Health
Study shows: These eight factors are crucial for a long life
Eight lifestyle factors are critical to longevity. Regular exercise is one of them.
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According to a new study, 40-year-old men and women could live 23.7 and 22.6 years respectively if they lead a healthy lifestyle. Practical: The study lists eight habits with which such a long life can succeed.
Eight lifestyle factors crucial
The team led by Xuan-Mai Nguyen from the University of Illinois analyzed data from over 700,000 US veterans aged 40 to 99. It defined eight habits as a healthy lifestyle: being physically active, not smoking, managing stress well, eating well, not drinking excessively, sleeping well and regularly, having positive social relationships, and not being dependent on opioid painkillers. “We were really surprised at how much you could gain by introducing one, two, three or all eight lifestyle factors,” Nguyen said in a statement from the American Society for Nutrition.
The greatest risk factors were found to be low physical activity, dependence on opioid painkillers and smoking. These factors were associated with an increased risk of death of 30 to 45 percent each during the study period. Poor stress management, high alcohol consumption, an unhealthy diet and poor sleep hygiene increased the risk of death by around 20 percent, and a lack of good social contacts by five percent.
Lifestyle changes can also be effective in old age
The doctors found that a change to a healthy lifestyle increases life expectancy even in old age. “The sooner the better, but even if you make a small change at 40, 50 or 60, it’s still beneficial,” Nguyen says.
The study’s data comes from the Million Veterans Program, a US national research program that examines how genes, lifestyle, and military experiences affect the health and well-being of veterans. The analysis by Nguyen and colleagues considered data from 719 147 veterans collected in 2011-2019.
Lifestyle important for cancer risk
Lifestyle also plays an important role in reducing the risk of cancer. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cancer risk factors include alcohol, low physical activity, unhealthy diet, obesity, red and processed meat, sugary drinks, tobacco use and exposure to ultraviolet radiation. A study by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) found that in ten high-income developed countries, on average, a third of respondents do not follow cancer prevention recommendations. The countries studied were Australia, Germany, France, Great Britain, Israel, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Spain and the USA.
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“It is important to understand whether people do nothing to reduce their personal cancer risk because they do not know about the risk factors, or whether they do not act despite knowing about the risk factors,” says Pricivel Carrera from the National Cancer Prevention Center, according to a statement from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. Therefore, together with her DKFZ colleague Silvia Calderazzo, she analyzed the data from the UICC study with regard to the state of knowledge on cancer risk factors. They found that if the number of people who are well informed about cancer risk factors increases by 1 percentage point, the number of people taking action to reduce their risk increases by an average of 0.169 percentage points.
40 percent of all cancer cases in Germany are avoidable
The people in Japan were the worst informed and also practiced the least cancer prevention there. But even in Germany, the knowledge of those surveyed about cancer risk factors was below average. “In Germany, around 40 percent of all cancer cases are preventable – through a healthy lifestyle and the use of vaccinations,” says Carrera.