Does a Healthy Lifestyle Really Pay Off?
28 Apr 2002
Have you ever wondered how much benefit you gain from being good? Saying “no” to rich desserts you’ve enjoyed for years. Tossing away tobacco, too many martinis and other vices. After all, why give up these pleasures if the return is only marginal. Now a study from Harvard answers this question. And the findings even shocked researchers.
Dr. Meir Stampfer is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at The Harvard Medical School. He reports in the New England Journal of Medicine a huge study involving 84,129 women. It’s called the “Nurses Health Study” in which researchers have followed the habits of these nurses for over 20 years.
Stampfer confirms that a good lifestyle definitely reduces the risk of disease. But that’s not earth-shaking news. We’d all have to be living in another world not to know that controlling weight is a prudent health move. That it’s wise to avoid nicotine in the lungs, eat less fat and make exercise a lifelong habit. This study simply confirmed these previously known facts.
So what is so special about this report? Earlier studies had shown the risk of heart disease if patients were only partly virtuous. This study shows what happens when they decide to be totally virtuous. And the cumulative effect surprised everyone.
For instance, nurses who did all the right things were rewarded with a phenomenal decrease in coronary heart disease. They were 82 percent less likely to develop the nation’s number one killer than those who were less virtuous.
Dr. Stampfer claims that the elimination of all faulty lifestyle choices would literally remove heart disease from the list as the nation’s number one killer. It would remain an important cause of death but far less widespread.
The report contains other surprises. One would have thought that nurses, of all people, would be prudent about health issues. After all, they’ve already demonstrated an interest in health by becoming nurses and are dedicated enough about good living to enroll in the study.
But only a mere three percent of nurses were making all the right choices. And we know that this figure would be even lower for the general population.
Where did nurses fall off the heart-health bandwagon? Dr. Stampfer reports they skidded off at ever fork in the road.
For instance, 25 percent of nurses smoked. A shockingly high number were obese. And exercise for many was placed on the back-burner.
Stampfer says the study also shows nurses were eating enormous amounts of fat in fast foods. But even those nurses who thought they were eating healthy diets by cutting back on all sorts of fat were still going astray by believing that all fats were bad.
For instance, most parents are unaware of the difference between the beneficial fats in milk and those in processed foods that can be harmful. The fat in milk contains 64 different fatty acids and many of these are only available in milk which is fresh, unrefined and unaltered by any manufacturing process. It is the preferred fat.
It’s also been shown that growing children need the fat in whole milk. Children experience rapid growth during the first few years of life. This makes them nutritionally vulnerable if the do not have sufficient dietary fat. It’s also poorly understood that children need whole milk up to 18 years of age.
Stampfer believes the diet of millions of North Americans would improve greatly if food manufacturers substituted unsaturated fat for saturated fat and trans fats.
There’s no doubt that the fat message has reached the ears of many consumers. Today shoppers can choose from a large number of low fat products. But herein lies the trap. To make up for the lost fat something else must be added, and it’s usually sugar. By choosing low fat products loaded with sugar consumers are trading one evil for an even greater one.
This report is great news for those people who have eliminated several questionable habits. But it’s disconcerting that 97 percent of nurses have such a bad track record. Time and time again we see how easy it is to talk about healthy lifestyle. But it’s not easy to convince people to follow it. At the moment all the recent nutritional research hasn’t made much impact on either nurses or the general population. North Americans have a long way to go to reach Minerva.
