Ten Tips for Lowering Your Risk of Heart Disease or Cancer

Instead of waiting for New Year’s Eve - or even New Year’s Day - to make your resolutions for 2009, why not start to collect items now? I came across an excellent list of lifestyle tips on the Bandolier Healthy Living website. They were written in 2000, but they are more relevant than ever today. Here they are, slightly edited; for the complete list, go to the healthy living pages on Bandolier.
!. Eat whole grain foods (bread, or rice, or pasta) on four occasions a week. This will reduce the chance of having almost any cancer by 40%. Given that cancer gets about 1 in 3 of us in a lifetime, that's big advice.
2. Don't smoke. If you do smoke, stop. Nicotine patches, gum or inhaler won't help much, and acupuncture won't help at all. Reducing smoking is better than nothing, as there is a profound dose-response (the more you smoke, the more likely you are to have cancer, or heart or respiratory disease). But quitting completely should be your goal. If you must, ask your doctor for a medication that really helps.
3. Eat at least five portions of vegetables or fruit a day, and especially tomatoes (including ketchup), red grapes and the like, as well as salad all year round. This reduces the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
4. Use Benecol® instead of butter or margarine. It really does reduce cholesterol, and reducing cholesterol will reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke even in those whose cholesterol is not particularly high.
5. Drink alcohol regularly. The type of alcohol probably doesn't matter too much, but the equivalent of a couple of glasses of wine a day or a couple of beers is a good thing. The odd day without alcohol won't hurt either. Think of it as medicine.
6. Eat fish. Eating fish once a week won't stop you having a heart attack in itself, but it reduces the likelihood of you dying from it by half.
7. Take a multivitamin tablet every day, but be sure that it is one with at least 200 micrograms of folate (vitamin B12). The evidence is that this can substantially reduce chances of heart disease in some individuals, and it has been shown to reduce colon cancer by over 85%. It may also reduce the likelihood of developing dementia. Folate is essential in any woman contemplating pregnancy because it will reduce the chance of some birth defects.
8. If you are pregnant or have high blood pressure, coffee drinking is best minimized. For the rest of us drinking four cups of coffee a day is likely to reduce our chances of getting colon cancer and Parkinson's disease.
9. Get breathless more often. You don't have to go to a gym or be an Olympic marathon runner. Simply walking a mile a day, or taking reasonable exercise three times a week (enough to make you sweat or glow) will substantially reduce the risk of heart disease. If you walk, don't dawdle. Make it a brisk pace. One of the benefits of regular exercise is that it strengthens bones and keeps them strong.
10. Check your height and weight to see if you are overweight for your height. Your body mass index (BMI) should be below 25. If you are overweight, lose it. This has many benefits. There is no good evidence on simple ways to lose weight that work. Crash diets don't work. Take it one step at a time, do the things that are possible now, and combine some calorie limitation with increased exercise.
Once again, I’d like to pay tribute to Bandolier, which is a UK website devoted to the benefits provided by evidentiary medicine (i.e. medical treatments that have been proved to work in well-conducted studies). These healthy-living tips are, for the most part, entirely relevant to the years 2008/2009, and are valid for USA citizens equally well as for Brits.