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

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

#121

Post by ecwilson »

izzydata wrote: post #11
_Microft wrote: 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.

That one doesn't make any sense to me. Alcohol is basically poison. Perhaps small amounts of it won't do any harm to you, but how could it possibly have a positive effect on your health?

I've always assumed it was one of two things:

1. The social benefit. There's research showing that if you have a rich social life and friend network, you live longer. The assumption being that the drink is likely to be with other people.

2. The stress management benefit. It's not healthy to be stressed out. The alcohol's mitigating effect on stress may be greater than the alcohol's poisonous effect, in the right dose, for the right person.

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

#122

Post by nradov »

1e-9 wrote: post #81
TurkishPoptart wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any way for lazy people to get started with HIIT without going to a gym?

Yes! One set of jump squats as high and as rapidly as you can do them without pause, until fatigued. Rest two to three days afterwards. Once you get into a habit where you hate to miss a workout, switch to doing burpees instead. You can do this anywhere, including a hotel room, so it minimizes reasons to skip. It is surprising how much this works your cardio as well as strength. You can get super-fit doing this one t…

The guests in the room below would appreciate it if you utilized the hotel fitness center instead of doing burpees in your room.

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

#123

Post by Someone1234 »

bosie wrote: post #107
Someone1234 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of my links very specifically look at adherence rates. > Results: Dietary adherence remained high throughout the controlled food intake phase (days adherent: 86%) and the self-selected food intake phase (days adherent: 89%). And: > For both groups, moderate intensity, intermittent exercise showed excellent adherence and this may be a useful model for future research studies. So I'm not sure, having read both lin…

Both of your links have nothing to do with general population adherence rate though. They are adherence rates within a pre-selected group of people for a specific study (apologies if i am reading this wrong). I was actually surprised by the low adherence rate. The studies were done on small sets of folks for a very short period of time (2/8months) with little effort to adhere and yet the participants couldn't even do…

> They are adherence rates within a pre-selected group of people for a specific study (apologies if i am reading this wrong).

Yes, that's generally how studies work.

> The studies were done on small sets of folks for a very short period of time (2/8months) with little effort to adhere and yet the participants couldn't even do that.

You have to view it in context, diet and exercise changes have a very low adherence rate historically. It may be "low" but even that is a marked improvement over a lot of the alternatives.

You asked for data that showed these strategies had good adherence rates, which I provided. I could find additional studies, but those too would have a scope and would therefore be dismissed just as readily. I don't have a population-level study to link.

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

#124

Post by tluyben2 »

DenisM wrote: post #83

> drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) This part Of “stay healthy” advice has always puzzled me - it looks like full blown alcoholism. Am I way off?

Is alcoholism not actual dependency on alcohol? As in not being able to leave it from one day to the next? If people drink 15 beers/day it is unhealthy but if they can quit tomorrow for months (or ever), it is not alcoholism right? Many people know it's unhealthy to consume enormous amounts during december (I know plenty who do a few bottles of wine per day per person) and then just quit 2nd of January. As far as I can see on the definition of alcoholism, that is not alcoholism... There is no dependency; they just like to be drunk for a month... And stuff themselves with fat. A lot of people all over the world (if they can afford it) do.

And 4 units/day (which is not 4 beers in many cases, it is less, but let's say it is) is something a lot of people do; they are, again, not dependent on it.

Doing damage is something else. I think no alcohol (at all) (+no/little refined sugar, processed food, stress laden work, too much fat, smoking anything, living in smog infested cities, driving motorcycles etc etc) are better, but that's just a feeling; the 'advice' seems to change every few years. One year wine is good for your cardiovascular system, one year it's bad. And the amounts vary too. Etc.

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

#125

Post by reaperducer »

giardini wrote: post #71

Leaving sex out of the equation was an unfortunate oversight. STDs cause a lot of grief and arguably as much or more damage than diet. AIDS speaks for itself; herpes is implicated in Alzheimer's, heart disease and other ailments and is just a general curse without the modern antivirals (although many persons are naturally immune); gonorrhea and syphilis continue to mutate to new drug-resistant forms.

Leaving sex out of the equation was an unfortunate oversight.

Maybe it's covered under "vigorous exercise?"

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

#126

Post by astura »

didibus wrote: post #113
DenisM wrote: post #83

> drinking alcohol only in moderation (defined in this study as just under 2 units for women and 4 units for men daily) This part Of “stay healthy” advice has always puzzled me - it looks like full blown alcoholism. Am I way off?

To be honest, I've never head of health issues caused by alcohol beyond the possibility of your liver failing. So I suspect, if you stay within liver failure bounds, you're good to go in terms of health. I'm ignoring here the fact that drinking more might cause a cascading effect of bad habits, like eating more, exercising less, sleeping less, etc. Here I assume that you'd drink, but not degenerate your other habits…

Beyond liver failure excessive alcohol use causes throat and mouth cancer as well as pancreatitis at the very least.

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

#127

Post by astura »

giardini wrote: post #71

Leaving sex out of the equation was an unfortunate oversight. STDs cause a lot of grief and arguably as much or more damage than diet. AIDS speaks for itself; herpes is implicated in Alzheimer's, heart disease and other ailments and is just a general curse without the modern antivirals (although many persons are naturally immune); gonorrhea and syphilis continue to mutate to new drug-resistant forms.

>AIDS speaks for itself

HIV does not significantly reduce life expectancy for patients who consistently take retroviral therapy.

https://www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/news/20170510/life-expectancy...

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

#128

Post by dkarl »

Someone1234 wrote: post #27

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…

because people actually do them and stick to them

The same can be said of any beneficial practice while it's trendy. HIIT and intermittent fasting are trendy right now. Nothing can stop the wheel of fashion from turning, so let's wait and see if they still stand out as "something people actually do" when they're passé.

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

#129

Post by shantly »

odonnellryan wrote: post #102
jopsen wrote: post #97

Hmm, the list of habits wasn't even that bad: Don't smoke, drink little, keep a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9, exercise 30min per day, have a diet in the top 40-percentile most healthy. These seems like feasible habits. Sure if you're overweight, smoking or drinking a lot changing the status isn't easy. But you don't have to go vegan :)

But go vegan. It's easy!

I eat mostly vegetarian (I'm not a principled vegetarian so I'll eat meat in some circumstances, just way less than most people) and that's pretty easy, but milk is really cheap & convenient (chemically) for so much cooking, eggs are like a nutrition-on-a-budget cheat code and also chemically useful in lots of cooking, and I love cheese. Going vegan would hurt.

[EDIT] if there's one modification I'd really like to make to my diet, it'd be to add fish once or so per week, ideally the fatty, oily, low-on-the-food-chain sort that're supposed to be so heatlhy. I need some kind of guide for how to work up to enjoying fish when you didn't grow up eating it. I can tolerate larger fish when cooked & seasoned very well, but don't really enjoy it at all, and have no understanding of what even to do with the smaller, healthier sorts that isn't stomach-turning (to me) to even consider. Though for some reason I love sushi and calamari, so, go figure.

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

#130

Post by Bartweiss »

capkutay wrote: post #8
_Microft wrote: 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.

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.

Bear in mind that the study looked at the combined impact of multiple factors: working out, eating healthy food, and not being overweight were specifically studied. So by definition, this "10 more years" population were the people for whom drinking didn't snowball.

That said, the individual-factor breakdown really did find that at low doses, rising alcohol consumption correlated with improved health. Undoubtedly some healthy-user bias between no and light drinking, but it's a pretty smooth curve through moderate consumption.

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