You’re not Bill Clinton, I’m not James Carville, and this is certainly not August 1992.

So there’s no need for me to advise you on how to defeat incumbent George H. W. Bush in the upcoming presidential election. No need to argue that the current recession has become an albatross around his neck.

And that we, the Democratic party, can turn that albatross into a noose and hang him with it with this as our rallying cry.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

In case you’re too young to remember or so old you forget, that refrain became the catchphrase that just might have swayed the 1992 election. And that phrase, in modified forms, has lived on.

In 2004, Iraqi War protestors often carried “It’s the war, stupid” signs. Since then, modifications of the phrase, according to Political Dictionary.com, have been used for other hot-button issues: the environment, education, or “almost anything else.”

Today, it will be modified again. Because if you’re currently facing a health problem or fear one’s in the making, the reason probably is the same.

“It’s your lifestyle, stupid.”

While that could be hurtful to read, it’s intended to be helpful.

As is last week’s recommendation to read 350-plus pages of potentially helpful hurt: Good Energy (Avon, 2024) by Casey Means. In essence, it’s a self-help health book about how poor lifestyle choices lead to metabolic dysfunction — the umbrella term for any impairment in the way your body processes and stores food.

At its onset, metabolic dysfunction may only create minor problems, like fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, or a bit of pain. If left unabated though, it causes major ones, like depression, anxiety, infertility, insomnia, erectile dysfunction, Alzheimer’s disease, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

But Means isn’t the only one connecting disease to “stupid” lifestyle choices. A new report from the American Cancer Society and published in the July issue of CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians links them to the incidence of many cancers.

It does so using 2019 data from multiple studies on cancer incidence and mortality as well as risk-factor prevalence and finds that four in 10 cancer diagnoses and almost half of all cancer deaths of adults 30 years old and older in the United States result from nine less-than-intelligent lifestyle decisions. Including four this column so often rails against: smoking cigarettes, eating a poor diet, avoiding physical inactivity, and the inevitable result of the last two: gaining excess body weight.

Furthermore, another study published in July by Nature Human Behavior links the incidence of heart disease to lifestyle in a rather compelling manner. Researchers from the China Kadoorie Biobank Collaborative Group utilized data housed in their biobank on 96,400 Chinese adults to determine a “favorable” lifestyle can counteract the unfavorable genetics that make you more likely to develop three specific types of heart disease.

They ascertained this by placing the participants into one of three groups in two different ways. The first was based on lifestyle, and the categories were favorable, intermediate, and unfavorable.

The unfavorable group contained the individuals who were currently smoking, not eating a sufficient amount of fruits or vegetables daily, not exercising enough, or had too high or too low of a body mass index.

The second separate grouping categorized the participants based on their genetic risk for three cardiovascular diseases: coronary artery disease, ischemic stroke, and intracerebral hemorrhaging (brain bleeding). The labels here were low, intermediate, or high.

When all the categories were compared and the numbers were crunched, the researchers not only found that a favorable lifestyle trumped high genetic risk, but also that those found to have a high genetic risk benefitted from a favorable lifestyle the most.

In fact, the high genetic risk group was nearly 15 times less likely to suffer one type of coronary artery disease, early-onset coronary artery disease, if they changed an unfavorable lifestyle into a favorable one. They were about 2.5 times less likely to develop any of the other aforementioned ailments as well.

Finally, a paper presented at the American Society for Nutrition’s yearly conference linked a higher consumption of ultra-processed foods with an increased risk of death in older Americans by up to 10 percent when compared to those who consumed the lowest. This was determined by using info from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, one that kept tabs on over a half million participants for about 20 years.

While past research made it clear that a diet high in UPFs is less than best, this study added an important twist, one well summarized by Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, preventive cardiology dietitian at EntirelyNourished.com, who was not involved in the research but asked by Medical News Today about it. That a higher consumption of ultra-processed foods can now be associated with increased mortality risk “independent of other factors like smoking, obesity, and diet quality.”

In other words, the detrimental effects of UPFs are not negated by making other “smart” lifestyle changes — even ones related to your diet.