You like death, right?  You want to meet your maker earlier rather than later, and what's better is that you're very interested in following known conflicted advice -- right?

Then step right up and do what you're told, fool:

For decades, if you asked your doctor what your odds were of suffering a heart attack, the answer would turn on a number: your cholesterol level.

....

The end result: Twice as many Americans — one-third of all adults — would be told to consider taking statins, which lower cholesterol but also reduce heart risks in other ways.

There are several problems with this.

First, the lipid hypothesis has never been proved.  

The evidence, however, is that the alternative hypothesis, that systemic inflammation is what causes coronary artery disease (along with dramatically increasing the risk of strokes) is the true cause.

But there's no money in the alternative hypothesis and in fact there's plenty of disincentives to prove it up.  

Let's leave aside the conflicts for a minute, although I'll get back to them.  I'll simply focus instead on the lipid hypothesis itself.

See, it dates to 1850 or thereabouts.  This is not something new, and with roughly 150 years and billions of dollars to be made from it one would expect that by now there would be a multitude of hard scientific studies that could demonstrate by strict proof that this hypothesis was correct.

So where are they?

Now let's talk about conflicts:

"It is practically impossible to find a large group of outside experts in the field who have no relationships to industry," said Dr. George Mensah of the heart institute. He called the guidelines "a very important step forward" based on solid evidence, and said the public should trust them.

Uh huh.  Sure.  Just like I should trust those who argue that a person with a compromised insulin response should eat carbohydrates that require an insulin response to metabolize -- when there are other options available that fulfill the actual dietary needs of the body? 

Exactly how many attempts to kill people -- albeit slowly -- do you expect me to tolerate?

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. High cholesterol leads to hardened arteries that can cause a heart attack or stroke.

There's no proof of that.  In point of fact cholesterol is necessary for cellular metabolism and there is no evidence that the presence of high cholesterol levels causes hardened arteries.  There is, however, plenty of evidence that inflammation leads the body to respond by attempting to encapsulate the inflammed tissue -- this is the ordinary and normal response that heals injuries. 

That is, by the way, the alternative hypothesis -- that it is systemic inflammation that is in fact responsible for coronary artery disease and that while lowering cholesterol may blunt the body's inflammatory response it is neither safe or effective since the underlying condition remains.

Most cholesterol is made by the liver, so diet changes have a limited effect on it.

Right.  And that's the problem -- the evidence strongly suggests that drugging people targets the wrong thing.

It gets worse.  One of the claimed "new indications" for Statin use is this:

—People ages 40 to 75 with Type 2 diabetes.

Statins have listed as one of their side effects the potential to cause Type 2 diabetes!

So now we want to prescribe a drug for people with a given condition that has listed as one of its side effects causation of the condition itself?

Never mind that we're still peddling the crap diet advice:

—People should eat a "dietary pattern" focused on vegetables, fruits and whole grains. Include low-fat dairy products, poultry, fish, beans and healthy oils and nuts. Limit sweets, sweet drinks, red meat, saturated fat and salt.

Really?  Really?

Obesity is without question a major factor in heart disease and stroke.  That's not a hypothesis, it's fact.  Obesity is also a major factor for high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes.  In short if you're fat the odds are all tilted the wrong way when it comes to your health in both coronary and stroke-risk factors.

The simple answer to this is to quit trying to fight evolution.  That is, stop believing that man is smarter than God - because he isn't.  The processed food industry, along with many others (Nike anyone?) puts forward the premise that man is smarter than God and drills it into your head on a daily basis but what you'll note is the utter absence of anything approaching scientific proof of these assertions -- all you see instead is marketing slogans.

Why?  Strict scientific proof would be the gold standard if it existed.  Since it's absent in said messages and yet it would be the best marketing possible I am forced to conclude that it's absent because such evidence does not exist.

If you stop fighting evolution -- that is, if you stop fighting that which you were born with and that which has evolved over millions of years you come to the conclusion that if it didn't exist 5,000 years ago you probably shouldn't eat it -- and that when it comes to dietary balance you should pay attention to the balance available 5,000 years ago.

