Making optimal food choices is an integral part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

The nutritional focus of the Pritikin Program is not elements like carbs or fat. Our focus is food, healthy food like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and seafood. Nothing we recommend is extreme, except that our recommendations are extremely healthy.

The doctors, scientists, and registered dietitians of the Pritikin Longevity Center base their nutrition recommendations for the Pritikin Program on a huge body of research showing that our health improves quickly and dramatically when we eat the foods our bodies are biologically designed to eat.

The fact is, our 21st century diet, high in salt, sugar, and saturated-fat-rich foods like cheeseburgers and fries, is killing us because it's so drastically different from the food our ancestors ate for hundreds of thousands of years.

Our ancestors' diets consisted of a lot of very high-in-fiber vegetables and fruits, some nuts, and for most, some seafood and/or very lean meat. This is the diet our human digestive systems evolved on. This is the diet we're designed to eat.

Since our 21st century diet is very new in evolutionary terms, just 100 years old, our bodies haven't had any chance to adapt to it. What we have, then, is a mismatch between what we ate as we evolved and the food we eat now, and the sad result is many of our modern health problems, including dangerously high blood pressure, soaring blood sugar levels, high cholesterol, and heart attacks.

But we also have the ability to get well real fast, as numerous studies on the Pritikin Program have shown. That's the gift of feeding your body the right fuel.

The Pritikin Exercise Program is based on scientifically proven principles and is designed to maximize your health.

The exercise component of the Pritikin Program is based on state-of-the-art science for losing weight, getting fit, and achieving optimal health. Every facet is designed to be simple, practical, and easy to follow wherever you are, from home to hotels.

The Pritikin exercise program also accommodates all levels of fitness - from those who have not exercised in years to athletes in training for marathons and triathlons.

The program encompasses three kinds of exercise:

• Cardiovascular,
• Strength training, and
• Stretching.

The benefits achieved with this three-pronged approach are enormous. Since 1975, the Pritikin exercise program has helped more than 100,000 Pritikin guests worldwide:

• Control blood sugar
• Normalize blood pressure
• Improve body composition (lose fat and gain muscle)
• Increase strength
• Increase flexibility
• Improve cholesterol levels
• Improve heart and lung capacity
• Reduce stress
• Increase bone density, and
• Enhance virtually all the fitness-related skills needed to enjoy daily activities, such as better agility, better balance, better coordination, more power, more speed, and better reaction time.

The foods we eat, our physical activity, and the emotions we feel are all intricately interconnected.

Reaching your nutrition and fitness goals is easier when you have the ability to reduce stress and cope with disturbing feelings such as anger and anxiety. Negative, irrational thoughts and unpleasant states of mind often cause emotional overeating and other barriers to healthy living.

The Pritikin Program teaches us how to use the powers of our mind to significantly increase the likelihood that we'll make the best choices for our health and well-being. Bottom line: Positive, healthy thoughts fuel positive, healthy behaviors.

Mind-Body Medicine originated more than 4,000 years ago in the East. Physicians in China noticed that illness often followed periods of frustration in their patients' lives. In the West, medical professionals now share the view that emotions, life events, and coping skills can have a very strong influence on health.

Using easy-to-launch techniques like relaxation training, guided imagery, and cognitive therapy, the Mind-Body component of the Pritikin Program focuses on three basic goals:

• Taking charge of our thoughts and feelings;
• Managing stress;
• Improving our relationships with others.