These days everybody is looking for the latest thing to keep themselves as healthy as possible. Some Americans swear that essential oils for health do wonders for their body. Others swear by various real food diets as the key to staying healthy.
But in the United States, studies have shown that Americans use health prevention care services only about half the recommended amount. Health prevention care services provide plenty of benefits, but many Americans don’t use them. As a result many Americans succumb to diseases and illnesses that are easily preventable. In fact, chronic illnesses accounted for 86% of healthcare costs in 2015 alone and that number has continued to rise since then.
What can you do to stay healthy? Here’s some easy preventive health tips for keeping yourself in good health:
- Exercise: One of the best things you can do for your help is to get a good amount of exercise. An easy way to do that is to go for a walk. Studies have shown that walking at a fast pace for just 30 minutes a day can help lower a person’s risk of diabetes. Walking is something everyone does and you can go as fast or as slow as you like. If it’s been awhile since you exercise regularly you can walk a few minutes to start and build up your pace and amount of time you walk over time.
- Wash up: Another easy tip when it comes to health prevention is to watch yourself, especially your hands. This is and especially good tip if you like to cook because more than a 100,000 Americans are hospitalized each year because of food-borne illnesses have a good way to prevent any contamination of your body or anything else in your home is to wash your hands. Again, it’s something that everyone does, it’s super easy and you can keep yourself clean and healthy by washing your hands when you cook or go to the bathroom or in any other situation where clean hands are a necessity.
- Incorporate antioxidants: If you’re all about a healthy eating lifestyle, one of the best things you can do in terms of health prevention is to incorporate more antioxidants into your diet. Think foods like blueberries, beans, kale, spinach or even dark chocolate. You probably don’t know it, but your body is in constant defensive mode against free radicals which pop-up as a byproduct of food when it’s turned into energy. The free radicals cause damage to your cells and can even kill them. Eating foods with antioxidants can help fight these free radicals and help reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease.
- Keep your bones healthy: You’ve probably heard the bone conditions like osteoporosis or a normal part of aging. To a certain degree that’s true, but you can take steps to protect your bones no matter how old you are and it’s never a bad time to focus on your bone health. You can eat foods that are rich in vitamin D and calcium as a good start.
- Get health screenings: You’ve like we heard a lot of stories, perhaps even from friends, about folks getting cancer but being unaware of it until symptoms have become too aggressive. To prevent that sort of thing from happening to you, one of the best things you can do in terms of health prevention his to get regular health screenings. Some common types of health screenings for cancer include colon cancer, lung cancer and prostate cancer. You can also do screenings for breast cancer, lead and autism.
- Protect yourself from the sun: There’s nothing better than soaking up a few rays on a nice summer day. But almost no one enjoys getting a sunburn and not wearing sunscreen carries many risks for your skin. Without sunscreen, you’re opening yourself up to damage like skin cancer, so cover up even a little bit the next time you hit the beach.
By using even a few of the prevention tips listed above, you’re setting yourself up for a healthy future. The last thing you want to do is roll the dice on your health or discover a major problem before it’s too late.
