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From our friends at Healthy Monday…

With all the diet and fitness crazes, the infomercials and public service campaigns, launched over the last two decades, you’d suspect that Americans had increasingly embraced healthy habits. But an important new study in the American Journal of Medicine reveals just the opposite. Between 1988 and 2006, adults adopted consistently fewer healthy practices. Regular exercise decreased from 53 percent of adults to 43 percent over the period. Eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables dropped from 42 to 26 percent. Maintaining a healthy weight tells a similar story: obesity in adults rose from 28 to 36 percent.

The cost in lives lost from all this unhealthiness is equally discouraging. Daniel Akst in the Wall Street Journal argues that the biggest premature killer of Americans is Americans, that we’re bent on a sort of slow-motion suicide. He cites a new study co-authored by Dr. Majid Ezzati at the Harvard School of Public Health suggesting that if we could get every American to stop smoking, we’d save 467,000 lives a year. Eliminating high blood pressure would save 395,000, while getting people to slim down to an appropriate weight would save 216,000 lives. Crunching the numbers of the 2.5 million annual deaths in the United States, nearly half could be prevented if people simply led healthier lives.

Sit back and really let that sink in. . . nearly half of all U.S. deaths could be prevented by healthier choices.

It’s as sobering as it is hopeful. The Obama Administration, meanwhile, is pushing for universal health coverage. This noble mandate will, of course, save lives, if enacted, but those numbers are relatively modest, in the range of 18,000 deaths each year according to most estimations. Meanwhile, over in Europe, governments and health bureaus are adopting innovative system-wide measures.

In Denmark, doctors and nurses carry wireless handheld computers, not clipboards; medical records are accessed and saved electronically, limiting dangerous mis-diagnoses and paper work. In Germany, “disease-management programs” spread best practices by allowing doctors to compare their success rate with other physicians using the world’s largest database on hospital performance. In England, health officials use a metric called “quality-adjusted life year” to assess if a program is worth funding, based on whether it sufficiently extends a patient’s lifespan.

But outside of these larger systemic solutions, what can we do as individuals? How can we take control of our health in ways that don’t overwhelm our finances or our sanity? The Healthy Monday campaign provides an answer: take small steps and repeat them until they become habits. The campaign uses a simple tool built into the calendar of our lives. A regular prompt, at the start of each week, that can act as a powerful reminder to help us cut calories, start exercising, quit smoking, limit meat consumption, and embrace other healthy actions.

A new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health confirms that periodic prompts can indeed encourage healthy behavior. Simple reminders help motivate people to change in lasting, deeply beneficial ways. These messages can be deployed via email, telephone or mail – or just friend to friend over a coffee. Healthy Monday offers weekly tips you can sign up to receive in your email box.

Speaking of the power of email, the ALIVE test has just been published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. Kaiser Permanente, a large healthcare organization, tested ALIVE (A Lifestyle Intervention Via Email) using its employees. It was a 16-week program delivered by email – highly tailored to each individual’s lifestyle constraints, physical activity preferences and current diet – designed to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, and encourage physical activity, while decreasing consumption of saturated fats and added sugars. The results were positive, significant across all goals, and healthy behaviors were still observed four months after the program ended.

Evidence is mounting that simple weekly prompts, where larger initiatives have failed, can encourage people to incorporate healthy behaviors. Why not make each Monday the day to jumpstart your good health?