Just five extra minutes of sleep and two minutes of moderate exercise, such as brisk walking or climbing stairs, can add a year to a person’s life, according to a study released on Wednesday.
Adding half a serving of vegetables to the daily diet could also contribute to an additional year of life for people with the poorest existing sleep, physical activity and dietary habits, the study revealed. The research followed nearly 60,000 people over eight years.
Published in The Lancet journal eClinicalMedicine, the study found that seven to eight hours of sleep per day, more than 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity, and a healthy diet were associated with more than nine additional years of life and years spent in good health.
“The combined relationship of sleep, physical activity and diet is larger than the sum of the individual behaviours. For example, for people with the unhealthiest sleep, physical activity and dietary habits, achieving one additional year of lifespan through sleep alone would require five times more additional sleep per day (25 minutes) than if physical activity and diet also improved slightly,” said the international team of researchers from the UK, Australia, Chile and Brazil.
In a separate study published in The Lancet, researchers from Norway, Spain and Australia found that adding just five minutes of extra walking to the daily routine could reduce the risk of death by 10 per cent for most adults.
The increase in activity could also help the least active adults reduce their risk of death by around 6 per cent.
The study, based on data from more than 135,000 adults, further showed that reducing sedentary time by 30 minutes per day was associated with an estimated 7 per cent reduction in all-cause mortality if adopted by most adults, who spend about 10 hours a day being sedentary.
Around 3 per cent of all deaths could be prevented if the change were adopted by the most sedentary adults, who spend an average of 12 hours per day inactive.
“These estimates provide important evidence of the wide-ranging public health benefits associated with even small positive changes in physical activity and reductions in inactivity,” said corresponding author Prof Ulf Ekelund from the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo.
The researchers cautioned that the findings should not be used as personalised advice, but instead highlight the potential benefits at a population level.
–IANS
