New Year resolutions could add years to your life

Life 8 January 2008

The millions of people resolving to live a healthier life in 2008 can take heart: four relatively simple, healthy behaviours may add 14 years to your life, say researchers. Even better, they help no matter how fat or unhealthy you are already.

Kay-Tee Khaw and colleagues at Cambridge University in the UK monitored 20,000 people aged 45 to 79 in Norfolk for 11 years to see how death rates related to lifestyle.

“People have looked at this before,” says Khaw, “but only at one kind of behaviour, or at complex measures of diet or exercise. We wanted to measure things from everyday life so people know what they are.”

The team grouped people according to whether they said they did any of four healthy behaviours: not smoking, exercising, eating fruits and vegetables, and drinking alcohol moderately, when they joined the study.


People were counted as exercising if they did as little as an hour a week. And those with a certain level of vitamin C in their blood were considered to be eating enough fruit and vegetables. People who drank between one to fourteen units of alcohol a week – around nine 125 ml glasses of wine, or seven pints of 3-4% beer – were considered “moderate” drinkers as opposed to drinking none, or more.

Every little helps

The study found that for any given age, sex, social class, and level of obesity – all things that affect death rates – a person who did none of those things had the same chance of dying as a person 14 years older who did all those things. In other words, people doing all four healthy things effectively added 14 years to their lives.

And each healthy behaviour added up. People who did all four had a quarter as much risk of dying within a given time as people who did none, but people who did only two had half the risk.

“Even a little bit helps, and the more the better,” says Khaw. And the effect was just as dramatic in people who were already ill or who had other risk factors. “Being overweight is a health risk,” says Khaw. “But we found that these activities reduce your risk of dying by the same amount, whether you are overweight or lean.”

Journal reference: PLoS Medicine (vol 5 e12)