WGU - C217 - Competency 154.1.7: Early Adulthood - Human Growth and Development Across the Lifespan. Questions and answers, rated A+ 2024

Explain the roles of nutrition and exercise in the health of young adults. In emerging and early adulthood, few individuals stop to think about how their personal lifestyles will affect their health later in their adult lives. As emerging adults, many of us develop a pattern of not eating breakfast, not eating regular meals, and relying on snacks as our main food source during the day, overeating to the point where we exceed the normal weight for our age, smoking moderately or excessively, drinking moderately or excessively, failing to exercise, and getting by with only a few hours of sleep at night. These lifestyles are associated with poor health, which in turn diminishes life satisfaction. In the Berkeley Longitudinal Study—in which individuals were evaluated over a period of 40 years— physical health at age 30 predicted life satisfaction at age 70, more so for men than for women. One study explored links between health behavior and life satisfaction in more than 17,000 individuals 17 to 30 years of age in 21 countries. The young adults' life satisfaction was positively related to not smoking, exercising regularly, using sun protection, eating fruit, and limiting fat intake, but was not related to alcohol consumption and fiber intake. The health profile of emerging and young adults can be improved by reducing the incidence of certain health-impairing lifestyles, such as overeating, and by engaging in health-improving lifestyles that include good eating habits, regular exercise, abstaining from drugs, and getting adequate sleep. How is adult cognition different than that of adolescents'? What is meant by post-formal thought? Some developmentalists theorize it is not until adulthood that many individuals consolidate their formal operational thinking. That is, they may begin to plan and hypothesize about intellectual problems in adolescence, but they become more systematic and sophisticated at this process as young adults. Nonetheless, even many adults do not think in formal operational ways. Some theorists have pieced together these descriptions of adult thinking and have proposed that young adults move into a new qualitative stage of cognitive development, postformal thought . Postformal thought is: