Heart Disease Risk Assessment Paper

1. After taking the heart disease risk assessment, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my assessed risk was “very much below average”. I have always thought of my lifestyle as above average in terms of health, and was glad to have this assessment reaffirm that. The only two improvements suggested were to eat more fish and more vegetable oil (which surprised, because I had thought that oils were to be avoided if possible). For the diabetes risk assessment, my assessment results were the same, “very much below average”. This was encouraging and affirming just like the heart disease assessment. For the prostate cancer assessment, my results were “below average”. This made sense in the context of our class discussion regarding the likelihood

In order to decide whether I will apply this suggestion, I will assess the threat of prostate cancer, and the sum of the barriers and benefits associated with eating 5 or more servings of tomato products a week. For the threat assessment, I perceive that my susceptibility to prostate cancer is great after discovering that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetimes. Though only one in 36 of those men will die of prostate cancer, the severe circumstances that surround any type of cancer would be undesirable for me. In addition, by taking this assessment and doing research, I have been cued to action to reduce my own risk. Because of this, I weigh that the benefits of eating 5 or more servings of tomatoes weekly to be greater general health, more incentive to buy other vegetables as I buy tomatoes, more incentive to cook at home with tomatoes rather than eat out, and more protection against prostate cancer. The barriers to this would be the greater expense of purchasing tomatoes and tomato based products, and the fact that I do not particularly enjoy the taste of tomatoes. However, because I perceive the benefits of eating more tomatoes and vegetables in general to be outweighing the costs, I choose to set a goal of eating 5 or more servings of tomato products each