You didn't have a given fresh fruit, for example, all the time -- only for a few weeks out of the year when they were ripe and could be picked.  You had an assortment of vegetable material available to eat, but again, in variety through the year.  What you did have available to you nearly all of the time was meat and fish, including animal protein and fats, of various species and types.

Note that there were no transfats, no vegetable oils, no hydrogenated anything and no processed grains of any sort.  In other words all of the things that spike your insulin response today did not exist -- all of the so-called "fast carbohydrates" are modern inventions.

In other words the insulin spike caused by modern eating is biologically abnormal.

Want to fight God?  Go right ahead.  I will simply observe that you're betting against several million years of evolution (or "the guy upstairs", depending on what you believe.)  Either way this is a crappy bet and you're odds-on to lose.

This may be anecdotal, but it's also true.  A few years ago I was having happen to me what happens to most men and women as they get a bit older.  My waistline was expanding, my body mass was going up slowly but inexorably, my athletic performance was going down and while I didn't have anything serious going on medically the path I was on was quite clear, if I bothered to look.  

I ran cross-country when I was in High School -- as "recreation" (we had to take a sport every semester.)  I never was any good at it and in fact I hated it, but I did it.  I always had an issue with heel striking while running, and had various so-called "professionals" tell me that this orthotic or that "funky shoe" would fix whatever was going on.  They were all full of crap and none of it worked.  Through my 30s several times I tried to lose the "spare tire"; I bought exercise equipment and used it diligently, counted calories and similar.  Sure, it sort of worked -- if I kept at it with diligence I could lose 10lbs or so.  But as soon as I dropped the diligence -- even a bit -- the weight came right back on.

When I saw what was going to happen with Obamacare and came to the conclusion that our government was going to destroy any hope of my having access to reasonable health care and so-called "safety net" programs as I aged, mostly due to the fact that the people in our nation simply insist on being stupid, I came to the conclusion that my 210lb body was either going to have to become a 150lb body or I was going to end up weighing 300lbs by the time I was 70 and somewhere between here and there I would likely wind up with a serious chronic and debilitating disease or be dead outright.

Worse, none of the so-called "standard advice" like you have in that article had worked.  I had tried it all. You've probably tried it.  It doesn't work folks, and the reason it doesn't work is that your body actively fights what is being propounded because you're trying to fight how the human animal has evolved over millions of years.

It fights because that's how you are hard-wired by God.  When you take in fast carbohydrates which includes nearly all grains (e.g. breads, etc), sugars (especially "high-fructose corn syrup") and other items with a high glycemic index your body reacts by spiking its insulin production because it was never designed to process any of those things and you are insulting your body's systems.  If you consume enough carbohydrate to fill your glycogen stores before that energy can be consumed (which are quite limited) the rest is stored as fat -- it has to be otherwise it would wind up as excessively-high blood sugar.

The problem is that due to the spike in insulin when that processing is complete you feel hungry again even though you just packed on the remainder of your intake into fat cells.  The calories you just packed on and stored as excess are not burned up before you become hungry!  Your body is wired this way because absent processed foods it is nearly-impossible to trigger this response; it is simply an amplification of what would otherwise be the normal response to eating brought about by the engineering of foods we were never designed to consume.

Can you resist this?  I suppose you can try but if you're wondering why all these "diets" fail this is the reason -- you're fighting how your body is wired.

Likewise, I found that all the so-called "running shoes" were trying to prevent my body from being harmed by heel striking while I ran.  This is backwards as it was trying to prevent an injury rather than prevent the cause of the injury, which is the excessive shock loads placed on your joints.

Your body knows how to run such that you do not heel strike and instead use your calf muscles as shock absorbers but in order for it to do so you must not interrupt the signals that would be otherwise transmitted from your foot to your brain -- and you also probably ought not alter the natural mechanical relationships that exist between your foot and leg structures.

How did I figure this out?  I started thinking for myself and integrating what we all learn and in fact know to be true and when that conflicted with the so-called "conventional wisdom" I decided to err on the side of that which we had scientifically proved instead of what someone with a lot of letters after their name was pontificating on.

