Just 2.7 percent of American adults are living a healthy lifestyle, defined as eating a good diet, getting moderate exercise, having a recommended body fat percentage and being a nonsmoker, according to research from Oregon State University and the University of Mississippi.
The results of the study are based on 4,745 people from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study and measured behaviors. Researchers defined sufficient activity as 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity per week, and a healthy diet as being in the top 40 percent of people who ate food recommended by the government. They used accelerometers to measure activity and X-ray absorptiometry to measure body fat and took blood samples to check for smoking status.
Only 2.7 percent of participants had all four healthy lifestyle characteristics; 16 percent had three; 37 percent had two; 34 percent had one and 11 percent had none. By category, the results were:
- 71 percent of adults did not smoke
- 38 percent ate a healthy diet
- 10 percent had a normal body fat percentage
- 46 percent were sufficiently active
"This is sort of mind boggling. There's clearly a lot of room for improvement," Ellen Smit, PhD, the study's senior author and an associate professor at OSU, said.
Researchers also compared the lifestyle characteristics to biomarkers of cardiovascular health and determined that having at least one or two health lifestyle characteristics was associated with better levels of some cardiovascular risk biomarkers.