TARA PARKER-POPE ESSAY


Have you had your five to nine servings of vegetables today? Exercised for an hour? Cut back on saturated fat and gotten eight hours of sleep?

Dictating the rules for healthful living has become a cottage industry . But when it comes to achieving these goals, many of us feel we are falling far short.

Now Dr. Susan M. Love, a respected women’s health specialist , offers a new rule: stop worrying about your health.

In the new book, “Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won’t Break Your Health,” Dr. Love makes the case that perfect health is a myth and that most of us are living far more healthful lives than we realize.

Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that failing to live by the various health rules is a major source of stress and guilt, particularly for women. For most of us, “pretty healthy” is healthy enough.

“Is the goal to live forever?” she said . “I would contend it’s not. It’s really to live as long as you can with the best quality of life you can.”

The book, written with Alice D. Domar, a Harvard professor and senior staff psychologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, explores the research and advice in six areas of health - sleep, stress, prevention, nutrition, exercise and relationships. In all six, they write, the biggest risks are on the extremes, and the middle ground is bigger than we think.

Most people believe that it’s best to get at least eight hours of sleep a day. But the studies on which this belief is based look at how much men and women sleep under ideal conditions - silence, darkness and no responsibilities other than taking part in a sleep study. These studies don’t tell us anything about how much sleep we really need on a daily basis or what will happen if we get less.

A 2002 report in Archives of General Psychiatry found that people who slept seven hours a night were the least likely to die during a six-year study period. Sleeping more than seven hours or less than five increased mortality risk. It wasn’t clear from the study whether more or less sleep increased risk or whether there was an underlying health problem .

“We need to be more realistic,” Dr. Love said. “If you’re sleepy all the time, you’re not getting enough sleep for you. If you’re fine on six hours, don’t worry about it.”

And there is nothing magic about losing weight. People who are obese or underweight have higher mortality rates, but people who are overweight are just as healthy as those of normal weight - and sometimes healthier. “The goal is to be as healthy and have as good of a quality of life as you can have,” Dr. Love said. “It’s not to be thin.”

Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, professor of family medicine at the University of California, San Diego, cautions against interpreting a relaxed health message as an excuse to overeat or stay sedentary.

She said many people seemed to have lost sight of what it meant to be healthy. “The point of this is to use your common sense, and if you feel good, then you’re fine,” she said. “The goal is not to get to heaven and say, ‘I’m perfect.’ It’s to use your body, have some fun and to live a little.”

STUART BRADFORD