Small changes to exercise, sleep and eating habits can have amazing effects on people’s health and extend their lives, a large British study suggests.
The study, published Jan. 13 in the journal eClinicalMedicine, sought to find the minimal lifestyle changes that could measurably extend people’s lives. Researchers searched within data collected from around 60,000 people in the UK Biobank Cohort, a repository of medical and lifestyle data for hundreds of thousands of British adults.
The research team related participants’ documented habits to their theoretical overall lifespan and health, calculated using statistical modeling. They found that people who got just five extra minutes of sleep each day, got just two extra minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, and added half a vegetable per day tended to live significantly longer than the worst performers, those whose sleep habits, exercise, and nutritional patterns placed them in the bottom 5% of the overall cohort.
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According to a statistical model, the former group lived one year longer overall than the latter.
That doesn’t mean adding a few minutes of exercise or sleep or making small changes to your diet will guarantee you an extra year of life, Stephen Burgess, a statistician at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
“This study itself does not prove that these habits improve health,” he cautioned. “We’re modeling what happens to our lifespans if we improve our health by changing these factors.”
Interestingly, the data suggests that improvements across several dimensions of well-being are “greater than the sum of the parts,” study lead author Nicholas Cormel, a nutritionist and researcher at the University of Sydney, told Live Science. For example, to add an extra year to life through sleep alone, the study suggests that a person would need an extra 25 minutes of sleep each night, which is not a luxury many people have. But even small improvements in sleep, exercise, and diet can have big overall benefits.
Cormel said the findings suggest that “healthy habits work better as a package.”
“Each of our actions influences each other,” he said. “If you have a bad night’s sleep, it often changes the way you eat and the way you move. And you see that in all of these different behaviors.”
According to the model, study participants with an optimal combination of these behaviors (at least 40 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise, seven to eight hours of sleep a day, and an overall healthy diet) were predicted to live nine years longer overall and nine years longer in good health than those in the poorest 3%.
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Such studies, known as cohort studies, should be taken with a grain of salt due to their design. Rather than asking people to change their habits and seeing how that change affects their health, they retrospectively compare the two groups. Therefore, it is not possible to conclusively prove that a particular change caused the relevant effect. They can only draw a link between the two.
For example, in the UK Biobank cohort, sleep and exercise habits were only measured for up to one week, and the data assumed that people continued with the same habits over time. Similarly, diet was only assessed at the beginning of the study, rather than being monitored over time. Therefore, it is possible that the participants changed their habits after these assessments were made, which would weaken the possibility that their habits extended their lives.
All this leaves room for the possibility that other unmeasured factors, rather than these lifestyle differences, caused the improvement in lifespan.
For example, it may be that one group is wealthier, which happens to make it easier for that group to exercise, sleep well, and eat well. But ultimately, Burgess explained, the difference is partly explained by wealth, not just behavior. It’s also possible that rich people live in less polluted areas than poor people, which could contribute to the difference in life expectancy. Nothing can be said from this study alone.
“The overall message that small changes in these factors are likely to be beneficial is probably correct,” Burgess said. “But it’s less clear whether the exact numbers are accurate.”
Cormel agreed, saying more research is needed to confirm the results. Still, the idea that even small lifestyle changes can have a big impact could offer an interesting alternative for people looking to improve their overall well-being, he suggested.
“New Year’s resolutions often fail because they try too hard,” he argued. “We strive to go to the gym every day. We strive to be perfect.” The study suggests that there may be “different paths to getting from A to Z” by making small changes across several areas of well-being that can accumulate healthier habits while improving overall health.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice.
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