How many years could you add to your life by reducing your weight to normal, and maintaining it there? This is a question that can be answered, and the answer is a dramatic one. No matter what your age may be, you can increase your life span by a definite number of years. What's more, those additional years can be healthy, happy years, full of things that make life worth living - really worth living. In the first six chapters of this book we have heard the part that diet plays in warding off heart disease and in promoting over-all good health. We have seen how your arteries work, and have discovered the nature of the health wrecker - fat. You have been given a program of what foods to eat and what foods to avoid to achieve health, by low-fat living. You have learned how to use dietary supplements and how to count the calories, so as to keep your weight at the proper level. All of these things have been given to you for one purpose - to show you how to live the low-fat way, because the low-fat way is the key to healthier, longer life. Now let's find out how many extra years of health and life you can count on, once you have followed the low-fat way of life.
Even if you've had a heart attack, the low-fat diet can double your normal span of expected years. During the past 12 years, my associates and I have studied the effects of low-fat reducing diets on men and women who had survived heart attacks. We found that those who followed a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet such as you have found in this book, and who reduced their weight to normal, gained twice as many years of life as the non-dieters who had also suffered heart attacks.
The same low-fat diet may lengthen the life of everyone. The logical conclusion is that if, as we have seen, coronary atherosclerosis is already extensively present in the entire population, then this normal-weight-through-diet health program would give an over-all additional five years to every person in the nation. This conclusion is borne out by authoritative figures that will be given at the end of this chapter. The amazing advances of American medicine since 1945, with all the new wonder drugs, surgical innovations, improved treatment techniques, and public programs, have resulted in extending the average American's life five years. This was achieved by the creative genius of many researchers and the expenditure of billions of dollars. Now similar results can be accomplished by a simple, intelligent health program, aimed at proper nutrition for controlling weight and at the same time providing better health. As a physician, I have been faced many times by the tragic spectacle of a family that will impoverish itself to extend the life of an unfortunate victim of cancer or leukemia only a few months or a year. With these examples in mind, it would seem well worthwhile to convince people as a whole of the urgent necessity of maintaining normal weight through proper nutrition. Yet, being only human, we forget the unpleasant aspects of living unless we have a strong motive to change them by changing our habits.
You can do something about it. That is why I am basing this advice on an appeal to self-preservation. At any age, it is natural for you to want to stay alive, in good health, as long as possible, and to extend your years to the ultimate possible hour. Now, with what you have learned in this book, you can do something about it, on your own, with little effort, and with amazing results in health and longevity. The tables found in this chapter are based on more than 50,000 individuals studied by insurance companies. Look at them, and you will be able to see at a glance exactly how many years you can add to your life span through proper nutrition and weight control.
Ideal weight can add more "bonus" years of life. The figures in the tables are conservative ones because they are computed on the basis of average weight rather than ideal weight. It is clear that if you aim for ideal weight still more "bonus" years of life can be yours. But you cannot expect to receive this "bonus" without working to earn it. A wit recently observed that it takes more than a plaid waistcoat to keep a check on your stomach. Although said in jest, there is a great deal of truth to the statement. Success will come through careful study of the suggestions given here, as well as the careful and consistent application of them. And it is never too late to begin. Let us suppose, for example, that you are 50 years old and markedly overweight. How many years can you add to your life by reducing to normal weight and staying that way? A check of our table reveals that if you are more than 30 per cent overweight, you could add a little over four-and-a-half years. That is well worth the effort, isn't it?
What about younger people? Our studies, and those made by life insurance companies, all point to the same conclusion: Excessive weight put on in young adulthood, and maintained through life, carries the risk of shortening life by a frightening number of years. Let us say, for instance, that you are in your early twenties, and are markedly overweight. If you do not reduce to a normal figure, and stay that way, you are sacrificing over fifteen and a half years of life! Whatever your age, if you are obese, it is important to get your weight down as quickly as it is safe to do so. This does not mean that you should "fall" for the widely advertised but ineffectual and even dangerous reducing pills that promise to "melt the fat off" within a few days without much dieting. Every practicing physician has at one time or another sadly shaken his head at the spectacle of so many Americans trying to reduce the quick and easy way, without sacrificing their deeply entrenched dietary habits. The safe way, the effective way, is through the low-fat diet program presented in this book. The low-fat way is the healthy way, the way of longer life.
