Sleep, Diet and Exercise Can Extend Your Lifespan

Combining small improvements across several areas of well-being could lead to greater health benefits than optimising a single factor in isolation, a new study suggests.

Recent research indicates that small improvements in habits relating to sleep, diet and physical exercise could add up and lead to significant increases in life expectancy.

Minor changes in physical activity, sleep and eating habits could have remarkable effects on health and could extend a person’s total lifespan, according to a large study carried out in the United Kingdom.

The research

The research, published on 13 January in the journal eClinicalMedicine, set out to identify the smallest lifestyle improvements that could measurably extend lifespan. The researchers analysed data from almost 60,000 people in the UK Biobank cohort, a database containing medical and lifestyle information on hundreds of thousands of British adults.

The research team correlated the participants’ documented habits with their longevity and general health, estimated through statistical models. The results showed that people who slept just five minutes more a day, did two extra minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity daily and added half a portion of vegetables a day tended to live significantly longer than those with the poorest results — that is, people whose sleep, exercise and eating habits placed them in the bottom 5% of the cohort.

According to the statistical model, the first group had, on average, a lifespan one year longer than the second.

This does not mean that adding a few minutes of exercise or sleep and making small dietary changes automatically guarantees an extra year of life, Stephen Burgess, a statistician at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

“This study, taken on its own, does not demonstrate that these habits improve health,” he cautioned. “The statistical models estimate what might happen to our lifespan if changing these factors really did improve health.”

Interestingly, the data suggests that improvements made simultaneously across several aspects of well-being are “greater than the sum of their parts”, the study’s lead author Nicholas Koemel, a dietitian and researcher at the University of Sydney, told Live Science. For example, to gain an extra year of life through sleep alone, the study suggests a person would need to sleep around 25 minutes more per night — a luxury many cannot afford. By contrast, very small improvements in sleep, exercise and diet can have a significant combined effect.

Healthy habits work better as a package

Koemel explained that the results suggest “healthy habits work better as a package”.

“Each of our behaviours has an interconnected impact on the others,” he said. “If we have a bad night’s sleep, we often eat differently and move differently. And that is reflected across all these behaviours.”

According to the model, participants with the most optimal combination of behaviours — at least 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical exercise, seven to eight hours of sleep a day and a generally healthy diet — would have lived, on average, nine years longer and would have benefited from nine additional years of life in good health, compared with the bottom 3% of participants.

By their very nature, such studies, known as cohort studies, must be interpreted with caution. They compare two groups retrospectively, rather than asking people to change their habits and then observing the effects on health. As a result, they cannot conclusively demonstrate that a particular change caused a specific effect; they can only identify an association between the two.

For example, sleep and exercise habits were measured only over a period of up to a week within the UK Biobank cohort, and the data assumes that participants maintained the same habits in the long term. Similarly, diet was assessed only at the start of the study, without being monitored over time. Participants may have changed their habits later, which would reduce the certainty of the link between lifestyle and lifespan.

A factor that was not measured

All these aspects leave room for the possibility that it was not lifestyle differences that determined the increase in lifespan, but another factor that was not measured.

For example, one group may have been wealthier, and this may have allowed them to exercise more, sleep better and eat more healthily. In that case, the difference in lifespan would be partly explained by living standards, not by behaviours alone, Burgess explained. Wealthier people might also live in less polluted areas, which could contribute to a longer lifespan. This cannot be established from this study alone.

“The general message that small changes in these factors are probably beneficial is most likely correct,” Burgess said. “But it is not clear to what extent the exact figures are accurate.”

Koemel agreed, emphasising that further research is needed to confirm the conclusions. Nevertheless, the idea that even very small lifestyle changes can have large effects could represent an interesting alternative for those wanting to improve their general well-being.

New Year’s resolutions

“New Year’s resolutions often fail because we push ourselves too hard,” he said. “We try to go to the gym every day. We try to be perfect.” This research suggests there may be “a different way of getting from A to Z”, through small changes made across several areas of well-being, which can accumulate over time and lead to healthier habits and better general health.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/health/tiny-improvements-in-sleep-nutrition-and-exercise-could-significantly-extend-lifespan-study-suggests