General Health Measures

by: petergitundu21
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Smoking, Drinking, Stress, Accidents ,Naturally anyone who wants a long life should not smoke. If you are smoker, there are already plenty of books, schools, and methods to help you stop. I won't at­tempt to add to these. If you smoke one pack of cigarettes a day, in addition to a 700 percent increase in your chance to develop lung cancer, your chance of cancer of the mouth increases by 900 percent, cancer of the larynx, 700 percent, of the esophagus, 300 percent, of the pancreas, 170 percent. Heavy smoking increases your risk of heart disease 2 to 3 times. Smoking actually causes more deaths from heart disease than from cancer, although lung cancer is the major danger perceived by the public. Mild to moderate alcohol intake is not necessarily unhealthful, and in fact may be a slight positive factor in preventing heart disease. However, alcohol does mean empty calories, with no accompanying nutritive value in terms of the RDAs, so the less booze the better. Table 9.1 gives the caloric content of common alcoholic beverages. Be moderate.

The combination of alcohol and tobacco is particularly bad. Cancers of the mouth and throat are twice to 6 times as common among heavy drinkers as among nondrinkers, and the combination of heavy drinking and heavy smoking raises the risk to 15 times. Among moderate smokers, those who drink heavily face 25 times the risk of cancer of the esophagus as nondrinkers. There is no convincing evidence that stress in and of itself accelerates the basic aging process, although it may potentiate the development of arteriosclerosis, heart disease, and possibly even cancer (by its effect on the other wise protective immune system). Stress experiments in mice performed years ago at Brook haven National Laboratories did not show any effect on survival curves. Stories that sudden fright may turn the hair white overnight are all merely testimonial evidence. Animal studies involving the "general adaptation syndrome" suggested at one time that certain forms of stress those which put the animal into a "fight or flight" frame of mind cause a sudden outpouring of adrenal hormones, and that too much of these hormones may accelerate some features of aging. But this "general adaptation syndrome" has not in fact been accepted as a good model of aging. The relation of stress to "aging" is unsettled.

But in terms of disease susceptibility, you must try to avoid certain forms of stress: not so much that of hard work, which is probably beneficial, but the stress of anxiety and or frustration. 4 For some time it was thought that so called "Type A behavior," characterized by ambitiousness, competitiveness, and a sense of time urgency, predisposes to increased risk of heart disease, but this idea is now being questioned. The study of how socioeconomic and behavioral factors, like stress in the workplace and loneliness at home, influence the risk of heart and other diseases is almost a new medical specialty. For a while at least we shall hear conflicting views. A recent study of 2,320 men who had suffered a first heart attack undertook to evaluate risks for a second. The men were classified according to the amount of stress in their daily lives and the degree to which they were socially isolated. Second attack rates in stressed, isolated persons were 4 times as frequent as in others, but there seemed to be little or no correlation with "Type A behavior" or with the "intensity" of the personality.

Fast cars and dangerous pastimes may shorten your life expectancy, but not by accelerating aging. Five percent of deaths are due to accidents, and it can be shown mathematically that if all diseases were eliminated and aging itself completely halted but the accident rate remained at today's level, maximum life span would extend to about 600 years. 6 That's not too bad, and in any case your personal perils are your personal business, your own pleasure. Having hitch hiked and river boated across Central Africa for my 58th birthday,? I won't tell you to sit carefully at home and avoid danger. But that's the third factor on our survival curve: aging, disease, then accidents.

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About the Author

peter gitundu is a health specialist and has carried out research on many health related things, he also writes many health articles too. If you found the above article useful he recommends you to visit his site at: http://www.online-health-care.com/blog/ for more related articles.

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