Tuesday 13 February 2018

We Do What We Know Is Bad for Us, Why?

a post by Brian Lee for the Lifehack blog

We all know what a bad habit is. Smoking, eating unhealthy foods, excessive alcohol consumption and living a sedentary lifestyle are just some of the things that are drummed into us as behaviours we ought to avoid in order to increase our overall well-being.

Yet a study by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that in the year 2000, avoidable behaviours such as poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking and drinking alcohol were some of the underlying causes of nearly half of the deaths in the United States:

Tobacco: 435,000 (18.1% of total US deaths)
Inactivity and bad eating: 400,000 (16.6%)
Alcohol consumption: 85,000 (3.5%)

If we know bad habits are so detrimental to our health, why do we continue to do them?

Continue reading

I doubt that the figures for the UK are much different.


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