Healthy Lifestyles

A. Introduction

I. Balance is an essential part of a healthy life style. No matter how beneficial or harm something is for the health of an individual, it should never be incorporated to an excess. As a student of public health, one goals to educate the public about the best ways to live a healthy life style. Prevention is key and the way to prevention is balancing the healthy choices and decreasing the unhealthy choices. The most important unhealthy habits that the population is experiencing today are physical inactivity, poor diets and the use of drugs and alcohol.

B. Background

I. Physical Inactivity: This problem did not begin and cannot necessarily end. It has to do with humans as a society. From the beginning of time this problem existed. However, the reason for this problem being a much larger issue at this point is all around us. In the earlier part of human existence, many of the daily tasks that we do were much more difficult than they are now. For example, attaining clean water was not as easy as turning on the faucet. One would have to travel some sort of distance to get to the closest river or well in order to obtain clean water. Another example is traveling. Before walking was the primary method of getting from point A to point B. Now we have automobiles that transport us in fractions of the time. Though these advancements are very beneficial to us, they decrease the amount of physical activity we perform on a day-to-day basis. The article Dr.I-Min Lee ScD and colleagues published called “Effect of physical inactivity on major non-communicable diseases worldwide: an analysis of burden of disease and life expectancy” states the direct correlation between the lack of physical activity and major non-communicable diseases such as coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes as well as breast and colon cancers. Their researched goaled to see whether the implementation of activity in inactive individual’s lives would bring forth a positive change when it...