Most young and middle-aged adults in the nation live in an unhealthy manner and lack knowledge about coronary heart disease, the most common fatal heart disease among young people, even though the death rate from heart diseases has increased nearly 30 percent in the past decade, a survey has showed.
The survey was conducted by the Taiwan Heart Foundation from April 17 to April 24, in an effort to gauge lifestyle, health awareness and knowledge of coronary heart disease and its treatments among young people. It collected 1, 086 valid responses.
Of those polled, 85.8 percent said they exercised for less than two-and-a-half hours a week, the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s recommended minimum for physical exercise, the results showed, while 79 percent said they had to work more than eight hours per day, which could be one of the reasons 64.8 percent of respondents said they got only between five and seven hours of sleep a night, less than the seven to nine hours suggested by the US National Sleep Foundation.
“The survey uncovered a link between long working hours and a lack of exercise,” Taiwan Heart Foundation deputy executive manager Yeh Hung-i (葉宏一) told a news conference in Taipei yesterday afternoon.
Yeh said the majority of respondents who worked for more than 12 hours a day had no exercise habits at all, while most of those with who worked less than eight hours a day exercised for more than two-and-a-half hours a week.
Meanwhile, the respondents had an average score of 3.82 out of 10 in a test on the causes, symptoms and treatments of coronary heart disease.
“More alarming is that as many as 74.9 percent of those polled were unaware that diabetes is a major risk factor for coronary heart disease,” Yeh said.
“While 54.9 percent were able to identify insufficient physical activity as a possible cause of heart disease, only 14.2 percent said they met the recommended exercise quota,” he said.
The foundation urged the public to adopt the “S-ABCDE” principle to protect themselves from heart disease — sodium restriction, alcohol limitation, body-weight reduction, cigarette smoke cessation, diet adaptation and exercise adoption.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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