These small lifestyle tweaks can add a year to your life

Taking the stairs rather than the escalator can make a big difference in the long term Jozef Polc / Alamy 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. Advertisement 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. Free newsletter Sign up to Eight Weeks to a Healthier You Your science-backed guide to the easy habits that will help you sleep well, stress less, eat smarter and age better. 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...

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