Major study calculates effect on lifespan of habits including healthy eating and not smoking

This article by Ian Sample appeared in The Guardian, April 30th, 2018.

Brief commentary by CRUS co-founder Paul Cienfuegos: The co-author of this research study says, “Given that the habits of a healthy lifestyle are well known, the mystery is why we are so bad at adopting them.” It’s not really a mystery at all. The primary explanation can be summed up in two words: corporate rule. “[M]any people struggle to give up smoking” because We the People allow cigarette manufacturing corporations to legally market their deadly products to people all over the world as a Supreme Court granted First Amendment right of free speech of a corporate person. The marketing of products that will likely kill you – in fact their sales as well – are something that We have the authority to end simply by dismantling corporate constitutional “rights”.
The same solution is available to us regarding “[T]he continuous peddling of unhealthy food” by corporations exercising their First Amendment “rights” and their property “rights” and their privacy “rights”.
“[P]oor urban planning” should more accurately be called “land use planning by property owners”, primarily corporate property owners. Again, corporations have Supreme Court protected property “rights”, which includes their right to design cityscapes so that you literally cannot tell one city from another, and where cars are catered to instead of human beings. 
If We the People stopped mobilizing ourselves endlessly in short-term conventional single-issue campaigns and instead took a long collective breath and asked ourselves whether there were structures of law that make unhealthy eating and drinking and exercising habits inevitable, we could begin to redesign our activism to be a lot more effective, by taking on corporate constitutional “rights” that are the centerpiece of most if not all of these unhealthy behaviors.
People who stick to five healthy habits in adulthood can add more than a decade to their lives, according to a major study into the impact behaviour has on lifespan. MORE…