Live data from Hacker News

Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

nhs.uk

31–40 of 173 posts

Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that any amount of alcohol is bad for you is about as surprising of a concept to me as vaping actually being bad for you. Drinking poison or filling your lungs with anything that isn't air is not healthy.

Presumably you are not including any mental benefits? Or consider 'stress' of any sorts as a non-health issue?

Or social benefits, depending on which country you live in. Way too broad to say that any alcohol is "bad for you".

Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

#32

Living a long and healthy life is simple, but it isn't easy. Which is to say almost everybody knows this, very few people live it. The toughest battle isn't yet again telling people that 1+1=2, but rather figuring out ways to make it more accessible to people (read: cheap, low time commitment) and more sustainable as a lifestyle. That's why ideas like HIIT[0] and IM[1] are interesting, not because they're superior to…

I love the example of HIIT. I discovered it inadvertently 10 years ago when I switched to recreational sprinting as a primary form of exercise. It results in excellent physical conditioning with a minimal time investment (about one hour per week total).

Establishing habits is difficult and complex. Finding highly efficient (in time, energy, drudgery, money, etc) ways to achieve a desired outcome is a critically important cornerstone of that process, in my experience.

Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

#34
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also have to factor in the opportunity cost of drinking...going for a drink after work instead of the gym? What comes next? Bar food with your beer and maybe a pizza? I'd rather have the work out, good meal, hydrate, and get good sleep. It's obvious that good habits snowball into more good habits, while bad habits snowball into more bad habits.

haha, this reads like some abstinence only sex education argument or something. don't let that one beer turn in to a good time! i think it's funny that having a good (if not optimally healthy) time would be so ridiculed, but maybe that's just me. FWIW i know a lot of people who work out at 4:30am in order to gain that time for after work social activities which often include alcohol, so not mutually exclusive.

I'm one of those people. Rather, it's gym at 5:30/6:00 AM so that I don't have to go later. Then I can have a pizza day and not feel guilty. Life's too short to live so puritanically, if you ask me. Some of the biggest eaters and drinkers I've known were also some of the highest performing athletes. I'm not fond of the habit of isolating each of these habits as if each of them are as statistically effective as they are in a vacuum.

Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

#35

This is one of the best general-audience presentations of a study I've seen. The "What kind of research was this?" section, with a quick explainer on cohort studies, is by itself a lot more context than many media outlets offer, and the other sections add up to an accessible primer on how this type of study is performed, no scientific background required. Excellent science communication from the NHS.

NHS's online communication is almost always excellent.

Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

#36
post #10
post #2

Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) . If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.

Quite surprising for me too. Or rather, I don't understand the unit they mention. From the article linked: also collected alcoholic beverage consumption, including red and white wine separately (4 ounces, increasing to 5 ounces in 2006), beer (one glass, can, or bottle), and liquor (one drink or shot). We multiplied the amount of alcohol in grams per specified portion size by servings per day, determined the midpoint…

A unit is 10ml of pure alcohol, roughly half a pint of 4% beer or half a glass of wine. This unit value is printed clearly on pretty much all alcohol containers. (In the US it seems incredibly difficult to find the ABV % for the drinks you buy.)

A bottle of beer is usually 330ml so 1.3 units, so moderate drinking would be defined as up to 2 pints or 3 bottles of 4% beer daily.

Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

#37
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that any amount of alcohol is bad for you is about as surprising of a concept to me as vaping actually being bad for you. Drinking poison or filling your lungs with anything that isn't air is not healthy.

Presumably you are not including any mental benefits? Or consider 'stress' of any sorts as a non-health issue?

Of course stress is a problem, but the thought that you have to drink to solve that problem is a terrible thought to me. It is unfortunate if this is what society thinks.

Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

#39
post #10
post #2

Surprising: one of the healthy habits mentioned is drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) . If I drank any alcohol on a daily basis, I would be scared that it would go downhill from there. Habits are hard to change, so better do not pick up bad ones at all. I'm convinced that just avoiding to do stupid things is half the battle already.

Quite surprising for me too. Or rather, I don't understand the unit they mention. From the article linked: also collected alcoholic beverage consumption, including red and white wine separately (4 ounces, increasing to 5 ounces in 2006), beer (one glass, can, or bottle), and liquor (one drink or shot). We multiplied the amount of alcohol in grams per specified portion size by servings per day, determined the midpoint…

A bottle of beer (say 500ml) at 5% strength would be 2.5 units, so not as much as 4 bottles a day [1]. Also worth noting that alcohol you buy in shops in the UK has the number of units printed on the label, so it's fairly easy to keep track of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_alcohol

Re: Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals

#40
post #12

How can I have a top40% healthy diet score? w

They didn't list this, but most things I've heard (eg, "How Not to Die" by Dr. Michael Greger who reads a lot of studies) is to eat a whole food, plant based diet. Might not have to give up meat completely, but the less you eat, the healthier you will tend to be.
Post reply on HN