Getting to health doesn't need to be all that complicated. And it also doesn't need to be about "should." Don't pursue health because it's an obligation, or because someone says you should. Pursue health because health is a currency you can spend on living better.

I realized that my seed of a wish to witness change in people's experience with cancer was blossoming before my eyes. Just within my relatively short lifetime, we have evolved in opportunities and options, enabling people with cancer to have a better quality of life.

If we got down to the bedrock of true prevention -- lifestyle as preventive medicine -- we could add years to life, add life to years, and save a whole lot of money by putting to use the science and sense long at our disposal.

The predominant efforts of health promotion might reasonably be catalogued in terms of carrots, sticks, and leading people to water -- whether or not we can make them drink it. Which leads, naturally, to horses.

We need to reduce our emphasis on disease management and emphasize health promotion instead. How much more desirable -- and less expensive -- it would be to prevent diabetes and heart disease, rather than to have to treat those diseases and their myriad complications.

The way we respond to obesity and related chronic disease in the U.S. is like waiting to send every adult to night school to learn English -- painfully, poorly, expensively, and late -- rather than having them grow up speaking fluently all along.

We must not only change who is covered but also what is covered to include personalized lifestyle medicine if we are to make current treatments more effective and less costly.