Can one plus one equal zero? Your physical quality of life depends on the answer to this question!

Chronic disease now kills 7 out of 10 United States citizens—1.7 million deaths per year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. So many of these deaths are stunningly preventable, as is the suffering that affects millions more. There is an ocean of health information out there, but you can boil it all down to simple math: Add natural healthy habits, and subtract unnatural, harmful habits.

Start from this simple premise, and apply it first to what you eat. Nutritional math means eating healthy foods and avoiding chemicals. The principle is simple, yet practicing such a simple, natural, healthy diet is deceptively challenging.

As highlighted by The Dorito Effect author Mark Schatzker, we are all mesmerized by heavily advertised, putty-like tubes of Go-Gurt, unnaturally fresh Twinkies, quirky veggie puffs and other items identified on their vivid polypropylene packaging as foods. Corporations design these products with extremes in color, appearance and taste to induce us to keep buying. But these items contain perfect mixtures for creating chronic disease. The American Action Forum estimates that the health-care bill they incur, including lost economic productivity, is $3.7 trillion every year. Evidence also indicates that the prevalence of chronic disease exacerbates the spread and severity of outbreaks, such as coronavirus.

A 2019 British Medical Journal entry states that more than four daily servings of this starchy, sugary, greasy mess of products caused a stunning 62 percent increase in all-cause mortality. Half the calories in the average American diet comes from these types of foods. This is a major reason why, as a 2015 Commonwealth Fund brief shows, America has the lowest life expectancy, highest chronic disease burden and double the obesity rate of 10 other high-income countries.

The 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study asserts that poor diet is the top cause of premature death. At the same time, insufficient intake of healthy foods deprives the body of critical nutrients.

You must not only subtract what is bad but also add what is good. Invest the time, effort and money to eat more natural, nutritious foods, which strengthen your body’s energy, capacity and resistance to disease. Focus on basic staples like vegetables, fruits, beans, lentils, whole grains like quinoa, brown rice, unprocessed meats, plain yogurt, nuts and seeds, and healthy oils like extra-virgin olive and avocado oils or ghee (butter fat).

This is far better than adding chemicals to your body through processed foods, then turning your poor health over to doctors and pharmaceutical manufacturers to add more chemicals.

The U.S. government reports that 1 in 3 Americans takes at least one prescription drug, 1 in 5 takes three or more, and 1 in 10 takes five. It is common for people to eat extremely unnatural foods and reflexively trust extremely unnatural medicines, rather than facing the cause and disciplining ourselves to change our habits.

We don’t realize the complexity and balance of our bodies’ structures. Naturally, hormones make adjustments that regulate several bodily processes. But pharmaceuticals are designed to take the place of hormones or other natural chemicals that regulate the body. They are not designed anywhere near as perfectly as the biology you were created with, so they always disrupt, in some way, that interconnected balance.

The side effects can be immediate or delayed, discernible or hidden. But they are there. B. Joseph Guglielmo, dean of pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco, acknowledged, “The bottom line is, if a drug creates a complication of a normal body function, that’s a disease.”

Readily available prescription drugs are so powerful, doctors prescribe them so regularly, and people trust in them so much that one estimate ranks prescription medication as the fourth-leading cause of death among Americans. About half of those killed received the wrong dosage or took their prescriptions when intake was inadvisable, but the other half took their drugs correctly (Polish Archives of Internal Medicine).

Far too many of us constantly eat unnatural, non-food foods, suffer obesity and other diseases, then look to pharmaceuticals for “cures.” Herbert W. Armstrong wrote that the premise is deeply flawed, and that premise boils down to the idea that one poison plus one poison equals no poison. Our approach to individual and public health was terribly wrong long before the debacle of covid-19 and governmental response.

You have the opportunity to understand the truth about the existence of physical, biological laws that bring about good health. Whether you choose to obey or break them determines your future state of health. Take personal responsibility by adding real foods to your diet, and look into eliminating medicines. This is the proper nutritional math that helps you reduce the risk of future disease and almost immediately gives you a better quality of life.