Ed was having a very good night. It may have been a freezing Michigan
evening in the dead of winter, but Ed was glowing. He had just
bowled a perfect 300 for the benefit of his team, the third perfect
game of his life.

He had been bowling for decades, but these three scores were
all hallmarks of the past two years, as was his induction into the
Kalamazoo Bowling Hall of Fame. Life was great. Ed was at his peak.
Ten more pins went their separate ways as he nailed another
strike on the fourth frame of the next game. Returning to his chair, he
suddenly knew something was terribly wrong. Then, nothing.
Friends and family watched their Kalamazoo hero clutch his chest
and collapse. A tiny blood clot had suddenly formed in Ed’s heart. His
life simply stopped.

John Ritter’s darling daughter was celebrating her 5th birthday,
just a few days prior to her dad’s 55th. Her famous father was busy,
preparing to tape the latest episode of his hit television series, 8 Simple
Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.

While working on the set, he began to feel ill. Things quickly
went from bad to worse and Mr. Ritter was rushed to St. Joseph’s, the
same Burbank hospital where he was born. Several hours later, as a
team of surgeons struggled to repair his torn aorta, he died on the
operating table.

The sudden tear that ended John Ritter’s life was reportedly due
to a heart defect, an undetected problem Mr. Ritter may have had
since birth.

There are only a few stupid reasons people die—
they just happen to kill a whole lot of people.

Ed’s story made the national news because in the midst of personal
glory he dropped dead. John received even greater coverage
because he was well known to most Americans.

Every day, the lives of average, healthy-looking folks come to an
abrupt end, sending shock waves of misery through the lives of their
loved ones. Their stories may lack the tragic irony or celebrity status
to make them newsworthy, but for every John Ritter, there are a thousand
John Does.

As I write this, the first baby boomers are just hitting 60, and the
average life span in America is up to 78 years. And that’s great, since
life expectancy was only 40 years just a century ago.

Yet it’s a harsh statistical fact that in every group, somebody has
to fall below the average. This means that for all the spry characters
who make it to their 80s and 90s, an equivalent number of unlucky
souls die long before Medicare ever kicks in.

We’ve all seen it. A father dies suddenly of a massive heart
attack. A mother wastes away from cancer. End of story. No more
holidays, soccer games, or school plays to share with the family. Someone
else must walk their daughters down the aisle. Show up to your
next high school reunion, and you’re sure to hear about a few more.
Here’s the tragedy: Many of these people die in the prime of life
from common medical conditions we already know how to find and fix.
How could this happen? In most cases, it happens because no
one looked for or treated the problem the right way, in the right place,
at the right time.

Devastated friends and relatives, watching a loved one die, can’t
help asking if something could have prevented this life from ending so
soon. Whether the patient is suffocating from congestive heart failure
or battling a cancer consuming their body, the answer is often a heartbreaking
“yes.” It’s terrible to realize that someone you loved might
still have been with you.

Every year, tens of thousands of people “slip through the cracks”
and pay the ultimate price. And it’s not that we don’t care! Both the
health-conscious and the “worried well” in America spend billions of
dollars on products that promise to keep them healthy or ensure a long life.

If a fraction of this energy and money was applied to truly effective
screening, prevention, and treatment, death could be postponed
for tens of thousands of men and women.

There are countless “stay healthy” books to guide you through myriad
dietary and lifestyle changes, herbal and vitamin cures, and other instant
miracles to ensure your health and longevity. This is not one of them.

Even the books with good advice on healthy living don’t seem to
inspire and sustain meaningful changes. They just leave most readers
feeling guilty. Often, it seems impossible for busy people with too
many demands and not enough time to redesign their lifestyle.
Not that cutting back on junk food or taking time to exercise are
bad ideas; they’re not. But here’s the irony. Even if you pull it off—
exercise every day, eat only salad, fish and tofu, take vitamins, meditate,
and grow your own organic vegetables, you will only increase your
chances of avoiding a preventable early death by a tiny percentage.
In fact, if every citizen in this country ran five miles a day and
never again ate cholesterol-laden food, there would still be millions of
people like Ed, dying for stupid reasons, dying because of heart attacks,
strokes, cancers, and other diseases that could have been detected
and stopped.

This book is about real results. And real results for living longer
don’t come from good intentions and superhuman discipline. They
come from being smart about identifying and treating the things most
likely to kill you.

It’s not difficult to avoid the most common killers if you accept
that reducing your chances of dying young is worth a little effort and
money. That is what this book will help you do. Minimal scare tactics,
no false promises, and no reasons to feel guilty.

When people die prematurely, it’s rarely because they’re lazy,
simple-minded, or have a death wish. It’s because they’re misled.
But while it may not be their fault, they are part of the problem. If you
are an average, forty-plus American, you’re most likely focusing your
efforts to be healthy on the wrong things. Most of us plow headlong into
harm’s way because of some basic things we fail to do and because of one
thing we should never have allowed in the first place. I will bet that:

• You are not getting all the right tests to see if you have a
  life-threatening medical time bomb waiting to go off.
• You are not taking the medicine, supplements, or other
  treatments that can defuse that bomb.
• You are not separating useful health information from the
  hype, partial facts, and plain nonsense you get from the
  news media.
• But you are allowing accountants, bureaucrats, policy makers,
  and politicians to make major healthcare decisions
  for you, perhaps unknowingly.

Medical issues fascinate many of us and affect the health of all
of us. They also make juicy headlines, whether it’s Mad Cow prime
rib, the dangers of Phen-Fen, or the latest Avian Flu scare. Yet this
simple fact never makes the daily news:

Your number one, greatest risk of dying is from a
disease that can be prevented or successfully treated.
Apparently, this crucial message isn’t considered newsworthy.
Of course, there are a million ways to die. A meteorite could fall from
the sky and end my life in an instant. An inoperable brain tumor could
kill me in a few months, or I might just get onto the wrong plane at the
wrong time. I hope to avoid all three, but I don’t worry about them.
These possibilities and thousands like them are unavoidable, incurable,
or random tragedies.

Most of the time, however, death is a dreary, predictable intruder.
It comes in the guise of some health condition that can be detected
and arrested before it claims its victim. Yet, it slips in easily and frequently,
picking off friends and family because we aren’t paying
attention!

If there were hundreds of complicated things we need to do to
avoid such disaster, there might be an excuse for not taking action.
But, here’s the frustration: There are only a few stupid reasons people
die; they just happen to kill a whole lot of people….

This is an exerpt from Chapter 1 of Stupid Reasons People Die