Establishing guidelines on lifestyle
Since ancient times, man has always wanted to live longer and better, without accepting the changes that time and age are having on their health both physically and emotionally lead to aging, and death. Diseases, illnesses, losses are processes difficult to accept in today’s culture that wants to live an eternal youth.
Different age groups are distributed life-cycle periods are not watertight compartments that have remained entrenched throughout history and among different civilizations and cultures. Rather, they have been great elasticity, surrounding himself with powers and segments according to the circumstances and interests of each type of social organization and at any given time.
Each historical period for each age has had a meaning and a certain requirements. For example, the prototypical values of youth, traditionally taken as a mere transit or learning for subsequent adult life, end up becoming an independent value, capable of prestige with his own imprint “as a kind of new King Midas – the rest of the ages. And in the opposite way, old age, previously considered as a source of prestige and wisdom, is stigmatized in their specific traditional values, oriented the same way by this mark of collective civilization. A determining factor in this process has been to increase the longevity or life expectancy, and their qualitative conditions, leading to a lengthening of their youth.
And the question that happen to such a claim is precisely: what is due this phenomenon?, Question whose answer is fairly recent as the situation itself, dating from a few years collective concern about radical changes in styles of life to make it more long and, above all, more and better quality.
It is impossible to talk about lifestyle not framed within the concept of lifestyle, since both determine how man develops within the society and its relationship to health-disease process. Both concepts, method and lifestyle, began to undergo medical sciences in the second half of the twentieth century, from the time when you resize the concept of health and therefore also the concepts are resized on the determinants of health.
These concepts, developed earlier by other areas of social sciences, have helped to better understand and operationalize the biological elements involved in the health-disease process and are an integral part of social medicine, which is the forefront of our time. They have their origins in the 50s, when both were established in the U.S. the first school of preventive medicine in recommending pay attention to health prevention and, therefore, began to study the factors involved in their care, although not identified the style and way of life within these elements. Also its roots in England, when H Sigesrist (1945) defined four main tasks of medicine: promotion, prevention, recovery and rehabilitation, which prompted the study of biological elements involved in health.
The way to arrive, in general, these new findings in medicine, came from the change of health status in populations with an advanced socioeconomic development, where infectious diseases were no longer the leading causes of death, and there were other factors influence the occurrence of diseases and deaths, for example: a system of inadequate health care, behavioral factors and unhealthy lifestyles, environmental health risks and biologic factors. In this way, began to conceive that the determination of health is a complex, multifactorial and dynamic factors interact not only set out to damage health, but to increase it and preserve it.
In 1974, Marc Lalonde proposed an explanatory model of health determinants, which is used today in recognizing the lifestyle and the social environment-including, in the broadest sense, beside the human biology and the organization of health services. Then, P. L. Castellanos (1991) clarified how this interaction occurs between the determinants of health with the category living conditions, that would be “the general processes of reproduction of society acting as mediators between the processes that shape the way of life of society as a whole and the specific health situation of a specific population group. ”
To characterize the lifestyle as a determinant of health, multiple criteria were used in the epidemiology and social sciences have made great contributions to establishing relationships between material conditions and the manner in which the large social groups are organized and carried productively in these conditions. For example, health services and utilization of educational institutions and educational level of the population, types of housing conditions and overcrowding, water supply and environmental hygiene, etc. This category is essential in understanding not only of the health status of populations, but also in the making of health policy and health promotion strategies, and its range covers the major social groups at large.
What is a lifestyle? According to M. Philosophical Dictionary Rosental, P. Iudin (Editora Política, La Habana, 1981) referring to the style we suggest that it reflects both the economic and social conditions of life of society and the peculiarities and traditions of this or that people would be because how it behaves or manifests a particular culture, so that every people, nation, or even different social groups may have different lifestyles and making it even more particularly, a community, a family or an individual can have a lifestyle depending on their particular knowledge, actual needs, economic opportunities, etc. It is a mode of individual life is the way people live. Is closely related to behavioral and motivational sphere of human beings and, therefore, refers to the personal form in which man is as a social being and individuals under specific conditions.
For lifestyle we call a generic way, those cognitive patterns, affective-emotional and behavioral show some consistency over time, under more or less consistent and can become risk factors or safety, depending on their nature.
Epidemiological studies have shown the relationship between the lifestyle that people exhibit and the health-disease process. A healthy lifestyle is an important factor in shaping the profile.
When talking about healthy lifestyles, behaviors that we refer to diminish the risks of disease, such as adequate control and treatment of stress and negative emotions, a good exercise regimen, sleep and distraction control and avoidance abuse of substances like caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, a proper distribution and use of time, etc.
Dr. Morales Calatayud lifestyles mean the set of behaviors that a particular individual is implemented and maintained consistently in their daily lives, and that may be relevant to the maintenance of their health or that puts at risk for the disease. Walkers and other researchers in health promotion program of the Northern Illinois University in 1987 identified some kinds of behaviors that make a lifestyle health promoter and have built a consistent tool to evaluate the population. Among the lifestyle behaviors have self-actualization, health responsibility, exercise, nutrition, interpersonal support and management of stress.
Behavioral self-control is the most important tool that can provide an individual to make changes to your lifestyle, and because the lifestyle is determined by the conditions of life, an important element in this research is to identify risk factors. Issues such as motivational factors, learning, beliefs and social influences, in addition to the biological history, have been identified as components of the behaviors and habits that characterize the lifestyle of a person, therefore, to establish healthy behaviors and eliminate risk behaviors in a stable manner, such as aspiration of health promotion is a challenge for our science.
It imposes the analysis from a multidimensional perspective. As I said Rodríguez Marín (1995): “The analysis of lifestyle should be done from a model that considers the human being the cutoff between social systems and micro-organic. Individual behavior occurs at the intersection of the two types systems, so that the social and biological events have a reciprocal impact on such behavior and, in turn, on the functional integrity of the person. ”
The analysis of lifestyle takes on a growing interest, since the set of behavior patterns and habits of everyday people have a major impact on their health and, in addition, each day increases the prevalence of these diseases related to bad behavioral habits. One of the key objectives of the APS is the modification of behavior of the population, both lifestyle changes that threaten individual well as to achieve healthy feeling. In our daily work as doctors in primary health care that has become a challenge of line.
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