How Small Health Choices Turn Into Chronic Disease

Founder & Practitioner, Golden Path Alchemy
- Discover why chronic disease doesn’t appear overnight, and how small, repeated choices quietly push the body toward breakdown or resilience over time.
- Understand how relying on systems, prescriptions, or assumptions about ‘safety’ disconnects people from their body’s natural ability to heal and adapt.
- Learn how reclaiming daily health decisions, such as sleep, movement, nutrition, stress, and environment can shift your biological trajectory at any age.
Full Transcript
Opening on Health Choices 0:00
Every time you make a good choice, you're making a deposit. But every time you make a bad choice, you're withdrawing from that deposit, from that account. So unfortunately, most people are living with a bank account that is deficient and is in a negative. According to Warren Buffett, 96% of Americans live on credit cards. And that's his biggest concern about the economy and the welfare, financial welfare of individuals. Well, when it comes to our health, it's the same thing. And what's interesting about both scenarios is that it is a choice.
So you can't blame it on an outside entity. Your body, if you make a good choice, you will be healthier. But if you make it by choice, you cannot complain about your health issues because it's your choice. What if aging isn't about slowing down, but leveling up? I'm Dr. Isaac Jones. This is the Longevity Leaders podcast. Hi, I'm Dr. Ashley Beckman here on the Longevity Leaders podcast, and I have the special guest, Dr. Fab Mancini. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. So we're very interested.
You have a brand new book. Can you go into what inspired you to write this? You know, I had another book coming out in January that I wrote during the pandemic. It's my fifth book. And I wanted to help people pivot and be able to respond to the circumstances in a more positive way.
Why Fab Mancini Wrote Self-Health 1:34
But when I saw that Bobby Kennedy got accepted or nominated as HHS Secretary, and I was very honored to be invited to the inauguration. And we had an incredible Maha Ball. And I have been supporting Bobby over the last four years before that. And I said to myself, you know, the administration is going to make some changes. But at the end of the day, who's still going to talk to the individuals about potentially thinking differently about the choices they're making every day? So I said to him at the inauguration, I said, Bobby, I'm going to write a book test for you and for the administration that will go to the 80% of the public that does not subscribe to the way that we live and the way that we think.
And as I was praying about it and writing, it came up the title self-health. And the reason that I've been in the self-help movement for over 45 years, and I said to myself, what if all of a sudden the self-health movement can surpass? the self-help movement, because there's no higher priority than your health right now before you can improve any other area in your life. If you don't have your health as your foundation, then you're never going to be able to reach your full capacity or potential as a human being.
And I wanted to be able to write it from a perspective that is very layman's term for individuals to understand how do we really reverse chronic disease. So that's the mission of the administration. So I wanted to bring it down to the individual and empower them and said, look, the government is going to restructure HHS. The government is putting pressure on food companies to change some of the things they're putting in it. The government is going to be doing new studies to showcase some of the biases of previous studies that were showing people that certain pharmaceuticals were safe and effective.
But at the end of the day, the government cannot force you or not force you to make a decision towards your health that day. So the essence of the book is to show people that the only thing that reverses chronic disease is your ability to make a better choice today when it comes to your health than the one you made yesterday. And all I'm asking them to do is to make one. I love that. And then from there, I explained what is chronic disease, how is it that we got here, why is it that we can't give the most precious thing that we have, which is our health, to others that may or may not have our best interests at hand.
How is it that the healthcare system got to be so broken? Why in the United States we rank one of the worst countries in the world when it comes to our health? Why is it that chronic disease is 90% of the healthcare cost? Why is it that 76% of Americans have a chronic disease? Why is it that over 45% of the children in America have at least one chronic disease? That's the thing that I wanted to solve by empowering the individual to make a better choice every day. And that's the thing with working with clients, you know, a lot of this is overwhelming to them, right?
And then they do assume that just because things are made that they're safe and that it couldn't lead to disease, right?
