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

nhs.uk

151–160 of 173 posts

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

#151
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 :)

I agree, you don't have to go vegan, but you could go mostly vegan, so that instead of meat and dairy being the default they become the exception.

Once you start it's a slippery slope to full on vegan. You will look at meat and dairy not as food but as liabilities to you and your earth.

Then it's just kinda depressing. Here you are in an alternate universe with hope and love and beauty while your friends and family stuff buttered bred muscle into their mouth and complain about all their health issues brought about by eating meat and dairy. These same friends look at you with concern for your life decision to not eat meat or dairy while you look at them with concern for their decision to eat meat and dairy.

You research it and realize the meat and dairy industries lobby and get our money for their ad campaigns. got milk beef. its whats for dinner pork. the other white meat

For the last 70 years they have been programming us that this is how food should be three times a day, every day. We will look back on the cruelty it takes to buy meat on foam wrapped with cellophane and our grandkids will ask us how we disassociated ourselves enough to take part in it all. Why didn't we shout from the rooftops that we are destroying ourselves, our world, our dear sentient animals?

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

#152
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so it doesn't apply to your friends then? I am talking about daily drinking - the topic article promulgates it as "healthy". Someone who "could stop drinking any time" and yet drinks every day year-round is de-facto addicted - among all the possible things they could do in the evening they always chose to do the same exact thing. Many addicts are high-functioning, but they are still addicts.

FWIW the rest of the recommendation by the NIAAA (National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) is no more than 14 drinks per week for men and 7 drinks per week for women. So, they are not advising that 4 drinks per day every day for a week is safe.

The article does not mention the weekly limit though, which is typical - 4 units per day is mentioned often and the second limit is hardly mentioned at all.

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

#153
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe ABV is printed on every alcohol label in the US (I suspect there is a regulation mandating it)

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

#154
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention having children, which if my experience is any indication is the #1 reason parents use for being overweight and unfit, not having time and/or energy to properly care for themselves now that they have kids.

Ironically the best way to care for their kids is to set a good example by eating and living healthily. When was the last time you saw healthy parents with an obese child or obese parents with a healthy child vs. how often you see healthy parents with healthy children and obese parents with obese children?

My mom was in extremely good shape with obese children. She was a homemaker who did hours of exercise everyday. As such she could basically eat potato chips and donuts and stay in great shape. For people who had to do things like study or work, it didn’t work out.

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

#156
The drink units are weird in this article. Most people (in the US) think of a drink as closer to a 1.5oz 80 proof shot or 12oz of 5% abv beer, which works out to 17.75ml of ethanol. The article defines a drink as 10ml of ethanol. So the guidline for men would be on a bit over 2 budweisers per day.

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

#157
post #156

The drink units are weird in this article. Most people (in the US) think of a drink as closer to a 1.5oz 80 proof shot or 12oz of 5% abv beer, which works out to 17.75ml of ethanol. The article defines a drink as 10ml of ethanol. So the guidline for men would be on a bit over 2 budweisers per day.

It's explicitly not "a drink" that's defined as such, but a "unit of alcohol". It's a standard measure in the UK for actual alcohol content in drinks.

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

#158
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe ABV is printed on every alcohol label in the US (I suspect there is a regulation mandating it)

While most does, at least the box of Heineken in my fridge (don't judge me, left over from a party!) doesn't have the ABV on the box, though does on the cans inside.

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

#159

The first of the good habits is a good diet. The first medicine is food.

I'd actually say that the most impactful first habit is regular exercise. Especially a few hours of strength training and a few hours of aerobic exercise per week.

You can have a mediocre diet and still see huge health benefits. The opposite is not true: a sedentary lifestyle will kill you and the last years will be miserable with little in the way of physical autonomy.

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

#160

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…

This is nonsense. Even if you do everything right, you can have bad luck. Illness can happen to anyone.

Of course you can improve your odds, but acting like sickness is some sort of personal failing is a bad mentality, and one of the reasons American health care is so messed up.

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