NEW DELHI, India — Just five additional minutes of sleep a day and two minutes of moderate physical activity such as brisk walking or climbing stairs could add up to a year to a person’s life, according to new research released on Wednesday.
The findings come from a long-term study that tracked nearly 60,000 people over eight years and examined how small improvements in sleep, physical activity, and diet affect lifespan and overall health. The research was published in The Lancet journal eClinicalMedicine.
The study found that adding half a serving of vegetables per day could also translate into an extra year of life for individuals with the poorest existing sleep patterns, physical activity levels, and dietary habits.
Researchers reported that getting seven to eight hours of sleep per night, engaging in more than 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity daily, and following a healthy diet were collectively associated with more than nine additional years of life and more years spent in good health.
“The combined relationship of sleep, physical activity, and diet is larger than the sum of the individual behaviours,” an international group of researchers from the UK, Australia, Chile, and Brazil said. “For example, for people with the unhealthiest sleep, physical activity and dietary habits to achieve one additional year of lifespan through sleep alone would require five times the amount of additional sleep per day (25 minutes) than if physical activity and diet also improved a small amount.”
In a separate study published in The Lancet, researchers from Norway, Spain, and Australia found that adding just five minutes of extra walking to a daily routine could reduce the risk of death by 10 percent for most adults. Among the least active adults, the risk of death fell by around 6 percent.
That study, based on data from more than 135,000 adults, also showed that cutting sedentary time by 30 minutes per day was associated with an estimated 7 percent reduction in all-cause mortality if adopted by the majority of adults, who spend about 10 hours a day sedentary. For the most sedentary individuals, who average 12 hours of inactivity per day, such a change could reduce deaths by around 3 percent.
“These estimates provide important evidence on the wide range of public health impacts associated with even small positive changes in physical activity and inactivity,” said corresponding author Prof Ulf Ekelund of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo.
Researchers cautioned that the findings should not be interpreted as personalized medical advice, but rather as an indication of the significant population-level benefits that can result from modest lifestyle improvements. (Source: IANS)
