Lifestyles and Health
Lifestyles are a major determinant of who shall live and who shall die (Fuchs 1974; McKinlay and Marceau 1999). Mechanic (1978, p. 164) argues that the concept of lifestyles refers to a diverse set of variables, including nutrition, housing, health attitudes and beliefs, risk-taking behavior, health behavior and habits, and preventive health behavior.
Confirming the Link Between Lifestyles and Health
Establishing the causal linkage between lifestyles and health is not a simple task. Variables included in lifestyles interact with each other (Mechanic 1978), making it difficult to adjust for confounding variables such as race and ethnicity, gender, social class, and psychological distress.
In addition, there are problems in specifying the nature of the etiological relationship between lifestyles and disease. Not every person who engages in an unhealthy lifestyle will die prematurely. For example, some heavy smokers do not develop lung cancer. Genetic predisposition, comorbidities, other health habits, and access to adequate medical care are factors that may intervene in the relationship between host and disease. For certain conditions, it may be complicated to determine the precise role of risky lifestyle behaviors in the development of disease.
The most convincing models of the relationship between lifestyles and health are those built on triangulated evidence from animal, clinical, and epidemiological studies.
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