Self-Health vs Self-Care 5:09
So if you can buy it in the store, buy it at a pharmacy, that it's safe. And we know that they're not, and that a lot of this accumulation is creating and adding to these chronic illness epidemic that we have, right? So one thing I would say, too, that was kind of interesting to me is how you picked the title, because this movement for self-care is huge. And for a lot of women, it's adding all this new pressure of their to-do lists of self-care. But the terminology of self-healing is different, right?
And it's more nurturing. Yeah, and you know, the self-care movement, and I've been part of that for a long time, had never really taken off. It helped a lot of people, but it really didn't take off the way that we would have expected it. And for me, the self-health, my previous book that I did 12 years ago was called The Power of Self-Healing. And that became number one in 12 countries, translated in eight languages. And the message in that book was your body has the ability to heal itself. It is set up with organs and systems and cells that are designed to actually keep you healthy.
So all of that was a great awareness. People loved it. They began to be empowered. But then this book takes that story now to another level. Yeah, we know that the body can heal itself, but if I'm making bad choices, my body is going to struggle and it's going to break down. And I only have one body. You know, I can, if I live in a house or an apartment, I don't have to take care of it because I can always move. If I have a car and I don't do the maintenance properly and I don't change the oil and I don't wash it or whatever, I can always trade it in.
If I have bad shoes, right, if I have shoes and I wear them out and I don't take care of it, I can always buy a new pair of shoes. But where are you going to change your body? You have no options. This is the only body we get. We might as well take care of it. If you're a medical doctor, nurse practitioner, chiropractor or other health expert that's stuck in a broken system, There's a better way. The Freedom webinar shows you a proven five step system to build a seven figure virtual health practice or how to modernize your current brick and mortar practice without the burnout.
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Daily Choices and the Backpack Analogy 7:54
And we do have so many choices every day, right? Every meal, every thought, you choose to exercise or not, hop in the sauna or not, right? To me, it's, again, very important to give people their power back because there's so many things we don't have control over. But your choices you do, and especially in regards to your health. Well, in the book, I gave the metaphor that think of yourself as you're going through life and you get a backpack. And in that backpack, every single day, you can choose to make a good or bad health choice.
So let's say that I'm not going to sleep long enough because I'm going to stay up all night watching TV or playing video games. Or, I'm not going to manage my stress whenever, you know, so I'm not going to do any meditation or prayer or breathing exercises. And I'm not going to watch what I eat and I'm going to buy processed foods or fast foods and that's going to be 90% of my meals. Or potentially I'm not going to go to the gym or even walk at all. I'm just going to stay sitting the way, you know, one of the biggest syndromes right now is called the sedentary syndrome, which means that over 87% of Americans mostly sit all day long or lay down all day long.
They don't move their bodies. And that's one of the main reasons for the obesity and the weight gain that we have in our country. So every time you make a bad decision, it's like putting a rock on your backpack. But every time you make a good decision, it's like actually taking it off. So I tell people, I say, look, you can live very healthy with a backpack on. But just make sure that you're removing those rocks as much as possible. And if you find yourself like me, I'm going to turn 60 and you never did anything for your health and you think, is it too late?
No, it's not too late. Because you can detoxify your body right now in simple ways. You know, you can do fasting, which is one of the best ways that I have found to detoxify the body. Right now, there's a lot of concern about people that are learning about some of the chemicals that were in the vaccines, and they're trying to find ways to detoxify themselves. And we have incredible people like Dr. Mercallo and many others that have created great protocols towards that. You have other people that are finding out that our water has over 232 toxic elements, including the worst things you can imagine.
Maybe now I'm going to start drinking or filtering every single water that I drink. It's amazing how many people still drink tap water, right? And so again, I think because we've been in this field a long time, you've been in it much longer. The things that we've become accustomed to, we forget that sometimes those foundations aren't in place for everybody. In my estimation, it's over 80% of the people out there. They, for whatever reason, has never decided to put health as a priority. They wear their bodies out to the point of no return.
