The Building Blocks of Health: How to Optimize Wellness with a Lifestyle Checklist

In his book, The Building Blocks of Health––How to Optimize Wellness with a Lifestyle Checklist, preventive medicine expert J. Joseph Speidel, MD, MPH, describes why most of us have a lifestyle that harms our health. He documents that by following his Lifestyle Checklist, we can put in place the Building Blocks of Health and reverse much of the lifestyle-related damage to health that leads to illness and premature death. Based on more than 2000 articles from the medical literature, the book lays out the scientific basis of why adopting healthier ways of eating, exercising, and living prevents disease, optimizes, and maintains health. Readers will learn:•Why the lifestyle of 95% of Americans is unhealthy.•That a healthy lifestyle can prevent 90% of diabetes, 80% of heart disease, and nearly 50% of cancers.•That an optimal lifestyle can add 10 to 15 years to life.•That multiple behavioral factors are necessary to keep us healthy––they are the Building Blocks of Health.•How to use a Lifestyle Checklist to adopt and stick to the behaviors needed to become and stay healthy. Many books on health focus on a single topic such as nutrition or heart disease but The Building Blocks of Health documents why you can’t rely on doing just one thing, like getting a lot of exercise, or avoiding just one risky behavior, like not smoking, to get and stay healthy. Multiple factors are at work to make us sick or keep us healthy. Each of the book’s 16 chapters focuses on an important health-related topic. The book provides the reader with the information needed to choose optimally healthy whole-food plant-based nutrition; guidance on how to reverse and avoid overweight and obesity; a description of beneficial and harmful vitamins and other dietary supplements; how to prevent heart attacks and stroke; how to prevent cancer; and how to avoid Alzheimer disease and other causes of dementia. The book emphasizes the benefits of exercise and other forms of physical activity and explains how to avoid COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. Additional chapters cover stress and mental health, osteoporosis, sexual and reproductive health, environmental toxins, and other topics, including the benefits of sleep, preserving eyesight, preserving hearing, and accident prevention.Everyone should read this book because almost all of us have an unhealthy lifestyle that makes us ill and contributes to early deaths. The book provides the health-preserving information doctors would tell their patients––if only they had enough time to provide good counseling about an optimally healthy lifestyle. The behaviors described in The Building Blocks of Health are highly effective in restoring and maintaining health. Our bodies have a remarkable power to heal when we stop the biological damage caused by our unhealthy lifestyle.

J. Joseph Speidel MD, MPH is a physician, author, scholar and advocate in the field of public health. He is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health and a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. Previous positions include serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corps Office of the Surgeon General with a rank of Major, directing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Population, president of Population Action International (PAI), directing the population grants program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Co-director of the UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. Dr. Speidel has served on the board of directors of more than 20 non-profit organizations. As director of USAID and Hewlett Foundation programs Dr. Speidel was responsible for the management of development assistance and charitable awards totaling more than $1 billion. Dr. Speidel is board certified in Preventive Medicine and serves on the Editorial Board of the University of California, Berkeley Wellness Newsletter. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications in the field of health and population. In addition, Dr. Speidel has helped prepare more than 50 health-related scientific reports that are posted on the website Catalyst for Children (http: //catalystforchildren.org), a resource that provides educational materials to improve the welfare of children and youth. As president and spokesperson for Population Action International, Dr. Speidel gave more than 750 interviews with print media and made more than 250 radio, TV, and personal appearances including on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, BBC, Voice of America, and on talk shows including Good Morning America, The Charlie Rose Show, and Larry King Live. Dr. Speidel is a recipient of the Arthur S. Flemming Award for outstanding young men in government, the Carl S. Schulz Award of the American Public Health Association, the Family Planning Visionary Award of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, and the Allan Rosenfield Award for Lifetime Contributions to International Family Planning of the Society of Family Planning. The goal of Dr. Speidel's new book, The Building Blocks of Health--How to Optimize Your Health with a Lifestyle Checklist, is to help Americans adopt a lifestyle that will reverse much of the damage from their unhealthy way of living that leads to illness and premature death. Each of the book's chapters focuses on an important health-related topic such as nutrition, weight control, heart disease, cancer and dementia. This is a book that all Americans should read, and doctors will want to give to their patients because they do not have enough time to provide good counseling about an optimally healthy lifestyle. The behaviors described in The Building Blocks of Health are highly effective in restoring and maintaining health. Dr. Speidel's website is: jjspeidel.com