Are You About to Pay With Your Life?

Few 7-year-olds learn what a heart attack looks like firsthand.

I was one of the unlucky few that did.

When my father was 41 years old, he suffered a major one — with four of his coronary arteries blocked 90% or more.

It came out of nowhere, striking a man who was otherwise healthy, without any history of heart problems, and to top it off, at perhaps the worst time possible.

My parents just happened to be at the Gaithersburg, Maryland, branch of the Motor Vehicle Association, waiting in line for him to get his picture taken for a new license.

The wait had been long and was close to over when he felt the first pinch, as he later went on to tell me… But because it was the MVA and he’d already waited for so long, he just decided to keep waiting.

It wasn’t until he was actually standing in front of the camera that the first unmistakable symptoms hit.

More than 30 years later, my mother still keeps that license in her desk — a document of the moment when his heart went into potentially fatal distress.

She keeps it as a testament to his stubbornness… But to me, that driver’s license is a reminder that when it comes to assets, which we spend most of our time talking about here at Wealth Daily, a person’s health, which we don’t usually talk about, stands above all others.

You Don’t Get a Second Try With This

It’s also the one asset we’re most likely to neglect.

The smartest people I’ve ever met, my father being one of them, often put their health on the back burner in favor of other, more immediate, more pragmatic issues.

It’s usually not until something finally breaks down and your body takes you to the brink that most people begin to act.

Sadly, for many, whatever they do is too little, too late to change their fate.

With the specter of my father’s genetics always gnawing at me, I resolved to not wait for my own wakeup call — because when it comes to heart problems, that wakeup call itself is often what kills you.

And it kills more Americans every year than any other single cause.

So I started watching my cholesterol in my mid-20s, and in my 30s, I started doing stress tests on my heart, about two decades before the average American male.

My cholesterol, I found, was always high, no matter what I did. But my arteries, based on the contrast dye mapping of my heart done during the very unpleasant stress tests, showed low to nonexistent levels of blockage.

It gave me hope that I may have been spared my father’s fate, and perhaps that I might take more after another close blood relative: my mother’s dad, who, despite spending most of his life in Soviet Russia, still made it to his 106th birthday.

That’s 65% longer than the average male living in Russia.

In American terms, that would be the equivalent of living to the age of 125.

Genes definitely play a role. There is no denying that.

However, there’s also no denying that genes are non-negotiable. You’re stuck with what you get, and there’s no changing it.

Nobody is Perfect. Everyone Has Limits. Everyone Can Improve

So the only option, then, is to take the factors you can control and stack the deck in your favor.

Lifestyle, perhaps as much as genetic makeup, determines the length and quality of our lives.

And while some might say that people like the grandfather I just mentioned disprove that — given the relatively paltry existence Soviet society afforded the average citizen — the fact is, his lifestyle had at least as much to do with his longevity as his genes.

Born in far Eastern Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula just three months after the Wright brothers’ first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, he spent his childhood living in a home without running water, in one of the world’s most forbidding climate zones.

After serving in the Navy in Vladivostok, he left for Moscow, where he lived for the next 60 years, working as an economist for the communist party.

During his life, he saw his home city bombed by the Germans, evacuating his wife and infant daughter — my mother — east to avoid a ground assault, which was eventually halted just 17 miles from the capital.

He lived through rationing of every kind imaginable; survived the Soviet medical system; outlived all of his friends; and only after finally outliving my grandmother — who was 17 years his junior — did he go through immigration to the States in the late ’80s.

In the ’90s, he became a citizen… and in 2004, when he turned 100, he received congratulatory letters from the presidents of both former Cold War adversaries.

The point of this mini biography isn’t to point out how sturdy this man was.

He was actually never much to look at. 5-foot-7 at best, he never broke 150 lbs., and he was blind in one eye and bald as a cue ball by the time he was 30.

Personal Decisions Make All the Difference

His real strength came from discipline, and the list of things he had to endure shows that lifestyle plays the biggest role in keeping a person healthy and capable well into their 80s and beyond.

You see, through all this turmoil, his two constants were his diet and his daily activity regimen.

He never started his morning without a warm-up and stretches, and he rarely went a day without more strenuous activity, such as chopping firewood, which he was still doing into his late 90s.

He also never went a day without taking a walk for half an hour or more, like clockwork.

There’s no mystery that physical activity helps you stay younger and stronger.

What was a big shock, though, was his diet.

Back in the 1990s, when low cholesterol, low saturated fat, and decreased protein intake were all the rage, I was horrified to see him eating oil- and butter-drenched meat every single day.

And not just any meat, either. He didn’t seem to deny himself any of the things Americans had been taught were supposed to be only rare treats.

Bacon, steak and eggs, pork of every kind… the fattier the better.

I remember telling my mom that we need to get his blood tested to see what was going on, because this man seemed to be breaking all the rules of prevailing dietary theory and eating pretty much like he had all his life.

Did he know something we didn’t?

Was there a secret to it all?

As usual, there wasn’t.

He was just eating what he grew up eating all those decades earlier in a village that probably hadn’t changed its appearance in centuries.

Our Bodies Crave the Nutrients They Need

It was a primitive diet, designed for primitive life and primitive work conditions.

And the big “secret” was that it worked just as well in modern times with modern people.

It’s just one of those things that people of the old world knew and understood, and it took modern marketing and corporate propaganda for us to forget.

This truth, however, is finally starting to resurface.

I recently stumbled upon a study analyzing this exact issue and detailing some very surprising findings.

Surprising, that is, only to those who still buy into the prevailing theories on what you should eat and what you shouldn’t.

Given my own family history with heart disease, this study was a major eye-opener for me, and it’s already caused me to change some of my habits.

Whether you’re overweight or slender, whether you have heart disease in the family or not, I urge anybody who wants to live a proactively healthy life to check this report out.

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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