Common Sense Best Guide For Health

With years of research and millions of taxpayer dollars, scientists have discovered what the old wives always knew. The cornerstone to good health is common sense.
Grandma always said that to stay healthy you need to get a good night’s sleep, eat plenty of vegetables, exercise and stay in touch with friends and family. Such wisdom may seem simple, but data keep accumulating to support these recommendations.
A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (April 23, 2003) showed that combining moderate exercise with a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and low in fat leads to weight loss and reduced blood pressure.
Prior research showed that a sensible diet helps control hypertension. Exercise has also been found beneficial. But in this study scientists tested whether both together would work better than either alone.
More than 800 adults were followed for six months. As grandma could have predicted, the combined approach worked best.
Exercise has also been shown to help prevent or control diabetes, relieve depression and reduce the risk of heart disease. Regular exercise also is reported to improve sleep.
Canadian researchers have found that people with chronic insomnia have lowered immune system responses. These findings are not good news for the 47 million Americans who are chronically sleep deprived. Not only may they be more vulnerable to infections like colds or flu, but they may suffer other negative consequences.
Insomnia can contribute to slow reaction time, reduced alertness and impaired memory and concentration. All of these increase the risk for accidents at work or on the road.
What about keeping up with family and friends? In our fast-paced society, that may not seem as important as Grandma thought it was. But study after study demonstrates that people with more social support have better health.
Research both in California and in Sweden found that when thousands of people were questioned and then followed up, those who felt lonely with few friends had two to four times the risk of dying in the next decade. An investigation at Duke University found that people who participated in religious services regularly were less likely to die in the following six years. Blood tests showed that these individuals had less stress and stronger immune systems than those who did not attend church or temple.
Grandma might have wondered why scientists needed studies to prove what seemed self-evident to her. Perhaps most critical of all, she relied on good common sense and tried not to let the cure be worse than the disease.
A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine (April 17, 2003) noted that adverse drug events (ADEs) are frequent, affecting roughly 25 percent in one outpatient survey. An editorial in the Journal of the American medical Association (March 5, 2003) estimated that nearly two million adverse drug events occur annually and “perhaps as many as 180,000 of these ADEs are life-threatening or fatal.”
Drugs save lives, but when side effects threaten quality of life their use needs to be reevaluated. Non-drug approaches such as exercise, diet, sleep and social support should be the foundation of every person’s health plan.