So I bought a pair of "Five Fingers" shoes and began the "Couch to 5k" program.  When I started I could not run a quarter mile without stopping to walk, my per-mile time was over 12 minutes, I couldn't do more than a mile and a half in total and my max heart rate exceeded 170bpm even with that very-moderate level of exertion.  I felt like I'd been hit by a damned truck while doing it too.

In short I was a fat, out-of-shape bastard -- like many of you.

At the same time I began moving my butt I got rid of all processed foods and began eating a high-fat, low-carbohydrate (vegetables and a few fruits only), moderate-protein diet.  No hydrogenated anything, no sugars, no processed grains.  The simple filter before it went down the pie hole was this: if it didn't exist 5,000 years ago don't eat it.

Results?  Five months later I ran 3.73 miles without stopping at a 9:04 pace with my heart rate in the 150s.  My body mass was down 30lbs.  I kept going and eight months later reached my goal body mass of 155.

A year later I was running 10ks at an 8 minute pace, 5ks sub-22 minutes and my body mass had been completely stable, never varying by more than 5lbs.

More importantly, there both remain.  I'm objectively in the best health I've ever enjoyed in my life, absent perhaps my adolescence.  I run 5 and 10ks for fun all the time, competing once in a while just to do it.  I'm contemplating entering a half-marathon next spring.  I'm not hungry all the time, I eat what I want when I want -- but what I want are things that existed 5,000 years ago.  I'm 50, my A1c is normal, resting heart rate is in the low 50s, BP is normal and most-importantly I feel good.

Here's before -- and today -- in pictures.

We're all going to die some day and I've come to grips with my own mortality.  But irrespective of what some guy with a bunch of letters after his name wants to try to tell me I'm not intentionally putting poisons in my body that have listed side effects including causing type 2 diabetes and serious, even fatal muscle tissue breakdown (such as rhabdomyolysis.)  Yeah, I know, that latter side effect is "rare", but if it happens to you then you're utterly screwed.  I'm certainly not going to take crap like that in pursuit of an unproved hypothesis related to cholesterol, when the evidence continues to pile up that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease in the first place.  

I note that our own government and doctors have told us for years to prefer things like margarine over butter, for example -- and yet we are now warned about trans-fats. Was that a "mistake" or a lie driven by pecuniary interest?  It doesn't matter if you're dead, does it?

We are all issued exactly one meat sack in this life and if you pay attention every doctor and other so-called "professional" in the field flat-out admits that they are practicing medicine.

Well, absent damn good cause they're not going to practice on me.

The FDA should be disbanded.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday took a first step toward potentially eliminating most trans fat from the food supply, saying it has made a preliminary determination that a major source of trans fats -- partially hydrogenated oils -- is no longer "generally recognized as safe."

If the preliminary determination is finalized, according to the FDA, then partially hydrogenated oils will become food additives that could not be used in food without approval. Foods with unapproved additives cannot legally be sold.

How did they get "generally recognized as safe" status in the first place?  Was there science behind that determination?

Nope.

There was lots of lobbying and, well, "just doing it" though.

And guess what -- the introduction of these "foods" is highly-correlated with the rise in incidence of coronary disease and obesity.

The replacement of saturated fat with these fats was claimed to be "healthy" -- that was the justification.  That was a lie.

The reason these engineered fats were introduced is that they are shelf-stable.  That is, because of the hydrogenation they are highly-resistant to oxidation, which means they do not spoil at room temperature even over extended periods of time.  This allows bulk manufacturers to make and ship things that can be sent over large distances without refrigeration and will sit for months or even years on a shelf without degrading.

Of course fully hydrogenated oils are not covered by this "revelation" -- yet.

But as I have said for quite some time, why would you eat something that has been designed to evade biological breakdown when that is exactly what is supposed to happen to food in your gut?

Between "cheap" carbs (such as high-fructose corn syrup, another Frankenstein creation) and hydrogenated oils you're committing slow suicide.  

Stop eating them.

Then stop listening to your government and start listening to facts.

Among them are the fact that the so-called "food pyramid" was never created by scientific inquiry -- rather, it was a combination of agribusiness influence and outright government corruption.

