Wendy Wolfson
Newswire21.org

It seems mind numbingly simple - and yet so difficult to do - but just maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, not smoking and getting regular exercise could reduce your chances of developing major diseases by up to 80 percent. 

At least 3.5 hours of exercise a week makes a difference.

Those four behaviors had an enormous influence on whether a large group of middle-aged people developed chronic problems like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke or cancer during a multi-year study. 

Dr. Earl Ford and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed the behaviors of 23,153 people, adjusting the data for differences in age, sex, education and occupation. The study focused on German participants in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition-Potsdam Study who were between the ages of 35 and 65.

The researchers gave point values (healthy 1 point, and unhealthy 0) to behaviors such as not smoking, having a body mass index under 30, getting at least 3.5 hours of weekly exercise, and eating a healthy diet high in fruits, vegetables and whole grain bread - and low in meat.

Results were summed up by a value ranging from 0 to 4.  Fewer than 4 percent of people had 0 healthy behaviors. Most had between 1-3 healthy behaviors. But only 9 percent of the thousands of study participants maintained all four healthy behaviors.

The risk of developing a chronic disease decreased inversely with the number of healthy behaviors. 

An average of 8 years later, 3.7 percent of participants (2006 people) developed diabetes, 0.9 percent had heart attacks, 0.8 percent had strokes, and 3.8 percent had cancer.

However, that 9 percent of people who started the study with all four healthy behaviors had almost an 80 percent lower relative risk of developing a chronic disease. 

Specifically, they had a 93 percent less chance of diabetes, an 81 percent less chance of a heart attack, a 50 percent less chance of a stroke and 36 percent less chance of cancer than the participants without healthy behaviors.

Lifestyle Changes
Leaders of the study, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, concluded that these major chronic diseases, which together comprise most of the risk of death, are mostly preventable just by changing lifestyle.

Dr. David Katz, an associate professor (adjunct) in Public Health Practice at the Yale University School of Medicine wrote the opinion summary of the study, titled "Living Well is the Best Revenge." According to Katz, the bottom line means we should be "getting at least 30 minutes of moderate activity most days and maintaining a BMI below 25, although that is generic rather than individualized."

This study solidly rests on the evidence of several large previous studies. Caveats were that the study did exclude moderate use of alcohol because of the potential for abuse. The occurrence of disease in the study was also self-reported information, confirmed by doctors. Lifestyle was also self-reported. And the study was done on Germans, so should probably be repeated for other populations, the authors said.