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Why You Should Live Healthy Early?
 

Many people are not living a healthy lifestyle. Most of the working adults are stressed by their work. Many are overweight or even obese, and some are smoking. These can eventually lead to heart disease and many other diseases. Statistics in 2009 showed that one American would die from a heart attack.

Unhealthy lifestyle usually begins from young. A person, who can adopt healthy lifestyle habits during his or her early adulthood, will have a better chance to prevent heart disease. This was what researchers from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and National Institute of Health had reported on Feb 28, 2012 in the journal ‘Circulation’.

The researchers were aware that a low cardiovascular disease risk profile in middle age is somehow linked to significantly better health conditions in older age. A person is said to have a low cardiovascular disease risk profile when this person’s untreated cholesterol is less than 200 mg/dL, untreated blood pressure between 90 and 120 mm Hg, never smokes, and no history of diabetes mellitus or myocardial infarction.

Unfortunately, not too many middle-age adults can have such a low risk profile. In fact, one recent study found that only 7.5 percent of people who aged between 25 and 74 are in this low-risk group and are not overweight.

In order to examine whether engaging healthy lifestyle behaviors throughout young adulthood is related to the presence of the low cardiovascular disease risk profile in middle age, researchers looked at data from 3,154 people aged between 18 and 30 in a study known as the Coronary Artery Risk Development in (Young) Adults Study, which began in 1985. The mean age was 25 years old and 56 percent of the participants were women. The participants provided information on their diets, and underwent physical examinations and blood tests during year 0 (1985-1986), year 7 (1992-1993) and year 20 (2005-2006).

It was found that when study participants were in their early 20s, nearly 44 percent had a low risk of developing heart disease. But 20 years later, only 24.5 percent still met the criteria.

In the study, even people with a family history of heart disease had a low cardiovascular disease risk profile, provided that they started living a healthy lifestyle when they were young. This more or less supported the idea that lifestyle might play a more important role than genetics.

5 healthy lifestyle behaviors used in the study were: maintaining a lean body mass index (less than 25 kg/m2), avoiding excess alcohol intake, not smoking, eating a healthy diet and regularly exercising.

At the beginning of the study, most participants were engaging in only 2 or 3 of the behaviors. Only 6 percent of the participants were found to engage in all the 5 behaviors and 15 percent of the participants either did not engage or engage only 1 behavior.

When the participants reached middle age, 60 percent of those who had maintained all 5 healthy behaviors and less than 5 percent of those who followed none of the healthy lifestyle behaviors had a low cardiovascular risk profile.

It appears that many middle-age adults tend to have unhealthy diets, gain weight and not to be physically active. Such lifestyle can certainly lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and higher cardiovascular risk. Researchers stressed that many previous studies have suggested people who can maintain low cardiovascular risk in middle age will have a better quality of life, will live longer and will have lower cost of medical care in their older age.

As maintaining a low cardiovascular risk profile can induce a lot of benefits, public health and individual efforts are necessary to improve the adoption and maintenance of healthy lifestyle in young adults.

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