Lifestyle diseases are illnesses associated with the way an individual or a group lives, including cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, chronic liver disease, smoking-related diseases and obesity. There are a number of considerable factors that can lead to those sicknesses. For instance, external causes involve poverty, work pressure, unhealthy diets and unbalanced life, while internal factors refer to unawareness and misconception of those illnesses. Consequently, those sicknesses have significant long-term effects on individuals’ lives, which may shorten their life expectancy. Furthermore, lifestyle diseases have been regarded as one of the primary causes of mortality in the world. Globally, 60 per cent of the death toll is due to sicknesses associated with unhealthy ways of life, which can translate to nearly 36 million deaths (AllAfrica Global Media, 2011). In addition, by the year 2015, those illnesses will become a considerable financial burden around the world (Sabu et al., 2009: 1-14). This essay will focus on causes and effects of lifestyle diseases in the world.
The first section will analyse the causes of lifestyle sicknesses in the developed world. These causes can be divided into three parts, which are unbalanced diets, lack of regular exercise and insufficient sleep. Those who are in developed countries sometimes do not pay much attention to their diet and the consumption of alcohol which could lead to several diseases, such as obesity and hypertension. For example, fruit and vegetables contain a great many of nutritions, such as vitamins, minerals and fibers, and many other things that do good to health. Eating more fruit and vegetables can make the risk of certain cancer or cardiovascular diseases (CVD) lower. However, in the United States, the consumption of fruit and vegetables decreased from 3.43 times per day in 1994 to 3.24 times per day in 2005. It seems to show that the