How do your habits contribute to you falling ill?

 LIMA — Should you catch a bug this cold and flu season, there is generally a good reason why. Often, the choices we make in our daily lives, from diet to sleeping habits, contribute to illness more than we might think.When it comes to lifestyle choices that might contribute to illness, doctors sometimes differ in opinion, said Warren Downhour, a family physician and surgeon at Lima Memorial Health System.“It’s controversial,” he said. “You could talk to 10 different doctors and they might give you 10 different opinions.”However, Downhour and other local medical professionals agreed that some factors definitely contribute to people’s likelihood of contracting infections, viruses and other illnesses. Some of these we may know intuitively. With others, we might not understand how much impact they really have.These factors are:• Smoking. Smoking devastates your personal health, and not just because it can cause cancer, said Greg Parranto, a family practice physician at Allen County Health Partners. On a day-to-day basis, smoking greatly increases your chances of contracting lung, upper airway and sinus infections.“I always tell my patients that do smoke that the smartest thing they can do for their health is quit smoking,” he said.Why is that? Cigarette smoke paralyzes the little hairs, or cilia, inside your lungs, said Michael Humphrey, chief clinical officer for St. Rita’s Medical Center. The cilia work to clear lungs of mucus and other things, he said, so without them, the risk of respiratory infection runs high.• Poor eating/drinking habits. It might sound elementary, but good nutrition sometimes takes a backseat during the winter, Humphrey said. Without good nutrition, the body doesn’t have the resources it needs to stay healthy.“This time of year, diets can vary a lot,” he said. “People eat a lot more unbalanced food, and those states in parts of the country that have winter weather, people start shifting to a lot of fast food. Nutrition can affect the balance of the immune system.”Drinking plenty of water is also vital during cold and flu season, Parranto said. Water literally flushes bad stuff out of your system, he said, which helps your immune system fight infection.• Shift work and bad sleep habits. You might think you can get by with only four or five hours of sleep a night, Downhour said, but you’re wrong. People who do not get at least seven hours of sleep every evening run their bodies down, he said, which lowers the body’s ability to fight disease.“It’s like running your car on tires that are soft,” he said. “You’re not going to last as long.”Similarly, studies have shown that people with disrupted sleep patterns, such as shift workers, have higher levels of disease than those who work normal hours, Downhour said. Shift work not disrupts important hormonal rhythms, but also adds stress to your body, which in turn can affect your immune system.• Negative stress. We all experience stress on a regular basis, Parranto said. Some of this stress is positive stress, and some of it is negative. The negative stress, he said, can impact your health in a big way.“If you have an unhealthy relationship, or unfair expectations, or you’re anxious or worry about things you have no control over, that’s more apt to help you become ill,” he said.”Coping mechanisms for dealing with stress prove just as important as the stress itself, both Parranto and Downhour said.“Air traffic controllers are under enormous stress at all times, but they aren’t all dropping from high blood pressure or strokes,” Parranto said. “They are able to cope with the stress. For them, they don’t find the stress debilitating. It’s a positive thing that keeps them on their game.”• Poor mental health. Parranto said studies show a negative correlation between depression and increased physical illness. In other words, depression appears to be related to getting sick, although nothing has proven that one causes the other.Depression can also affect your physical health in other ways, Downhour said.“Someone who is chronically depressed may not eat well or may not practice things like hand-washing or trying to pick the best foods,” he said. “Another aspect of mental health are expectations or self-fulfilling prophecies. If someone thinks they’re going to get sick, they tend to get sick.”• Working in childcare or in schools. Children carry more germs than anyone else in our society, Downhour said. This means people who work with kids on a regular basis, especially daycare workers, greatly increase the likelihood they will become sick. “If someone has worked regularly in a daycare for the last 90 days, then they have much higher levels of all these community-acquired illnesses,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any (career) equivalent to that, nothing else like it out there.”Humphrey also said people who work in childcare or in the schools are more likely to carry the germs home to their families and friends, putting them at risk for illness, as well.For that matter, Parranto said there could be increased risk for anyone who works in a high-traffic job surrounded by strangers. A cashier at a grocery store, for example, or a restaurant worker will probably encounter more germs and viruses than someone who doesn’t deal with many people.