I was too sick to leave my bed. In fact, I was too weak even to lift my head from the pillow.

At age forty-eight, at the peak of an international business career, I found myself on the brink of death. I had lost forty pounds from an already thin frame; I looked skeletal. My vital signs were failing. My doctors expected me to die.

I chose to live. I say “chose” because on my own, relying on my knowledge of biochemistry and my determination not to die, I saved my own life.

I took some fairly simple steps, but I also took one profound leap. I made a powerful discovery: Almost all disease can be prevented or reversed. As a result, health is a choice and no one has to be sick.

This book presents an entirely new theory of health and disease that will ultimately change the way medicine is practiced. This book offers a revolutionary way to perceive health, a guidebook for living based on cutting-edge science that is simple to understand.

This guide gives you the power to control your own health in a way that you perhaps never imagined possible.

In reality, humans experience only one disease. All disease is the result of malfunctioning cells, no matter if the disease is a “common” cold, a mental illness such as depression or a life-threatening cancer.

This theory of malfunctioning cells cuts through the confusion of health and disease and provides a unifying understanding of what keeps people well or makes them sick.

The two causes of disease, the two reasons that cells malfunction, are deficiency (insufficient nutrients) and toxicity (excessive toxins). These two causes work through six areas of daily life: the six pathways each person travels toward health or disease.

If you take care of your body’s needs along these six pathways, you give your cells what they need and you avoid what is toxic. You will not become sick.

The theory presented in this book—a unifying theory of disease—is the most important health discovery to emerge in the last few hundred years. No such theory existed during the evolution of what we now call “modern medicine,” which explains why the medical establishment cannot cure nor prevent disease as effectively as it might.

My theory of health offers power, simplicity and clarity in place of powerlessness, which is what most people now feel. Most people are overwhelmed and confused by the constant flood of conflicting health information, the thousands of different diseases that physicians “treat” with drugs and surgery.

This swirl of specialists, symptoms and side effects leaves people without cures for their disease and, too often, either growing sicker or facing death. We end up powerless because we have no idea why we are sick or how to make ourselves well again.

My new approach asks you to make profound shifts in what has been conventional thinking about illness and health care. By preventing and reversing disease through the six pathways, you put the power to get better and stay well into your hands.

If you are so sick that you have given up hope, this approach is the light of choice. Had I this level of understanding years ago, I would never have become sick in the first place.

I have shared my ideas with thousands of people around the world, including hundreds of medical doctors. I have seen people who have been sick for a decade or more apply this information and quickly become well again.

I have seen people who have fruitlessly tried endless doctors, hospitals, clinics, medications and even gimmicks. They become well again by applying logical, sound, scientific approaches to enhancing health at the cellular level.

This book asks you to think outside the box of traditional medicine—a box that may have you stifled by misinformation and cut off from the kind of understanding that will truly make you well.

Consider how conventional thinking can trap us: Why do we easily accept that stress can make us sick, but we have difficulty embracing the idea that love, laughter and a balanced life can make us well?

Why are we willing to ingest chemicals in the form of prescription drugs that are alien to our body, but we are skeptical that natural substances—primarily the right foods—can heal?

Why are we willing to recognize the damage of an obvious poisoning—a major chemical spill, for instance—but we ignore the devastating effects of small amounts of toxic substances, which accumulate in our bodies and make us a little bit sicker every day?

Our bodies have an amazing capacity to heal, but they are more vulnerable than you may realize. This book teaches you how to tap that capacity for healing and how to avoid the toxins and the stresses—in the environment and inside your own body—that make you sick. Many dangers around us go unrecognized, but they take a toll every day.

My theory of wellness takes you to the front lines of the battle between health and disease: the cell. Your body is made up of trillions of cells. Cells have needs, which I identify, that must be met if they are to function well. If your cells are healthy, your body will not become sick.

If your cells do not receive what they need or if they are damaged or poisoned, they will stop working right and you will become sick. (You may be surprised to discover what is toxic to your cells.)

Cells that receive what they need and avoid harm can function well and provide for healthy life, regardless of your age, the genes you have inherited or the “germs” to which you have been exposed. Healthy cells refuse disease; no one with healthy cells has any reason to become sick, not even to contract a cold.

People alive today are far sicker than most of us recognize, and they die decades sooner than their genetic potential. Healthy life, well past one hundred years old, should be our birthright.

We do not usually think about health in this way. We don’t knowingly choose disease, but we do choose diets and lifestyles that lead to disease.

Unable to predict, prevent or conquer disease, most people and most physicians pursue treatment—such as prescription or over-the-counter drugs—once obvious symptoms have presented, after massive cellular malfunction has already occurred.

Patients and their physicians treat body parts or body systems as unrelated. The mainstream medical community has no unifying theory of disease, no unifying treatment and no plan for prevention, and therefore true and lasting health is an illusion.

This book describes how to keep your body—all your cells—truly healthy. Understanding the six pathways toward health and following them in the right direction will change your life.

You will learn things about nutrition that you have probably never heard before, including how the way you shop, the way you cook or the foods that you combine at a meal spell the difference between health and disease. You will learn to recognize hazards in your home and how to stop toxins from being created within your own body.

You’ll learn specifics, down to the kind of vitamin supplements you should take, the toothpaste you should use and the olive oil you should buy. I name names and identify brands based on how the products affect cells, because buying the wrong products does nothing to keep you healthy. Certain products, in fact, make you unhealthy.

Consider your own life: Do you suffer from a health condition that you have given up trying to cure and now accept as fate?

Do you bounce from one medical specialist to another, dizzy with conflicting diagnoses and different ideas about which treatments are best?

Is your cabinet full of medications that you take regularly without any sense that you are healing?

Are you tired most of the time?

Do you expect to live past your eighties?

This book guides you out of the maze of medical specialists and on a path toward wellness. This book teaches you how to question your doctors’ advice and how to evaluate, on your own, the medicines you should take, if any.

You can regain the kind of energy for living that you may have thought was lost forever. With this book you can learn how to live beyond one hundred years of age.