Lifestyle and the elderly

Abstract

A RANDOM sample of over 4,000 residents of Cardiff were questioned about their lifestyle and attitudes to health. Comparisons between the younger and older age groups showed that older people drank less alcohol and smoked fewer cigarettes than younger people, but that they took less exercise and ate fewer foods of the kind associated with a healthy diet. Com parisons between the Cardiff survey and others reveal similar findings. There is a marked variation in the response of older people to different issues, pos sibly due to financial pressures. Older people were much closer to younger people in their knowledge of lifestyle issues than in their habits. Measures of the effectiveness of recent prevention strategies suggest that older people, as well as being interested in improving their health, will respond with changing their habits. Most importantly, they may experience enhanced well-being, if carefully targeted and treated as partners in the education process, rather than being simply recipients.