Fight Aging!

It is no big secret that maintaining a healthier lifestyle will extend the time spent free from age-related disease and generally improve the experience of later life. In this day and age, and now that the very harmful practice of smoking is waning somewhat, the practice of maintaining better health largely means resisting the siren call of excess calories and consequent excess weight. The presence of visceral fat tissue in excessive amounts accelerates the aging process. Staying slim over the course of life thus pays off down the line. If you instead choose to damage yourself in this way, the inevitable result is an earlier onset of chronic ill health, greater medical expense, and a shorter life expectancy.

The longer you lead a healthy lifestyle during midlife, the less likely you are to develop certain diseases in later life. The more time a person doesn't smoke, eats healthy, exercises regularly, maintains healthy blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels, and maintains a normal weight, the less likely they are to develop diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, or to die during early adulthood.

While unhealthy lifestyle behaviors are associated with higher risks for certain diseases and death, the association of the duration in which people maintain a healthy lifestyle with the risk of disease and death had not yet been studied.

Using data from the Framingham Heart Study, researchers observed participants for approximately 16 years and assessed the development of disease or death. They found that for each five-year period that participants had intermediate or ideal cardiovascular health, they were 33 percent less likely to develop hypertension, approximately 25 percent less likely to develop diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease, and 14 percent less likely to die compared to individuals in poor cardiovascular health.

Link: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/buso-hlr030920.php