The amount of brainwashing that goes on in our society today in this regard is hideous and infests virtually everyone.  We "learn" from an early age that fats, especially animal fats, are bad for us while all that is easy and cheap to make, especially cereals, breads and similar, are good.  That "margarine" and other "lighter" (but engineered) oils are good, what they displace (e.g. butter) is bad.  That the word "light" on a label means that it's better for you than the same product without the "light."

So what has following this advice gotten us?  Record obesity and Type II diabetes, along with heart attacks, strokes and massive and outrageous morbidity.

You government has been literally killing you.

The truth?  God knows better than man.  Man corrupts any time it's profitable, and boy is it profitable when it comes to this sort of thing.

What do you want to eat?  What you ate before your government was around -- or any government was around.  

That was not engineered food.

It was foods such as eggs, meats, fishes and unprocessed plants, subject only to being cooked.  

Fat in food does not make you fat.  Carbohydrates, especially easily-digested carbohydrates, make you fat because they are released quickly in the digestive system and when your body's glycogen reserves, which are modest in size, are filled the body must convert the remaining carbohydrate to fat and store it in order to avoid driving your blood sugar through the roof.

Worse, the insulin response that is necessary to this process (and to maintenance of your blood sugar level within the normal range) results in you feeling hungry when the process of carbohydrate-to-fat conversion nears completion.  The hunger response is not linked to your glycogen reserve level, something that anyone who eats low-carb (and thus has low glycogen reserves all the time) can tell you is a fact.

Unfortunately if you eat when your glycogen stores are high you will immediately store all of what you take in to fat rather than using it for energy.

Now add to this how one makes a particular thing (e.g. salad dressing, etc) "light" -- you remove fats and replace them with carbs.  The "light" version will actually make you hungrier and thus fatter, exactly the opposite of what you would expect!

The other problem is that everyone has claimed that saturated fats are "unhealthy" and the opposite are "good."  But there is no scientific basis for this; "observational" studies are worse than useless as they identify "things" that are simply not true because they fail to isolate the causative factors.  For example, you could say by observational study that water causes cancer because everyone who has cancer has consumed water.  This would obviously be nonsense, but it is exactly what observational "studies" offer up all the time!

What's worse is that the other half of the claim on fats in the diet, that polyunsaturated fats are "healthy" (while the other kind are bad) may be literally killing you.  Most of those oils are very high in Omega-6 fatty acids -- indeed, processed seed and vegetable oils are pretty-much where it all comes from in our diet, and none of that is natural; without industrial processing these "foods" would not exist.  The really bad news is that systemic inflammation is caused by too much Omega-6 in the body, and the body's response to inflammation is to try to "fix it" under the assumption that the reason for the inflammation is some sort of intruder that doesn't belong in the body at all.  That's great if the cause of the inflammation is a thorn you stepped on that is causing an infection.  It will kill you if the inflammation is in your coronary arteries because you're eating crap that was engineered by man and our body responds to it as if we were eating a poison!

Finally, cholesterol.  There are literal billions of dollars made every year prescribing statins to "lower" cholesterol.  The problem is that cholesterol is necessary for life, that it is synthesized by the body and that most forms of it in the body are either benign or helpful.  Worse is that the standard three-panel test for cholesterol (LDL, HDL and Triglycerides) is worthless because the triglyceride number is not directly measured and only one subtype of LDL is harmful in the body!  The only meaningful test is one that is much more expensive and thus rarely used.  At the same time statins have a litany of side effects that are in and of themselves dangerous, including cognitive impairment and muscle damage, some of which can be permanent.

As an aside counting calories is virtually guaranteed to fail.  The reason is that 3,000 calories are, more or less, one pound of body mass.  That is, 30,000 calories are 10lbs.  If you're off by as little as 100 calories a day you will gain or lose 10lbs a year.  In 10 years that's 100 lbs and that's enough excess to call anyone fat.  

100 calories is about the caloric content of one banana, less than one 12oz can of sugared soda (that's ~140 calories) or ten potato chips.  Can you possibly count your caloric intake in a day closely enough to be less than 100 calories "off"?  No.

