These small lifestyle tweaks can add a year to your life

If you’re hoping to improve your health this year, there’s some good news: Making even small changes to your sleep, eating, and exercise habits could have a big impact on longevity.

“Only about 5 extra minutes of sleep per day, about 2 extra minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity – such as a brisk walk or climbing stairs – combined with just half an extra serving of vegetables per day are linked to an extra year of life expectancy,” says Nicholas Koemel of the University of Sydney, Australia.

It’s no surprise that getting enough sleep, exercising, and eating well are essential to a long life. Countless studies have demonstrated this, for example comparing the lifespan of people with healthy diets to those with unhealthy diets, or examining adults who meet (or fail to meet) the World Health Organization’s physical activity guidelines of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week.

But it was not known to what extent very small lifestyle changes affected our lifespan and health span, that is, the number of years spent in good health.

To fill this gap in our knowledge, Koemel and colleagues analyzed sleep, diet and physical activity data from almost 60,000 adults, aged 40 to 69, from the UK Biobank project. Participants took surveys that asked them to recall how often they had eaten various types of foods, such as fresh fruit or processed meat, over the past year – with their diets ranked from unhealthy to healthy on a scale of 0 to 100. A few years later, they wore wrist movement trackers for a week to measure their exercise and sleep habits, and their mortality and health were tracked over a subsequent eight-year follow-up period.

Using these measures, the researchers identified the 5% of participants with the least healthy lifestyles: They slept about 5 hours per day, engaged in about 5 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per day, and averaged a score of about 35 on the dietary scale.

The researchers then used a statistical model to estimate that, compared to these less healthy participants, those who slept about 5 minutes more each day, engaged in moderate to vigorous exercise for about 2 minutes more, and ate the equivalent of half an additional serving of vegetables per day lived on average a year longer.

This combination of small lifestyle changes had the same effect as larger changes in a single aspect of lifestyle — such as sleeping an extra 25 minutes without changing exercise or diet, Koemel says. “When we bundle lifestyle changes together, we get more bang for our buck and reduce the overall demands of a given behavior. »

Compared to the least healthy group, those who slept an extra 24 minutes, spent an extra 4 minutes in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, and ate the equivalent of an extra serving of vegetables would go an additional four years without major chronic diseases, namely dementia, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and type 2 diabetes. “Individuals could not only gain additional life expectancy, but also extend their quality years – this is a truly wonderful finding,” says Koemel.

Small lifestyle adjustments were estimated to provide similar benefits even for the average participant, who slept about 7.6 hours per day, did about 31 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise per day, and scored about 54 on the dietary scale, Koemel says.

The findings support a second study published this week, which analyzed mortality and exercise data – measured via movement trackers – from more than 40,000 people, aged 64 on average, in Norway, Sweden and the United States. Ulf Ekelund, of the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences in Oslo, and colleagues plugged this data into a statistical model and predicted that if the vast majority of the population – except the most active 20 percent of people – engaged in an extra 5 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise per day, about 10 percent of deaths could be avoided on average over the next eight years.

But both studies have certain limitations. For example, dietary recall surveys are prone to errors because people forget what they ate, and it’s impossible to know whether a week’s worth of physical activity or sleep data is truly representative of a person’s general habits over long periods of time, says Alan Cohen of Columbia University in New York.

More research is needed to determine how long lifestyle changes need to be made before producing benefits, Koemel says. It’s also important to explore how the findings vary across age groups and whether they apply in non-Western, low- and middle-income countries, where physical activity levels, diets and chronic disease rates vary, he says.