The proportion of people engaging in multiple unhealthy lifestyle behaviours has fallen significantly according to a new report on the clustering of unhealthy behaviours over time from The King’s Fund.
However, almost all the improvement has been among higher socio-economic and better-educated groups, exacerbating health inequalities. The study is the first to examine how patterns of multiple lifestyle behaviours have changed over time in England. It uses data from the Health Survey for England to analyse changes in the clustering of four key lifestyle behaviours – smoking, excessive drinking, poor diet and lack of exercise – between 2003 and 2008. The report found that the proportion of the population engaging in three or four of these behaviours fell by 8% over the period, suggesting that public health initiatives have been important in improving health among the population as a whole. However, the report also shows that these initiatives failed to have an impact among lower socio-economic groups. The proportion of manual workers and people with no qualifications engaging in all four behaviours remained unchanged. As a result, the gap between higher and lower socio-economic groups has widened – those with no qualifications were five times more likely to engage in all four behaviours than better educated groups, compared to only three times as likely in 2003.