But your body can do this on its own if you don't destroy its hunger/satiation balance.  Just as a normal human body has one teaspoon of sugar circulating in the blood stream at any given time (yes, just one teaspoon), an amount impossible to accurately regulate manually yet one that in a healthy person is automatically maintained the desire to eat or not is also automatically regulated and will maintain caloric balance on its own if you don't destroy it.

Stop listening to the crooks that have less interest in your health and more interest in selling you cheap engineered products that are very profitable for them even though they are in fact slow poisons.

The simple way of looking at this is that if whatever you're about to stick in the pie hole couldn't exist without modern chemistry you're at risk of consuming something manufactured without regard to your health and safety, but rather only with regard to someone's profit.

Am I talking out my ass?  Well, you tell me -- on the left is what I was eating the so-called "food pyramid."  On the right is what I have looked like for the last two years -- roughly 60lbs lighter.

I pay no particular concern to trying to "meter" calories yet my body mass has been +/- 5lbs for the last two years with zero excursions beyond that boundary.

That means that I have managed to maintain my caloric intake to within a tolerance of 50 calories a day (at the outside) and in fact it's probably closer to 20 calories -- or an amount that sums to roughly two potato chips or a couple of broccoli crowns on a daily basis.

That's obviously impossible by actually trying to count intake, as to be that accurate I'd have to have a scale with me at all times, eat only the prescribed amounts and have effectively zero error, no "snacks" or other impulse consumption and similar.  Outside of a laboratory where one is confined 24x7 that's impossible.

You can choose to not be a fat bastard, no matter where you are now.  

The way you choose isn't a function of how much you exercise, although you might find, as I have, that exercise is actually enjoyable, especially when you're not 50+ lbs overweight.

Your body mass is a function of what you eat and whether you listen to those who are effectively trying to slowly poison you for profit -- or not.

Now I've seen it all.

The USSC upheld Obamacare by, basically, twisting the Constitution into a pretzel, crapping on it, whizzing on that and then eating it.

Finding first that the Commerce Clause bars the government from compelling one to enter into commerce, the analysis then turned to whether there was any way to save the constitutionality of the act.

The justices found one.

They re-interpreted the penalty clause as a tax.

And of course, Congress can levy taxes.

That's the path taken by this tortured process -- a path that could only be dreamed up if someone had already determined the outcome they sought instead of being an independent jurist.

The real surprise, however, is that Chief Justice Roberts, believed to be a strict constructionist on the court, managed to not only agree with this piece of tortured logic he found and constructed it as the opinion is his!

So much for judicial restraint and strict construction!

You really ought to read the dissent that starts on page 127 of the opinion.  Justice Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito eviscertate the majority, saying in part:

Here, however, Congress has impressed into servicethird parties, healthy individuals who could be but are not customers of the relevant industry, to offset the undesirable consequences of the regulation. Congress’ desire to force these individuals to purchase insurance is motivatedby the fact that they are further removed from the marketthan unhealthy individuals with pre-existing conditions, because they are less likely to need extensive care in the near future. If Congress can reach out and command even those furthest removed from an interstate market to participate in the market, then the Commerce Clause becomes a font of unlimited power, or in Hamilton’s words, "the hideous monster whose devouring jaws . . . spare neither sex nor age, nor high nor low, nor sacred nor profane." The Federalist No. 33, p. 202 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

What little was left of The Constitution died today, June 28th, 2012.

And incidentally, the math on federal health spending coupled with this decision means that by the time a 55 year old man reaches 85 (his life expectancy, roughly) the Federal government will be attempting to spend roughly $15 trillion a year on health care.

(No it won't, no we won't get that far, and the detonation of our government on the fiscal side is now assured -- or your health care will be sacrificed.  This is mathematics, not politics.)

PS: For those who think that the majority opinion somehow "upholds" limits on the Commerce Clause, you're reading this wrong.  Dead wrong.  The opinion finds that anything that Congress wants to do it can compel with any sort of financial penalty and construe it as a tax -- even though such is blatantly unlawful under both the Anti-Injunction Act and, for many such instances as a direct tax (as it would not be apportioned as required by the Constitution.)  The justices simply ignored these infirmities when it suited them; in effect they used the Clinton argument -- the word "is" means whatever they want it to mean even when it required two different meanings at the same time. 

