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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

#131

Post by xchaotic »

mrlala wrote: post #18
izzydata wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe it can have a positive affect on your mental health, in moderation? Sharing a bottle of wine or champagne with my wife can be one of the most enjoyable experiences to us.. going out to the pub having some beer with family & friends is great. An argument could be "you can have just as much fun doing something else", but I don't know.. that's not really my experience. A moderate amount of drinking usually makes t…

Absolutely this. Hypothetically you could have fun with no alcohol, in practice the people that don’t drink are the most boring and as a result don’t get laid as much. You will die anyway maybe ten years later but if you don’t reproduce you’ve lost the gene game and the future population will be of those that drank. Which maybe explains why we still drink despite health reasons to the contrary.

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

#132

Post by 1e-9 »

nradov wrote: post #122
1e-9 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a valid issue. If you aren't in a fitness center, you can exercise near a load-bearing wall or pillar to attenuate the floor impact harmonics, which always seems to work well for me.

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

#133

Post by Bartweiss »

vzidex wrote: post #91
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.

You can have sex without getting STDs - either by sticking with one/few monogamous relationships, or just using protection. On the other hand, sex has been found to have lots of benefits (I'm at work so I don't want to be looking up citations, but intuitively a few minutes of cardio can't be a bad thing).

"You can have sex without getting STDs" also means it's a pain to study. Almost all mortality is statistical - you can smoke your whole life without getting lung cancer - but STDs are an even more random risk factor. There's no cumulative damage across events, detection and treatment are massively influential, and different populations have completely different risk profiles.

These findings are backed by two cohort studies, one on female nurses in the UK and one on male health professionals in the US. There's really not much chance their STD outcomes correspond to the general population.

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

#134

Post by Bartweiss »

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.

It is an unfortunate drawback, but I don't think it's an oversight.

This data comes from cohort studies on nurses and other healthcare workers, so it wouldn't generalize well at all. We can assume eating veggies and smoking cigarettes affect them similarly to other people. They might be more likely to recognize problems and seek treatment, but they're not actually getting more or less nutrition out of kale.

When it comes to sex though, doctors and nurses are likely to have very different risk factors than the population average, in ways that are hard to rigorously study. Even beyond using protection or getting tested, they probably don't have the same protection error rates, partner pools, etc., as the general public.

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

#135

Post by scrollaway »

alamortsubite wrote: post #112
mamon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Netherlands or Belgium 8-12 oz servings of beer compensate by it having higher ABV (8-10%), so the amount you consume is actually pretty much the same as with 16oz lager or pilsner.

Yes, it's the same in the U.S. (though much of the beer is less worthy of savoring). But the point stands that "there's no such thing as consuming a small glass of beer as it's not really a beverage you savour" is wildly inaccurate.

You're right, I should have qualified that statement with "for most people…".

I doubt your claim that this sort of beer savouring is "common in US bars" (or if it is commonly available, I doubt that it is commonly ordered).

To put it another way, compare the amount of alcohol ingested on an average evening where beer was the primary beverage vs. an average evening where wine was the primary beverage.

I don't have data to back this up and it's not like I drink heavily myself, but my instinct and experience tells me alcohol-for-wine consumption is much lower than beer's, and so it is in most people's minds.

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

#136

Post by Bartweiss »

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 don't expect anyone to rehash the usual debates over this, but I have a question I've never found answered convincingly...

How the heck do vegans eat high-protein diets? I don't mean "get enough protein to avoid deficiency", there are lots of recipes for that. But practically every vegan food I see described as "high protein" is well under 1/3 protein, which is a pretty unremarkable target if you want to build muscle.

Eggs are a really easy way to fix that: you can eat a lot of them, you get a pretty good range of micronutrients, and their macros are majority-protein so you have "budget" for other foods. Is the vegan fix just getting really good at cooking seitan with green vegetables? That's (with tempeh and tofu) the only option I've found that's even in the right ballpark.

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

#137

Post by Bartweiss »

low_common wrote: post #38

Does < 10 cigarettes a month count as smoking?

The study has a per-factor breakdown here: https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.l6669

"Ever smoking" looks like "smoked any amount but doesn't presently" rather than "occasional smoker through present", and the lowest bucket for current smokers is 1-14 cigarettes per day. "Ever" and "1-14" show clear and substantial health effects, which isn't promising, but <10/month looks to be below any of the actual measured brackets.

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

#138

Post by thebean11 »

seveneightn9ne wrote: post #56
low_common wrote: post #38

Does < 10 cigarettes a month count as smoking?

No, smoking is usually defined as smoking daily. But there's so few people that smoke less-than-daily that they aren't usually included in these sort of studies so it's harder to say what sort of effect it has.

Seems pretty common in my experience, pretty much always "I only smoke when I drink" folks.

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

#139

Post by didibus »

JackRabbitSlim wrote: post #120
didibus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's pretty conclusively bad for brain health; alcoholics hands aren't shaking from weak liver function... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147148920...

Had never heard of that before. Thanks for the link. So its probably that brain damage also only happens at levels that put the liver at risk, and maybe that's why this isn't observed in the OP study?

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

#140

Post by didibus »

astura wrote: post #126
didibus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see, had also never heard of this. I'd guess then that we're talking in the same level of excess that make you at risk of liver damage? And that might be why these don't seem to impact OP's study?
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