There's a revolution taking hold in the healthcare industry.

Over the last few years, a new way of discussing health, wellness and disease prevention has been rapidly gaining ground, and attitudes about exercise and nutrition are being completely transformed.

When we started Nutraceutics in 1994, nutritional science was still seen by many as some sort of alchemy. The American medical community had always acknowledged the value of fruits and vegetables as part of a balanced diet, but we never really stopped to ask why that balanced diet was so important.

We knew the playing field was changing when the National Institutes for Health (NIH) first began putting real dollars into research on alternative medicine. Although researchers around the world have been exploring non-pharmacological remedies for decades, this NIH move was a catalyst for a serious attitude adjustment within mainstream medicine.

Today, you can't pick up a newspaper without reading about some new research linking nutrition to wellness and disease prevention. A growing number of physicians are embracing the science of movement and nutrition, and many are even taking a proactive approach to helping patients incorporate the latest research into their daily lives.

Biochemists, pharmacologists, physiologists, botanists and nutritional scientists are collaborating as never before. Studies exploring the complex interactions of dietary intake, exercise and environmental factors on health are reported monthly in peer-reviewed journals around the world. This research is converging into a new, groundbreaking view of medicine that unites the science from many disparate fields into a holistic approach to wellness and prevention.

While we've come a long way, we still have a long way to go. Education is a start. We have to challenge ourselves to ask more questions, seek the latest clinical intelligence and then bring that data to public attention. We must do a better job of making the connection between a healthy diet and a healthy lifestyle-between the quality of what goes in our bodies and the quality of how we live. Only then will we truly understand that the key to a happier, healthier life lies not in a pill, but in ourselves.