Better than any pill—and no side effects! Healthy lifestyles, statins, and aspirin

Abstract

Behaviors which are associated with the preservation of health include nonsmoking, regular exercise, a low body weight, a healthy diet, and a low alcohol intake. Together, as a healthy lifestyle, these have been shown to be associated with marked protection against a wide range of diseases: diabetes, vascular disease, cancer, and dementia. On the other hand, the protection associated with statins and aspirin, the two most commonly used preventive drugs, is limited to vascular disease and, probably for aspirin, cancer. These are not alternative prophylactics and any two, or all three-a healthy lifestyle, a statin, and aspirin-can reasonably be taken together. Only a small proportion of the members of the community follow a healthy lifestyle. Yet a small increase in the uptake of the healthy behaviors throughout the community can be shown to have relatively large effects on the incidence of disease. There is therefore an urgent need for health promotion activities across the whole community to be greatly increased and for new challenging and encouraging strategies to be devised and tested.

Inaugural Lifestyle Medicine Editorial

“…We suggest you add it to your table of contents alerts, read it, submit high‐quality articles, and consider reviewing or joining the editorial board. We want to build the evidence base for lifestyle medicine, so will welcome articles from all disciplines that improve our understanding of the effects of lifestyle interventions, including exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress management, relationships, and avoidance of toxins, as well as interventions that support or enable lifestyle changes like group consultations, 25 whether or not they are compared to drugs or other interventions 26 . We have seen how powerful open access publication can be but would argue that rapid, robust peer review is highly desirable to ensure that decisions are made on the best evidence.…”