- Researchers find that people who adopt eight healthy lifestyle habits by middle age could live substantially longer.
- Some of these habits included having good sleep hygiene and not smoking.
- Men who adopt all eight habits by age 40 would be predicted to live an average of 24 years longer than men with none of these habits.
- Women who adopted all eight habits by the age of 40 would be predicted to live an average of 23 years longer than women with none of these habits.
A new observational study identified eight lifestyle habits that—when adopted by midlife—may extend an individual’s lifespan.
The researchers used data from medical records and questionnaires from 719,147 enrolled in the Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program MVP, a health research program centering around more than a million United States veterans that is designed to help researchers study how genes, lifestyles, military experiences, and exposures impact health and wellness.
Xuan-Mai T. Nguyen, a health science specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs and fourth-year medical student at Carle Illinois College of Medicine in Illinois, presented the study Monday at Nutrition 2023, the flagship annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition in Boston, Massachusetts.
The eight identified habits are:
The data used for this study was collected between 2011 and 2019. It featured U.S. veterans between the ages of 40 and 99. Over 30,000 participants died during the follow-up.
“We looked at all-cause mortality in this study using cox proportional hazard regression models and longevity using a multi-lifetable method, calculating the longevity for male veterans and female veterans separately,” Nguyen explained.
Veterans who adopted all eight habits had a 13% reduction