What was left of the Constitution and our Republic literally died today, and not one political candidate or party that I've seen respond to this thus far has gotten it right.

I may be beating on a dead horse here, but this topic keeps coming up on the forum and I think it needs substantive expansion and more pounding of nails.

Look folks, this is mathematics at a "macro" (that is, "everyone's involved") level.  The Federal Government went from spending $53 billion on health care (all forms) in 1980 to over $800 billion last year.  Private insurance costs have risen by some 9% annually for the last 30 years.  The Federal Government's spending has tracked this rate of expansion as well, which means that the commonly-held claim that this is all about "more elderly people on the government tit" is false; the working population is roughly constant in age.

The Republican Party (and the "Tea Party" contingent within it) have repeatedly stated that "nobody over 50" is going to have their Federal Government medical benefits tampered with.  Roughly, your life expectancy in the US is 85.  This means that if you're 50 today you have some 30 years of life left.

At a 9% escalation per year your medical costs -- whether insurance or government spending -- will multiply by a factor of 13.3 over the next 30 years.

That is, if you spend $600 a month now, assuming you did not get older or sicker, you would spend $7,980 a month in 30 years on your health insurance, or some $95,760 per year.

The Federal Government will spend not $800 billion but $10.64 trillion on health care at this rate in 30 years.

Neither of those things is going to happen; the money does not exist.

But this is the path we are on when you can demand a bypass, a hip replacement and $200 tests.  When the cost of Juanita the illegal Mexican, giving birth is forced upon you as an American Citizen.  When you may make lifestyle choices that severely impact your health and yet force someone else to pay for them.

If you keep believing in this, America, you are going to die sooner than you should, because what you believe in will not happen.

You therefore have two choices: You can either go "baaaaaaahhhh!" like a Sheep right up until the medical system collapses, at which point if you are dependent on it for a drug, procedure or device you will die or you can do what you can to change the course of your life and with a reasonable probability avoid that outcome.

That's all there is folks.  This is not about what someone wants and it is not about what you think you can demand.  It is about mathematics.

Let's talk about the cost picture for a minute.  I'm going to pick on one common test -- HbA1c, used to measure long-term glucose control.  It is commonly used among diabetics to monitor not their instant blood sugar but how well they control it over time.  The test measures the amount of damage in the blood caused by excessive swings in blood sugar over the last four months or so (the normal lifespan of a red blood cell); once a cell is damaged in this fashion it remains damaged.  A "normal" range for a non-diabetic person is between 4 and 6%; diabetics with excellent control can approach normal but few achieve it.  Elevated values are very bad; levels over 7% are strongly associated with serious complications.

For an apparently-healthy person who is not attempting any sort of intervention for diabetes this test is far better in diagnosing trouble than a single fasting glucose test, since it checks damage over time as opposed to "at the present instant."

Ok, so there's the background.  Now why do I bring this specific (and common) medical test up as an example?

That's easy: I can easily find prices for this as a lab test and outside the lab.

The lab price of this test is about $65 from my survey around the web of various medical labs.  But at WalMart I can buy two tests for $30 and perform the test myself at home in three minutes.

In other words the "doctor" price -- where cost-shifting, monopoly behavior and other games are present is four times that of the competitive price in an open market.

Never mind the privacy issues -- if I go to a lab the lab gets to choose who obtains the information.  If I have "insurance" then that data becomes part of my indelible record for anyone who has "a financial interest" in my medical care to look at forever.  If I buy the test and take it at home, I control who gets the information and on what terms since I paid for it with my own money and only one pair of eyeballs sees the result.

But on a cost-control basis, even leaving the privacy issues aside, why doesn't the local doctor's office simply buy these boxed products from WalMart and use them?  They're approved by the FDA and as such they have to be "lab-style accurate" or they wouldn't be.  Both use blood samples so the testing methodology is the same.

