Clustering of unhealthy behaviours over time: implications for policy and practice

People’s lifestyles – whether they smoke, how much they drink, what they eat, whether they take regular exercise –affect their health and mortality. Less is known about how these behaviours co-occur or cluster in the population and about how these patterns of multiple lifestyle risk have been evolving over time. This paper considers this in the context of the English population and sets out the implications for public health policy and practice that flow from the findings.