5/10/20

Healthy lifestyle and life expectancy

This is a summary of the Harvard study:
Healthy lifestyle and life expectancy free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: prospective cohort study https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.l6669
In 3 sentences: 
At age 50, life expectancy free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes was 23.7 (95% confidence interval 22.6 to 24.7), 26.4 (25.2 to 27.4), 29.1 (28.0 to 30.0), 31.8 (30.8 to 32.8), and 34.4 (33.1 to 35.5) years among women who adopted zero, one, two, three, and four or five low risk lifestyle factors, respectively. 
Life expectancy free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes at age 50 was 23.5 (22.3 to 24.7), 24.8 (23.5 to 26.0), 26.7 (25.3 to 27.9), 28.4 (26.9 to 29.7), and 31.1 (29.5 to 32.5) years among men who adopted zero, one, two, three, and four or five low risk lifestyle factors, respectively. 
The percentage of life expectancy free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes from total life expectancies was 74.8%, 77.6%, 80.1%, 82.2%, and 83.6% among women (75.3%, 75.8%, 76.8%, 77.9%, and 79.0% among men) who adopted zero, one, two, three, and four or five low risk lifestyle factors, respectively.
The 5 low risk lifestyle factors are:
1. high Alternate Healthy Eating Index - higher the better
2. no smoking - more smoking the worse
3. moderate activity - more vigorous the better
4. alcohol - none only better than heavy drinking, best is moderate drinking, surprise!
5. low BMI - lower the better until too low
I'm a little disappointed with these findings.  If you do everything right, you're only expected to live 31.1-23.5=7.6 years longer and only 4.2% more free of cancer, cvd, and diabetes.

Keep drinking!