The Power of Health Behaviours - Pt 2/3

Health Behaviours Impact on Heart Disease Risk Factors: Diabetes Diabetes mellitus is high blood sugar and a complex disease because it has a very complicated development period, a complicated and poorly understood disease period which leads to an even more complicated disease impact period. There are basically two types of diabetes, Type 1 “insulin dependent” diabetes (T1DM) and Type 2 “non-insulin dependent” diabetes (T2DM). T1DM affects about 380,000 Canadians and is the diabetes you get when you are a kid and your body does not produce insulin so you have to have insulin injections to survive. T2DM affects about 4,000,000 Canadians and is the...

Health Behaviour #4: No tobacco smoke exposure “Smoke exposure” includes smoking tobacco and any situation when you breath in tobacco smoke. One of the most bizarre stats from our Healthy Hearts Schools’ Program shows that around 50% of grade 9 students are exposed to tobacco smoke either by smoking, being with friends who smoke, living in homes that allow smoking inside or being around family or family friends when they smoke. This 50% number is not a one off or year of special circumstance, it is consistence through years of grade 9 data. You would think it would decrease with...

Health Behaviour #3: Quality of food Eating too much of any type of food is bad for us. A balance is needed and the Mediterranean diet is the most researched diet to show long term benefits in heart disease prevention, and, it is a balanced approach to eating. Eating the Mediterranean diet is a behaviour as much as it is a diet / pattern of eating. We have to hunt and gather the food, we have to prepare the food and we have to eat the food. That’s a lot of behaviours needed to get this right. The Mediterranean diet...