Building Healthy Habits For Disease Prevention: 6 Tips And Advice

The common adage ‘health is wealth’ is true indeed because if you’re suffering from any disease, you’d need to pay for treatments, which can proveto be expensive. From medication to maintenance, it can eat up all your fortune. And worse, if you don’t have enough finances, you may not be able to get the proper treatment you’d need.

And while medicines could temporarily cure your illness, some may cause side effects, like developing other types of diseases,such as fatty liver disease. Thus, it’s best to practice building healthy habits for disease prevention.

Your lifestyle may determine how healthy you are in the near future. For instance, if you’re a heavy smoker, you may be placing yourself at risk of developing lung cancer. If you have an unhealthy diet, your chances of developing heart disease increase. What’s worse is if there are other factors contributing to an unhealthy lifestyle as there’d be higher chances of contracting diseases. On the other hand, if you have a healthy lifestyle, you can enjoy the following positive impact on your life.

One common effect of having a healthy lifestyle ishelping you appear younger and fitter. If you’re not overeating, chances are you won’t gain more weight. And consuming enough nutrients could make your skin glow, your eyes bright, and your hair lustrous. Then if you rarely drink alcohol, you couldslow down skin aging. Moreover, you could prevent under-eye bags if you always have adequate sleep. All of these couldhelp make your appearance better and natural even without the use of commercial skin or beauty products.

Aside from physical appearance, you could also have a happier and relaxed feeling if you engage in physical activities. These activities could release brain chemicals to help balance your emotional well-being. And when you’re emotionally okay, you’re able to perform better. Consequently, you won’t get easily irritated or stressed with simple things, which may not be so when your mood isn’t balanced.

Another way to promote a better mood is limiting your alcohol intake. That’s because alcohol can slow your brain activity, which could result in aggression, depression, or anxiety. But you could prevent this from happening by keeping your alcohol intake at a minimum.

You may also improve your endurance as well as strengthen your body if you practice a healthy lifestyle by doingregular exercises. Doing this would improve your cardiovascular system, which means your body would receive adequate oxygen since your muscles are energized. As a result, you’d be able to perform your daily tasks more efficiently.

  1. Lesser Chances Of Developing Diseases

Another important benefit of having a healthy lifestyle isit could help shield your body from diseases. By eatinga proper diet and doing exercise, you could prevent high blood pressure and heart diseases. It’s because these activities could help keep your blood flow smoothly, and as a result, your blood pressure and cholesterol levels are kept within a safe range. You could also avoid other health problems, like arthritis, cancer, mental illness, diabetes, and similar illnesses, by managing your lifestyle.

If you think you haven’t practiced a healthy lifestyle yet, it’s not too late to start now. Perhaps one of the first thingsto do is to visit a healthcare facility nearest you and have yourself examined by professionals. For instance, if you’re in Idaho, seeyour physician at theIdaho Falls Community Hospitalorother healthcare institutions to know if you may have some underlying diseases you’re unaware of. They could advise you on the right way to start a healthy lifestyle that would suit your age or any underlying condition, if any.

What Healthy Habits Should You Practice?

Knowing the benefits of healthy habits isn’t enough.It’s best to learn how to observe them, too. That way, you could ensure you’re reducing your chances of being infected by diseases or developing them because of yourunhealthy habits. While unhealthy living isn’t the sole cause of acquiring diseases, it plays a significant role in disease prevention. Learn more about this below.

  1. Eating Healthy

A balanced diet couldoffer your body a lot of benefits. Here are some of the wayshealthy eating could affect your overall well-being:

  • Boosts ‘good’cholesterol: While too much cholesterol may be terrible for the body, you still need ‘good’ cholesterol, also known as high-density lipoprotein (HDL). HDL works like a vacuum, removing plaque buildup and extra cholesterol (the bad ones) and sends them to your liver.

This process couldhelp in the prevention of stroke, heart attack, heart disease, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome since the liver expels the bad cholesterol out of your system. To ensure this happens, consider adding high-fiber fruits, fatty fish, whole grains, beans and legumes, and other food rich in HDL to your diet.

  • Affects certain parts of the body:One exampleof how a healthy diet could affect your body is when you eat food rich in calcium. This nutrient could help your bones become stronger and healthier, which is essential to avoid osteoporosis. Another example is when you limit your intake of saturated fats. This would allowyou to lessen your chances of acquiring heart disease as this unhealthy fat could increase your cholesterol and blood pressure.
  • Prevents obesity: You could avoid weight problems, such as obesity, by eating healthy. Since obesity could lead to other conditions, like heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, and type 2 diabetes, it’s best to reduce eating food high in calories, fats, and sugar. With these unhealthy elements in your body, your organs won’t be able to work correctly since extra weight could weaken your bones.

