With the Affordable Care Act, close to 32 million legal residents of the US should now have health insurance of some kind. While this is a great start and provides a safety net for catastrophic illness, it does nothing to address the question of what eats up to $ 2.3 trillion (or 16% of our GDP) every year. We have lost our competitive edge in manufacturing and if we continue on this trajectory, we will lose our service industries over the next decade. While we spend 80% of our health-care dollars on 5 health problems (diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes and cancers), all of these can be significantly impacted by the life-style choices we make. These health problems correlate directly with food choices, portion sizes, lack of physical activity and smoking. The #1 thing we can do to reduce our health care cost while improving our health is to focus on life-style! Focus more lifestyle issues like nutrition and physical activity, stress management and sleep. In the United States we spend around 10% of our income on food. In the rest of the developed world it is closer to 20% (and in places like India, it might be as high as 50%).The ample availability of inexpensive high-calorie food does not mean that it is nutritionally complete: in fact most of our highly processed diet in nutritionally bankrupt. Our population is over-fed and malnourished at the same time. Why is it that we spend more on medical care than we do on food and it’s the other way around in Europe and Japan? Couple that with our sedentary lifestyle, over-booked and over-stressed lives, and we have a lethal combination. We would do a lot better with a more plant based diet (eaten slowly, mindfully) and 60 minutes of any physical activity which we enjoy every-day than by taking more pills to prevent health problems. We need to shift the focus to self-care: that is the essence of health. There is nothing selfish about self-care! Taking better care of oneself is the most radical act of compassion one can perform. Taking care of our own health is the most powerful way in which we can make a difference for the world. By focusing on eating the right foods, physical movement and stress management, we can reverse the effects of heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, creating true health and living longer, richer and more vibrant lives: this is the true purpose of health.