How Many Years of Additional Life Expectancy Does a Healthy Lifestyle Provide?

What does a healthy lifestyle achieve for life expectancy? It is surprisingly hard to answer that question for humans. Researchers can't construct carefully cultivated lifestyle choice groups and follow them from birth to death. Instead, messy and imperfect vaults of epidemiological data must be fed into complicated statistical machinery, using strategies that are, at the end of the day, guided by a healthy dose of intuition and common sense. Different groups can and do produce widely different answers to questions regarding additional years added by diet, exercise, or other factors. One has to survey the field in aggregate, averaging over dozens of studies to try to get an idea of what might or might not be the reality. So take this one study in that context - the number produced at the end is large in comparison to other studies I've seen in past years, but the authors are trying to consider all of the major effects rather than just one. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including eating a healthy diet, regular exercise, and not smoking, could prolong life expectancy at age 50 by 14 years for women and just over 12 years for men, according to new research. Heart disease and stroke are major contributors to premature death in this country, with 2,300 Americans dying of cardiovascular disease each day, or one death every 38 seconds. Researchers point out that the U.S. healthcare system focuses heavily on drug discovery and disease management; however, a greater emphas...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs