Lifestyle choices do make a difference in how long you live. If there were any doubt about the effect of smoking, drinking, eating too much or the wrong things and not exercising, British researchers have laid it to rest. The United Kingdom Health and Lifestyle Survey recruited almost 5,000 adults in 1984 and 1985. Each person told the scientists how often they ate fruits and vegetables, how much they exercised, whether they smoked and how much they drank. The investigators calculated a health behavior score based on the answers, and then followed up for approximately 20 years.
In that time, about 1,000 of their subjects died. The scientists found that people with poor health behaviors were significantly more likely to perish than those with a healthy lifestyle. The worse the health behavior score, the higher the risk, so that people with four unhealthy habits were 3.5 times more likely to die during follow-up than people without any bad behaviors. The bottom line is that cleaning up your act can help you enjoy life longer.
[Archives of Internal Medicine, April 26, 2010]
The People's Perspective on Medicine