Things that - surprisingly - affect your health

Everyone knows the expression 'You are what you eat'. And everyone knows that exercise is important for health. But there are actually other factors that also greatly affect your health. Doctor and health advisor Pia Norup reveals some of them here.

You are what you eat! And after the "Can you eat yourself healthy?" few still doubt the power and potential of the way we eat to improve our health and even alleviate and eliminate symptoms.

We also all know how important it is to get moving. Exercise is well-known and well-documented as an effective and health-promoting tool.

BUT... there's actually a lot more to life that affects our wellbeing, our health, our ageing, our risk of getting sick and our ability to overcome illness! And some of these factors are surprising to many. 

1. Social relationships
It got me thinking when I recently heard that the UK has appointed a Minister for Loneliness. A minister for loneliness! How can loneliness be so high on the list of priorities that they even appoint a minister for it! There is currently no diet or exercise minister in Denmark or any other country. So why a minister for loneliness?

Well, maybe because loneliness is considered as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Or the other way around: Which factor is found to have the greatest protective effect against disease in larger populations? Social relationships, or in other words, your "social capital" - the amount of time and energy spent exchanging thoughts and engaging with other people.

People who have the most positive social relationships live the longest! It doesn't necessarily have to be the closest relationships, but many contacts throughout the day. However, it's not entirely irrelevant what this social contact brings. Surrounding yourself with people who have the same bad habits as you, or who negatively influence your mood and stress levels, can be a negative spiral for lifestyle disease.(Source)

A sense of belonging, of having a group of people around you where you can be yourself and feel safe. A strong social network protects against stress, and it has been proven that a stressful event will induce a lower stress response in people with a good social network than in people without.

They have studied the so-called "Blue Zones", which are the places in the world with the highest concentration of people living past the age of 100. One of these Blue Zones is a small town on the Italian island of Sardinia. One characteristic of these places is a primarily plant-based diet and a food chain where food is made from local crops and grazing animals. But another fact is the social culture and cohesion across ages. The sense of belonging and the meaning of growing old. The older the more status. No one is lonely.

2. Life-changing events
Fifty years ago, two doctors, Dr. Rahe and Dr. Holmes, developed a method to quantify the impact of so-called "lifechanging events"(Source). They identified 43 life events, each of which was weighted according to how much of a life change and subsequent adjustment they required. At the top of the list are death of a spouse, divorce and incarceration. Then the death of a close family member, serious illness or trauma, etc. Positive events such as pregnancy and having a child are also included in life-changing events.

Each event represents a value and when you test a person, you get a certain score. Dr. Rahe and Dr. Holmes subsequently showed in a study of 67 medical colleagues that a higher score was directly correlated with more disease.

How can we use that knowledge? We are not all the same, and we know that the same event can be experienced differently by different people. It's ultimately about the experience of stress triggered by the individual situation.

Similar studies have been done with the same result. The more major life events, especially the negative ones, the shorter the life. (Source: Mortimer J, Shanahan M, editors. Handbook of the Life Course. New York: Kluwer/Plenum; 2003)

3. Meditation
Regular meditation is one of the most effective stress prevention and health promotion measures you can take. A recent study shows the positive effects of meditation right down to the regulation of our gut bacteria, which play an important role in inflammatory processes.

Studies over time have also shown the effect in the form of reduced blood pressure - both systolic and diastolic - but also reduced anxiety and depression, reduced insulin resistance, increased antibodies, better pain management and quality of life and improved self-perception.

4. Beliefs and giving love
We all need a sense of higher purpose and we know that a positive outlook on life affects our mood and the mood of others. Not surprisingly, it also affects the risk of illness and the ability to self-heal. In addition, people who are highly loving, caring and interested in others have been shown to have significantly less illness than others.

5. Relationship with mom and dad
An older study, The Harvard Mastery of Stress Study - a 35-year follow-up study - found that if your relationship with your mother or father was "tolerable" or "stressed", you were 91% and 82% more likely to have a significant health challenge, respectively. If the relationship with both parents was 'strained', the risk was 100%. Conversely, if the relationship with both parents was warm and caring, this risk was as low as 47% - more than halving the risk. So, again, a factor that can be stressful significantly increases the risk of health challenges.

Published on December 6, 2022