What’s the secret to living longer? It’s a question we all want to know the answer to.
Doctors have found five ways you can add more than ten years to your life – and you can still enjoy a glass of wine each day.
Adults who eat healthy, exercise regularly and don’t smoke can prolong their life expectancy at 50 by 14 years for women and 12 years for men, according to research published in the journal Circulation.
You also need to keep your body weight at a healthy level and not drink too much, experts from Harvard Chan School of Public Health found.
Men and women who maintained a healthy lifestyle were 82 per cent less likely to die of heart disease and 65 per cent less likely to to die from cancer compared to those who lead an unhealthy life.
Harvard Chan researchers looked at 34 years of data on more 78,865 women and 27 years of data from 44,354 men.
They found the five key factors for living a long, healthy life are:
1. Not smoking
2. Having a healthy BMI of 18.5-24.9
3. Exercising for at least 30 minutes every day
4. Drinking moderately – no more than one small glass of wine for women and two small glasses of wine for men each day
5. Eating a healthy, balanced diet
Women who don’t adopt the healthy lifestyle plan have a life expectancy of 79 and men who don’t follow the tips have a life expectancy of 75, according to the research.
But if they lived by the five rules above their life expectancy would increase to 93 and 87 respectively.
And they were 74 per cent less likely to die during the course of the 30-year study.
Senior author Frank Hu, chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard Chan, said: “This study underscores the importance of following healthy lifestyle habits for improving longevity in the U.S. population.
However, adherence to healthy lifestyle habits is very low. Therefore, public policies should put more emphasis on creating healthy food, built, and social environments to support and promote healthy diet and lifestyles.”
The Office for National Statistics puts UK life expectancy at 79.4 years for men and 83.1 years for women.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that all of us can expect to reach those ages, since the estimates are based on the age a baby would reach if they were born today.
However, there are now concerns that life expectancy growth is slowing down in the UK, after a leading doctor claimed British kids can no longer expect to live longer than their parents.
According to the World Health Organisation heart disease was the biggest killer in 2015 followed by stroke, both of which were responsible for 15 million deaths worldwide.
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Source: The Sun UK