Pretty much all non-genetic chronic conditions are a result of diet and exercise. You can drastically reduce your chances of cancer, stroke, heart attack, alzeihmers, T2 diabetes, Parkinson’s.... you name it, with diet and exercise.
You can even cure most of them with diet and exercise.
I’ll be downvoted to oblivion, but you should know that illness is a choice.
So I got this friendly reminder from life few months ago that you can tick all the "healthy lifestyle" boxes and still get fucked over. Long story short, I work a completely normal IT office job, exercise, eat healthy, etc etc, and yet I contracted a human Parvovirus from someone, probably completely randomly as it's contagious before you get any symptops and it spreads by air. It absolutely fucked me over - was out of action for 2 months just non-stop in bed with weekly visits to the hospital, super high fever, lack of energy to do literally anything, and then as I was starting to feel better - it has completely messed up my knee, to a point where it's still completely arthretic and I need to have physio sessions weekly just to be able to walk without pain.
No, I will not believe this was by choice in any way. If you don't have a built-in parvovirus immunity from having had it as a child(when the symptoms are super mild), you can contract it at any point in your life and there's nothing a "healthy lifestyle" will help there.
And I'm sure that's not the only thing you can catch randomly from someone that can completely upend your life for a while.
The choice to "diet and exercise" is easier for a rich guy with a personal chef and trainer.
It's much more difficult for a poorer person working 2 stressful jobs, having to go back in a home late in the day exhausted and deal with whatever family/personal issues lurking around.
And while there's a spectrum between one and the other extreme, more lower middle class, working class people are closer to the second case. (And there are circumstances in the first case, like stress, addiction, psychological history, that can make it hard to diet/exercise, even if you could easily afford a personal chef/trainer).
So, yeah, it's a choice.
But what (budgetary, stress-wise, family, expert, time, etc) support a person has in making that choice and sticking to it is not the same in all case, and can vary widely pro and against.
I was with you until you wrote this. Instead of encouraging people to live better because they can reduce their chances of getting sick (I agree with that) you took it a step further and into negative territory.
Just say that a lot of chronic conditions can be improved by better lifestyle. Don't blame the victim.
One of the two, eventually also developed more severe autoimmune conditions.
I agree with you that we can prevent a huge amount of disease with diet and exercise. I do not agree with a broad assertion that illness is a choice. That is a cruel misunderstanding of illness, that mocks the people who - despite their best efforts - got a shit roll of the dice.
What do you do and how do you control the quality of all these things for a long stretch of time (1, 10, 30 years?)? In theory, as you have more income, you may have more control over some of the areas above, but the reality is that some factors are still difficult to control/ balance.
There is still a major part of acute illnesses that are directly associated with choice in the areas of dieting and exercise, so do not take my response as a full counterargument to your opinion.
[1] World's Air Pollution: Real-time Air Quality Index - https://waqi.info/ [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-20/world-ban...
I would really like to see this graph to justify my own addiction to whole foods and shop there with less guilt.