How to Be Healthy for Life

Most people hope to live a long, healthy life. Let's look at some simple tips to help you be healthier for life.




Upwards of 70 - 80% of a person’s life expectancy* depends on health-related behaviors or the lifestyle choices a person makes over a lifetime according to information presented in Whitney and Rolfes' textbook, Understanding Nutrition.

Living a healthy lifestyle, making good healthy choices and avoiding poor choices can greatly increase your overall life expectancy and general well being.


How to BE HEALTHY for Life

Following these tips can help you focus on the following areas to live a healthier life, be healthy and improve the quality of your life.

•Balance and Moderation

•Exercise for the Body and the Brain

•Healthy Foods

•Enough Sleep

•Aging Healthfully

•Lifestyle Choices

•Time to Unwind

•Health Checks

•Youthful Thoughts

More on the BE HEALTH Tips

Balance and Moderation

Keeping in balance means making sure that the number of calories you eat during a day equals the number of calories you use during a day; this balancing helps to maintain body weight. Balance also refers to keeping one’s professional, family and personal life being equally represented.

Moderation is eating your indulgence foods occasionally. Focus on eating healthy most of the time, but still having a little room in your daily calories for indulgences.


Exercise for the Body and the Brain

Physical Activity can be helpful for maintaining a healthy body weight and body composition. Being physically active helps in lowering one’s risk for cardiovascular diseases, improves risks of diabetes, improves mood and lowers one’s risk for depression. Being active also includes involving others whether a human or an animal companion on your walks.

The brain also needs to be kept active. Keeping the brain active involves using the brain daily by solving crossword puzzles or math equations, reading, writing, imagining and creating. Volunteering and being socially active is also a good way to keep the brain energized and active.

Healthy Foods

Focus on eating a variety of healthy foods. "Healthy Foods" include eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, cereals, breads and other grain products and legumes (beans). With dairy and meats the emphasis is on choosing lower-fat milk products, leaner meats and foods prepared with little or no fat. In addition limit the intake of salt, alcohol and caffeine.


Enough Sleep

Sleep is important for people of all ages. Getting enough sleep has been shown to increase one's ability to fight off diseases, improve your cardiovascular health and improve mood. Sleep can also help with improving one's ability to concentrate, learning and memory in addition to reducing irritability and impatience.

The average amount of sleep needed by people is 8 hours a night but many people can do well on 6 hours, where others need as much as 10. The absolute amount of sleep needed varies from person to person.

Perhaps the best thing for many people about getting enough sleep is having more energy to do what they like to do.


Aging Healthfully

Aging healthfully includes, among others, finding ways to reduce and manage stress, being physically active, getting enough sleep, eating healthy foods, making good lifestyle choices, staying socially active, watching for changes and nurturing the spirit as well as the mind.


Lifestyle Choices

Since 70 – 80 % of longevity depends on lifestyle choices, it is important to emphasize the good lifestyle choices and de-emphasize the poor ones.

Good lifestyle choices include eating healthy food, participating in daily physical and mental activity, getting enough sleep and minimizing stress.

Poor lifestyle choices to de-emphasize include limiting or reducing high fat foods, limiting the number of empty calories – those from sugar, fat and alcohol, quit smoking and using tobacco and limiting the amount of inactivity.

Time to Unwind

Stress can impact a person over a lifetime. Whether the stress comes from the environment or personal sources all forms cause a stress response in the body, which over time drains the body reserves making the person more susceptible to illness and disease.

Taking the time to unwind and reducing, removing and de-stressing helps lessen the negative impact on the body and improves overall health and well being.

Health Checks

Yearly routine exams are an important part of monitoring for potential diseases. Getting blood pressure checked, cholesterol and lipids screenings, being evaluated for risks of osteoporosis and getting basic cancer screenings (mammogram, colonoscopy and prostate exams) can to help a person “BE HEALTHY.”

In addition, it is important to watch for any changes and signs of disease and seek prompt treatment if something arises.


Youthful Thoughts

Author Ellen Glasgow once noted "Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty." There is a lot of truth in the expression, "You're as young as you feel" so to feel young, remember to think young thoughts.


Final Thoughts

Remember that following these simple tips, making daily healthy food and lifestyle changes over a lifetime can greatly improve a person’s longevity* or your total years of life lived and also the quality of living.

To Stay Healthy as you age, you have to BE HEALTHY for life.

__________________________

Words Used Defined

Life expectancy is the average number of years lived by people in a given society.

Longevity is having a long life span.

How Much Energy Does It Take to Make Bottled Water?

Producing, packaging and transporting a liter of bottled water requires between 1,100 and 2,000 times more energy on average than treating and delivering the same amount of tap water, according to a peer-reviewed energy analysis conducted by the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Oakland, California.


Popularity of Bottled Water is Rising

Bottled water has become the drink of choice for many people around the world, and sales have skyrocketed over the past few years. In 2007, for example, more than 200 billion liters of bottled water were sold worldwide. Americans alone purchased more than 33 billion liters for an annual average of 110 liters (nearly 30 gallons) per person—a 70 percent increase since 2001.

Bottled water has become so popular that it now outsells both milk and beer in the United States. Carbonated soft drinks are the only bottled beverage that U.S. consumers buy in greater quantities than bottled water, and per-capita sales of bottled water are rising while per-capita sales of milk and soft drinks are going down. The irony here, of course, is that a lot of bottled water is little more than tap water, which costs very little and is much better regulated and more rigorously tested than bottled water.

Adding Up the Energy Costs of Bottled Water

For the energy analysis, environmental scientists Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley of the Pacific Institute assessed the energy used during each stage of bottled water production. They added up the energy it takes to make a plastic bottle; process the water; label, fill and seal the bottle; transport bottled water for sale; and cool the bottled water before it ends up in your gym bag or your car’s cup holder.

Writing in the February 19, 2009 issue of Environmental Research Letters [pdf], Gleick and Cooley report that manufacturing and transportation are the most energy-intensive processes involved in putting a bottle of water in your refrigerator.

The two scientists estimate that just producing the plastic bottles for bottled-water consumption worldwide uses 50 million barrels of oil annually—enough to supply total U.S. oil demand for 2.5 days.

Transportation energy consumption is harder to figure, because some water is bottled locally and travels short distances to reach consumers while other brands of bottled water are imported from distant nations, which increases the amount of energy needed to transport them. According to the report, imported bottled water uses about two-and-a-half to four times more energy than bottled water produced locally.

Overall, the two scientists estimate that meeting U.S. demand for bottled-water—assuming the 2007 consumption rate of 33 billion liters—requires energy equivalent to between 32 million and 54 million barrels of oil. The energy required to satisfy the global thirst for bottled water is about three times that amount.



Think Before You Drink

If you imagine that every bottle of water you drink is about three-quarters water and one-quarter oil, you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of how much energy it takes to put that bottle of water in your hand.