Dr. Speidel’s book, The Building Blocks of Health––How to Optimize Wellness with a Lifestyle Checklist, provides a science-based strategy to reverse lifestyle-related damage to our health that leads to illness and early death.

Readers will learn: •Why the lifestyle of 95% of Americans is unhealthy. •That a healthy lifestyle can prevent 90% of diabetes, 80% of heart disease, and nearly 50% of cancers. •That an optimal lifestyle can add 10 to 15 years to life •That multiple behavioral factors are necessary to keep us healthy––they are the Building Blocks of Health. •How to use a Lifestyle Checklist to adopt and stick to the behaviors needed to be healthy.

The Building Blocks of Health documents why you can’t rely on doing just one thing, like getting a lot of exercise, or avoiding just one risky behavior, like not smoking, to get and stay healthy––attention to multiple factors is essential. Each of the book’s 16 chapters focuses on an important health-related topic such as nutrition, weight control, heart disease, cancer and dementia. This is a book that Americans should read because almost all of us have an unhealthy lifestyle. This is a book doctors will want to give to their patients because they do not have enough time to provide good counseling about an optimally healthy lifestyle. The behaviors described in The Building Blocks of Health are highly effective in restoring and preserving health because our bodies have remarkable power to heal when we stop the biological insults caused by an unhealthy lifestyle.