I'll give you a perfect example. I'm an early riser, so I go work out first thing in the morning. And in my gym, there's a very famous cardiologist that never misses a day. So one day I happened to just be in the locker room with him and I said, do you mind if I ask you what motivates you at this stage in your life to work out so hard? And I said, Fab, I get reminded every single day. I have patients coming to me with all kinds of problems, blocked arteries, all kinds of cardiovascular issues. And I give them the recommendations of how to prevent that from happening.
They just won't do it. And they show up, so I do a procedure, whatever surgery, and they'll show up three months later, four months later with another problem because they choose not to change their lifestyle. And that was his motivation. And he said, I'm not going to end up like one of my patients. And to me, that kind of was a very interesting impact that he had in me because doctors are recognizing through their patients that even what they're doing is not working. When we have so many people sick right now in the United States over the last 10 years, the number one reason for personal bankruptcy in a person's life
Detox, Chronic Disease, and Lifestyle Risk 12:40
is a health issue. It's over 65%. So can you imagine that people out there are going broke just because they're not putting attention to their health? What if they just, like a lot of times people say to me, you know, Fab, I just don't have time to make these changes. And I say, well, how would you like for me to keep you from going broke? Because that's where you're heading. You're going to end up bankrupt like so many Americans right now that chose the same attitude. I believe that we live in a very special time right now because we're questioning more than ever.
The pandemic did something very unique and that is that it made people realize that the information we were given might have not been the accurate information or even thought through properly. And that might have had even an ulterior motive. Right. And all of a sudden, many other countries chose not to follow the protocols that you we in the United States enforced. And I was looking at studies in Turkey, for instance, where this first happened. Turkey was one of the first countries that had identified ivermectin as one of the best possible solutions for reducing the symptoms of the pandemic, COVID-19, and they published it.
And in the United States, they refused to share that publish. Doctors were told not to talk about it. We didn't see it in any of the journals. We had to actually go in and find out where all these people were publishing. It was in their countries because we in the United States chose not to do that. So I think it's important for every single person that's listening to this to realize that maybe everything I've been taught was not correct. Right. I have a tagline in my book, in the back of my book that says, what if everything you've been taught about your health is wrong?
And I did that purposely because I want people to think. I want people to question. I want people to look at the evidence out there that we have plenty of evidence that we're reversing diabetes. Even though there are so many people that think, oh, I've been diagnosed with diabetes and they think of a life sentence. And you're going to have to learn to live like this and take all this medication for the rest of your life. And it's fairly easy to reverse in the pre-diabetes. We figured that out years ago.
Neuropathy, right? I have so many doctors, friends of mine that are reversing neuropathy over 80% of the time. But patients are told there's nothing we can do for you, but one day we may have to amputate your foot because of it. I mean, imagine, and this is the craziness that people are living that they just have accepted. that I'm going to learn, I have to learn to live not feeling good. The headache is normal. I have not had a headache. I can't even imagine over 40 years. I don't even know what that's like.
But you talk to most people and a headache is normal. Stomach after you eat, right? Not normal, but common. Most people think it's normal though. Oh yeah, I ate a hamburger or I ate a cheeseburger or I ate a pizza and I'm going to have heartburn so I have to take this. Right. They think that that's a normal lifestyle and little do they know anything about the gut biome. Little do they know how the gut is associated not only with your brain but your immune system. Little do they know that this could be the answer to many of their symptoms if they just happen to spend a little time nurturing that system and improving it.
And learning to feel how their body is, right? I think so many people are out of touch with the way they feel because they are used to feeling bad, that those things are normalized. And then they don't really have the experience of realizing that your food shouldn't make you feel bad. You should just feel normal after and ideally even energized. But people are so disconnected from that reality, sadly. Well, and I also, one of the things that I've been sharing with people is the understanding that for years we have had very basic testing from blood to urine in pretty much any doctor's office that you go to.
Yes. And that testing is very limited. And in fact, that testing has been designed to actually prove that you have a condition, so therefore the medication that we're offering you can be justified. But in functional medicine, We have had for years the ability to test beyond the basics.
