 Why are Americans so obsessed with diets? It's funny because my upbringing has been mostly European. My dad's family's from Haiti, but they're very French, a lot of them were educated in France, and my mom's family is from Eastern Europe, I guess you could say. But being around my dad's family mostly as a kid, I was really accustomed to European table manners and kind of the European way of life, where we would sit down every single night, the candles had to be lit, the table set, napkins folded, glass of wine poured, and you had to use impeccable table manners, or else you got in trouble. Now one thing that's interesting to me is that when you go to Europe and you talk about health, you hear a lot more about quality of life, the way a person lives. But when you go to America, people often talk about diet as if that's the biggest factor in health. And I think this is a misnomer and is not correct. Now in this video, I want to share why I think this is a mistake and a flaw, and is not the most important factor in health, and what I believe, according to Chinese medicine, is the most important factor. Hey Alex Hine, author of the book Master of the Day, current doctoral student in traditional or classical Chinese medicine. Now the first link in the description is a free download of a PDF, which is five daily rituals that can help you add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. So you can go check it out, download it there, you'll also get weekly emails from me on how to use Chinese medicine to improve your health. So the first thing to think about is that when you look at the traits of the people who are the longest lived on earth, almost 50% of those traits have nothing to do with diet or exercise. So when we look at the traits of the people from the blue zones, the centenarians, when you look at the top nine traits that Butner added in his book on the blue zones, he noted moderate regular physical activity, life purpose, stress reduction, moderate caloric intake, plant-based diet, moderate alcohol intake, engagement in spirituality or religion, engagement in family life, and engagement in social life. Now basically half of those are literally not your diet or your exercise. They're really about these kind of psycho-emotional quality of life markers, and I find that, again, European culture is very much in tune with quality of life from the work hours to the way people eat and the way they eat and they love their life and move a little bit more slowly and have more time off and pay for the maternal leave. And all of these qualities are more attuned to the way one lives. And there's this idea that Europeans, they drink more, they smoke more, they eat more fat, and yet they've got better health. It's very peculiar, you could say. Always puzzles researchers, which is a bit silly, I don't know why that would be puzzling. But it's really telling that this guy that had studied the longest lived people affirms this idea that the way one lives is half of the battle in terms of living a good quality of life and a healthy life. So the second thing to think of is that we tend to think that diet is the most important thing, most important single factor in terms of being healthy. And maybe it is the 80%, but I believe more than that is the way we live. It is the most important factor, overall, the snapshot, the gestalt of a person's life. That is the most important predictor of longevity and health at every age. You know, there was a recent study that said that loneliness, which is an emotional stressor is as lethal as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. And we know that pessimists live shorter than optimists, and they have worse quality of life at every stage. Pessimists are more prone to health problems and stress related problems. And that negative people, lonely people, depressed people, all of these psycho emotional factors greatly predispose someone to illness. That's not surprising. When the negative person is firing this negative cascade of stressors, which then affects hormones and affects all these biological processes, compared to someone that's like, you know what, all that stress is, it's all good. It's alright. I don't know if this bad event is a good thing or a bad thing in the long run, we'll see. Maybe it's the best thing that ever happened to me getting dumped. I don't know, we'll find out. It's not surprising that those would result in a better quality of life and less disease. So you can eat right, and you can work out, but you can also be a workaholic who works 80 hours a week, who's stressed out of his freaking mind, or the person who's domineering and controlling and they're like trying to control every little thing in their life. And it's making them this neurotic, high strong mess. That's going to make you sicker, more than any good diet, more than any workout every single day, I promise. That will do more damage than the 30 minutes meditating or the one hour of yoga, Davey. The third thing to think about is what traditional Chinese medicine says about all of this. So in traditional Chinese medicine, what determines health is really the free flow of Qi, the free flow of energy, if you want to use that term, but really, it's the free flow of everything, the free flow of your bowels, the free flow of your emotions, the free flow of all the factors going on in your life. Are you showing up to work and you're like, I love this. This is my passion, my calling. Or are you showing up? And you're like, I got to deal with my dumb boss again for years. When can I quit? That's damaging, right? That's not causing flow. That's causing stuck. I could feel it in my chest just showing up in the traffic. The free flow, the smooth flow of everything. And I don't know that I would personally translate Qi as energy, but it is a concept to illustrate everything from the immaterial in our life and our universe, which would be energy to the material. So it's the free flow of everything. It's the energy dynamic that we talked about. And everything in your life affects your energy dynamic, ranging from your inborn constitution to the weather, to your emotions, to your diet, to the way you live, to your exercise or lack of exercise, your sleep, all of that affects the energy dynamic in your body. But sometimes what affects the energy dynamic most causing disease, for some people, that's emotions. Some people, it's the lack of sleep. For some people, it's the fact that they just hate their job so much. For some people, it's heartbreak or it's depression. And for others, it may be diet, it may be smoking, it may be a million things. What if the glass of wine or two that you love every night, what if depriving yourself of that impacts the energy dynamic more than having the glass of wine? What if the depriving of yourself is more damaging to your health than having the glass and a half of wine per night that gives you so much enjoyment at the end of the day? That's the thing to think about. That's a real consideration. When we just give these blanket statements that don't drink coffee, don't have wine, don't have chocolate, don't enjoy life, don't have sex more than once per week because it's bad for you. All these ridiculous black and white statements. Consider what they do on an individual level and everyone's so different. So that is a little impassioned rant for the day. And I think it's important for us to always remember the quality of the person's health is a mirror of the quality of their life. We can't just say coffee's bad for you. Coffee's good for you. It doesn't even make sense at all. It's just not even true. So before you think that diet is the cure for everything, consider looking at the whole view of a person's life and the whole view of how all these things impact the energy dynamic in that one person. All right. Some food for thought and of course you can grab the free download there which is the five daily rituals to add 10 years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine and also check out my related videos there and