Lifestyle Medicine: The Benefits
When people realize their lifestyle is actually making them sick, there are steps they can take to take charge of their health, by identifying their unhealthy behaviors and learning healthy habits instead.
More than your genes, the lifestyle choices you make determine your health as you age. Even your longevity is more related to how you live than how long your parents lived.
Yes, some people have a gene for heart disease and others have a gene for colon cancer, but genes are a predisposition, not a destiny. Our current understanding of how we wind up with a medical condition is that we are born with a gene for it, and our lifestyle either turns on the gene or turns it off. So, the person with a gene for heart disease who lives a healthy lifestyle is vastly increasing the odds of living a life with little or no heart disease. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but they don’t invalidate it.
The fact is that the healthier our lifestyles, the more good genes we turn on and bad genes we turn off.
Treating heart disease with healthy lifestyle living has been shown to stop the progression of heart disease and even reverse the process. The same is true for Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other risk factors and diseases.
Is it realistic to treat something as serious as heart disease or diabetes with lifestyle? Yes. In a well-known study, lifestyle change was compared to a medication to prevent patients with pre-diabetes from becoming full-blown diabetics. Lifestyle change was shown to be more effective than medication.
Research over decades has shown that of all the treatments for heart disease, preventive medicine is the most effective. Of course some people will still need medication or surgery. But, healthy lifestyle living were the norm, we would reduce or eliminate approximately 90 percent of the heart disease we now have. This is incredible when you realize that heart disease – a lifestyle disease - kills more Americans than all other diseases combined.
True prevention doesn’t take place in the doctor’s office, but begins with the choices we make every day for our families and ourselves. It’s not just about eating well, staying active, and undergoing screening tests. But also how we manage ourselves under stress, whether we have solid social connections, pay attention to the joys and find meaning in our lives. Not only can we live longer, but we can live longer well.
Without good health our worlds become very small. Think of how it feels when you have the flu and you can’t participate in your life; all you want to do is get better and “be yourself” again. When you are really healthy, you feel energetic, resilient, up for whatever comes your way, open to endless possibilities, and fully engaged with your life.