Medical Sociology
How does a healthy lifestyle promote good health and a longer life expectancy? Justify your answer with examples and reasoning.
A healthy lifestyle comprises of eating healthy meals and exercising regularly. This combination of healthy living extends not just the number of years, but also improves the quality of years a person lives. Diet improves the quality and quantity of years by regulating the insulin levels as well as the leptin secretion in the body. These components are important factors that regulate healthy ageing by controlling the interaction of lifestyles factors, the environment, and genes. Medical research has revealed that there is clear connection between healthy eating and illnesses like type II diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer to name but a few. For instance, energy imbalances in the body lead to nutrient deficiency diseases many of which are related to chronic diseases.
Doing regular exercise is not a surefire guarantee that a person will live longer because other risk factors like genetics, accidents, and environmental toxicity reduce the lifespan of an individual. Nonetheless, regular exercise increases a person’s odds of living a prolonged life by improving his or her cardiovascular health. In turn, good cardiovascular health lowers the risk of blood clots, heart attacks, stroke, and heart failure among other complications. This happens because exercising improves blood circulation by exercising cardiac muscles and lowering the body’s blood pressure.
In the contemporary world, cancer is the leading cause of death in Europe, America, and many parts of the world. A healthy lifestyle of diet and exercising can reduce the risk of exposure even to a high risk individual who is highly susceptible to getting cancer due to genetic factors. Additionally, having regular exercises can improve the living standards of people who live with mental illnesses (Zantinge et al., 2014). Mental conditions like Dartmouth decrease the longevity of an individual by twenty or thirty years. Having regular exercise schedule can reduce the risk of suicide that comes with a mental illness such as Dartmouth.
A healthy lifestyle of exercising and eating healthy improves the quality of life by reducing the health problems that a person may experience, even those who do not develop serious and life threatening diseases like diabetes or cancer. For instance, non life threatening diseases like arthritis and osteoporosis may undermine a person’s ability to move around freely. Also, exercising improves bone health in elderly people whose bones repair very slowly in the occurrence of a fracture. Exercising is important for promoting bone density thereby protecting the body against osteoporosis, a disease that lowers the quality of life when his or her bones become susceptible to breaking and healing very slowly. Other than having regular exercises, a calcium rich diet and exposure to the sun leveling up vitamin D levels is crucial to the body.
Suggest and then briefly explain two theories that support this viewpoint
The compression of morbidity theory: It was developed by James Fries and it stipulates that many illnesses in the human body occur when a person …
