Impact of Lifestyle on Health

Introduction Lifestyle is a way used by people, groups and nations and is formed in specific geographical, economic , political, cultural and religious text. Lifestyle is referred to the characteristics of inhabitants of a region in special time and place. It includes day to day behaviors and functions of individuals in job, activities, fun and diet. In recent decades, life style as an important factor of health is more interested by researchers. According to WHO, 60% of related factors to individual health and quality of life are correlated to lifestyle (1). Millions of people follow an unhealthy lifestyle. Hence, they encounter illness, disability and even death. Problems like metabolic diseases, joint and skeletal problems, cardio-vascu-lar diseases, hypertension, overweight, violence and so on, can be caused by an unhealthy lifestyle. The relationship of lifestyle and health should be highly considered. Today, wide changes have occurred in life of all people. Malnutrition, unhealthy diet, smoking, alcohol consuming, drug abuse, stress and so on, are the presentations of unhealthy life style that they are used as dominant form of lifestyle. Besides , the lives of citizens face with new challenges. For instance, emerging new technologies within IT such as the internet and virtual communication networks, lead our world to a major challenge that threatens the physical and mental health of individuals. The challenge is the overuse and misuse of the technology. Therefore, according to the existing studies, it can be said that: lifestyle has a significant influence on physical and mental health of human being. There are different forms of such influences. Consangu-inity in some ethnicity is a dominant form of life style that it leads to the genetic disorders. Reformation of this unhealthy life style is a preventing factor for decreasing the rate of genetic diseases (2). In some countries, the overuse of drugs is a major unhealthy life style. Iran is one of the 20 countries using the most medications. They prefer medication to other intervention. Furthermore, in 15-40% of cases they use medications about without prescription (3). Pain relievers, eye drops and antibiotics have the most usage in Iran. While self-medications such as antibiotics have a negative effect on the immune system, if the individual would be affected by infection, antibiotics will not be effective in treatment. Overall, 10 percent of those who are self-medicated will experience severe complications such as drug resistance. Sometimes drug allergy is so severe that …