Fighting Disease With Diet

My mom's long and painful struggle with cancer has really made me take a long, hard look at my own life.

We've all heard stories of people who "pointlessly" lived the "perfect" healthy life. They ate healthy foods, exercised regularly, didn't smoke, didn't drink excessively, and didn't do drugs. Yet they still ended up with fill-in-the-disease-here and died too young.

And we've also heard stories about very old people who lived extremely unhealthy lives. They ate nothing but potato chips and candy bars, they were sedentary couch potatoes, and they smoked 2 packs of cigs a day. And they also lived to be 90+ years old without a single major illness.

But health experts say that those people are the exception, not the rule.

So what's the truth? Is it all just a game of chance? Does living healthy really make a difference in the final outcome?

I've always believed that life is pretty much a craps shoot. But I've also believed that it's important to play the odds. By this I mean that healthy living doesn't guarantee a healthy life... but it does put the odds in your favor.

And to a certain extent... it's all about achieving some kind of balance between the "ideal" and the "realistic."

Or am I just deluding myself... and it's all just a matter of spinning the roulette wheel and hoping for the lucky number?