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Healthy Behaviours: Making Lifestyle Changes.
A study in this month's issue aims to quantify the combined impact of four key healthy behaviors on mortality in men and women in the United Kingdom: not smoking; not being physically inactive; drinking alcohol moderately; and, as represented by our image, having a blood vitamin C level consistent with a fruit and vegetable intake of five servings a day (Khaw, et al. e12). The estimated impact of 14 additional years of life as a result of these behaviors suggests that modest and achievable lifestyle changes can have a marked effect on the health of populations. However, as this month's editorial discusses with reference to previous PLoS Medicine papers on urban safety and physical activity in the United States (Bennett, et al. e306) and food insecurity and high-risk sexual behaviour in Botswana (Weiser, et al. e260), individuals in isolation often cannot make the lifestyle changes they want, and a set of complex processes govern the translation of research into public health outcomes.
Image Credit: Image by Umberto Salvagnin (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaibara/)
Citation: (2008) PLoS Medicine Issue Image | Vol. 5(1) January 2008. PLoS Med 5(1): ev05.i01. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pmed.v05.i01
Published: January 29, 2008
Copyright: © 2008 Umberto Salvagnin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
A study in this month's issue aims to quantify the combined impact of four key healthy behaviors on mortality in men and women in the United Kingdom: not smoking; not being physically inactive; drinking alcohol moderately; and, as represented by our image, having a blood vitamin C level consistent with a fruit and vegetable intake of five servings a day (Khaw, et al. e12). The estimated impact of 14 additional years of life as a result of these behaviors suggests that modest and achievable lifestyle changes can have a marked effect on the health of populations. However, as this month's editorial discusses with reference to previous PLoS Medicine papers on urban safety and physical activity in the United States (Bennett, et al. e306) and food insecurity and high-risk sexual behaviour in Botswana (Weiser, et al. e260), individuals in isolation often cannot make the lifestyle changes they want, and a set of complex processes govern the translation of research into public health outcomes.
Image Credit: Image by Umberto Salvagnin (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaibara/)