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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 Smoking rates barely budged (26.9 percent to 26.1 percent), King's group found. More people did report drinking moderately in the 2001 to 2006 survey versus the earlier survey (40 percent to 51 percent), the researchers said.
Overall, the number of people practicing all five healthy habits dropped from 15 percent in 1988 to 8 percent in 2006, King noted. This low percentage was seen in both healthy people and people with chronic health problems such as heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.
"We are not eating our fruits and veggies," King said. "We are exercising less, we're more obese. It's not a good end-of-the-year report card. But we can do better next semester. We need to get back to the basics of healthy lifestyles and not taking the easy way out of pills, because they are not as effective as a healthy lifestyle in preventing cardiovascular disease and maintaining vitality through the middle and later years."
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Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, believes that changes in society that foster healthy lifestyles need to be enacted to help reverse these trends.
"A consistent and compelling body of scientific literature makes clear that a very short list of lifestyle behaviors, dominated by dietary pattern, physical activity level and tobacco use, overwhelmingly influence both the likely number of years in our lives, and the quality of life in our years," Katz said.
The current study is disheartening, "if not depressing," Katz said. "In every way conceivable, from cost to convenience, the modern food supply favors the consumption of highly processed, low-nutrient, high-calorie foods. Every aspect of modern life, from hectic schedules, to constant stress, to the reliance on labor-saving technology, fosters sedentariness," he said.
These regrettable trends are a dose of reality, Katz said. "We cannot, with any hope of success, devise a world that fosters ill health, and encourage people to navigate through it as if it weren't there. Eating well, being active, and in general taking good care of oneself and one's family must lie along paths of lesser resistance."
More information
For more information on the benefits of healthy living, visit the American Heart Association.
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