Just a few extra minutes of exercise and sleep a day can extend life expectancy: study
A recent study has revealed that adding just a few minutes of exercise per day could significantly impact a person's life expectancy. When combined with an extra 24 minutes of sleep and small improvements to diet quality, these daily changes could add up to several additional years of life.
The research, published in eClinicalMedicine, followed a group of people for eight years after they signed up for UK Biobank, a massive project that collected data on demographics, health, and lifestyle in the early 2000s. The team of researchers, led by Nicholas Koemel of the University of Sydney, fitted 59,078 people with trackers to monitor their exercise and sleep patterns for a week and rated their self-reported diet at the time they signed up for UK Biobank.
According to the researchers, this study is the first of its kind to investigate the minimum combined doses of device-measured sleep and physical activity, alongside a comprehensive dietary score. The study found that small improvements in all three areas made gains in both lifespan and healthspan.
The study found that improvement of life expectancy by one year when participants added:
- just five extra minutes of sleep per day,
- just under two minutes per day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity,
- and an extra half serving of vegetables.
Moira Junge, an adjunct clinical professor and health psychologist at Monash University, praised the studies and said looking at the combination of sleep, exercise, and diet over the long term is crucial in longevity research.
The second study, published in The Lancet, examined participants who had low activity levels and spent hours sitting throughout the day. The study found that a nine per cent reduction in mortality risk when those sitting for eight or more hours a day reduced their sitting time by 30 minutes. Increasing physical activity by just five minutes a day could have a significant health impact, especially for minimally active people.
Lauren Ball, a professor of community health and wellbeing at the University of Queensland, said the two new studies reconfirm the importance of diet, physical activity, and sleep for overall health and wellbeing. While these numbers might be inspiring for some, Dr. Koemel said they were not a 'silver bullet'. The studies found that mortality improvements were most significant in participants who were inactive, but there was a 'saturation point'. Despite this, Dr. Koemel said looking at small daily changes across sedentary behaviours, sleep, diet, and physical activity could have positive impacts more widely.
