Better than any pill—and no side effects! Healthy lifestyles, statins, and aspirin

Behaviors which are associated with the preservation of health include nonsmoking, regular exercise, a low body weight, a healthy diet, and a low alcohol intake. Together, as a healthy lifestyle, these have been shown to be associated with marked protection against a wide range of diseases: diabetes, vascular disease, cancer, and dementia. On the other hand, the protection associated with statins and aspirin, the two most commonly used preventive drugs, is limited to vascular disease and, probably for aspirin, cancer.

These are not alternative prophylactics and any two, or all three—a healthy lifestyle, a statin, and aspirin—can reasonably be taken together.

Only a small proportion of the members of the community follow a healthy lifestyle. Yet a small increase in the uptake of the healthy behaviors throughout the community can be shown to have relatively large effects on the incidence of disease.

There is therefore an urgent need for health promotion activities across the whole community to be greatly increased and for new challenging and encouraging strategies to be devised and tested.