I Saw 120 Patients This Week. Here's Why They Were Actually Sick.

So what are 120 of the sickest people in the hospital actually sick with? Well, when I went back through my list, the pattern, well, it became almost monotonous, to be honest.

And that monotony is the whole point.

It was heart attacks and unstable angina, which is that crushing chest pain that you get that comes on when the arteries feeding the heart muscle have very slowly narrowed and clogged up with fatty deposits over decades until eventually the blood just cannot get through.

That is what we call a heart attack.

It was strokes where that very same process, this time in the vessels supplying the brain, finally blocks or bursts and the brain tissue starts to die by the minute.

There were falls.

And when you look closely at the falls in older people, so many of them trace straight back to muscle that's just wasted away over the years until the legs simply cannot save a stumble or to a brain that has already been dimmed by dementia.

That week alone, we had numerous people going to theater, to surgery for amputations related to type 2 diabetes, toes and feet being lost to a disease that builds in near silence over decades as raised blood sugar slowly damages the vessels and the nerves.

We had kidney failure and there was heart failure, like I mentioned, the same small handful of conditions coming through the doors over and over and over again.

And here's what really struck me about that entire list because nearly every single one of these people was younger than you'd expect anybody to be facing these things, younger than the age at which a body really starts to wind down.

If only that life had been full of the things that I talk about on this channel, like real food that has been grown in the ground and regular movement, being strong, not sitting all day, decent sleep and keeping clear of the things that modern life crowds around us instead.

Because almost every single one of them was the very slow downstream consequence of how a life had actually been lived, of blood pressure left untreated for years, of a diet that was slowly doing damage from the inside out, of movement that had just gradually disappeared, of the early warning signs that nobody ever joined up and acted on years earlier.

So what are 120 of the sickest people in the hospital actually sick with? Well, when I went back through my list, the pattern, well, it became almost monotonous, to be honest.

And that monotony is the whole point.

It was heart attacks and unstable angina, which is that crushing chest pain that you get that comes on when the arteries feeding the heart muscle have very slowly narrowed and clogged up with fatty deposits over decades until eventually the blood just cannot get through.

That is what we call a heart attack.

It was strokes where that very same process, this time in the vessels supplying the brain, finally blocks or bursts and the brain tissue starts to die by the minute.

There were falls.

And when you look closely at the falls in older people, so many of them trace straight back to muscle that's just wasted away over the years until the legs simply cannot save a stumble or to a brain that has already been dimmed by dementia.

That week alone, we had numerous people going to theater, to surgery for amputations related to type 2 diabetes, toes and feet being lost to a disease that builds in near silence over decades as raised blood sugar slowly damages the vessels and the nerves.

We had kidney failure and there was heart failure, like I mentioned, the same small handful of conditions coming through the doors over and over and over again.

And here's what really struck me about that entire list because nearly every single one of these people was younger than you'd expect anybody to be facing these things, younger than the age at which a body really starts to wind down.

If only that life had been full of the things that I talk about on this channel, like real food that has been grown in the ground and regular movement, being strong, not sitting all day, decent sleep and keeping clear of the things that modern life crowds around us instead.

Because almost every single one of them was the very slow downstream consequence of how a life had actually been lived, of blood pressure left untreated for years, of a diet that was slowly doing damage from the inside out, of movement that had just gradually disappeared, of the early warning signs that nobody ever joined up and acted on years earlier.