Four golden rules can give you 14 extra years of life

Jan 9 2008

According to scientists in Britain there are four golden rules to living a longer healthier life and they say people who take them onboard live on average for another fourteen years.

In a study by researchers at Cambridge University and the Medical Research Council involving 20,000 people over a decade, it was found those who failed on all criteria were four times more likely to have died than those who had adhered to the rules.

The four golden rules to living longer are - not smoking; taking exercise; moderate alcohol intake; and eating five servings of fruit and vegetables a day.

As the study focused on how the combined impact of these four simply-defined forms of behaviour impacted on the health, the suggestion is that several small changes in lifestyle could make a significant difference to the health of most people.

The evidence demonstrating that smoking, diet and physical activity influence health and longevity are overwhelming, but there is scant information on their combined impact; together with the vast and often conflicting definitions for healthy behaviour the end result is often confusion for public health professionals and for the general public.

Kay-Tee Khaw and colleagues used a health behaviour score that is easy to understand in order to assess the participants in the study who were all from Norfolk.

Between 1993 and 1997, 20,000 men and women between the ages of 45 and 79, none of whom had known cancer or heart or circulatory disease, completed a questionnaire that resulted in a score between 0 and 4; a point was awarded for- not currently smoking; not being physically inactive (physical inactivity was defined as having a sedentary job and not doing any recreational exercise); a moderate alcohol intake of 1-14 units a week (a unit is half a pint of beer or a glass of wine); and a blood vitamin C level consistent with eating five servings of fruit or vegetables a day.

Deaths among the participants were recorded until 2006.

After taking age into consideration, the results showed that over an average period of eleven years people with a score of 0 - i.e. those who did not undertake any of these healthy forms of behaviour - were four times more likely to have died than those who had scored 4 in the questionnaire.

The researchers calculated that a person with a health score of 0 has the same risk of dying as someone 14 years older who had scored 4 in the questionnaire.

The findings held true regardless of how overweight or poor they were.

The study which is part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), conducted across ten European countries, is the largest study of diet and health ever undertaken.

The results of the study strongly suggest that these four achievable lifestyle changes could have a marked improvement on the health of middle-aged and older people, which is particularly important given the ageing population in the UK, the U.S., Australia, Canada and other countries.

The research is published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine.