Healthy Lifestyle: Strengthening the Effectiveness of Lifestyle Approaches to Improve Health

Executive Summary

A healthy lifestyle is a valuable resource for reducing the incidence and impact of health problems, for recovery, for coping with life stressors, and for improving quality of life. However, convincing Canadians that health is a good investment, and providing guidance and incentives to create a culture that fosters health, are complex processes. How do we direct efforts to engage people in becoming and staying healthy?

The purpose of this paper is to redefine the construct "healthy lifestyle" so that the term can be more usefully applied in health promotion and population health, and in the implementation of health-related interventions. The authors present a reconstructed perspective of "healthy lifestyle", evidence for the effectiveness of lifestyle interventions, and promising approaches to foster healthy lifestyles. We suggest that barriers to implementing healthy lifestyles include how the concept has been defined and promoted, and how people, especially those with lower socio-economic status, are enabled to live healthy lives.

This paper has been prepared by an inter-sectoral "Lifestyles" Working Group comprised of members of the Canadian Consortium of Health Promotion Research Centres and Health Canada. It addresses the questions: Is "healthy lifestyle" a useful concept? What are the determinants of lifestyle choice? What approaches have been used to foster healthy lifestyles and have they been effective? How can social and community processes foster healthy lifestyles?

The authors conclude that a healthy lifestyle is an adaptation to one's social environment. Unless lifestyle is constructed (as a category of intervention) in concert with the way that lifestyle is experienced by target group(s), interventions are unlikely to succeed. The strategies for action set out in the Ottawa Charter are relevant to interventions aimed at the interdependence of individuals and communities, with most emphasis placed on strengthening communities, environments, and public policy arenas. Social environments are complex. Therefore, we must approach health issues and problems that recognize this complexity and that are targeted at a number of determinants, and at more than one level simultaneously.