1.2 ‘Lifestylism’

The term ‘lifestyle’ is often associated with health-related behaviours, like those you considered in Activity 1. A substantial amount of the total current burden of disease (i.e., the number of years of life lost to disease and the number of years lived with disability as a result of disease) is attributable to unhealthy behaviours such as smoking, alcohol misuse, poor diet and a lack of physical exercise (Jagannathan et al., 2019; Dai et al., 2020; Timmis et al., 2022).

The term ‘lifestylism’ was coined by Petr Skrabanek (1994) and implies that most diseases are caused by the unhealthy behaviour of individuals, such that it is people’s lifestyles that affect their health, and indeed their life expectancy. This link between behaviour and disease has been much emphasised by health professionals.

Learning about lifestyles and wellbeing requires some ‘way of knowing’. In other words, some evidence is needed to ‘make sense’ of the challenge of adult obesity, to take one example. Such evidence can be acquired through both quantitative and qualitative research methods. In the next section, you will begin to explore how quantitative evidence is used to understand what obesity is and how it is linked to unhealthy lifestyles, before moving on to qualitative approaches later in the course.