A study carried out by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention validates four healthy lifestyle factors your mother always tried to drill into your head — don’t smoke, watch your weight, get some exercise, and eat right. The CDC says they can help ward off chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
“The message from our analysis . . . is clear,” the researchers reported in Archives of Internal Medicine. “Adopting a few healthy lifestyle factors can have a major impact on the risk of morbidity.”
Before you dismiss the research as nagging recommendations you've already heard, consider this: They are associated with an almost 80 percent decreased risk of chronic diseases. Specifically, diabetes risk is lowered by 93 percent, myocardial infarction risk by 81 percent, stroke risk by 50 percent, and even the risk of cancer is cut by 36 percent. And the results are similar for men and women.
Even if you can’t embrace all four factors at once, study leader Dr. Earl Ford says that you can reap health benefits by adding one of these healthy behavior at a time.
1. Never smoke
Cigarettes and other tobacco products put smokers at high risk for many diseases including heart attack; stroke; respiratory diseases; and cancer of the lung, cervix, mouth, bladder, pancreas, kidney, and esophagus. In fact, more than 90 percent of lung cancers are related to smoking. It can definitely reduce your life expectancy; according to experts, the time cut from your lifespan is equal to the time you spend smoking.
