Dr. Mercola here, welcoming you to another Question & Answer Video Update. Today's question comes to us from a reader who is concerned about their parents' well being. They write, wondering if it's too late for them to begin to eliminate trans fats, start eating organic food and doing all the other tremendously-wonderful things I recommend to help your body restore itself to health.

Now, you might think that their parents were 90 or 100 years old. But they're asking the question for parents who are 55 to 65. Of course, the answer is, it's not too late! Now, there are rare situations when it just may not make any sense to initiate these changes, and that is, for the most part, if you're pre-terminal. If you've got a week or two weeks to live, the likelihood of this health program being effective is pretty minimal. Unfortunately, we do see a fair number of people who come to visit us at the clinic in that situation, and we do the best we can. But at some point, you do reach a critical threshold where there's just not enough vital force left in the body to recover.

However, assuming you don't have one or two weeks left to live, there's a strong likelihood that it's going to help you. It is the best shot you have. Remember: You want to take control of your health. You want to get off of the medications that you're on, and you'll definitely want to do that carefully and prudently, to wean off of medications under the instruction and supervision of a trained healthcare professional, so as not to cause yourself damage from stopping medications precipitously.

Realistically, it is clearly the most powerful steps you can take, to stop harmful habits and substances and take control of your health, adopting a healthy lifestyle. Your body was designed to stay healthy. It wants to move towards health. It wants to move away from disease, as long as you give it the proper food/nutrition, remove yourself from toxic influences and have some system or process to address the incredible damage that it can be incurred from emotional insult.

If you're eating the right foods, if you're taking care of the emotional traumas that we all invariably go through, if you're removing yourself from toxic influences, your body will go towards health.

I personally believe that the current human genetic system is designed to allow us to live to be about 120. Clearly, all the evidence supports that it's very, very rare to see anyone above the age of 120, and I'm not aware of any authentically-documented incidence of humans living beyond that age. But does that mean that lifespan will always be as we now know it? I don't believe so. I think there's incredible, radical innovations in technology today that will literally, (highly likely in the next 20 years or so and maybe sooner), enable us to effectively extend our lifespan by another 50 years. Clearly, you're going to want to do everything you can to optimize the repair recovery system which you were born with. So, do the best you can to take care of your health.

I want to let you know that this week, mid-June, we just finished the first draft of Take Control of Your Health, and it's going to the printer. Hopefully, it will be available sometime in mid-June. It outlines a whole system, radical innovations and new variations on nutritional typing ^TM that we've just introduced, which simplify the process and make it much easier to do. Stay tuned for that.

I hope this information is helpful. Please know that it's really almost never too late to take control of your health.