Epilogue

 

hile this is the end of our Fantastic Voyage, we hope it is just the beginning of your personal journey of discovery. If there is one message we have tried to impart, it is the unprecedented opportunity you have to greatly improve your health. Health is not simply the absence of disease; rather, it refers to the effectiveness of every level of your existence, something you can always improve. The effort you put into this endeavor will be repaid many times and will assist you in whatever life goals you may have.

Society has a number of powerful and widely held but misleading ideas that we have tried to counter:

• The health care system will take care of me if I have a problem. The reality: Our medical system is largely geared toward dealing with health issues once they erupt as full-blown disease. Very little attention is paid in our medical schools to nutrition and disease prevention. Waiting until symptoms of disease appear is often too late. The first symptom of heart disease may be a heart attack; cancer may not be evident until it has already metastasized. The knowledge to avoid the degenerative diseases that cause more than 90 percent of all deaths and vast suffering is available, but the responsibility to apply this knowledge is yours.

• Taking a supplement or drug is a last resort. The reality: When our bodies evolved tens of thousands of years ago, it was in the interest of the species for humans (and other animals) not to live much beyond their child-rearing days. Now that we live in an era of abundance rather than scarcity, this evolutionary program is no longer relevant. We have the means to dramatically slow down and in many cases halt and reverse degenerative disease and aging processes, but these require reprogramming your biochemistry through nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle as well as taking advantage of supplements and drugs. This process will become easier with the more powerful Bridge Two and Bridge Three therapies and interventions being developed, but today it requires understanding and effort.

• The only things we can count on are death and taxes. The reality: We’ll leave the issue of taxes for another book, but the means to extend longevity indefinitely are in our grasp. Although we do not yet have all the tools we need to stop and reverse all aging processes, we do have the means right now to stay in good health and spirits until the full blossoming of the biotechnology and nanotechnology/artificial intelligence revolutions, which will indeed provide radical life extension.

Health knowledge is expanding at an accelerating pace. While this book was being written, dramatic new developments continued to become available on a weekly basis. We kept reworking the text to include many of these, but realized that if we kept doing this, the book would never be finished. So this book is a snapshot in time. Our primary mission has been not to provide an unchanging set of rules, but rather to describe an overall attitude and approach to improving your health, one based on a continued search for insight in an era of expanding knowledge. This search will indeed be a fantastic voyage. We hope that you will join us.