Lifestyle and Mortality - The Healthiest Way to Live (Vorabdruck

Journal/Book: Homeostasis. 1993;

Abstract: A large-scale prospective cohort study, in which 265 118 adults aged 40 and above in 6 prefectures in Japan were followed up for 17 years, revealed close associations between selected lifestyle risk factors and mortality for all causes of death (n = 55 523) and also for each cause of death such as heart diseases (n = 8 798) and cancer (n = 14 740), daily cigarette smoking being the leading risk promoting factor while daily consumption of green-yellow vegetables (GYV) is the leading risk reducing factor. Daily consumption of GYV was identified to have a unique risk reducing effect for all causes of death, heart diseases and cancer of most sites even in the case of the existance of other risk enhancing lifestyles such as daily smoking, daily drinking and daily meat consumption. Daily smoking was observed to accelerate the speed of aging by 5-years compared to non-smokers while daily consumption of GYV slows down the speed of aging by 10 - 15 years, indicating that the speed of aging is likely to be controlled by such simple modification of lifestyles.The nested case control study for random sample of 9 194 subjects revealed that the risk of stress complaints such as irritation and /or insomnia (n = 810) was significantly lower in daily consumers of GYV when most other risk factors were adjusted. An independent health survey conducted by us for 9987 subjects also revealed lowered risk of such stress complaints in GYV daily consumers, particularly in those with higher serum levels of beta-carotene. Therefore, the primary slogan for the healthiest lifestyles must be 'carotene instead of nicotine' or to consume GYV as much as possible while refraining from cigarette smoke as much as possible.

Keyword(s): the healthiest way to live

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