Quotes About Prevention

In one analysis, a typical American population that departed even modestly from the Western diet (and lifestyle) could reduce its chances of getting coronary heart disease by 80 percent, its chances of type 2 diabetes by 90 percent, and its chances of colon cancer by 70 percent.

To have prevented one single sin is reward enough for the labors and efforts of a whole lifetime.

My mom was a diabetic. Her sister was a diabetic, so I was already a candidate.

I have seven scars from having moles removed. One was a melanoma, six were precancerous. Get your moles checked!

If you're going to go to a festival, drink water for six days before you get there.

It's a fact of life that there will be oil spills, as long as oil is moved from place to place, but we must have provisions to deal with them, and a capability that is commensurate with the size of the oil shipments.

All minorities think they're immune, but we're absolutely part of the one in five that gets skin cancer! It's a myth, and myths are meant to be debunked!

I will take on the epidemics of gun violence and campus sexual assault, so that everyone in America is safe and respected, no matter who they are, where they live, or who they love.

In 2011, an interesting milestone in human history was passed. For the first time, more people globally died from non-communicable diseases like heart failure, stroke and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined.1 We live in an age in which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle. We are in effect choosing how we shall die, albeit without much reflection or insight.

The fact is," he says, "we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven't had another experience like that isn't because we have been especially vigilant. It's because we have been lucky.

more than half of all first heart attacks (fatal or otherwise) occur in people who are fit and healthy and have no known obvious risks. They don't smoke or drink to excess, are not seriously overweight, and do not have chronically high blood pressure or even bad cholesterol readings, but they get a heart attack anyway. Living a virtuous life doesn't guarantee that you will escape heart problems; it just improves your chances.

A person who smokes cigarettes regularly (about a pack a day) is fifty times more likely than a nonsmoker to get cancer. In

An Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was established in Britain in 1899 and an American society was formed the following year.

No one knows, because it is essentially impossible to determine, to what extent environmental factors contribute to cancers now. More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans.

Today some 40 percent of us will discover we have cancer at some point in our lives. Many, many more will have it without knowing it and will die of something else first.

Remarkably, even with all the improvements in care, you are 70 percent more likely to die from heart disease today than you were in 1900. That's partly because other things used to kill people first, and partly because a hundred years ago people didn't spend five or six hours an evening in front of a television with a big spoon and a tub of ice cream. Heart disease is far and away the Western world's number one killer.

The largest source of foodborne illness is not meat or eggs or mayonnaise, as commonly supposed, but green leafy vegetables. They account for one in five of all food illnesses.

Today some 40 percent of us will discover we have cancer at some point in our lives.

As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.

It hardly needs pointing out that for most of history the focus of medicine has been to make sick people better, but now increasingly doctors devote their energies to trying to head off problems before they even arise, through programmes of screening and the like, and that changes the dynamics of care entirely.

A person's lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5 percent, and eating processed meat every day appears to boost a person's absolute risk of cancer by 1 percentage point, to 6 percent (that's 18 percent of the 5 percent lifetime risk).

A heart attack, as one doctor has put it, is "50 percent genetic and 50 percent cheeseburger.

Atul Gawande has written, "is getting clinicians like me to do the one thing that consistently halts the spread of infections: wash our hands.

1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year.