Americans Falling Short of a Healthy Lifestyle, a Government Report Reveals

Thanks to heavy drinking, smoking, obesity and inactivity, the average American continues to make poor lifestyle choices, and which falls short of a healthy lifestyle.

In explaining the conclusions of this report, Charlotte Schoenborn, who works as a statistician for the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said, “Changes have not been enormous. It’s been a very, very slow process of changing awareness of personal choices for healthier ways of life. All of the health-related federal agencies, and a lot of non-federal groups, are putting a lot of resources to make people aware of the effect they can have on their own health. This report is just designed to say where we are.”

The report’s findings is based on data compiled from 2008 to 2010 and after reviewing survey answers from 77,000 interviews that were conducted randomly.

While the only positive seems to be that 70 percent of adults get the recommended amount of sleep, six out of ten adults who drink tend to have five or more drinks in one day. Also, 20 percent of adults smoke regularly and less than half attempted to quit over the last year. Finally, only one out of five adults have met the federal guidelines for aerobic exercise and muscle-strengthening activity while one out of three are completely inactive.

Yet despite this report revealing similar results compared to their previous report, the demographic of young adults reveal this age group making promising lifestyle choices. One noticeable improvement is that this age group showed a reduction in smoking, from 23.5 to 21 percent.

With the overall goal to improve health, the impact that this would have on healthcare would be saving billions of dollars in health spending.