What is climate friendly healthy living?
To some degree this will be different for all of us. It depends on who we are, where we live, who lives with us, if we have a job, what sort of job, if we have kids, our baseline health and lots of other factors. It can be broken down into two parts - Lifestyle Medicine and Environmental lifestyle. Both involve our lifestyle choices but one looks at the impact on our own health the other on the impact on Earth's health.
Lifestyle medicine is a branch of medicine that looks at how our lifestyle choices affect our health and how we might improve our health by changing those choices. Whether we are able to change our choices goes back to all those things and more that are listed in the first sentence. Lifestyle medicine divides the lifestyle factors affecting our health. These can be divided into 4, 6 or 8 categories. Which ever way things are divided all areas are covered. If we take the 8 divisions. The first one is genetics - what we are born with. This we cannot change, though Professor Tim Spector shows in his book Identically Equal, that though our genetic code is predetermined how our bodies express that code can be altered by our lifestyle. The second is antibiotics which is a whole field in itself and not an area we will tackle here. The remaining six are diet/nutrition, environment, sunshine, sleep , mental health and physical activity.
Environmentally, we are told that to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees and prevent environmental catastrophe we need to change the way we live. This statement can be overwhelming, where do we start, how much do our actions have an impact and isn't a lot of the impact locked into the social structure of where we live? Lloyd Alter gives the strong argument in his excellent book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle that we do have an impact on the lock in element of our environmental impact by how we chose to live and what we choose to buy. He also sites the Covid pandemic in 2020 and how many of the apparently vital parts of our lives turned out not to be so vital. Lloyd Alter structures his book around the study from the Institute of the Global Environmental Studies (IGES), Aalto University titled 1.5-Degree Lifestyles: Targets and Options for Reducing Lifestyle Footprints which divides our elements of daily consumption into 6 areas: nutrition , housing, mobility, consumer goods, leisure and services. This helps us structure where change might be beneficial, worthwhile and achievable, many of which not only reduce our environmental impact, but also improve our health and are a cheaper way of living.
As Lloyd Alter shows the divisions are artificial as our lives and environmental impact are an intertwined web. The same can be said for our health, our bodies are not a series of organs strung together we are a complete complex interconnected human being. To try and tackle everything at once is overwhelming so it is useful to break things down in some way, even if it is artificial. I hope this area will help to make change more manageable.
Lifestyle medicine is a branch of medicine that looks at how our lifestyle choices affect our health and how we might improve our health by changing those choices. Whether we are able to change our choices goes back to all those things and more that are listed in the first sentence. Lifestyle medicine divides the lifestyle factors affecting our health. These can be divided into 4, 6 or 8 categories. Which ever way things are divided all areas are covered. If we take the 8 divisions. The first one is genetics - what we are born with. This we cannot change, though Professor Tim Spector shows in his book Identically Equal, that though our genetic code is predetermined how our bodies express that code can be altered by our lifestyle. The second is antibiotics which is a whole field in itself and not an area we will tackle here. The remaining six are diet/nutrition, environment, sunshine, sleep , mental health and physical activity.
Environmentally, we are told that to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees and prevent environmental catastrophe we need to change the way we live. This statement can be overwhelming, where do we start, how much do our actions have an impact and isn't a lot of the impact locked into the social structure of where we live? Lloyd Alter gives the strong argument in his excellent book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle that we do have an impact on the lock in element of our environmental impact by how we chose to live and what we choose to buy. He also sites the Covid pandemic in 2020 and how many of the apparently vital parts of our lives turned out not to be so vital. Lloyd Alter structures his book around the study from the Institute of the Global Environmental Studies (IGES), Aalto University titled 1.5-Degree Lifestyles: Targets and Options for Reducing Lifestyle Footprints which divides our elements of daily consumption into 6 areas: nutrition , housing, mobility, consumer goods, leisure and services. This helps us structure where change might be beneficial, worthwhile and achievable, many of which not only reduce our environmental impact, but also improve our health and are a cheaper way of living.
As Lloyd Alter shows the divisions are artificial as our lives and environmental impact are an intertwined web. The same can be said for our health, our bodies are not a series of organs strung together we are a complete complex interconnected human being. To try and tackle everything at once is overwhelming so it is useful to break things down in some way, even if it is artificial. I hope this area will help to make change more manageable.
