All month, we’ve featured key health heroes and speakers from this weekend’s Longevity Now Conference. Bulletproof’s Dave Asprey told us about his daily health habits, holistic guru Lissa Rankin talked to us about fear and anxiety, and of course, our Guest Editor, David “Avocado” Wolfe filled us in on wellness protocols you may have never thought of. To wrap up the month on a high note, we’re shining the spotlight on one last health hero, a visionary in the wellness world, Dr. Joseph Mercola.

Dr. Mercola is not only a passionate advocate of natural medicine – he has actually succeeded in implementing much-needed changes to our current healthcare system. After 25 years as a family physician serving tens of thousands of patients, Dr. Mercola launched Mercola.com – the number-one natural health website on the web – and his written numerous books, including the brand new, Effortless Healing, that has us rethinking the way we approach pain relief and disease. Here are a few insights from Dr. Mercola on turning your health and immunity around for the better – no magic pill required…

As one of the leading physician advocates for using food as medicine, reaching many tens of millions through my website, you may think I have always been a healthy eater. The truth is that I wasn’t.

I was raised eating the typical American diet—bread, chips, doughnuts, and dessert after nearly every meal. I also had cavities in half my teeth filled with mercury before I reached adulthood. My face and back were riddled with acne.

Yet I never connected the dots between what I ate and my symptoms until well in to my medical career. This was largely due to effective media and marketing strategies of the junk food companies that are even more effective today.

When I started my medical practice thirty years ago, I thought the best way to address patient’s health complaints was to write a prescription.

My first wake-up call came from The Yeast Connection by William Crook, M.D. When I first read it in the mid-1980s, I ignored Crook’s nutritional advice and only prescribed antifungal drugs as treatment for yeast overgrowth. Not surprisingly, my approach failed miserably. Ten years later, I read the book again. This time, the nutritional guidance hit home. I started counseling my patients to change what they ate, and saw their symptoms evaporate.

That catalyzed a new direction for me as I traveled across the country nearly every month to conferences to learn how to apply nutrition to my medical practice. This new information worked and many of my patients started getting better.

It became clear that I could only treat tens of thousands of patients so I started a website to share this information that now reaches over ten million individuals every month. I refined my role from an expert responsible for ‘fixing’ patients to an educator who helps people unlock their own healing potential.

My staff and I review nearly a thousand articles a week and publish summaries and my commentary on the best ones in my daily newsletter. I also interview many of the leading health experts in the world.

Very few people have the time to read a thousand health articles a week which is why I started the newsletter. But I also realized many don’t have the time to review all my old newsletters and would like a condensed summary of the core principles on how to regain your health and not have to be in constant pain and take medications every day.

That is why I’ve distilled my learning and experience into 9 healing principles in my new book Effortless Healing. Remember, your body is an exquisite machine that is tuned to create health. The question to ask each time you prepare to eat or decide when to go to bed or what type of exercise to do is: Do I want to degenerate, or regenerate? The choice – and the power – is yours. Here are five of the nine principles from within the book.