Environmental Health Tools – PreventDisease.com

While looking for materials for an upcoming post on feng shui and indoor health (“risky dust bunnies”), I ran across a promising site – PreventDisease.com. It seems to have good news articles, such as this one about the benefits of exercise and eating properly; six weeks is all it may take for simple changes in diet and exercise to start making dramatic reductions in risk of diabetes, cancer or heart disease (you hear that, snack food industry spokespersons?). It even includes cites to the actual papers in the literature.

PreventDisease.com provides a generous helping of tools and calculators, including the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s heart attack risk calculator, the Harvard School of Public Health cancer risk calculator and a calculator for estimating your biological age. I have a biological age of 32, which is not too bad for a chronological 48 year old. While I’m working on doing better, it’s nowhere near as good as my wife, with a biological age of 22 and a chronological age of 47 (she’s the fitness and nutrition guru in the family).

Since we’re all apparently on our own with regard to protecting our environmental health, and since not protecting our health can have financial as well as personal consequences, the importance of sites such as PreventDisease.com becomes readily apparent.