Human Health Ecology: A New Scientific Method

Numerous observational studies have highlighted the crucial role of lifestyle in the prevention of chronic diseases (Riboli and Kaaks in Int J Epidemiol 26(Suppl 1):S6-S14, 1997; Riboli et al. in Public Health Nutr 5(6B):1113-1124, 2002; Boffetta et al. in Eur J Epidemiol 29(12):929-936, 2014). Prospective multicohort analyses further documented the quantitative impact of lifestyle on life expectancy and healthy life years. Nyberg et al. demonstrated that favorable behavioral profiles are associated with more than ten additional years lived free of major chronic diseases (Nyberg et al. in JAMA Intern Med 180(5):760-768, 2020). Similar findings emerged from the China Kadoorie Biobank (Lv et al. in Lancet Public Health 6(12):e895-e906, 2021) and the US study by Li et al. (BMJ 368:k239, 2018). Collectively, these data confirm that lifestyle is the most powerful and modifiable determinant of long-term health, with effects ranging from 10 to 15 years in terms of both survival and quality of life. Based on this evidence, we propose Human Health Ecology as a new scientific paradigm, operationalized through the Method of Resilient Ecology, aimed at redefining health as a measurable ecological property of systemic balance and resilience.