Health under control

Author Julia LangeReading 6 min

Contents

What you need to know to stay healthy

Life today makes people realize what they tend to forget – how important their health is. The human body has been equipped with many safety systems. But for them to work effectively, you have to take care of that body. And surprisingly, in emergencies, your immune system is the only thing you can count on.

The evolution mentioned above has been shaping you for thousands of years. You are perfectly prepared to deal with a variety of threats – your skin is waterproof, you have tightly placed sensors all over your body – temperature, touch, and pain. Your eyes are adapted to stereoscopic vision, and your ears are not closed, so even when you sleep, at least one of your senses is constantly awake.

immune system

You have antibodies and many other defense reactions. You have a sense of smell, which allows you to judge whether food is edible, and tears, which wash dust particles from your eyes, somehow manage to get into your eyes before another defense mechanism that closes your eyelids reacts. Well, it’s tough to fault this perfect project called the human body.

Civilization versus Evolution

There is only one problem. Evolution works pretty sluggishly. Changes are made over at least several dozen generations, and the world you live in is changing much faster. Evolution has not had time to prepare you for the invention of artificial light, the widely available cheap carbohydrates, and the fact that you spend most of your life indoors.

Today, you eat too much and too poorly, move little, sleep little, and stress too much, and many of you still have deadly habits, like smoking or alcohol.

Although life expectancy continues to increase, much of it has to do with medicine-you. Live longer because doctors can save your life when your neglected bodies refuse to obey you. They can cure cancer, control diabetes, repair arteries, and even transplant some organs, such as a heart, liver, or lungs, and extend life by a few or a dozen years.

Prevention is better than cure

This phrase is so trite and clichéd that it no longer impresses anyone. But, as is often the case with clichés, it sounds very genuine. What does it mean in practice? Look at the press reports – how long it takes to see a specialist when procedures such as femoral head implantation are scheduled, what cancer care is, and how much more painful surgeries cost in private clinics with no waiting lists.

If you take care of your health today, you won’t have to spend a fortune in a few years to repair something that’s broken. You can spend it on much nicer things. That’s an essential financial aspect, but there’s another important one: quality of life.

Disease prevention

A common cold, the flu, or a sore tooth is enough to feel how dramatically your mood drops when something is wrong with you. And as the years go by, there will be more and more complaints. And it’s joint pain, shortness of breath after entering the first floor, and the fear that you have a heart attack. You all want to live a long life, but you often forget that quality of life is just as important as longevity. Why live long if the second half of your life consists of pain, swallowing pills, and going to the hospital?

Disease prevention

Fortunately, you are not helpless. Taking care of yourself is not difficult, expensive, or unpleasant. It can be charming, which evolution has taken care of, inventing serotonin and endorphins. These so-called happiness hormones are released, for example, after exercise, after eating certain foods, after sex, and in many other pleasurable situations. That’s why you like them.

Here is a set of WHO recommendations on what you can do to stay healthy and live as long as possible. The rules are so simple, and nothing could be simpler.

At least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week

Muscle-strengthening activities, that is, strength training, should ideally be done two days a week. That’s only half an hour a day, not counting weekends. If you can’t do it regularly, you can cut 150 minutes down to 75 if it’s an intense workout and you get tired. The optimal amount of exercise is 300 minutes a week.

Diversify your nutrition

What does a balanced diet mean? A healthy, well-balanced diet protects against many chronic diseases. Try to eat the right amount of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats in the proper proportions. Studies show that the most common dietary mistake is eating too many carbohydrates (mainly sugar) and saturated fats. These are ingredients added to highly processed foods and so-called fast foods.

High-energy carbs and fats are precious when there is limited access to food, so you enjoy eating sweets and fatty burgers. Unfortunately, this pleasure builds up around your waistline and arteries, causing rapid breathing and heart problems. So instead of eating highly processed foods, eat more raw fruits and vegetables. And oily sea fish is a rich source of very beneficial omega-3 fatty acids. This is where you become victims of evolution.

WHO recommendations

If you still smoke, quit

All other methods will do little good if you poison your lungs several times daily. Smoking can cause heart disease and strokes, which are also significant causes of death. And while you may think you’re doing your skin a favor by staying thin, all that smoke is aging you faster than the extra pounds.

Use technology

The fourth WHO recommendation is digital technology, which allows us to monitor health and the effectiveness of our changes like never before.

And it is this WHO strategy that fits perfectly into the Withings family of smart devices. Combined with apps, they are great tools for checking the most important parameters of your body, and then when you start to make changes, visible progress will motivate you to keep trying. Changes for the better are invisible to the human eye for a while, but the sensors are already picking them up and will tell you before you get frustrated that you’re going in the right direction.

Sources

Julia Lange

The food industry has poorly educated people about nutrition: it is still tough to find healthy foods that taste good. Foods that make you feel good now do not make you healthy in the long run. A wise eater knows how to find the right balance between good for you and good for the world.

That's because the food industry is built on profits, not health. You wouldn't need a dietitian to tell you what to eat if they did. You would know yourself and your body well enough to figure out what made you feel good and what made you sick.

However, a revolution in dietetics has taken hold in recent years, based on a scientific understanding of nutritional science and evidence-based nutrition. In other words, it's based on research, not marketing. By taking just a dozen ingredients and matching them to your body's needs, you can achieve perfect nutrition:
- No more illness.
- No more cravings for unhealthy foods.
- No more self-indulgent eating binges that spoil everything.

If that revolution had been around when most people were growing up, our food choices would have been different from what they are now. That revolution is based on understanding why we get sick and what makes us feel good. If you want to eat well, you need to ask yourself these questions: Why do I get sick? What makes me feel good? What are the effects of eating this food on my body, health, and the world around me?