What could you do with an extra 12 years?

by | May 28, 2010 | Alcohol, Cardiovascular health, Eating Naturally, Immune health, Natural Remedies, Naturopathic health

Twelve
Creative Commons License photo credit: swanksalot

“Eat right, exercise, die anyway.”

This was on a T-shirt given to me by a very skeptical person that eats no vegetables (except French fries/potatoes) or fruit (unless it’s juice), smokes, drinks alcohol like a pro and doesn’t exercise.

He also happens to be my brother.

He is fond of saying that he is going to outlive me – just for the sheer irony of it. However, chances are that will not happen.  Now there is even some data to prove it.

Last week, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a report that showed the 20-year consequence of four specific lifestyle factors: smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, low consumption of fruits and vegetables and a sedentary lifestyle.

Following 4,886 individuals over 20 years showed that avoiding just these four bad habits may lengthen your life by a full 12 years.

More specifically, these measurements were: current smoker (versus never or previous smoker), drinking more than two (women) or three (men) alcoholic beverages per day; consuming less than three servings of fruits and vegetables (combined) per day and getting less than two hours of physical activity.

This study puts numbers to what most everyone knows to be true, basic lifestyle factors have a significant and irreversible action on metabolism, which eventually lead to morbidity and mortality.

Said differently, it is what you do regularly (everyday) that determines the quality and quantity of your life.  Make healthy choices – including eating lots of fresh vegetables and fruit, not smoking, enjoying a drink or two and getting regular exercise – almost every day and you will live a longer, healthier life.

And just to be sure you’re covering all your bases, it would be a good idea to practice regular stress management (note that exercise will help with this, alcohol and smoking will not) and get 7-8 hours of sleep each night.

Excessive stress and sleep deprivation have been shown to not only decrease life span, they have also been found to contribute to increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and many types of cancer. Not to mention, people with high stress and/or little sleep are usually tired, cranky and not that much fun to be around.

In these days of debating how healthcare costs will be paid for, little discussion is centered around the fact that without individual responsibility and self-control—health care costs will continue to spiral out of control. The question is whether reports like this will be able to change behavior across a broad enough population to change the cost curve.

Pharmaceutical agents plainly cannot mimic the simplicity of these basic lifestyle modifications, and yet many clinicians have abandoned recommendations of the latter for the former.

Perhaps this latest report will give them a dozen more reasons to change their minds.

Lifestyle Therapies—A few recent studies: