ABSTRACT
Healthy lifestyle habits are those activities we engage in routinely that benefit the aging body and mind. Backed by evidence from a decade or more of research by multiple groups of investigators, these healthy lifestyle habits include exercising regularly, engaging in active leisure pursuits, fighting obesity, eating healthily, using alcohol moderately, maintaining satisfying social relationships, and managing stress. Depressed patients and those recovering from heart disease exhibited the same degree of improvement on cognitive tests as their healthy contemporaries. Scientific publications around the world have agreed that high levels of ordinary leisure activity provide nearly the same health benefits as vigorous exercise. None of the other healthy lifestyle habits behaves quite like light alcohol consumption for older adults. Other studies of nonmedical subjects found that moderate alcohol use correlated with better health, including a lower incidence of heart disease, ischemic stroke, and hypertension when compared with heavy alcohol users and abstainers.
