Healthy Living Worth 14 Years
January 8th 2008
Living a healthy lifestyle adds fourteen years to life, British researchers reported today. Fruit and vegetables, light alcohol intake, some regular exercise and not smoking all combined to add years to the life of people from the county of Norfolk in the UK.
The conclusions, by a Cambridge University team, come from a study of some 20,000 middle-aged and elderly people in Norfolk.
The study was conducted over a ten year period after the participants in the study had filled in questionnaires identifying how healthy their lifestyles were.
During the decade the unhealthiest people - who scored zero on the four measures of healthy living - were four times as likely to die as those whose lives were "healthy".
The findings are published in the journal PLoS Medicine today.
Researcher Kay-Tee Khaw said the team used an "easy to understand" measure of health behaviour.
The findings were independent of whether the participants were overweight and the researchers also eliminated age and social class as factors.
A healthy diet of fruit and vegetables was judged to be five portions a day.
A spokesman for the journal said: "The results of the study strongly suggest that these four achievable lifestyle changes could have a marked improvement on the health of middle-aged and older people, which is particularly important given the ageing population in the UK and other European countries."
PLoS Med 5(1): e12.
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