1. You are about to plan a 1,000-mile journey, and you aren't pressed for time. Rank the following means of transportation from the safest to the riskiest: bus, train, plane and passenger car. 2. What would you say kills more Americans annually: heart disease, cancer, or automobile accidents? 3. You're a healthy 45-year-old man, slightly overweight. Your father and his brother both died in their 50s of heart disease. Your mother, now 65, has had Type II diabetes for several years. Are you likely to get one of these ailments? 4. Winston Churchill, not to mention your Aunt Harriet, drank brandy and smoked habitually and was overweight besides. Both lived into their 80s and died peacefully in their sleep. Does that prove there is something health experts don't know? 5. You're a 43-year-old woman, a good cook, and you like a glass of wine or two with fine food. You were upset to read recently that even moderate alcohol consumption may double a woman's risk of getting breast cancer. The experts further stated that quitting now might not reduce the risk. However, you stopped drinking wine. Your sister is a teetotaler. Are you twice as likely to get breast cancer as she is? 6. You're 50, female, and a smoker. Your last checkup showed that both your blood pressure and blood cholesterol level were somewhat higher than they should be. You know this means that you risk a heart attack or stroke, but you read an article that said that even 50-year-old male smokers with high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol have only a 13% chance of getting sick within six years.

Last year, as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine and subsequently in scores of newspapers and magazines, studies by two prestigious research groups independently demonstrated a link between alcohol intake and breast cancer. A woman who drank even as few as three beers or glasses of wine weekly was found to have a 50% greater lifetime risk of developing breast cancer than a nondrinking woman. Widely publicized along with that figure was another statistic: that one American woman out of 11 develops breast cancer at some time in her life. That's a risk of 9%. It seems logical to conclude therefore, as many reporters did, that women drinkers run a risk closer to 14%, a terrifying narrowing of the safety margin.

A 50-year-old smoker, male or female, with elevated blood cholesterol and blood pressure is seriously courting cardiovascular disease. You may have only a 13% chance of developing it, since neither you nor your doctor has any way of predicting whether you'll fall into the lucky 87% who do not develop heart disease or the unlucky 13% who do. If these sound like favorable odds, you may decide not to make any changes in your habits. However, a more realistic way to consider the odds is as follows. If your risk factors were low (that is, you didn't smoke and your blood pressure and blood cholesterol levels were low), your chances of having a heart attack between age 40 and 64 would be only 6%. However, if you continue to smoke and do nothing about your other risk factors, your chance of having a heart attack during these years is 40%. This is a very big difference. Giving up cigarettes, controlling your blood pressure, and lowering your blood cholesterol level would significantly widen your safety margin. Obviously, that's the constructive action to take.