Sleep, physical activity, and diet play a major role in how long we live and how long we stay healthy – these lifestyle factors are often studied separately, but in real life they work together. This study, published in eClinicalMedicine, part of The Lancet, included ISEH’s Professor Mark Hamer, Chair of Sport and Exercise Medicine, and Dr John Mitchell, Research Fellow, as authors, alongside a dedicated international team of collaborators from leading institutions and universities. The authors examined how small, combined improvements in sleep, physical activity, and diet relate to living longer and staying free of major diseases.
The study followed 59,078 adults from the UK Biobank, with an average age of 64 years. Participants wore a wrist device for one week to measure sleep and physical activity. Diet quality was measured using a score based on how often people ate healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, and dairy, and how little they consumed sugary drinks. Researchers estimated how lifestyle habits were linked to total years of life and years lived without major diseases, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, lung disease, and dementia.
People with the healthiest combination of sleep, physical activity, and diet, sleeping about 7 to 8 hours per day, doing more than 42 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity daily, and having higher diet quality, lived about 9 years longer and spent about 9 more years in good health compared with those with the least healthy habits.
Those who had about 24 more minutes of sleep, 4 more minutes of physical activity per day, and a much healthier diet, were linked to about 4 additional years of healthy life.
Importantly, even small changes made a difference. Getting just five more minutes of sleep per day, doing about two extra minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity, and making small improvements in diet (such as adding half a serving of vegetables per day) were linked to living one extra year. Larger combined improvements were linked to about four more years of life without major disease.
What this means
Small, realistic changes to sleep, physical activity, and diet, made together, may lead to meaningful improvements in both how long people live and how long they stay healthy.
The research was led by Nicholas Koemel of the University of Sydney.
