Despite the odd blunder (above) about abuse of anti-biotics the tenor of comments on this useful post (thanks Gail) concerning public health and dietary and exercise and other social patterns, are all in the right direction.
The 'advanced' urban world has done well enough with vaccination and infectious disease control, infant mortality and malnutrition and death during child-birth, and very badly compared with some traditional agrarian cultures for chronic disease in mid to late life. The huge 'hi-tec' health care burden is largely a result of these chronic diseases in 'western' and OECD countries and their recent epidemic increase in 'transition' economies. (Try google 'diseases of transition'.)
However:
1. Recent smoking cessation among middle aged is calculated to have contributed half (50%) of the halving of age-weighted incidence of cardiac deaths in UK over a 20 year period. (Parts of UK still show world record incidence of cardiac morbidity.)
2. Massive difference exists in age-weighted incidence in important cancers between OECD countries and for example Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. Colerectal and prostate cancer for example are order of magnitude more prevalent in OECD. Do not want to frighten any Australians, but check out definitive database GLOBOCAN for prostate cancer.
3. Recent large meta-study seems not only to confirm that the degree of compliance with a defined version of so-called Mediterranean Diet is cardio-protective, but higher compliance makes a surprisingly favorable difference to onset of both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
4. I personally have reduced weight and kept it low (mild calories restriction) using a 'traditional' Med Diet, heavily skewed to 'non-dairy' vegetarian, with daily exercise for two decades following heart attacks at a relatively young age. Apparently my 'markers' and general fitness reflect the benefits - can still do half-marathons. Hope though that my low dose statin (only widely available in UK for last decade) will still be available - but generic versions are very low cost and adequate if quality control procedures are tight enough.