You don’t have to adopt my beliefs about health and fitness to benefit from them. You simply need to keep an open mind and seriously consider them.

One such belief you should seriously consider pertains to the degree to which you determine your health. It took shape years ago after I read up on genetics.

Poor health habits, it seems, have little effect on about three out of every 100 people. It’s why that neighbor who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day lived to be 103.

Proper health habits seem to have little effect on a similar proportion of the population as well. It’s why that coworker who never smoked a day in his life died of lung cancer at 43.

If the belief I call The Six-Percent Exception has merit, that means you are most probably neither genetically blessed nor genetically cursed. And that means your daily decisions — what types of foods to eat, whether or not to work out, what time to go to bed — dictate your present and future health.

Granted, The Six-Percent Exception is guesswork, but the results from the studies that follow are not — results that suggest that poor health is hardly ever happenstance.

Way back when this column began, type 2 diabetes was called adult-onset diabetes. The medicos believed it only occurred after decades of poor eating and insufficient exercise, that it could be controlled by medication, but medication was required for life.

But America’s increasing consumption of overly processed foods accelerated the adult-onset diabetes to such a degree that some teens developed it, so the medicos altered the name of it. Then a few pioneers prescribed super strict eating along with consistent exercise in lieu of medication, nullified the disease’s adverse effects, and altered a belief about it.

Most medicos now believe that lifelong remission of type 2 diabetes is possible.

Two studies published in the last two years strongly support that.

First, results of the Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial (DiRECT) published last year in The Lancet found that almost half of the subjects diagnosed as type 2 diabetics achieved remission by doing nothing more than following a prescribed weight-loss program. More recently, results of follow-up research published in the journal Cell Metabolism and lead by the man in charge of DiRECT, Roy Taylor of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, revealed why weight-loss can do this.

In many subjects, weight loss regenerated the functioning of a type of pancreatic cells known as beta cells, cells that cells that help produce, store, and release insulin and were once believed to be destroyed by type 2 diabetes. But the follow-up research proved that they can be regenerated if a significant amount of weight is lost — preferably sooner than later.

Taylor and his colleagues discovered that those subjects who regained pancreatic cell functioning had had type 2 diabetes an average of 2.7 years before dieting. The unsuccessful subjects, however, had had the disease on average for 3.8 years before any weight loss.

But the medicos knew about the link between poor lifestyle choices and the incidence of type 2 diabetes well before Taylor and crew knew that weight loss could regenerate beta cells. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2001, for instance, determined that 91 percent of the type 2 diabetes cases studied “could be attributed to habits and forms of behavior.”

And too often, type 2 diabetes leads to numerous other health problems. One that may not immediately come to mind, but should, is cancer.

A recent global review of over 20 million people in 47 different countries published in the journal Diabetologia found that when compared to healthy women, those with diabetes are 27 percent more likely to develop some form of cancer.

So in one plausible scenario, poor diet and a lack of exercise — two things totally in your control — lead to the continued weight gain that creates a myriad of minor health problems that ultimately create a major one: type 2 diabetes. Because this disease adversely affects your body in so many ways, your immune system is compromised and you contract a form of cancer.

Another factor in your control is how much sleep you get every night, and getting the proper amount helps if your situation is like the one above and poor diet and a lack of exercise has led to a few unwanted pounds.

A University of Michigan study, in fact, found that sleeping an extra hour (most people are to some degree sleep deprived) could theoretically lead to a weight loss of 14 pounds in one year. While this estimate considers a number of factors, a number of other studies have made one of the factors absolutely clear.

A lack of sleep disrupts the natural secretion of hormones that produce the hunger and satiety and increases the odds of weight gain.