Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, and self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body’s powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years. The chronic diseases commonly associated with aging—hypertension, coronary artery disease, Type II diabetes, degenerative joint disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s, as well as most cancers—are not the inevitable outcome of the aging process; they are born out of wrong food choices earlier in life. Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Medical intervention does very little to slow the progression of illnesses and gradual mental and physical decline. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth.

Separating aging from disease obfuscates a truth about how we reach the ends of our lives: though it's certainly important to know why someone fell from a cliff, it's equally important to know what brought that person to the precipice in the first place. Aging brings us to the precipice. Give any of us 100 years or so, and it brings us all there. In

Old age is the harbor of all ills.

Old age is the harbor of all ills.

Without mass testing, tracing, and isolating, you cannot contain. So everything else — the ban on mass gatherings, the school closures, the lockdown measures — all of it, of course, too late — amount to only half a strategy. In fact, all the signs are that they haven't really let go of their callous notion that people with "underlying" health conditions should be treated as expendable. But that is not just a few old people. About 43% of adults are reckoned to have at least one long-term health condition — disproportionately, of course, poorer people.

I define aging as the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us.

And because aging isn't a disease by the commonly accepted definition, it doesn't fit nicely into the system we've built for funding medical research, drug development, and the reimbursement of medical costs by insurance companies. Words matter. Definitions matter.

We’re good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees. Give us a disease, and we can do something about it. But give us an elderly woman with high blood pressure, arthritic knees, and various other ailments besides — an elderly woman at risk of losing the life she enjoys — and we hardly know what to do and often only make matters worse.

Growing old: the most common mitochondrial disease of all?

That disease
Of which all old men sicken,—avarice.

Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.

Six out of ten adults are living with a chronic illness. About 50 percent of Americans will deal with mental illness sometime in life. Seventy-four percent of adults are overweight or have obesity. Rates of cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, upper respiratory infections, and autoimmune conditions are all going up at the exact time we are spending more and more to treat them. In the face of these trends, American life expectancy has been declining for the most sustained period since 1860.

Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.

My belief is that every man after fifty-five is always ill more or less.