from Psychology, health and illness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Definitions
Leading organizations in the field of disease prevention and health promotion, such as the World Health Organization (Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland) and the Centers for Disease Control (Atlanta, USA), have since the early 1980s used healthy lifestyles as a label for a cluster of behaviours known to reduce the risk of injury, morbidity and mortality and increase the chances of good health and well-being. Health-related behaviours (health-enhancing or health-compromising) include eating habits, physical exercise, smoking, alcohol use, use of illegal addictive substances, sexual practices, risk-taking in traffic, work etc., use of safety devices (for instance wearing safety helmets when biking), sleeping habits, oral hygiene and personal hygiene. Examples of health-related behaviours which are relevant only to specific ethnic groups are exposure to the sun in order to obtain a more tanned skin among Caucasians, or use of skin-whitening creams among ethnic groups with dark skin colours.
The concept of lifestyle is also used in other contexts. In the field of marketing, analysis of consumer lifestyles means examining the way people live (their activities, interests, values and opinions) in order to better tailor marketing efforts to specific target groups.
According to Elliott (1993):
… a lifestyle has been defined as a distinctive mode of living that is defined by a set of expressive, patterned behaviors of individuals occurring with some consistency over a period of time.
It should be evident from this definition that the lifestyle construct is not meant to capture the totality of a person's behaviour.
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