The important role of health checks

Up until the age of 40, most people feel immortal. This is not so strange, because chronic diseases hardly occur under the age of 40. However, the run-up to these chronic diseases starts at a young age, when you can still take on the whole world. In this blog, we investigate how a preventive health check can make you the conductor of your own health again.

Health check

A health check is a test to check how healthy you are. You are healthy when you: “Are in a state of complete well-being, in which there is no physical injury or disease.” Importantly, this concerns preventive health that is not currently causing any problems.

Why should you do a health check?

A health check catches problems at an early stage. Of course, you can't prevent everything, there's also a factor of bad luck. But in most cases, early detection of health problems means that you positively change the final stages of these diseases. That is to say, they are less serious. Vincent Bastiaans, a movement scientist at the expertise centre for health, sports and work HAN SENECA, says: "If you check the status of someone's health and how that health is developing in a reliable, good and valid way, then we catch many problems". An additional advantage is that you ultimately reduce healthcare costs. A point of criticism from healthcare, for example, is that it increases the pressure on healthcare, because you get people for treatment sooner in the short term. However, the treatment trajectories become shorter, according to Vincent Bastiaans.

Type of health check

Health checks come in all shapes and sizes. From measuring your height and weight, calculating BMI, filling out questionnaires to an InBody scan at Happy Bodies. You can of course measure everything, but the most important indicators for your health are:

• Check your lifestyle
• Check your cholesterol; and
• Check your blood pressure.
• Check your blood sugar levels.

Health Netherlands

The Netherlands has many chronically ill people. Of all people over 40, 50% even have a chronic disease. The biggest culprits are:

• Diabetes
• Cardiovascular diseases
• High cholesterol
• High blood pressure
• Cancer
   

Add to that the fact that 50% of the Netherlands is overweight and a significant part of that is even obese. A large part of the chronic diseases can be traced back to that. Overweight can be traced back to our consumer society combined with a sedentary existence. We already wrote about this last week, with a few steps a day you can already achieve enormous health benefits.

The solution

The good news is that you can prevent 80% of the chronic diseases with a healthy lifestyle. Sports are a perfect remedy for high cholesterol and high blood pressure. At Happy Bodies we are happy to be part of the solution. Focused on the 40+ to grow old fit and vital. No, you do not have to exercise 5 times a week. Once every 5 days is enough.