Five critically important health habits….

Today's Post, Thursday, 5-28-2009

These 5 critically important health habits work with the three basic strategies.

1. Avoid things that harm your health.

2. Do things that support and protect your health.

3. Do enough of each of the first two things to be effective.

That’s why some recent news on the 5 critically important health habits is scary.

You might be very well advised to do better than most people now are doing by making a special point to be one of the few people who manage to do all 5. Doing all 5 tends to prevent cancer, type 2 diabetes, and all kinds of cardiovascular disease -- & increases your life span by up to 25 years. That means that you not only live 20 to 25 years longer, your healthy years go up even more. The amount of a quality life you get to live goes up sharply

Yesterday, LiveScience.com & other news services reported on an article published in the June 2009 issue of The American Journal of Medicine based on a survey they reported of Americans from 40 to 79 in age at two different time periods.

LiveScience.com slightly mistitled it as “American Diets Getting Worse.”

The real story is that fewer people in the United States did most of the five key health habits they surveyed and fewer did all five of them. In fact the percent of the people who managed to do all five dropped from 15 % to 9 % between the survey of 1988-1994 & the one done 2001-2006.

The five habits were:

1. Get regular exercise or comparable physical activity each week—at least 12 times a month.

2. Eat a total of 5 or more servings of vegetables and fruit or more on the average.

3. Moderate alcohol consumption (14 drinks a week or less with more than two a day infrequent for men and 7 drinks a week or less with more than one a day infrequent for women.)

4. Maintain a healthy weight (staying at a weight unlikely to mean more than 10 or 20 pounds of excess fat) – normally a BMI of 26.0 or less -- & for sure less than 30.

5. Not smoking.

And, three of the five saw declines.

1. Get regular exercise or comparable physical activity each week, at least 12 times a month –
went from 53 percent to 43 percent.

2. Eat a total of 5 or more servings of vegetables and fruit or more on the average–
went from 42 percent to 26 percent.

3. Moderate alcohol consumption–
went from 40 percent to 51 percent.

4. Maintaining a healthy weight– adults aged 40-74 years with a body mass index less than 30 went from 72 percent to 64 percent. (The article doesn’t say so; but the percentage of people at 26.0 or less also dropped as we know from other reports that show more people are now in the 25.0 to 29.9 category and fewer are below that.)

5. Not smoking–
went from 26.9 percent to 26.1 percent.

Even though these findings may partly reflect the aging of the baby boomers, the trends are so bad, clearly there are other causes.

Incredibly, the study also found that people with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, or risk factors for those conditions, were no more likely to do these 5 things than people without such risk factors.
These people literally were not taking action even when they began suffering because they had not done so.

(Part of that is due to the fact that their doctors simply have not been trained to ask them to, show them how, or help them do so or don’t even see that as their job or don’t find it doable given what they know and have time for.)

There are really only three things here.

Don’t smoke or stay where there is second hand smoke.

Follow the lifestyle that keeps you healthy, fit, and free of excessive body fat.

Follow the lifestyle that keeps you healthy, fit, and free of excessive body fat well enough that the scale and tape measure show you are doing it well enough to do the job.

A. Since Sunday, 5-31 is World No Tobacco Day 2009, tomorrow’s post will be on why to avoid tobacco smoke, second hand smoke, and tobacco with some tips on doing so. Of the habits it comes close to being the most important one to keep good health.

B. Here’s a few ways to follow the lifestyle that keeps you healthy, fit, and free of excessive body fat so that the scale and tape measure show you are doing it well enough to do the job.

1. Try to get in some walking each week; do at least two sessions of strength training each week even if you just do 20 minutes each with light weights; do at least 3 interval cardio workouts each week. And do the exercises with some extra effort and intensity once you get used to doing them.

2. Drink no soft drinks of any kind; discontinue ingesting any hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup; stop eating virtually all refined grain foods; eat sugar or foods containing it a few times a week or less rather than several servings every day; follow the guidelines on moderate drinking or drink a bit less.

3. Eat at least 3 servings of green or nonstarchy vegetables each day and more than 5 if you can manage it; eat at least one serving of fruit each day; and drink a glass of real fruit or vegetable juice each day but not more than 2 glasses of fruit juice. And eat organic produce to the best of your ability instead of pesticide and herbicide treated produce.

4. Eat healthy fat and oils only, avocados, raw or dry roasted nuts, extra virgin olive oil, and omega 3 oils from purified supplements or wild caught fish.

5. Eat healthy protein foods only, beef fed only grass, pasture raised only poultry, whey protein supplements, wild caught fish and seafood from unpolluted waters of kinds that do NOT over-accumulate mercury AND only eat nonfat or extremely lean meats and poultry or dairy products to the extent you can.

6. If you find you are too fat or too heavy or both, eat more vegetables, drink less alcohol, and ingest less sugar, or be more strict about eating only health OK things if needed, and increase the amount of exercise you get until you lose some of it. And keep track at least once a month to be sure you catch it if you start adding fat weight.