Making life style choices for your unique self

My daughter called the other day with questions about the passing of her grandparents. She was establishing herself with a new doctor and double checking our family medical history - good and bad. As we all know our unique family DNA predisposes us to certain illnesses and disease. 

And yet lifestyle choices have perhaps an even larger influence on our health as they are what can activate our individual DNA markers. Despite our personal family medical history we retain a lot of power in our overall health throughout our lives.

How Not To Die by Michael Greger does a thorough job of pointing one in the right direction as far as how to eat to combat the particular weaknesses in our family medical heritage. And while it’s a huge book it is easily organized with chapters on the various maladies we might be concerned about facing. So you can easily grab a copy and study up on the chapters that address your particular needs. 

Additionally if you go to Dr. Greger’s website nutritionfacts.org ,you can view hundreds of short videos dealing with lifestyle choices and their power to affect your health and well being. 

I recommend you query your extended family about your unique medical history and begin to steer your lifestyle choices to circumvent any concerns.

Another tool you can use in this effort is myfittnesspal.com . I would hope you have all noticed that besides tracking your exercise output and calorie input it tracks nutritional elements as well. I hope that you will look more closely at those this week. If heart disease runs in your family you might want to track your salt intake. Diabetes should steer you toward keeping your eye on sugar. Colon cancer would encourage you to keep track of your fiber grams etc. etc. 

And did you know you can change the default settings on your myfitnesspal.com account? Just go to settings and scroll down to choose what nutrients you most want to track.

In the past I proffered challenges to track and focus on fulfilling certain nutrients such as fiber or protein.  But instead this time I would like you to pick a nutrient to track. 

So our weekly bonus challenge is to:

1. Investigate your medical history and it’s weak points and choose a nutritional element you feel would be helpful to track.
2. If needed change your settings in myfitnesspal.com to track the element you have chosen
3. Make extra efforts each day this week to totally complete the recommended allowance of that element.

For each day that you complete this you will earn the 5 bonus points,