A workout, some coffee and you are good to go

Heavy coffee drinkers cut their risk of an aggressive form of prostate cancer up to 60%.

Daily exercise can cut your risk by 35%. Even if you already have prostate cancer, a 15-minute daily workout can improve your odds of beating it.

(Pete the Cat is drawn by the artist James Dean and is very popular around my part of Atlanta. We have several Pete prints around the house.)

Kathryn Wilson of Harvard looked at a population study of 50,000 male health professionals, and checked the cases of about 5,000 who got cancer against their coffee habits.

She was careful in the press release on her work, saying only that if you're a coffee drinker and do get cancer, feel free to have another cup.

The problem here is that coffee is highly complex stuff. It has antioxidants and minerals. It has an effect on insulin and glucose metabolism, as well as sex hormones.

And it's a natural diuretic. In the last several years I have made exercise and coffee a daily habit, but I have to limit my intake, because when the diuretic effects of coffee and exercise are combined I can find myself asleep at my desk before noon.

Healthier living in general is having an impact in the war against cancer. The latest annual report on cancer shows the cancer rate continuing to fall, although case numbers keep going up as people age. Those cancers that we know are impacted by healthy habits, like lung cancer, are falling fastest. Death rates are also falling.

There is one danger in all this good news, which I would like to hear comment on.

It is increasingly obvious that healthy habits cut health care costs. Whether through insurance or taxes, we are paying more-and-more for the bad habits of those who prefer to ignore health advice and consider it freedom.

Are you OK with that? And if you're not OK with it, what if anything can or should be done?

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com