Lifestyle and Diseas

• Anything that increases the chance that a person will develop a certain disease during a lifetime can record a risk factor, but it doesn't guarantee that the person will catch the disease.
• Risk factors are often aspects of a person's lifestyle, substances in the person's body or environment.
• Obesity, often due to poor lifestyle choices, is a risk factor for both diabetes and heart attacks.
• Exposure to air pollution and smoking are both risk factors for diseases like lung cancer.
• Diet, obesity, smoking, and lack of exercise all contribute to cardiovascular disease.
• Smoking has been proven to directly cause cardiovascular disease, lung disease, and lung cancer because the toxins in smoke can damage the walls of our blood vessels and the cells that line our lungs.
• Drinking too much alcohol can cause liver disease and either smoking or drinking while pregnant includes a whole range of health problems for the unborn baby.
• Obesity, which can be caused by poor diet and lack of exercise, can go on to cause type-2 diabetes and cancer.
• Diseases not only affect the individual who has the disease, they also impact their family, friends, and sometimes their entire country.
• When somebody gets ill, they often rely on their friends and family to support them and if they're really ill, they might not be able to work, which means that their whole family gets poorer.
• On a national scale, if there's more disease, the workforce will be less productive, and a bigger share of government spending will have to be spent on health to try and reduce the burden of disease.
• Scientists first need to find out who catches each type of disease and why, and what they found is that certain groups of people are more likely to have certain risk factors than others, and so those groups have a higher incidence of the associated diseases.
• Globally, people in developed countries like the UK with higher incomes are more likely to eat too much, not exercise enough, and have unhealthy diets, which is part of the reason obesity and its associated diseases are such a problem in developed countries.
• On a national scale within the UK, people from more deprived areas are more likely to smoke, have poor diets, and not exercise enough, so we see more cases of cardiovascular disease and obesity in those deprived areas.
• The key takeaway from this video is that there are loads of risk factors that affect our chances of getting a disease, but many of them are out of our control, and lots of them are influenced by the choices that we make.