Start A 'Health Virus'

Television and radio talk-show hosts often ask me why I am driven to educate people about optimal wellness. The simple answer: I want to make a difference. The longer answer: because I love the field of nutritional medicine.

Observing how simply changing our diet and adding a few nutritional supplements can change our health is profound. To watch someone with terminal cancer cure herself using food, love and the power of the immune system never ceases to amaze me. But I feel the bigger message is helping one another find optimal health and vitality so we can really make a difference in this ever-changing world–to have the energy to affect change, whether that means getting our government to cover the cost of naturopathic visits, allow tax cuts for those using preventive medicine, stop pesticide spraying, eliminate fish farms, or simply get people to eat well and walk every day. Each and every one of us has the power to create change.

One evening, while giving a lecture to a room filled with more than 500 eager listeners, it suddenly dawned on me that there was an army of people in that room. If each and every person became a messenger of health, radical changes in consciousness would occur. So I asked those 500 people to help spread the message they had just heard to 10 friends and request that those 10 friends tell 10 more. Just think what would happen if, the day after the lecture, 500 people descended on the local retailer and began learning about natural health.

Canadians have underestimated how much power we actually have and how quickly we can initiate change in the way foods and goods are manufactured and delivered to us. When we visit the grocery store and fill our shopping cart with toxic cleaning agents, farmed fish, pesticide-and herbicide-laden fruits and veggies, and processed, packaged, dead food, we are telling manufacturers that we love those products, that we want them to continue providing them and that we don’t care what it is doing to our environment. But just think of what would happen if hundreds of thousands of Canadians stopped buying those goods. Manufacturers would scratch their heads and realize they must provide what the consumer wants.

Every day I give thanks that I am able to research, write and lecture about something I love–optimal emotional, spiritual and physical wellness. The greatest gift we can give is the service of ourselves. Get passionate about health. Affect change within your family and those you love first, then get out there and spread the word. Deane Parkes, alive Advisory Board member, stated it perfectly. He said, "We need to start a ‘health virus’ and empower people to tell everyone they know about how to get healthy." Viruses spread quickly. We need a healthier message and we need it now. Start the health virus today by passing your copy of alive magazine to someone, and then ask that person to pass it to someone else. Tell everyone who will listen what you have learned from alive. Go to alive’s Web site alive.com, where you will find ready-to-use letters to send your local elected officials to initiate the health changes at the government level.