Testing, Genetics, and Functional Medicine 17:28
You know, when genomics came into the picture, I remember we started doing all this saliva testing where now we can even determine which medications could actually be life-threatening for us. And that's a test that everybody should do and carry with them whenever they end up going to a doctor or even a hospital. I agree. It's crazy to me that they're not tested for that before being put on antidepressants or any medication. It should be like getting a driver's license, right? What is going to be your genetic makeup so we make sure that we don't kill you in the hospital?
I recently had that happen to me. The wife of a dear neighbor friend of mine, very successful guy, retired, went to his medical doctor, got prescribed an antibiotic and ended up dead a few weeks later because of a reaction that was already in that body system, but nobody was aware of because he never did that testing. And the doctor was looking at his wife because they were friends and couldn't be more apologetic because he had no idea. It's not in their training. And then I started looking at all the functional blood testing for markers.
We have these things called markers that can actually identify a disease process before it even becomes symptomatic because most of us don't even know that there's something wrong until we have a symptom. But little do we know that that disease process has lived in our bodies for years, sometimes decades, before they express themselves into a symptom. So now we have the ability to actually test ourselves through dysfunctional testing that can give you an indication of where is my body beginning to struggle.
And let's work on that now while it's fresh, instead of 10 years later when there's so much damage already to the organ, to the cell, and almost maybe reversible at that time. And then what's amazing too is a lot of these labs that are newer, right, we can see if it's mold or metals or gut pathogens and then see why those markers are getting elevated, right? So the science has improved exponentially and we have so many more tools, which is really helpful. Yet, when they go to their doctor, unfortunately, they only see something flagged in the red, which means it's already in the disease process, and it's a bit late.
Well, you mentioned mold, which has been in this space for many years. Most people never test their home for mold until there's a problem. We know that most insurance companies don't cover mold because they know. They know that most houses have mold in it. And if we, I mean, I've had friends of mine that there was one in particular in California, a doctor that very successful, her and her children and her husband all struggled with mold in the house, but they didn't know it was mold and it was too late and everybody got very sick.
So finally they did the mold testing and they had to then cleanse their bodies from the mold. They moved houses and now they're thriving. But they went through years of agony and some of these conditions were very painful that they experienced. And her message right now to everybody is every household needs to be tested because you just don't know. And if you happen to live in an environment, that is toxic, then it's going to toxify your body to the point of breaking it down and be creating an illness that unfortunately could be life threatening.
That was part of my health journey with mold and Lyme. And so it became my focus because 95% of all my clients have mold exposure and most of it's significant. And all the little kids that do are very sick at a young age. So if we can change their health trajectory and get rid of that, it opens up a much more abundant life for them. To me, in the book, it's interesting because I talk a little bit about what are some of these things that they're hearing out there that have become very popular. Not only the diagnosis testing and all of that, but things such as stem cells.
There's a lot of information out there in science supporting, from a regenerative medicine perspective, how stem cells have really altered the lives of people. And then peptides now have become one of the most popular things out there, but most people don't even understand because the only peptides they think
Mold, Lyme, and Environmental Toxins 22:08
about are the pharma peptides that are primarily geared towards weight loss that have now been shown to show some significant side effects. But peptides are a natural response and it's a chain of amino acids that kind of guide the signals to the body to tell the body what it needs and where it needs it. And there are very natural peptides out there that are responding really well with very little to no side effects. And people needed to understand that. And then there's this movement of biohacking that people say, oh, I don't even know what it is, but I went to these fancy things.
And there's things such as red light and cryotherapy. And you have cold plunging and hyperbaric chambers of oxygen and all these things. And I wanted them to understand that there's science behind all of this, and these are just tools that you can choose to implement into your life or not. I mean, here, you know, we're celebrating longevity, and longevity is something that has become extremely popular, not just for the sake that we all recognize that we have the ability to live beyond 120 years old, More importantly, it's the quality of our lives today.
And that is really where I think the longevity component has really taught people that if I want to live longer so I can be with my loved ones longer, so I can enjoy my life longer, so I can enjoy my success longer, I need to pay attention to what I'm doing right now. Because if I don't, I mean, they have this thing called now the biological age, right? So you have your chronological age and now your biological age. And a friend of mine that is in this movement wrote a book called 30 is the New Hundred.
