These small lifestyle tweaks can add a year to your life

If you are hoping to boost your health this year, there is some good news: making even small tweaks to your sleep, diet and exercise habits could have a big impact on longevity.

“Just around 5 extra minutes of sleep per day, about 2 minutes more of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity – like a brisk walk or taking a flight of stairs – combined with just an extra half-serving of vegetables per day is linked to an additional 1 year longer lifespan,” says Nicholas Koemel at the University of Sydney, Australia.

It is no surprise that getting enough sleep, exercising and eating well are crucial to a long life. Countless studies have shown this by, for instance, comparing the lifespan of people who eat a healthy diet to that of people with an unhealthy one, or by looking at adults who do (or don’t) meet the World Health Organization’s physical activity guidelines of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week.

But it was unknown how very small lifestyle changes affect our lifespan and healthspan, which is the number of years spent in good health.

To fill this gap in our knowledge, Koemel and his colleagues analysed sleep, dietary and physical activity data from nearly 60,000 adults, aged between 40 and 69, from the UK Biobank project. The participants completed surveys that asked them to recall how often they ate various types of food, such as fresh fruit or processed meat, over the past year – with their diets being ranked from poor to healthy on a scale of 0 to 100. A few years later, they wore movement trackers on their wrist for a week to measure their exercise and sleeping habits, and their mortality and health records were tracked over a subsequent follow-up period of eight years.

Using these measurements, the researchers pinpointed the bottom 5 per cent of participants with the least healthy lifestyles: they slept for around 5 hours each day, engaged in about 5 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily and scored about 35 on the dietary scale, on average.

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

This combination of small lifestyle changes had the same effect as making larger shifts in only one aspect of lifestyle – for instance, sleeping for an extra 25 minutes without altering exercise or diet, says Koemel. “When we package lifestyle changes together, we get more bang for our buck and we reduce the overall requirement from any one behaviour.”

Compared with the least healthy group, those who got an additional 24 minutes of sleep, spent an extra 4 minutes doing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and ate the equivalent of an additional portion of vegetables were estimated to spend an additional four years free of major chronic conditions, namely dementia, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and type 2 diabetes. “Individuals might not just be gaining an additional lifespan, but actually extending their quality years as well – that’s quite a terrific find,” says Koemel.

Making small lifestyle tweaks was estimated to bring similar benefits even for the average participant, who slept for about 7.6 hours each day, got around 31 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise daily and scored roughly 54 on the dietary scale, says Koemel.

The findings support a second study published this week, which analysed mortality and exercise data – measured via movement trackers – from more than 40,000 people, aged 64, on average, across Norway, Sweden and the US. Ulf Ekelund at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo and his colleagues fed this data into a statistical model and predicted that, if the vast majority of the population – except for the most active 20 per cent of people – engaged in an extra 5 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise per day, about 10 per cent of deaths could be prevented in the following eight years, on average.

But both studies have some limitations. For instance, dietary recall surveys are prone to error because people forget what they have eaten, and it is impossible to know whether a week of physical activity or sleep data is really representative of someone’s general habits over longer periods, says Alan Cohen at Columbia University in New York.

Further research is needed to establish how long lifestyle tweaks need to be made for before they bring benefits, says Koemel. It is also important to explore how the findings vary between age groups and whether they apply in non-Western, low- and middle-income countries where physical activity levels, diets and the rates of chronic conditions vary, he says.