So when I first hear of this new study I had 2 thoughts…

1. DUH! How much money did they spend to realize that a healthy lifestyle could reduce the risks of poor health?

2. Why havn’t we heard these “new” findings in the media if it’s such definative results?

So here are the answers:

1. These results are proven time and time again, yet our culture still wants to believe there is some easy pill to pop, or that the unhealthy habits we have aren’t really that bad.

2. Because this study wasn’t funded by a major pharmaceutical company, and because the findings don’t require someone to purchase something of monetary value, there just isn’t much money to be made from these results. Do you think the media coverage would have been different had they been able to make a pill that would produce these results? Absolutely…

So here is the low-down of the study:

A
new, large-scale study from researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health
(HSPH) shows that women who followed a combination of healthy lifestyle factors
– not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, regular physical activity and a
healthy diet — had a dramatically lower risk of dying from all causes during
the two-and-a-half decades of the study. Furthermore, their risk reduction
surpassed that from following any single healthy factor alone. It is the largest
and longest-running study to directly estimate the impact of a combination of
lifestyle factors on mortality. The study appears online Wednesday, September 17, 2008 in The British Medical Journal.

“A healthy diet and lifestyle has a profound influence on risk of
premature death due to chronic diseases. The results of the study reinforce the
need to strengthen public health efforts around quitting smoking, maintaining a
healthy weight and diet and performing regular physical activity,“ said Rob van
Dam, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH and in the
Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School,
who led the study.

The research team analyzed data from 77,782 women participating in the
Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses’ Health Study. The researchers
analyzed the participants’ responses to questionnaires about lifestyle and
health conditions over a 24-year period, beginning in 1980. During the
follow-up, 8,882 deaths were recorded, including 1,790 from cardiovascular
disease and 4,527 from cancer.

Van Dam and his colleagues estimated that 55% of deaths from all causes,
44% of cancer mortality and 72% of cardiovascular mortality during follow-up
could have been avoided if participants had never smoked, engaged in regular
physical activity, avoided becoming overweight and ate a healthy diet. For
individual factors, the authors found that 28% of deaths could be attributed to
smoking, 14% to being overweight, 17% to lack of physical activity, and 13% to an
unhealthy diet. For nonsmoking women, 22% of deaths could be
attributable to being overweight.

“Our findings suggest that the combination of lifestyle factors has a
substantially larger impact on survival than any single factor. Clearly,
avoiding smoking is of major importance for health, but regular physical
activity, a healthy diet and weight management can result in large additional
health benefits. Even modest lifestyle changes such as 30 minutes of moderate
intensity physical activity (e.g., brisk walking) per day significantly reduced
risk of premature death,” said van Dam.

“Because prevalence of smoking has declined but prevalence of obesity is
increasing rapidly, the impact of obesity on chronic diseases and mortality will
become even more pronounced in the future,” added Frank Hu, professor of
nutrition and epidemiology at HSPH, and senior author of the study.

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