Health resolutions
Article Type: Food facts From: Nutrition & Food Science, Volume 39, Issue 2.
Come the 12th chime of midnight on New Year's Eve, most people have already resolved to make the incoming year better than the outgoing one. And out of any number of resolutions, health-based pledges are often the most popular whether it's to give up smoking, lose weight, take more exercise or cut down on booze.
However, according to researchers at the University of Hertfordshire led by Professor Richard Wiseman, despite the fact that more than half of us believe we can stick to our resolutions, only 12 per cent of us will have achieved our goals by the end of the year.
If you want to improve your health this coming year, there is an easy resolution you can make and one that could have significant consequences should you, or someone close to you, become ill in the years to come. And that's simply to resolve to find out more about the many types of health advice that most of us are bombarded with on a daily basis.
For instance, when experts offer conflicting advice, could you figure out which one to believe? Could you spot the difference between a good, solid clinical study and a badly-designed and carried out one? Or could you translate the scientific medical jargon used by a growing number of health product advertisers in order to make an informed decision about their products?
Smart Health Choices by Professor Les Irwig, Judy Irwig, Dr Lyndal Trevena and Melissa Sweet is a guide to making sense of health advice arms the reader with a healthy scepticism as well as the tools for evaluating the messages they're confronted with on a regular basis whether those messages come from a specialist, general practitioner, naturopath, the media, the internet or a well-intentioned friend or family member.
Smart Health Choices highlights why some health advice may be misleading and offers ways to identify meaningful health claims and research, and explains why it can sometimes be unwise to rely on the opinions of experts.
It also shows the reader how to make the right health decisions by asking the right questions, plus how it's essential to know the facts before making those decisions. In fact, Smart Health Choices shows how to get to those facts rather than be overwhelmed by information that may, at best, be unreliable.
