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

nhs.uk

51–60 of 173 posts

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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impor…

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

Depending on how lazy you are, you could try running in place with the Tabata protocol.

For me, one beautiful thing about sprinting is that you can do it anywhere you have a sufficiently lengthy stretch of open, flat ground. You can also shorten the sprint and do more of them to accommodate less permissive situations. I've even done wind sprints in my basement!

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

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impor…

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

I'd check out YouTube, there are tons of HIIT "classes" that you can do at home for zero or minimal cost.

But there are also more specialised classes if you have some equipment or are a certain body composition (e.g. easier on the knees).

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

#53
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mistake, I should have been more precise in my formulations. I was rather surprised that daily alcohol consumption still counted as moderate .

This seems to be a cultural UK/US difference which I've noticed moving to the US. In the UK a glass of wine with food every night would be seen as part of a healthy mediterranean diet and health advice on alcohol was refocussed to discourage binge drinking, emphasizing daily rather than weekly consumption limits. In the US daily drinking seems to be seen as bad (perhaps a legacy of prohibition?) while binge drinking…

> In the UK a glass of wine with food every night would be seen as part of a healthy mediterranean diet and health advice on alcohol was refocussed to discourage binge drinking,

I don't understand what you mean.

Public Health advice on alcohol in the UK has been pretty consistent for many years. There are 3 changes: the limits for men went from 21 units a week to 14 units a week; the advice to pregnant women to avoid all alcohol became stronger; and the advice about not allowing under 18s to drink alcohol became stronger.

In 1987 the advice was pretty close to what it is today.

http://www.ias.org.uk/uploads/pdf/Consumption%20docs/A%20bri...

We don't know if there's a safe limit

men should drink no more than 21 units per week

women should drink no more than 14 units per week

both men and women should have 2 to 3 days drink free

the total number of weekly units should not be drunk in 1 or 2 bouts.

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

#54

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.

This is an example of a thing they do where they make a point of responding to things that get media buzz, so if you see something elsewhere it is usually worth googling to see if they have a response.

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

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a cultural UK/US difference which I've noticed moving to the US. In the UK a glass of wine with food every night would be seen as part of a healthy mediterranean diet and health advice on alcohol was refocussed to discourage binge drinking, emphasizing daily rather than weekly consumption limits. In the US daily drinking seems to be seen as bad (perhaps a legacy of prohibition?) while binge drinking…

"A glass of wine with food" is fairly rare culturally outside of Europe I believe; and even in Europe, it's uncommon in beer countries (UK, Belgium, …). "Drinking every night" = "[at least] 1 beer / night" in the minds of people who associate drinking with beer. There's no such thing as consuming a small glass of beer as it's not really a beverage you savour.

Small (8 oz./235 ml) servings of beer that are very much meant to be savored are very common in bars in the U.S.!

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

#56

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.

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

#57

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 Do you have data to back this up? I would have thought the exact opposite. That HIIT and IM are techniques that people try after having seen a Ted talk or something like that and don't make a life discipline out of them. I also think plenty of people have some "common sense discipline" such as cycling/walking to work, and not eating junk food and sodas, and trying t…

Appreciate this is a sample size of one, but IM has worked reasonably well for me. I lost nearly 3 stone, my weight's up a little since then but I'm still within a pound or two of my lowest fat mass over a year on.

All it really is to me is skipping breakfast and not snacking after my evening meal. I only ever had breakfast because people told me it wasn't healthy to skip it. Not so sure they were right now. I still pig out at lunch, dinner and in between times.

https://i.imgur.com/v0OGPVz.png

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

#58
post #8
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.

Drinkers actually exercise more. So maybe they don't quite snowball.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2747097/

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