Study IDs four ways to cut disease risks

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Want to take health care reform into your own hands? Don't smoke, lose weight, get exercise, and stick to a good diet, says a new study. The advice may sound familiar, but people with those four habits have a dramatically lower risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

"Living a healthy lifestyle -- never smoking, maintaining a recommended (weight), performing adequate amounts of physical activity, and adhering to healthy dietary principles -- has a tremendous beneficial impact in preventing or delaying major chronic diseases," said Dr. Earl Ford, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in an email interview with Reuters Health.

To give a sense of the benefit, the rate of chronic diseases ranged from about a half a percent per person per year studied for those with all four habits to about 3% per person per year studied for those who had none of them.

Ford and his colleagues recently completed a study in more than 23,000 middle-aged Germans which showed that people who adhered to all four healthy habits had a 78 percent lower risk of developing a chronic disease compared to study participants without any of the healthy habits.

Encouragingly, Ford points out, "Although the largest reduction in risk is found among people who practice all four of these lifestyle factors, benefits are also gained by adding one healthy behavior at a time."

SOURCE: Diabetes Care, August 2009.