I found a great article over at medicinenet.com looking at this specific piece of information. Basically, people who smoke, who don’t exercise, who eat poorly, who drink alcohol, and they are three times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease, four times more likely to die from cancer according to a recent study that came out of the end of April in the archives of internal medicine.
They’ve looked at different effects of smoking and physical activity but nobody really seems to have until now really combined all of these effects into one study. In other words, if you are a person who is not exercising, smokes like a chimney and is extremely overweight and drinks like a fish- there’s your metaphors there- you can assume that you’re going to die early and you’re going to have multiple chronic illnesses if you continue to engage in this lifestyle choice.
The average age of the people in the study was about mid 40′s and they were looking at over the course of time that their lifestyles decrease their lifespan by 10 to 20 years. So, that’s a significant effect. People out there are starting families later and do they really want to miss out on 20 years of their children’s and grandchildren’s and maybe even great grandchildren’s lives?
This is something that people can start thinking about. It’s never too late to start living a healthier lifestyle. If you’ve already lived a bad lifestyle all your life, it doesn’t mean that there’s no choices and options for you. So we need to make sure we educate people that despite studies like this, it’s never too late to change. You can still shave years off the end of your life by improving your lifestyle now.
