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What is Healthy Living? |

Evidence for a Healthy Lifestyle

• As a population, it has never been more important to understand how to age healthy – 71 million Americans will be over the age of 65 by 2030, or 20% of the population. (State of healthy aging, 2007) (Foundation 2007).
• When you think of what aging is, it typically brings to mind cognitive and physical decline that is inevitable. Some might be under the impression that being old is defined by limitations: reduction in physical activities, less independence, too many medications and decreased mobility. But this just isn’t the case! Lifestyle Management plays a key role in enhancing a healthy life and minimizing the stereotyped process of aging.  Now we can all tell aging to back off!
• There is strong scientific evidence that points out certain lifestyle choices make up key pathways for positive functioning in older age, reducing risks of disease and disability and improving functionality and all around wellbeing.
• But how does healthy aging looks like? And how can a healthy ager be defined? That’s what we call the healthy aging phenotype. (HAPY phenotype) (Franco, Karnik 2009).

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• Investigators from Harvard University recently published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) a number of analysis aimed to describe the main constituents of a healthy lifestyle and their potential impact in mortality from all causes and specifically from cardiovascular disease and cancer among 120,000 participants of the Nurses Health Study (van Dam et al 2008).
• Van Dam et al found that never smoking, engaging in regular physical activity, eating a healthy diet, and avoiding becoming overweight were each associated with a markedly lower mortality during 24 years of follow-up. The authors estimated that 55% of all-cause deaths, 44% of cancer deaths and 72% of cardiovascular deaths during follow-up could have been avoided by adherence to these four lifestyle factors (van Dam, Li 2008).
• The authors concluded:

“ Avoiding cigarette smoking is of pivotal importance for the prevention of premature mortality. In our study of middle-aged women, adherence to lifestyle guidelines involving a healthful diet, regular physical activity and weight management was also associated with markedly lower mortality rates.”

• Of note, these results indicate that a healthful diet and regular physical activity have important health benefits independent of reducing adiposity. These findings underscore the importance of intensifying both efforts to eradicate cigarette smoking and those aimed at improving diet and physical activity (van Dam, Li 2008).
• Additional analysis on the participants of the Nurses Health Study, demonstrated that following a ‘healthy lifestyle’ (characterized by not-smoking, normal body mass index levels, moderate alcohol consumption, above moderate physical activity at least 30 minutes per day and a diet high in cereal fiber, marine n–3 fatty acids, and folate, with a high ratio of polyunsaturated to saturated fat, and low in trans fat and glycemic load) was associated with a 83% reduction of coronary heart disease and 91% reduction on the risk of developing diabetes mellitus (Hu et al 2001, Stampfer et al 2000).
• In another study, the EPIC-Norfolk study conducted in the United Kingdom, Khaw KT et al, studied the impact of lifestyle factors on mortality in men and women aged 45 to 79 years during an average of 11 years of follow-up. The authors found that those who smoked, were physically inactive, were non-moderate alcohol consumers, and had low fruit and vegetable intakes had a 4-fold increase in all-cause mortality as compared with participants who met none of these criteria and an increase of life expectancy of approximately 14 years (Khaw et al 2008).

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