If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.
― Hippocrates
The American Heart Association has just released 7 Impact Goals for improving health by 2020: not smoking, a normal body mass index (BMI), physical activity, a healthy diet, normal cholesterol, normal blood pressure, and a normal fasting plasma glucose. Reason being, an analysis from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey showed that individuals who met five of the seven ideal metrics had a 78% reduction in the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality. There’s no drug on the market that can do ANY of that!
“A very short list of lifestyle practices has a more massive influence on our medical destinies than anything else in all of medicine,” says Dr David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center and president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, in a telephone interview. “There’s almost nothing in all of medicine that has the vast, consistent, and diverse evidence base.” Agreed! And best of all, lifestyle changes are free and there are no side effects to worry about.