What Are Health Behaviors

What Are Health Behaviors - Health behaviors are behaviors undertaken by people to enhance or maintain their health. Poor health behavior are important not only because they are implicated in illness but also because they may easily become poor health habits.

A health habits is a health-related behavior that is firmly establised and often perfomed automatically, without awereness. These habits usually develop in childhood and begin to stabilize around age 11 or 12 (R. Y. Cohen, Brownell and Felix, 1990). Wearing a seat belt, brushing one's teeth, and eating a healthy diet are examples of these kinds of behaviors. Although a health habit may have developed initially because it was reinforced by spesific positive outcomes, such as parental approval, it eventually becomes independen of the reinforment process and is maintained by the environmental factors with which it is important to establish good health behaviors and to eliminate poor ones early in life.

A dramatic ilustration of the importance of good health habits in maintaining good health is provided by a classic study of people living in Alameda Country, California. conducted by Belloc and Breslow (1972). These scientist began by defining seven important good health habits:

1. Sleeping 7 to 8 hours a night.
2. Not Smoking.
3. Eating breakfast each day.
4. Having no more than one or two alcoholic drinks each day.
5. Getting regular exercise.
6. Not eating between meals
7. Being no more than 10% overweight.

Sleeping 7 or 8 Hours a night

Smoking can Damage the liver

Eating Breakfast each day

Having no more than one or two alcoholic drinks each day

Getting regular exercise

Not eating between meals

Being no more than 10% overweight

They then asked nearly 7.000 country residents to indicate which of these behaviors they practiced. Residents were also asked how many illnesses they had had, which illnesses they had had, how much energy they had had and how disabled they had been ( for example, how many days of work they had missed) over the provious 6 to 12 month period. The reserchers found that the more good health habits people practiced, the fewer illnesses they had had, the better they had felt, and the less disabled they had been.

A follow-up of these individuals  9 to 12 years later found that mortality rates were dramatically lower for people practicing the seven health habits. Specifically  men following these practices had a mortality rate only 28% that of  the men following zero to three of the health practices, and women following the seven health habits had a mortality rate 43% that of the women following zero to three of the health practices (Breslow & Enstrom, 1980).