Here's the answer: The entire medical system is built upon the premise of intentionally distorting price and cost-shifting on a massive scale, along with controlling you by denying you the right to control information about your own medical status and how it's used.  Since "profit" is typically a percentage of price this inures to the benefit of providers in the space.  And since there is no free market for these services -- Juanita can "pop in" and pop out a kid, billing you indirectly for her care (along with Dear old Granddad who can do the same thing!) there's zero incentive to solve the problem.  If it becomes common knowledge that the test in the store is just as good as the one in the lab and you have to pay for one or the other what do you need the doctor's office for in performing that test?  You might need his advice on how to interpret the results but he loses the mark-up on the lab work and so does the lab, and now you control the data instead of him.

Never mind the other issues that arise in our massively-fraudulent medical system, such as with drugs.  Some people claim that other nations have a "better controlled" cost structure.  That may be true but a big part of how they achieve it is by forcing you, the American citizen, to cover the cost of development of new drug and device therapies!  In Canada, for example, Viagra is a couple of bucks a pill.  In the US it's $25 or so.  The drug is the same, the manufacturer is the same, and the price disparity is maintained by the drug companies getting laws passed making it illegal for you to import those Canadian pills into the US, forcing a price collapse in the United States. 

I've written about all this before in depth, and it figures prominently in Leverage as well.  But today I want to draw your attention to something very important -- that avoiding the consequence of the collapse of the system is at least partially within your control.

We're not going to stop the stupidity folks.  There's been zero attention paid to this by any politician from the left or right, and in fact they're intentionally lying to the people on a literal daily basis in this regard.  This is not going to change and the system is going to collapse upon itself.  We are merely trying to figure out when, but if you're under 60 today it's a good bet you will live to see it.

When I pointed out the mathematical impossibility of what Steve Southerland and Jeff Miller were claiming (that nobody over 50 would see their Medicare changed) in a town hall meeting last year I was shouted down and told that I was out-of-order to state that they were lying in their claims.  The problem is that they were lying and they both knew it; it is never out of order to state the plain truth.  Mathematics is an exact thing and the record in this regard on Federal Spending is a fact, not supposition.  That this cannot continue is also a mathematical fact and since the lion's share of federal medical spending is in fact on Medicare it is mathematically inevitable that major reductions in that spending and the program itself will occur before those who are currently 50 die, if the program doesn't collapse entirely!

Every one of the people involved in this scheme and scam -- some 20% of our GDP -- are financial rapists and terrorists.  The entire corrupt system and its enabling politicians all deserve to have an asteroid fall on them when they go to the mailbox this afternoon.   Escaping from this corruption and outrage in its entirety is not possible.  Ultimately, you will have to either face your own mortality or become subject to the medical system's perversities. 

However, this doesn't mean you can't change the outcome between here and there in a positive fashion for you as an individual, because you can.

Let's start with the simple.  If you smoke, stop.  Right now.  Throw the cigs in the trash can and never buy or smoke another cigarette.  Ever.  It is the single-most productive thing you can do to change your health prognosis over time.  If you wish to keep smoking that's fine, but understand that you are likely to take years, and perhaps decades, off your life and you will not be able to force society to pay for whatever medical care you need as a consequence of this choice in the near future and beyond.

Second, look at this picture:

Which of these two men would you like to be?  One has a far greater chance of needing "intervention" by the medical industry some time in the next 30 years or so.  There's a roughly-50lb difference between those two pictures, and the change from #1 to #2 - 205 to 157, several pant sizes, a 42 suit jacket to a 39, along with two full shirt sizes (from XL to M in a T-shirt) and an inch of neck size in a dress shirt - took about nine months.  #1 was what I had been for more than a decade.  #2 is what I was when I was roughly 17, and am now again today.  The bad news was that several grand worth of business suits went to Goodwill as there was no reasonable way to alter them to fit.  The good news is that I haven't been in this good of condition since I was a teenager, and it's not just "being fat" (or not) -- it's also how I feel.

To get from #1 to #2 I did two things: I cut the crap from going down the piehole -- specifically, refined carbohydrates.  I also removed all manufactured fats from my diet (e.g. anything with the word "hydrogenated" on the label); if I want a "butter taste" on something (e.g. microwaved brussel sprouts, which I really like) I use butter, not Frankenfood. I also downloaded the program "Myfitnesspal" for my Android phone and started using it to log my weight, what I stuffed down the pie hole and how much exercise I was actually doing.   It works as it keeps what you're doing in your face.  It also has calorie and nutritional information for a lot of restaurant chain menu items which makes it easy to consult before you order when eating out -- and that makes a big difference.  For those of you who just can't get rid of the crazy carb stuff, I understand from my research that you can do either low fat and high carbohydrate or low carbohydrate and high fat -- both moderate protein (NOT high protein!) but you cannot stuff both high-glycemic carbs and fats in your body without becoming fat.  Since I just cannot deal with the idea of not eating steak or ribs, two of my personal favorite foods, the choice that I could actually live within was easy.

