A healthy lifestyle does not guarantee good health

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Google “healthy lifestyle” before reading this article. The search engine will give you over a million results. This is not a small figure, but this is not surprising when you consider that the concepts of "health" and "lifestyle" have become practically inseparable. The conviction has grown in us that we can protect our health if we get down to business ourselves, but is this really so?

In a recent study, the Mayo Clinic reported that despite the general obsession with a healthy lifestyle, fewer than 3% of Americans actually adhere to it. In the study, a healthy lifestyle was defined as the sum of four components: sports, good nutrition, body fat content - up to 20% for men and up to 30% for women, smoking cessation.

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not live up to all four criteria. But even if you start to follow all these rules, this does not guarantee that health will improve. To truly impact your health, you need to shift the focus from following a healthy lifestyle to other, often much more important, factors.

Public health has focused on individual risk factors that can impair health. In 2010, the UN named chronic diseases “lifestyle diseases”, listing smoking, physical inactivity and poor diet among the factors causing these diseases. This way of thinking has been around for 50 years in the United States, when the Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 to examine the role of lifestyle in the development of cardiovascular disease. In the 1960s, scientists focused on the study of chronic diseases, and the attitude finally took shape in people's thinking: health depends on a healthy lifestyle.

However, public health researchers are now beginning to realize that lifestyle changes do not guarantee health changes. In 2001, the National Institutes of Health conducted an 11-year study in more than 5,000 adults with type 2 diabetes. The aim of the study was to find out if intensive lifestyle interventions aimed at weight loss can reduce the likelihood of cardiovascular disease, which can occur in people with type 2 diabetes. As a result, the study participants lost weight, but the incidence of heart problems did not decrease.

The idea that lifestyle changes can lead to better health is tempting. This seems to be an opportunity to take control of health. As if you can guess what ailments you are facing and avoid them. Like a train: you see an approaching train and, in order to keep your life and health, you just have to get off the rails. But with illnesses, this method will not work.

Our ability to predict a person's chances of getting a particular disease is extremely limited. Too many factors affect the level of risk of getting sick: social, environmental, even economic and political. Therefore, it is easier to assess the state of health of a nation than to predict the state of health of an individual.

It is almost impossible to predict if you will get asthma. An African American child living in the United States, on the other hand, is 6% more likely to develop asthma than his white counterparts. This prognosis relates to the underlying factors that have historically shaped the health of the African American community in the United States.

Let us repeat: it is extremely problematic to predict individual health risks, but it is possible to understand what ailments threaten a certain society. To tackle these dangers, we must address their root causes, which means we must shift the focus from research to find a cure to research to protect public health.

For example, the organization raises money for research that seeks to identify environmental factors that trigger breast cancer. Thus, the organization seeks to reduce the overall incidence rate.

There are, of course, some lifestyle aspects that can increase your cancer risk: obesity, smoking, drinking alcohol, and neglecting sunscreen. But the man decided to reduce the risk of getting cancer: he lost weight, quit drinking and smoking. At the same time, the carcinogenic smoke from the environment, which he constantly breathes, negates all these potentially beneficial changes in lifestyle.

Until we seriously begin to deal with external health threats, no lifestyle modifications will lead to a decrease in the number of diseases.

In 2009, Dan Buettner gave a TED talk about how to live to be 100. He emphasized the importance of the "optimal longevity formula" - a lifestyle that will significantly increase the chances of living happily ever after. The video has received over 2.5 million views.

It's great that so many people are interested in self-improvement: the desire to stay healthy is admirable and no one should be discouraged from striving for well-being. But the sad thing is that by putting lifestyle above other fundamental causes of disease, we risk overlooking the factors that lead to massive occurrence of disease.