Health is not a static state. We all shuttle between good health and ill-health throughout our life.
But life is complex. You can feel good despite having a disease, while a physically fit person can experience ill-health and feel bad. We are all born different, but everyone can still do something for their health.
A health promotion perspective starts by looking at what creates and contributes to good health. This approach also involves accepting that there is no single factor that leads to health—there are numerous contributing factors, and they are all interdependent; hence, the 10 chapters in this book. The key is to activate the inherent powers that we all have in order to achieve meaningful, longer, and healthier lives—and not just to achieve good health in itself, but because good health is a resource that will help you achieve other goals in life.
This book gives advice on making body and soul feel good. And this advice is for everyone. If you already feel good, you can reinforce and retain that feeling. And if you’re already suffering ill-health or disease, there is advice that can boost aspects of your lifestyle and help you move from ill-health to health, or keep your health from deteriorating further.
Plenty of simple advice—take that first step
THE MOST IMPORTANT, but perhaps also the most difficult, thing is to take the first step toward changing your lifestyle. So choose something that is relatively easy to change and get started now. Then use this book for support and as a reference book to help you add more new habits to your life 1 step at a time. The transition to a healthy lifestyle shouldn’t be a chore—it should feel positive and meaningful. That way you’ll stick to these new habits for the future. See yourself eating well, see yourself cycling up that long hill. It’s important to create positive images of what is going to happen, as this increases the chance of it becoming a reality.
Keep returning to the book, discuss it with your friends, share your top tips. This keeps the topic of health alive.
What determines the length of your life?
AS I MENTIONED in the introduction, we now know that your lifestyle is the most significant factor for a long and healthy life. You are very much able to influence your longevity and your health through active choices.
Before we begin with advice for good health, we first need to understand how things fit together. How can we build up and strengthen our body and mental health, so that we can feel good and protect ourselves against inflammation?
Inflammation—the big threat
THE BIG THREAT to our health is the occurrence of inflammation in the body, largely due to an unhealthy lifestyle. I’ll be showing how lifestyle and inflammation are connected, how they affect our health, and how we can avoid it.
Risky inflammation is problematic because you have it all the time, but you won’t know that you have it, and you therefore won’t know that you are being damaged by it. You might even feel fine with your unhealthy lifestyle right now, but what may not be so clear is the high price you’re paying—premature ageing! The fact that inflammation has such an impact on our health is fascinating and relatively new information that may not be known by everyone.
By how many years can life actually be extended?
DIFFERENT HEALTHY LIFESTYLE changes can give different outcomes. The figures mentioned in the book are thus averages for everyone involved in a particular study. This means that if a change in lifestyle has given an average of 7 more years of life for all those in the study, the number of years for the individuals in the group may vary from 3 to 11, for example. There is thus no way of knowing exactly what the outcome will be in each individual case, but the message is still clear: making this lifestyle change increases the chance of improving health and extending life by a number of years.
And if you make several lifestyle changes, you can’t simply add up all the years of extended life for each particular change. Instead, the effects merge into each other, further increasing the likelihood of delaying diseases, feeling healthy, and extending your life.
Figure 1. An unhealthy lifestyle leads to increased risk of disease.
How does inflammation occur?
INFLAMMATION CAN OCCUR in various ways, but the main cause is free radicals.
When we breathe in, oxygen enters our lungs, transfers to the blood system, and is carried off to all the cells in the body. The cells then use the oxygen to produce energy for their critical functions. This forms a by-product—free radicals. The body is able to use small amounts of free radicals, but an unhealthy lifestyle creates too many. These electrically charged substances then go on the rampage, damaging cells in the body—and causing inflammation. All cells are vulnerable to damage, in tissue, blood vessels, and various organs. Our immune system also suffers (see Figure 1).
WHAT DOES LONG-TERM INFLAMMATION CAUSE?
AS WE AGE, the damage and inflammation caused by free radicals becomes ever clearer. The immune system fails and bacteria, viruses, and cancer cells are able to multiply and spread. But damage to the immune system can also make it overambitious, so that it starts attacking the body’s own normal cells. This gives rise to what are known as autoimmune diseases such as rheumatic pain, psoriasis, and inflammatory bowel disease.
Long-term inflammation also means that the body’s tissue, blood vessels, and organs have sustained damage and their function will gradually deteriorate. Overall, inflammation can lead to a number of different diseases, including those named in Figure 1.
Many of our most common diseases are caused by the same thing—inflammation.
How to boost your health and combat inflammation
CHOOSING A HEALTHY lifestyle boosts your health and also stimulates the self-healing processes that in various ways combat the occurrence and harmful effects of inflammation.
1.Build up a powerful immune system—through a health-promoting and invigorating lifestyle.
2.Reduce the production of free radicals—through a preventive lifestyle.
3.Render the free radicals harmless—through a protective lifestyle.
You decide, through your lifestyle, which path you want to take toward better health.
1. BUILD UP A POWERFUL IMMUNE SYSTEM
YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM comprises your lymph glands, spleen, and bone marrow, plus a large number of white blood cells of various kinds that patrol the body on the hunt for intruders. They defend the body against external invasion by finding and destroying harmful bacteria and viruses. They also deal with and kill off the body’s cells that have been damaged by free radicals, and that risk transforming into cancer cells.
A particular type of white blood cells known as “natural killers” or “NK cells” are the immune system’s special forces. As soon as they discover an intruder, they try to make cell-to-cell contact and release a toxin that forces its way into the alien cell and destroys it. That’s how fantastic our body