A Bad Diet Can be Worse Than Smoking

Before your family has to plan a funeral service in Roanoke, VA, there are some lifestyle changes that you can make right now to ensure that won’t happen for a very long time. Since the 1960’s, the medical profession (and Big Tobacco) has known that smoking is bad for human health and can cause cancer and death. 

As a result, for many years, the United States has waged a relatively successfully campaign against smoking. It began with warning labels on tobacco products. Then it progressed with tobacco product advertising being banned. After that, smoking in public places was banned. Now, many places of employment (especially in the medical profession) will not hire you if you use tobacco products. 

The number of smokers in the United States has dropped dramatically in the last 50 or so years as a result. Rates of lung cancer among younger Americans has also declined. 

However, when a bad habit that can lead to death is removed to improve health, then good habits that support good health need to be implemented. That has not happened. 

In America, we have adopted other bad habits that are causing us to die prematurely. 

One of these bad habits is that we are more sedentary now than ever. Instead of taking a walk every day or even mowing the yard with a push mower and doing vegetable and flower gardening in our yards, we sit. We sit at work. We sit at home. We sit in our cars. We sit on our riding lawn mowers. If we moved meaningfully (8000+ steps a day or 150 minutes a week), we’d automatically improve our chances of not dying an early death. 

Another bad habit that we Americans have adopted is a very bad diet. Part of this can be attributed to the overly busy lifestyles that we have. We pride ourselves on being able to multitask, to be extra productive, and to be everything to everybody, but all this time we expend on busyness means we don’t carve out time to cook healthy meals. 

Some of us live on fast food diets, which are filled with fat, salt, and sugar. Others of us eat the majority of our meals out in restaurants, eating heavily salted and fat-laden oversized portions of food. 

Some of us convince ourselves that we’re cooking at home and eating healthy, but the food we prepare comes out of boxes and cans, and is heavily processed with fat, sugar, and salt. 

We have gotten away from cooking everything from scratch. We don’t use fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and seeds along with reasonable portions of fresh fish, beef, and chicken as the basis of our daily diets. 

We also eat whenever we get around to it, instead of around a set time each day, and we eat too much of it. 

Having a perpetually bad diet has caused many health issues that raise Americans’ risks for death. These health problems include high blood pressure (often uncontrolled), obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. 

Bad diets have been linked to approximately 11 million deaths annually around the world, and the highest proportion of those deaths are in the United States. 

You don’t have to develop health problems and raise your risk of death because of what you eat. You want to be around for a long time to enjoy your life and your family. By substituting the bad elements of your diet with good elements, a little at a time, you can increase the odds that it will be a long time before your family is planning your funeral. 

For additional information about planning a funeral service in Roanoke, VA, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Conner-Bowman Funeral Home & Crematory can assist you.