you're a staunch vegan, love eating a paleo diet, or eat whatever you want, you can't look around and be OK with the decline of our collective health. Here's a rundown of the problems we are facing:

Horribly, someone has a heart attack every 34 seconds. And every 60 seconds, someone in the United States dies from a heart attack or stroke.

It's hard to believe, but 50 percent of us are now prediabetic or have full-blown diabetes.

A staggering one in two men and one in three women will get cancer. Autoimmune diseases are now the third leading cause of death and disease in the world—affecting over 50 million Americans and millions more struggling with autoimmune-inflammation spectrum problems.

Nearly 20 percent of adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder. Depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide. Anxiety disorders affect more than 40 million Americans and Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. In fact, a 2013 report found that since 1979, deaths due to brain disease have increased by 66 percent in men and a whopping 92 percent in women. Autism and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have sky rocketed over a short period of time. In 1970, an estimated one in 10,000 children were found to be autistic, in 1995 it was one in 500, and in 2001 it became one in 250. Today, one in 68 children are diagnosed as autistic.

The United States spends more on health care than the next 10 top-spending countries combined! And even though we spend trillions of dollars we rank last among all industrialized nations when it comes to living long, healthy lives. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) out of 13 industrialized nations the United States is the worst when it comes to years of life lost for adults and infant mortality rates.

In functional medicine, we're not anti-medication. We recognize that many people are alive because of these medications and advancements in modern medicine have brought us lifesaving procedures, especially in emergency care. We just ask the question: What is our most effective option that causes the least amount of side effects? For some, a medication may fit this criteria. But a lot of the time, pharmaceuticals are not the best choice.

The Okinawa study showed there is no reason why the majority of us can’t live at least 100 disease-free, healthy years. It's the interaction between our genes and our environment that determines our health. The foods we eat or don't eat, our stress levels, sleep, activity and exposure to toxins are constantly and dynamically instructing your genetic expression. This is a revolutionary message of health empowerment and responsibility.

With the strong influence that the pharmaceutical industry has on government policy, it's no secret that using foods as medicines is not high up on the list of mainstream medicine. You only need to eat hospital food once to know this truth. Even more, under current laws it is, in fact, illegal to say foods can heal. That's right. The words "treat" "cure" and "prevent" are in effect owned by the FDA and can only be used in the healthcare setting when talking about pharmaceutical drugs. This is the world we live in today; health problems are on the rise despite spending more on health care than ever—and we need to do something dramatically different.

The take home message? We can't depend on the drug companies or the government for what is truly our responsibility: our health. Share these words with your friends and family and let this be the manifesto for all of us that want to make the world a healthier place.