Tis the season of resolutions. I always hate to see how people start off with such positivity and idealism, plan to be stronger and healthier, and so often end up with that horrible stain of failure and resignation. Every year people fail to stop smoking. Fail to do enough exercise. Fail to lose weight. Then out come the excuses.

But I would like to throw an idea out there. What if no excuse was necessary? What if we stopped punishing ourselves and instead looked to real solutions? Real solutions that lie in understanding brain science and human behavior?

In the 1990s there was a study of more than 17,000 people done by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control that looked at how intense trauma and toxic stress during childhood leads to health problems as adults. Known as the “ACEs Study” (Adverse Childhood Experiences), it has become a defining study on how health professionals see individual health risk. We can easily imagine that having a lot of ACEs increases the likelihood of doing drugs, smoking, drinking and doing all those things that lead to health problems. Bad behavior goes along with a bad childhood, right?

But one interesting part of the ACEs Study is that the majority of the participants were white and college educated. We can’t stereotype that this applies to drug-ridden alleyways, we are talking about middle class Main Street.

Another interesting fact revealed in this study was that ACEs led to more than just addictive or bad behavior. In this huge group of more than 17,000 people it became quite apparent that there was a relationship between the number of ACEs a person had and their likelihood of having serious health problems that would otherwise seem unrelated, like heart disease and cancer.

Guess what the two leading causes of death are on the southern Kenai Peninsula? Heart disease and cancer. Just sayin’.

To continue reading this op-ed by Kyra Wagner, coordinator of Sustainable Homer and a member of the MAPP steering committee, go to: http://homernews.com/homer-opi...ect-with-others-more