(CNN) – Would you like to add healthy and disease-free 7 to 10 years to your life as you get older?
Try eliminating these five bad health habits: smoking, not exercising, being overweight, drinking too much alcohol and eating an unhealthy diet.
That is the conclusion of a new study that analyzed the impact of these behaviors on the possibility of living a longer life without diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and other chronic diseases.
“We discovered that following a healthy lifestyle can substantially extend the years that a person lives free of disease,” said lead author Dr. Frank Hu, who chairs the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health TH Chan .
“In particular, the women who practiced the five healthy habits gained more than 10 years of disease-free life, and the men who did it gained almost eight years,” Hu said.
More data
The research is an extension of a study published last year that followed more than 38,000 men for 28 years and 73,000 women for 34 years.
That research found that women who adopted the five healthy habits at age 50 lived 14 years longer than women who did not; the men who followed the five lifestyle factors at age 50 lived 12 years longer than the men who did not follow any.
This new study, published Wednesday in the journal BMJ, examined the same data to see how chronic diseases affected the quality of life during the study period.
The research was designed to see how five healthy behaviors interact to affect the risk of disease: never smoke, maintain a healthy body mass index below 25, do at least 30 minutes of physical activity every day, drink alcohol moderately and eat a Good quality diet
Women who practiced four or five of the healthy habits for 20 to 30 years, Hu said, had an additional 10.6 years of disease-free life compared to women who did not adopt lifestyle changes. When broken down by disease, healthier women earned an average of eight years without cancer, 10 years without cardiovascular disease and 12 years without diabetes.
Men who practiced four to five healthy behaviors gained a longer life expectancy of 7.6 years; an average of six years without cancer, almost nine years without heart problems and more than 10 years without diabetes.
The results were maintained even after adjusting the data for age, ethnicity, family medical history and other potentially influential factors,
Not surprisingly, men who smoked a lot, which is defined as 15 or more cigarettes a day, or obese men and women with a body mass index of 30 or more had fewer years without disease.
What happened if a person was diagnosed with a disease during the study? The data showed that half of the people diagnosed with cancer lived an additional 23 years if they adopted four of five healthy practices. Among those who did not change, half only survived an additional 11 years. The same patterns were observed for both heart disease and diabetes.
“This is a positive health message because it means that healthy lifestyle habits not only prolong life, but also improve the quality of life and reduce suffering related to chronic diseases,” Hu said.
The study had some limitations, including that the data on adherence to the five lifestyle factors were all self-reported, which made the result vulnerable to measurement errors.
What if you haven’t eliminated these five bad habits from your life?
“It’s never too late to adopt these habits,” Hu said. “For smokers, the most important thing one should do is quit smoking. For non-smokers, eating a healthy diet and being physically active are important for maintaining a healthy weight. ”
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