Therefore, it’s vital to incorporate enough nutrients into your diet. You don’t have to fully remove unhealthy food, but it’s best to keep them at a minimum. Instead, eat more nutrient-dense food like the following:

  • Vegetable oils
  • Proteins, like soy products, seeds, nuts, peas, lentils, seafood, eggs, poultry, and lean meat
  • Dairy, including yogurt, cheese, and low-fat or fat-free milk
  • Whole grains
  • Fruit and vegetables
  1. Being More Active

Aside from balancing your mood, physical activities could also help improve your overall quality of life.Most importantly, it may reduce your risk of developing health problems, like the following:

  • Osteoporosis:As you age, your bone formation decreases, which maylead to ‘porous bones’ or osteoporosis.But you could help prevent this by doingregular weight-bearing exercises, which aresaid to boost bone formation.
  • Obesity:Obesity could lead to other health problems,but you could strengthen the effect of a proper diet throughregular exercise. You could burn more calories and preserve muscle mass with physical activities, and these are essential in reducing body fats.
  • Asthma: If you have this condition, it’s best to become more active. That way, you might be able to control the severity and frequency of asthma attacks.
  1. Socializing More

Being healthy doesn’t only focus on the physical aspect of your body.It also includes your mental well-being. In fact, if you experienceany mental health condition, it’s not unlikely to experience other diseases. For example, if you have an anxiety disorder, you’dbe more likely to lose interest in performing physical activities. And you could develop health problems when you don’t do regular exercise.

To ensure you take good care of your mental well-being, try to mingle with other people. Person-to-person interaction is believed to stimulate the release of neurotransmitters,which regulate how people respond to anxiety and stress. One example of these neurotransmitters is dopamine, which is responsible for making a person feel good. Thus, when you socialize more, you could learn to become resilient to stressors in the long run.

Moreover, interacting with people could help in the following aspects:

  • Increased brain health:Socializing could help you boost your cognitive function, including your decision-making, problem-solving, reasoning, and memory skills. Stimulating activities and conversations are exercises for the brain to keep it functioning well. Without such activities, your cognitive function could decline, and thiscould sometimes lead to other mental health problems.
  • Reduced risk of Alzheimer’s:One example of mental health issues resulting from cognitive decline is Alzheimer’s. This condition causes the brain cells to die and the brain to shrink. In the long run, the person with this condition may be unable to function independently. When you interact more, you may have a chance to prevent this disease.
  1. Practicing Safe Sex

Another healthy habit that could prevent diseases is practicing safe sex. By doing this, you could avoid getting any sexually transmitted disease (STD). While it may be possible to abstain from sex to prevent STDs, it may not work for some. Thus, here are some practices you may want to consider:

  • Avoid mixing drinks, drugs, and sex:One of the many reasons people unknowingly contract STDs is not knowing their partners. And this happens when you’re too intoxicatedby alcohol and drugs that you may not be able to say no to the other personbecause you’re too wasted.
  • Practice a monogamous relationship:One of the benefits of having only one sexual partneris avoiding persons who may have STDs. This could work if both parties communicate about this monogamy principle and commit to it.
  • Practice sex safe: This means using appropriate barriers, like gloves or condoms, when having sexual intercourse. Although they may not be 100% effective against STDs, using them could reduce your risk of getting them.
  1. Sleeping Well

Even if life’s too busy, you need to have adequate sleep. That’s because rest has to do with the overall system of your body, making sleep connected to the immune system. The immune system is essential since it could protect you against illnesses, warding off any infection, and help in healing wounds. This means if you have a weak immune system, you’re more likely to become sick, or worse, develop life-threatening diseases.

But by having a healthy sleeping pattern, you could strengthen your immune system. On the other hand, if you don’t have enough sleep, your immune system can’t rev up, soyou may not be able to produce enough cytokines associated with inflammation. This cytokine production happens due to your circadian rhythm—the 24-hour internal clock of the body—and sleep.

This is essential as it could help fight off infection and repair wounds when you’re ill or injured. And this inflammation activity still works during sleep, which could strengthen the adaptive immunity of your system. Thus, enough sleep is essential for immune memory strengthening. This means it could teach your immune system to remember, react, and recognize dangerous antigens while you’re asleep. And this happens because of the following factors:

  • During sleep, inflammation releases stress. For this matter, you’re producing a sleep-promoting hormone, also known as melatonin, to counteract such stress.
  • During night sleep, the inflammation process couldn’t harm mental and physical performance, but it could if it’s occurring during waking hours.
  • When you’re sleeping, the immune system could perform tasks, like strengthening its memory, because your muscle and breathing activity slows down.

If you want to have an effective and balanced immune function, strengthen your immune system by having a healthy sleeping pattern. Conversely, a lack of sleep could weaken your immune system. When this happens, it could also affect how you sleep, which means rest and the immune system have a bidirectional relationship.

For instance, a weak immune system could cause circadian rhythm disruption, sleep apnea, insomnia, and other sleep disorders. And when you don’t have enough sleep, you may also develop other health problems.

  1. Observing Personal Hygiene

Another healthy habit that could significantly prevent contracting diseasesis having good hygiene. Aside from washing your hands, ensure you take good care of your whole body.

With handwashing, especially nowadays, you could protect yourself against germs and coronavirus. It could also help minimize your risk of passing these germs to other people. If you touch an object with harmful bacteria, you could become infected when you touch your mouth, nose, or eyes. But this could be avoided when you wash your hands regularly. If soap and water are unavailable at the moment, alcohol or hand sanitizersare good alternatives.

You must also keep your feet clean to avoid athlete’s foot, an infection of the feet and skincaused by various fungi that usually occur in the spaces of the toes. When you leave athlete’s foot untreated, it could spread to your hands and cause fungal nail infection.

For this reason,it’s necessary to always keep your nails clean and short since these are where infection houses and spreads.By keeping yourself clean, you’re removing germs, bacteria, viruses, and other harmful microorganisms that could spread over your body, making you sick.

Conclusion

Disease prevention is possible when you take care of your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. This includes eating healthy, practicing safe sex, exercising, and more. When you observe these healthy habits, you may lower your risk of developing or contracting any disease.