‘Mind boggling’: Study shows less than 3% of Americans have ‘healthy lifestyle’

RT

The lifestyle of more than 97 percent of Americans cannot be considered “healthy” according to a new study that examined people’s diets, exercise, body fat, as well as whether they smoked. Researchers also found trends based on age, gender, and ethnicity.

A study conducted by Oregon State University in partnership with the University of Mississippi and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga looked at 4,745 people included in National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data from 2003 to 2006, and found that only 2.7 percent met a four-part criteria for having a healthy lifestyle.  

“This is pretty low, to have so few people maintaining what we would consider a healthy lifestyle,” Ellen Smit, an Oregon State associate professor of public health and human sciences and co-author, said in a statement. “This is sort of mind boggling. There’s clearly a lot of room for improvement.”

The study, published in Mayo Clinical Proceedings, verified the extent of people’s exercise habits and physical characteristics using technology rather than survey questionnaires. An accelerometer similar to a fitness watch was used to calculate movement, and blood samples determined whether a person smoked or not. Body fat wasn’t measured by height and weight, but instead with advanced dual-energy X-rays. If a person was in the top 40 percent of the population in terms of eating USDA-recommended food, they were considered to have a healthy diet.

To be fully healthy, a person would have to engage in regular exercise at least 150 minutes per week, have normal body fat, eat well, and not smoke. Over 97 percent of Americans failed to meet all of these standards, but nearly 90 percent met at least one of the four.

Researchers found that only 16 percent of Americans had good enough health to claim to be in three of the four categories, while 37 percent could only meet the criteria for two, and 34 percent could only fulfill the requirements for one of the categories. Just eleven percent were so unhealthy that they didn’t pass any of the four benchmarks.

While smokers made up 29 percent of the sampling, 54 percent of those studied didn’t exercise enough, 62 percent were unhealthy eaters, and 90 percent carried too much body fat.

Other findings revealed that men were more likely to smoke and eat poorly, but were also more likely than women to get enough exercise. As for ethnicity, Mexican-Americans had better eating habits than non-Hispanic whites and blacks. It may not be surprising to learn that people over 60 years old were generally less healthy than those aged 20-39, but the older crowd did, in fact, show healthier habits when it came to what they consumed, eating better and smoking less than the younger crowd.

The four categories are linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and other medical conditions, the study’s authors explained.

“Although multiple healthy lifestyle characteristics are important, specific health characteristics may be more important for particular cardiovascular disease risk factors,” the study concluded.

https://www.rt.com/usa/336801-study-americans-healthy-lifestyle/

5 thoughts on “‘Mind boggling’: Study shows less than 3% of Americans have ‘healthy lifestyle’

  1. Well since healthy eating has now been declared a mental disorder by the BS psychiatry profession, I guess they’re killing themselves with poisoned food in an attempt to remain “sane”.

    If you know anyone who works in the psychiatry field, you need to confront him regarding his entire profession being a scam that’s used as a political weapon.

    “Did you study psychiatry under Stalin, or Hitler?”

    “Do you achieve an erection when you fry someone’s brain with 10,000 completely useless volts of electricity?”

    “Why don’t you get a real job doing something productive rather than participating in this charlatan ‘medical’ profession?”

    1. As someone with a BA in Psychology (and a Masters degree in Counseling) I fully agree with you Jolly! In fact a professor I had (who FYI was Jewish) actually told me that the business of Psychiatry was to keep people mentally ill! (After that I had no plans to ever work in that field…I go my Counseling certification…was already a certified teacher…mainly for the purposes of using it to help homeschoolers in case Texas changed its home schooling laws. In this day and age credentials count a lot.)

  2. I love it when “studies” begin with assumptions that naturally are “backed” by the “study.” The biggest assumption is Americans love to eat unhealthily (!) when most Americans (except the filthy rich, who can afford $1,000 steaks and the like from private organic food dealers, ranchers and the like) are FORCED to eat either GMOs, foods that contain GMOs, or foods that contain foods contaminated with pesticides which cannot be just washed off. The second assumption is that folks do not like to exercise…no, it’s not that folks do not like to exercise, it is that most folks do not like spending oodles of dollars they don’t have to join gyms or clubs which they’d have to do in urban areas to get any exercise. The third assumption is that city and suburban folks are just lazy….no, it’s not that, but urban and suburban folks do not have yards big enough for yard work, or stack and packs big enough to spend more than ten minutes a day to clean because the space is so small!

    It’s funny about that 3 percent thing…fact is about three percent of Americans live in rural areas which means working your butt off (gardening, chopping wood, raising animals, fixing fences, etc.) and thus “maintaining a healthy lifestyle” (plus you get to eat the fruits of your own labor, something most city and suburban folks cannot do).

    But since rural areas have so few jobs (especially good paying ones), is it any wonder Millennials are stuck living in big cities where the jobs are?

    It ain’t rocket science, and certainly isn’t worth an expensive “study”!

    1. Oh, and, about that “body fat”, which is another bogus standard based on the “Body Mass Index” some idiot nutritionists made up which makes everyone but anorexics/bulimics, athletes, and genetically skinny people “fat”–in this day and age, being a little “overweight” is fine IMHO, and when TSHTF and starvation time comes, being “overweight” is going to be vital!

      Just another illuminati tactic: get folks “normal” weight, then starve the crap out of them!

  3. “To be fully healthy, a person would have to engage in regular exercise at least 150 minutes per week, have normal body fat, eat well, and not smoke.”

    And not breathe chemtrails?

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