ABSTRACT
The recent years have witnessed major changes in the conception of human health and illness from a disease model, to a health model. It is just as meaningful to speak of levels of vitality as of degrees of impairment. The health model, therefore, focuses on health promotion as well as disease prevention. Lifestyle habits exert a major impact on the quality of human health. Current health practices focus mainly on the supply side by reducing, rationing, and curtailing access to health care services to contain health costs. The social cognitive approach works on the demand side by helping people to stay healthy through good self-management of health habits. By exercising control over several health habits people can live longer, healthier, and slow the process of biological ageing (Bandura, 1997; Bortz, 1982; Fries, et al., 1993; Fries, 1997). As health economists amply document, medical care cannot substitute for healthful habits and environmental conditions (Fuchs, 1974; Lindsay, 1980). Self-management of habits that enhance health and reduction of those that impair it is good medicine. Indeed, if the huge benefits of a few key lifestyle habits were put into a pill, it would be declared a spectacular breakthrough in the field of medicine.
