How Health Care Costs Lower With Healthy Diet & Exercise

In a 2005 interview with "Smart Business Los Angeles," UCLA Director for Human Nutrition and Professor of Medicine Dr. David Heber said, "Having people take better care of themselves is one of the best ways of reducing the costs of health care coverage." Studies continue to be released that support this commonsense approaches to controlling health care costs.

Lifestyle Choices

• The high cost of maintaining health

  If you aren't active, you will gain weight. If don't eat right, you will be nutritionally unsound. Poor health care habits lead to doctor visits, drug prescriptions and time off from work--all factors that contribute to high health care costs and put a strain on the health care system overall.

Diet and Exercise

• Stomach girth triggers health issues.

  If you make poor food choices or skip meals, you deprive your body of valuable vitamins, minerals and proteins, which are essential for health, sustenance and energy. If you also don't exercise, you'll lose muscle and build fat instead, usually around the midsection. This increases the likelihood that you will develop many conditions, from diabetes to heart disease to cancer.

Disease

• Continued unhealthy eating can wreak havoc on your body.

  Dr. Heber says one of the most serious afflictions you can develop from poor diet and lack of exercise is metabolic syndrome, which is a combination of high blood pressure, high blood fats and high blood sugar. Metabolic syndrome exists in 50 percent of Americans between the ages of 40 and 60. This unhealthy mixture can lead to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.

Costs

• The cost is high for a sedentary lifestyle.

  Heber says roughly $130 billion a year in health care costs are related to people who are overweight and inactive. In 2002 a major study by National Institutes of Health showed a 58 percent reduction in new cases of diabetes over five years in people who moderately altered their lifestyle to include diet and exercise.

Studies

• Health is wealth.

  Some people who are battling high cholesterol can spend up to $400 a month on cholesterol drugs alone. To add insult to illness, a 2010 study conducted by Dr. David M. Nathan and published in the "New England Journal of Medicine" found that some types of diabetic drugs were not lowering risk factors for heart attacks or strokes, as intended. These studies lend even more credence to the idea that you can help your health and your pocketbook by subtle lifestyle changes in consultation with your doctor.