Lesson 2, The Benefits of a Healthy Lifestyle

Make healthy lifestyle choices, eat the right food in the right amounts, exercise regularly, and not smoke and you will live a longer, healthier life. Do otherwise, i.e., eat too much of the wrong food, lead a sedentary lifestyle, and/or smoke, and you most likely will die prematurely and your last years will not be pleasant.

The benefits of making healthy lifestyle choices are huge. According to Dr. Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition of the Harvard School of Public Health:

The potential impact of healthy diet, when you combine it with not smoking and regular physical activity, is enormous. For example, our studies have shown that we could prevent about 82 percent of heart attacks, about 70 percent of strokes, over 90 percent of type 2 diabetes, and over 70 percent of colon cancer, with the right dietary choices as part of a health lifestyle. The best drugs can reduce heart attacks by about 20 or 30 percent, yet we put almost all of our resources into promoting drugs rather than healthy lifestyle and nutrition.

What Dr. Willett says is mainstream science.

Dr. Clyde Yancy, Past President of the American Heart Association, echoes what Dr. Willet says. According to Dr. Yancy by making healthy lifestyle choices and monitoring your health,

[g]ives people a 90 per cent chance of living to the age of 90 or 100, free of not only heart disease and stroke but from a number of other chronic illnesses including cancer....

So what's stopping you? The problem is that most people don't act until the situation is acute. Life goes on without a lot of difficulty even though a person is substantially overweight, has high blood pressure and cholesterol and is pre-diabetic. Unfortunately, the wake-up call, e.g., a heart attack, may come to late. Don't let that happen to you.

So what should you do? You should understand the benefits of making healthy lifestyle choices. Then act. Making healthy lifestyle choices will change your life.

Make healthy lifestyle choices and lead a longer, healthier life.

Category:

Education

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• nutrition
• exercise
• health
• fitness
• heart disease
• type 2 diabetes
• stroke
• colon cancer
• senior fitness
• lesson
• healthy lifestyle