How many years will a healthy lifestyle be added to us, and what will their quality be?
Scientists have calculated how much time can be added to life when adopting 5 health habits, and also looked at whether those years will force us to deal with heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Surprisingly, or not, the results differ between women and men
How many years will a healthy lifestyle be added to us, and what will their quality be?
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The various health sections (and we, of course, also) do not stop imploring you to adopt healthy habits, and bring more and more research to prove to you why this is important to you. Thanks to this, you probably already know that a healthier lifestyle will probably "earn" you a few more years. But does it still sound attractive if these extra years include dealing with serious illnesses?
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To the full articleA 2018 study by an international group of scientists led by Harvard University School of Public Health found that adopting five healthy habits could extend our lifespan: 14 years for women and 12 years for men. And these are the rules:
1) Eating a plant-rich diet and low in fats. We write about it here all the time
2) Moderate to vigorous exercise for several hours a week. We also write about this quite a bit
3) Maintaining a healthy body weight.
4) Avoiding smoking.
5) Limit alcohol consumption to one drink a day for women and two for men.
The researchers wanted to know how many of those years added to life expectancy were healthy, that is, without three common chronic diseases: heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. In a BMJ study this week, they report that a healthy lifestyle can actually contribute to more years of life with fewer illnesses - for women, it's a life expectancy after about 50 years of age (compared to people who don't have such habits), and for men it's about eight years.
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The goal is that the years added will also be health and joy. Group selfies of elders (Photo: shutterstock)
Group selfies of smiling adults looking happy (Photo: ShutterStock)
To understand how this works, researchers analyzed data collected from over 111,000 U.S. women and men who were 30-75 years old when enrolled in nursing health research from 1980 or in his follow-up study of 1986. Participants answered biannual questionnaires about lifestyle habits And their health, until 2014. Each participant was given a "lifestyle" score of 0-5 based on their responses to the questionnaires, with the higher scores representing stronger adherence to health guidelines, and then the researchers attempted to correlate these scores with the length of time the participants lived without. Heart disease, cancer or diabetes.
Women who reported four or five of the healthy habits lived an average of 34 more years and were free of these diseases after age 50, compared to 24 years in women who testified that they did not even have a healthy habit. The men who reported living four or five of the healthy habits lived an average of 31 more years, compared to the 23-year average for men who did not adopt the healthy lifestyle.
It's not "or all or nothing"
According to Dr. Ho, none of the five health habits tested stood out as more important than the others and their benefits in extending a healthy life expectancy were similar. That means it's not all or nothing. One must not despair and give up the matter because one or two habits only succeed, "Dr. Ho concluded.
Another finding from his findings was that it's never too late to start such a change (given the work that all research participants were over the age of 30): "It's always better to adopt healthy lifestyle habits as early as possible, but even adopting them at a relatively late stage in life will provide significant health benefits later" .