By Robert Vera, Co-Founder, Iron90

Every four years it happens, a new set of politicians from both parties agree on one single issue; our nation’s health care system is broken.

Supply and Demand:
At my company we understand the health care problem differently; it is one of supply and demand. The story goes like this; each year more and more people become dependant on health care to treat chronic illnesses like diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Sadly, today's chronic illnesses are debilitating our children in record numbers, there are near 300,000 children in the United States with diabetes. A recent study showed that a 13-year-old boy in the highest weight category increased his risk of having a heart attack or other heart-related problem by 33% at age 60.

"It's the age and the magnitude that's so striking to us," says lead author Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo of the University of California-San Francisco. The studies appear in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Thus, our health care system is treating more of our population for longer periods. Our system was never designed, nor is any nation’s, to treat the majority of the population each day with medication, surgeries and therapy from cradle to grave. Demand for health care is at an all time high and is increasing, as demand goes up so does the cost.

Who is to blame?
Each side of the political debate blames the other for the alleged broken system. Many who are ill blame their parents for passing them bad genes. However, the fingers are pointed in the wrong directions. For the last 16 years, both parties have shared power equally and both parties state that our health care system is still broken. In the case of genetic predisposition, we now know that the incidence of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic illness that are directly related to genetics may be less than once believed. If our politicians and parents are not to blame for our illnesses then who is? The fact is that our nation’s ills are self inflicted wounds; the trigger is pulled in childhood, we are all responsible for our own health and illness.

The Smoking Gun:
Why are so many of us so sick? Let’s examine the wreckage, 66% of our population is now fat or obese. More than 85% of people with type II diabetes are fat or obese. If you are fat or obese, your risk factors for a heart attack, heart failure of other type of heart disease increase 2 fold as compared to the non-fat population. Our population has become fat and obese because of our lifestyles; specifically we consume more calories than we burn off.

Personal Experience:
I am co-founder of a health and fitness company, our staff and clients think of food as the most pervasive drug we will ever put into our bodies. Depending on the dose, food can keep you healthy or kill you slowly. I have friends who are physical therapists, psychologists, NP’s, PA’s and medical doctors who were trained at Harvard. These are caring, hard working, brilliant professionals. To suggest that the health care system is broken, infers that their contributions and worth lack value. This is just not true.

We have clients that come to us health care dependent with type II diabetes, many others have been prescribed blood thinners and cholesterol medications. After shedding 20 or more pounds, nearly all of these clients no longer are diabetic or need medications. Why? They are no longer chronically ill. After losing 30 pounds, 100% of our clients report sleeping better, have more energy and feel better about themselves and their relationships. Curiously, Bariatric surgery patients have documented similar results. Let’s be clear, the reason why both groups become healthy is because they lost the fat and weight that was making them sick not because one group had their stomach surgically truncated.

A number of our clients are Physical Education teachers at local high schools in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area. They have come to us for both personal reasons to lose weight and professional reasons as they want to be examples to their students. One of these teachers’s shed 83 pounds from her 5 foot 4 inch frame to reach her final weight of 116 pounds. Her students witnessed her transformation and when she implemented the same program in her class, it had currency and the results were life changing. Combined, her class shed 100’s of unwanted pounds and learned about heart rate training. Most importantly, they gained a new fitness vocabulary, skills, tools and new lifestyle. It’s this new lifestyle that keeps them from joining the statistical trends of obese kids with long term health issues. This is proven, documented specific prevention. Sadly, it took more than a decade for this PE teacher to find a program that worked for both her and her students. There was a lot of missed "prevention opportunities" over those years and the worst part is that the PE teacher and school thought they were doing all that they could.

The Solution:
In most cases, prevention can't be found in a pill, many drugs treat symptoms not causes. More drugs and more health care professionals will not alone stop people from becoming ill. The genesis of this problem is our nation’s habit of consuming more calories than we burn off. It’s this national lifestyle that is making our population fat and sick. Recently the Health and Human Services Department issues new guidelines for healthy activity levels; “to end years of confusion about how much physical activity is enough, while making clear that there are lots of ways to achieve it”.

"The easy message is get active, whatever your way is. Get active your way," HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt told The Associated Press.

While we applaud this effort, we believe that the crisis demands more specific direction and action. Secretary Leavitt's guidelines have not ended the confusion, he suggests that health is about diet and exercise, yet he does not tell me or you how many calories we should eat in our diets or our specific training heart rate or how many push ups we should do. There is a wealth of new and well vetted information available about how to specifically use Heart Rate Training to safely shed body fat and total weight, these are the concepts that Lance Armstrong used to win the Tour De France seven times and are the same ones that our own clients use in their customized fitness plans.

We support Mayor Bloomberg of New York City and Governor Schwarzenegger of California in signing new laws that require all restaurants to include calorie information on menus. However, we would also suggest including on those menus a simple formula that provides each patron with the number of calories that they need to consume each day to maintain or shed pounds from their current weight (i.e. BMR Formula). These are easy yet specific additions to the ongoing efforts that add enormous value as they are directed at each person.

The Health Care Math:
Our Iron90 System is the only program in the marketplace that provides a customized daily caloric based meal plan and heart rate based training schedule. It is the only nutrition and fitness system that provides a specific plan to create a new lifestyle which rapidly sheds body fat, total weight and creates peak cardiovascular fitness. Every expert agrees that lasting weight loss is best achieved by a lifestyle change. Our Iron90 system is based in objective, proven science, because of this, we are able to make the claim that all 66% of the fat and obese population of our nation would not be fat or obese if they just followed our system (and, yes, we will put our money where our mouth is and give each person a 100% money back guarantee).

Health care costs are going up every year due to demand. Demand is increasing because we have more sick people. There are more sick people because more people are becoming fat and obese. More people are becoming fat and obese because of their lifestyle. Changing people’s lifestyle changes the economics of the health care problem, as demand goes down so will cost.

Speaking about cost, the cost of our 90 day customized program, which is based in science, proven to create a new healthy lifestyle, delivers weight loss and lasting fitness with a 100% money back guarantee, cost less than $300 and includes a heart rate monitor. According to the University Of Utah School Of Medicine, this is about the same cost as treating hypertension for 90 days which in most cases will be totally eliminated with our program. Thus, every $300 invested in prevention generates an estimated lifetime savings of over $60,000 per hypertension patient, this estimated saving does not include the socal cost of the illness, loss of product, increase life insurance cost, stress and more. Prevention programs with objective success metrics have been proven work.

Conclusion: 1 Oz. of Prevention Still = 1 Lb. of Cure
The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a report showing how obesity is spread via social networks. We have found that if this cycle works in the opposite direction. Once one of our client's sheds fat, total weight and gets fit, this client's friends and family members use our system to experience the same weight loss results. One person can make a differnce, our client's make this clear, they create ripples that influence everyone around them. Each of our clients, when following thier specific, customized program based in the best available science, have experenced successful weight loss results.

Our national health crisis is more pervasive and dangerous than our nation’s current financial crisis. We need a comprehensive health bail-out plan now complete with specific prevention actions, not general tips and suggestions. If you think the financial crisis is scarey, wait until you have a heart attack.