3 Small Lifestyle Changes Can Help You Live Longer, Studies Show

Five more minutes of sleep. Two more minutes of moderate exercise. And an extra half serving of vegetables. Doing these three things every day could increase your lifespan, Australian researchers say.
The researchers completed two studies. One used data from more than 60,000 participants in the UK Biobank research database. The second used information from that database and added data from the United States, Norway and Sweden.
They found that for the participants who reported poor sleep, physical activity and dietary habits, making those small changes “could lead to an extra year of life.”
The results also suggest that getting seven to eight hours of sleep a day, doing more than 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity (such as brisk walking or taking the stairs) a day and following a healthy diet could gain people over nine years of additional lifespan and years spent in good health.
“Sleep, physical activity and nutrition are all factors known to be linked to healthier lives, but they are usually studied in isolation,” said Nicholas Koemel, leader researcher on one of the studies; a trained dietitian; and research fellow in the physical activity, lifestyle and population health department at the University of Sydney. “By investigating these factors in combination, we can see that even small tweaks have a significant cumulative impact over the long term.”
The studies were published in the journals eClinical Medicine and The Lancet.
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