Second, I "moved more."  Google up "Couch to 5k" and do it.  If you can't do jogging for physical reasons (e.g. bad knees, hips or ankles) double or triple the distances and get a bicycle.  If you still can't do it for physical reasons then choose swimming (an essentially-zero-impact physical exercise) instead.  There are damn few people who cannot manage the physical requirements of swimming no matter how bad your joints and similar are and it is an excellent form of whole-body exercise.  I also found and bought a weight machine from a guy over in Destin who looked like he never used it. It needed a couple of cables replaced but was otherwise in pristine condition at a tiny fraction of the cost of buying one new.  I don't use it as much as I should, but it does get used and it matters.  I also found that it's easier on the joints of this old fart if I use the Vibram "Five Fingers" shoe-like things -- it's basically running barefoot with a pad to keep rocks from embedding themselves in your toes, and with them you're forced into good form which stops the injuries (fancy that -- the human body was designed better than all those crazy ideas from shoe companies?)  Beware that when you start using those, if you choose to, your calf muscles will complain loudly as they probably haven't been used extensively in years.

I'm not going to tell you that the "move more" part was easy.  It wasn't.  In fact, it was really hard when I started.  If you don't know if you have cardiac problems go see a doc and take a stress test first where he can watch your heart rhythm while you crank up the METS so you have a reasonable expectation you won't fall over and die when you begin.  That would be bad.  Starting out I couldn't run a mile without feeling like someone had hit me with a truck, but what I found is that the only way to keep from plateauing is to hit that wall and push through it -- just a bit further, a bit harder pace, and then keep at that level of exertion on further workouts until it becomes not-so-tough.  Then push again.

Having gotten here I've found it's not hard at all maintaining what I've achieved.  I jog a couple of times a week and ride a bicycle for grins, giggles and fitness, usually putting in at least half an hour of "working out" in some form three to five times a week.  I live near the MidBay bridge and when the weather is nice I sometimes choose to ride over it to the Crab Trap in Destin for lunch -- a roughly 15 mile round-trip, and an hour and a half including the time eat (on the beach, natch, so that's the reward.)  I can now crank off three miles at a 9 minute pace, a modest jog, without my heart rate going materially over 150 -- I can talk with you while jogging in a reasonably-normal tone of voice.  Nine months ago all of that was impossible.

It's a choice folks and one you need to make now, because at the present pace we're a couple of years -- maybe four or five at the outside -- before the medical system collapses under its own weight.  You can't make these changes in a day -- if you wait until it all comes apart it's too late. 

The politicians are all liars and they're going to sit back and watch you die as a consequence of your reliance on their lies.

If I, as a fat bastard pushing 50 years of age can accomplish this with nothing more than a decision to do so then anyone can in one form or another.  And yet when I look around at the Mall, at WalMart or just walking about the perception changes.  That first picture was what I thought of as "average" and I was about that in terms of American men.  Now I know differently -- I was on my way to an earlier death and whether I wanted to admit it or not I was fat.  I might have been "average" for America, but on an absolute scale I was overweight and pushing toward obese -- and that's a fact.

I know there are a million excuses as to why you can't do it, but just take a look at the picture above and then tell me again, with a straight face, that you want to be "Guy #1".  You're lying to yourself if you do -- you can do it, but don't want to, and thus far you've been able to get away with it because the government has always been there to "pick up the pieces."

That day is coming to an end folks, and this aspect of being prepared is, for many Americans, far more important than any other.  If you're rich and dead you're still dead, so if you look like the left-side photo (or worse) take care of that issue first.

It's a new year.  Turn the new year into a new you and avoid, to the extent possible, what's coming.