It makes sense that someone who was a slave for a good portion of his life would call freedom “the only worthy goal.” What doesn’t is that same someone contends he had been free, in actuality, the entire time he had been enslaved.

A bit of a puzzler, huh?

Not if you know the slave’s name, Epictetus, and that he eventually became one of the great Stoic philosophers. During his servitude, Epictetus displayed such intelligence that his master Epaphroditus granted him freedom on one condition.

That he study under the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus and then return to teach him what he had learned.

That return occurred nearly two thousand years ago. While there’s no written account of it, it’s safe to assume what Epictetus shared with his ex-master is contained in The Enchiridion, aka The Handbook, a manual for better living based upon Epictetus’s later lectures.

The Handbook begins with a simple statement, for sure: “Some things are up to us and some are not.” It’s because the acknowledgment and awareness of that fact is something Epictetus believes is absolutely necessary.

For true freedom, that only worthy goal, can only be achieved “by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.” Things like the weather, the traffic, the stock market, and — in far more situations than you may imagine — what other people think of you.

Here’s one thing I think of you. That you want to be free from ill health.

To achieve that, just alter Epictetus’s advice a bit.

Never disregard things that lie within your control. Things like your blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood cholesterol levels, and whether or not you smoke.

These four are specifically mentioned since a study published last month by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that disregarding one or more of them is inexorably linked with three of the worst sorts of ill health: heart attack, heart failure, and stroke.

Researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago and Yonsie University in Seoul, South Korea undertook the study because, as senior author Philip Greenland, MD, tells Medical News Today, recent studies have suggested the contrary. That unhealthy levels of the aforementioned four modifiable risk factors are “often absent” in people who experienced heart attacks and similar cardiac or vascular diseases.

Greenland and his colleagues, however, felt these recent studies had to be missing something, a something that would emerge by studying “long-term data sources.” So they did.

They studied two, one from the Korean National Health Insurance Service and the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, a medical research study involving more than 6,000 men and women from six communities in the United States.

These provided information amassed over the course of 13 to 19 years on more than 9.3 million adults, and that information refuted what’s been found in the recent studies. In essence, Greenland and his colleagues’ work revealed that you control whether or not you have a heart attack, heart failure, or a stroke to the nth degree.

They discovered that by uncovering the converse. That study participants who suffered a heart attack, heart failure, or stroke had one or more of what the American Heart Association defines as less-than-ideal health factors — having high blood pressure, high blood glucose, and high total cholesterol levels, and being a smoker — 99 percent of the time.

Another less-than-ideal health factor is metabolic syndrome, what the National Institute of Health calls “a group of conditions that together raise your risk of coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and other serious health problems.” The conditions are having a large waistline, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high blood triglycerides, and low HDL, or good, cholesterol levels.

If you have at least three of the five, it is said you have metabolic syndrome.

And a recent study published in the August issue of Neurology has found if you have metabolic syndrome, you also have something else. An increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

These researchers used another long-term data source, the U.K. Biobank, and considered data accumulated on more than 450,000 Brits whose average age was 57 at the start of the information accumulation. They were followed for 15 years and about 38 percent of them had metabolic syndrome.

In an article about the study for Medical News Today, Corrie Pelc reports that after all the numbers were crunched, it came to light that those with metabolic syndrome were about 40 percent more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than people without the syndrome.

What’s “particularly striking” is the dose-response relationship between the two, according to Michael S. Okun, MD, the director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at University of Florida and one of the experts Pelc cites in her article. “In simple terms,” Okun says, “the more features of metabolic syndrome you have, the higher your Parkinson’s risk.”

Which is just one more reason for you to never disregard any health matter that lie within your control.