Top Priorities for Staying Healthy

I've personally found the following 3 tips to be most beneficial in keeping myself balanced.

Happiness makes you healthy. It's trite-sounding, but supported by health behaviour experts and mounds of research. If you're happy with life, and have a healthy self-esteem, you'll be less stressed and less likely to develop bad habits that lead to health problems. It's a message politicians don't like as it doesn't allow for quick fixes.

Look after your teeth. Having a healthy, sparkling set of gnashers does wonders for your self-esteem and quality of life as you get older. But there's also increasingly persuasive evidence (and I started out a sceptic) that the bacteria that lurk in unhealthy teeth play a part in prompting heart disease and stroke. They may also be linked to some cancers and auto- immune diseases such as diabetes. Even if it's not true, it won't kill you to floss.

There's not much that exercise won't improve. We're bombarded with health education messages about everything from heart disease to cancer, but unless you have significant joint problems, one single piece of advice will help to prevent or treat most malaises you can think of: exercise more than you are at the moment. Finding time and motivation is the tricky bit.