Healthy Lifestyle Choices
Understand how lifestyle choices affect the body’s health: a balanced diet, regular exercise, adequate sleep, and avoiding harmful substances (tobacco, alcohol, drug misuse) help body systems function well, while poor choices increase the risk of disease
What a learner can do afterwards
- Explain how regular exercise strengthens the heart, lungs, and muscles
- Explain how sugar can contribute to tooth decay, excess food energy can lead to obesity, and too much saturated fat can increase heart disease risk
- State at least two harmful effects of smoking (damages lungs, increases heart disease risk) or alcohol (damages liver, affects brain)
1 · Read
Your body works better when you move it. Running, swimming, biking, and playing sports are all exercise. When you exercise regularly, your heart pumps blood more efficiently, your lungs take in more air, and your muscles grow stronger. These changes build up slowly, a little every day.
Diego jogs for twenty minutes most mornings before school. At first, he got tired quickly and had to stop and catch his breath. After a few months of jogging, his heart didn't have to work as hard to keep up, because exercise had made it stronger.
You already know a balanced diet includes different food groups. Adding one healthy food does not undo eating too much of another. Sugar feeds the germs that cause tooth decay. Taking in more energy than your body uses can lead to obesity. Too much saturated fat, found in foods such as butter and fatty meat, raises the risk of heart problems.
Smoking damages your lungs and raises heart disease risk. Your liver breaks down alcohol, and too much can damage it. Drug misuse can also harm your body and brain. Avoid tobacco, alcohol, and drug misuse. Use medicines only with a trusted adult following medical advice and the label.
Eating well, staying active, sleeping enough, and avoiding tobacco, alcohol, and drug misuse all work together to keep your body's systems healthy.
Readings written for this dataset.
2 · Watch
Take it off screen
Where it sits
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.