Introduction

There are a lot of components which contribute to health, and I’m going to try to touch on the ones I consider most important here.

From my learnings, the core elements of health are as follows:

• nutrition
• exercise
• sleep
• mental health

In this section, I’ll talk about a number of different factors which contribute to health, leaving Nutrition and Exercise (no page yet) to their own sections.

There’s a lot of interplay between these elements, and we’ll see a lot of the same strategies for prevention and improvements to well-being coming up over and over again. After the table of contents, you’ll find the Four Horsemen—the diseases that make up the majority of deaths in the US (and worldwide).

— The Four Horsemen —

Together, the following four diseases or conditions make up ~54% of the annual deaths in the United States (data from 2022, CDC). These four are:

• heart disease
• cancer
• neurodegenerative disease
• metabolic syndrome (or complications caused by it)

We’ll talk about each and how it is caused and treated.

Heart Disease (ASCVD)

Heart disease is referred to as ASCVD—atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. ASCVD is a term for a number of disorders that come from a loss of elasticity and thickening of the walls of the arteries.

To understand how this happens, we need to have a base understanding of cholesterol and the associated particles.