Right? Or 100 is the new 30. Either way, people are reversing their age right now by paying attention to what are the things that could actually limit me from living a long, healthy lifestyle. And we have that ability right now, not only through genomics, but we have all this functional testing. And then, of course, when the world of epigenetics came into the picture, it was showing us that less than 15% of our conditions are genetically related. 85% is more epigenetic, which is the environment, the lifestyle.
And this is really where longevity is really making a big point, that unless we begin to embrace our lifestyle choices, we will never achieve the longevity that we want. So in my book, I give, after every chapter, I did a 30-day challenge where I'm sharing with the reader one or two or three things that they could consider doing every week for 30 days. And all I'm asking them to do is at least one of them a week. Right. So just do one a week and then pick another one the next week. And within 30 days, hopefully you would have seen some changes that will inspire you to want to do more.
Stem Cells, Peptides, and Biohacking 25:18
But more importantly, they say that it takes 21 to 30 days to build a new habit. So I wanted them to give themselves permission to go 30 days. So hopefully, they're going to be able to have a new habit that will lead them to a better outcome when it comes to their health. Yeah, and it honestly can be as simple as that. And I love your backpack analogy, right? Because it is our choices every single day. And that's the thing about epigenetics and genomics, right? We have a lot of power that we're giving away, and it's time to take that power back.
And you're giving people ways to do that every single day. You know, I used another analogy that I love and that is that if you think of our bodies as a banking account and all of a sudden you make good choices every day, it's like putting a deposit. Every time you make a good choice, you're making a deposit. But every time you make a bad choice, you're withdrawing from that deposit, from that account. So unfortunately, most people are living with a bank account that is deficient and is in a negative.
And overdrawn. They're overdrawn, similar to the way that according to Warren Buffett, 96% of Americans live on credit cards. And that's his biggest concern about the economy and the welfare, financial welfare of individuals. Well, when it comes to our health, it's the same thing. And what's interesting about both scenarios is that it is a choice. So you can blame it on an outside entity, your body. If you make a good choice, you will be healthier. But if you make it by choice, you cannot complain about your health issues because it's your choice.
And that's what I said in the book. Your health is your choice. Period. It's not the genetics that you think it is. It's not your company not doing certain things. It's not the government not doing certain things. It's not Medicare and Medicaid not doing certain things. It's what I'm doing every single day that's making the biggest difference in the health. And that's what I wanted to hopefully grasp so they can feel like, okay, I'm going to take ownership of this health. I want to go on this self-health journey and I want to make myself healthier, even if you just do it 30 days at a time.
Longevity, Epigenetics, and the 30-Day Challenge 27:48
I love that. It's easy to implement as well. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can we find your book? If you go to my website, drfabmancini.com, drfabmancini.com, from there you can get the book. You can also follow me if I have any events coming up. You can get over $1,000 worth of resources on how to reverse chronic disease for free, because I've just wanted to give away as much as possible for people to realize that You know, they have resources that they can use. And then also for doctors, what's interesting is that the doctors are buying it by cases of 50, and they're giving it to their patients.
So their patients are now referring to them, their family members, because in the book, It's so simple to read and they have a change immediately, so they want to share it with somebody else. And then I teach them to just say, whenever you read a chapter, even though it may not apply to you, if you think of somebody in your life that may be struggling with that, would you mind referring them to us so we can help them as much as we're helping you? And that's what creates that referral mechanism. And that's how I want it to impact the millions of people is because through the providers, we can reach millions and millions of people just by them simply sharing the message of the book.
Well, it's an amazing undertaking, and I'm glad that you've written all of the books you have.
Health as a Choice and Where to Find the Book 29:28
And so this is timely and really, again, bite-size information, too, that people can implement on a day-to-day basis for lasting change. So thank you for all your work. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Longevity Leaders podcast. A Longevity Leaders community is on a mission to transform 100 million lives by 2040. If you enjoyed this show, please share this with somebody that you know, especially another doctor or physician, but also click that follow button. Until next time, stay strong and live long.

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