ten lifestyle tips to help avoid seeing a doctor about heart disease or cancer

reposted from: Bandolier


This sheet is a quick summary of ten lifestyle tips to help avoid seeing a doctor about heart disease or cancer, based on good quality information. For more details, see the healthy living pages off the Bandolier home page at www.ebandolier.com. This is also available as a downloadable PDF.

1. Eat whole grain foods (bread, or rice, or pasta) on four occasions a week. This will reduce the chance of having almost any cancer by 40%. Given that cancer gets about 1 in 3 of us in a lifetime, that's big advice.
2. Don't smoke. If you do smoke, stop. Nicotine patches, gum or inhaler won't help much, and acupuncture won't help at all. Try to reduce your smoking, as there is a profound dose-response (the more you smoke, the more likely you are to have cancer, or heart or respiratory disease). So cut down to below five cigarettes a day and leave long portions of the day without a cigarette.
3. Eat at least five portions of vegetables and fruit a day, and especially tomatoes (including ketchup), red grapes and the like, as well as salad all year. This protects against a whole variety of different nasty things:
   • It reduces the risk of stroke dramatically
   • It reduces the risk of diabetes considerably
   • It will reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer.
4. Use Benecol instead of butter or margarine. It really does reduce cholesterol, and reducing cholesterol will reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke even in those whose cholesterol is not particularly high. Benecol UK Home.
   
5. Drink alcohol regularly. The type of alcohol probably doesn't matter too much, but the equivalent of a couple of glasses of wine a day or a couple of beers is a good thing. The odd day without alcohol won't hurt either. Think of it as medicine.
6. Eat fish. Eating fish once a week won't stop you having a heart attack in itself, but it reduces the likelihood of you dying from it by half.
7. Take a multivitamin tablet every day, but be sure that it is one with at least 200 micrograms of folate. The evidence is that this can substantially reduce chances of heart disease in some individuals, and it has been shown to reduce colon cancer by over 85%. It may also reduce the likelihood of developing dementia. Folate is essential in any woman contemplating pregnancy because it will reduce the chance of some birth defects.
8. If you are pregnant or have high blood pressure, coffee is best minimised. For the rest of us drinking four cups of coffee a day is likely to reduce our chances of getting colon cancer and Parkinson's disease.
9. Get breathless more often. You don't have to go to a gym or be an Olympic marathon runner. Simply walking a mile a day, or taking reasonable exercise three times a week (enough to make you sweat or glow) will substantially reduce the risk of heart disease. If you walk, don't dawdle. Make it a brisk pace. One of the benefits of regular exercise is that it strengthens bones and keeps them strong. Breaking a hip when elderly is a very serious thing.
10. Check your height and weight on a chart to see if you are overweight for your height. Your body mass index is the weight in kilograms divided by the height in metres squared: for preference it should be below 25. If you are overweight, lose it. This has many benefits. There is no good evidence on simple ways to lose weight that work. Crash diets don't work. Take it one step at a time, do the things that are possible now, and combine some calorie limitation with increased exercise. The good news is that in a few years time we may have some appetite suppressants to make it easier.

Reference:

1. MJ Stampfer et al. Primary prevention of coronary heart disease in women through diet and lifestyle. New England Journal of Medicine 2000 343: 16-22.

More life before death

reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_blastland_and_andrew_dilnot/2007/12/no_news_of_good_news.html

Something wonderful is happening: people are living longer, healthier lives. So why don't we hear more about it?

All Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot articles

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December 9, 2007 12:00 PM

The past week has brought three pieces of outstanding good news. One received a short grunt of media acknowledgment, the others not even that. Yet they tell us more about human wellbeing than any number of health scares, gone-to-the-dogs jeremiads or nightmare scenarios.

The first piece of news is that we are, yet again, shown to be living longer than ever. What's more, the typical lifespan is not just up, according to the latest data from National Statistics this week, but rising at an accelerating rate: we are adding extra years, faster. Men have taken only about four years to put on their latest year of life expectancy. Astonishing.

Especially heartening for those zipping through middle age is where the gains come from. In earlier periods, it was improved infant mortality: as fewer babies died, the average lifespan increased. Now it derives as much from life extended at the end as sustained at the beginning. A 65-year-old man in 1981 could typically expect to live to 78. A 65-year-old man today will typically make it to 82.

Humbug, say those who feel that more years of life will be life endured, or, as Auberon Waugh almost put it: nothing is worth a couple of extra years in a nursing home in Weston-super-Mare.

But this brings us to the second hallelujah.

On average, the extra years are turning out, for women, to be healthy years, and about three-quarters of them for men. This lengthening of the so-called "healthy lifespan", measured either by the way people report their own health, or by subtracting the number of years of long-term disabling illness, challenges the presumption that longer life must mean decrepit life. We're getting wrinkly, not crumbly.

Source: National Statistics

That could imply more good news about the effect of an ageing population on health costs. Often described as a time bomb, it might be less explosive than suggested by the worst-case scenarios, which simply take the cost of healthcare in the few years before death and assume the line goes on flying upwards as the population wrinkles. The more accurate model might be that costs do go up, but that it is the proximity of death that sends them soaring, not the addition of what turn out to be healthy years before death.

The third piece of news is that, fast as life expectancy is rising for women, it is rising even faster for men. For so long the laggards, they are now closing rapidly. We don't know why, but we can speculate. For example, it may be that fewer men work in industries that, sooner or later, killed them. It could be that more women are in paid work, or enjoying lifestyles more like men's and so becoming more like men in this respect too. But the data suggest that men's progress is speeding up, rather than women's slowing down.

These gains are mightily impressive, and probably reliable. We can measure well enough the ages at which people die. The margin of uncertainty around the figures is tiny, the trends unmistakeable.

Of course, it's always possible there'll be bad news just around the corner, and the trends will reverse. Accelerating gains in lifespan can't go on forever - can they? - or one day the end will be receding faster than our approach. But just for now, we live, and live a bit more, in extraordinary times.

Despite the unrelenting coverage of everything that's wrong with our health service, the toxic soup people supposedly live in, the wretchedness of our diet or the stresses of modern living, something very good indeed is also happening, and on a huge scale; it's just that few talk about it.

We do not argue that all is right with the world, that no one experiences poor standards of welfare, or dies too young. On the contrary, we recognise huge demands for further progress. We know the gains are far from equally shared, and that a healthy old age might still mean a relatively impoverished one. We see that longer lives mean, other things being equal, more people.

But the numbers are a useful glimpse of the bigger picture. They are testament to how much people are continually achieving - and will go on to achieve - to improve wellbeing. Contrast that with how well they recognise this achievement, and one can't help but wonder at the lack of proportion. Longer life doesn't seem to make us grateful.

The authors will be speaking at Wanstead Library, Spratt Hall Road, London E11 2RQ on Thursday December 13 at 7pm. For details email vivian@newhambooks.co.uk.