These 5 healthy habits could help you live a decade longer

We’ve been reading and hearing about health fads that can prolong and better our live for quite sometime now. Mainstream media has been flooded with information on lifestyle hacks to products to the kind of food that can help increase our longevity. 

The most recent suggests that the five key habits that can help your live longerinclude, eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, keeping a healthy body weight, not drinking too much alcohol and not smoking. 

In fact, paying heed to these habits can help you extend your life expectancy by over 10 years, claims the study.

The researchers from the Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston found that women and men who maintained the healthiest lifestyles were 82 per cent and 65 per cent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and cancer, respectively.

"This study underscores the importance of following healthy lifestyle habits for improving longevity," said Frank Hu, Chair of the Department of Nutrition at the varsity.

Overall, those who followed all the five healthy lifestyle habits were 74 per cent less likely to die.

The life expectancy for women who adopted all five factors was projected to be 43.1 years at age 50, as compared to only 29 years, for those who did not adhere to the healthy habits.

While men who adopted the low-risk lifestyle factors, life expectancy at age 50 was 37.6 years, for those who did not follow it, it was 25.5 years.

In other words, women who maintained all five healthy habits gained, on average, 14 years of life, and men who did so gained 12 years, compared with those who did not maintain healthy habits, the researchers revealed in the paper published in the journal Circulation.

Here’s how these healthy can habits better your life, according to the study:

What’s a healthy bodyweight?

People with a body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 24.9 are considered to also have a ‘normal’ bodyweight.

 Women who followed healthy lifestyle factors like the ones listed above, averaged a BMI of 29.8, which is right between being overweight and obesity. Men on the other who don’t adhere to these lifestyle factors averaged a BMI of 28. In short, the lower your bodyweight, the better a person’s overall lifestyle.

How much is enough exercise?

Daily bouts of at least 30 minutes of moderate or vigorous exercise is an ideal amount you want to log in.

 Clocking in these many minutes in a day can decrease your likelihood of dying due to any cause by 56% in comparison not exercising at all. In fact, exercising for any amount of time, like an hour to three and half hours, saw the risk of dying fall by 44%.

Smokers who smoked up to 25 cigarettes a day are three times as likely to die

Inevitably, people who never smoked were considered the healthiest people of the lot. In comparison, people who smoked at least 25 cigarettes a day were three times more likely to die of any cause of illness, including cancer or cardiovascular diseases. Even people who quit smoking had a 50 percent higher chance of dying due to cancer and a 40 percent chance of dying due to a cardiovascular disease, as compared to a non-smoker.

Moderate drinking is ideal for your health

Moderate drinking amounted to 5 to 15 grams of alcohol per day for women and 5 to 30 grams for men.

 Both men and women who drank more than 30 grams of alcohol daily were 25 percent more likely to die from any cause. Surprisingly, both men and women who abstained from alcohol were 27 percent more likely to die of any cause than moderate drinkers. 

Eat a healthy diet that contained at least five servings of vegetables and four servings of fruits

A healthy diet was one that consisted of at least five servings of vegetables and four servings of fruits among other healthy eating parameters, according to the Alternate Healthy Eating Index (AHEI). Compared to the men and women who’s AHEI scores fell in the bottom percentile, people in the top group were 30 percent less likely to die of cancer 33 percent less likely to die of cardiovascular diseases.