On Fridays, we often talk about getting out and about. Right now, with so much of the country covered in snow, our advice is to stay warm, safe and go out if you feel comfortable doing so. Today, we’re looking at two studies that found that a combination of small changes to sleep, diet and exercise made a difference in a person’s lifespan and health.
The first study found that an extra five minutes of sleep, two minutes of vigorous exercise and an extra half serving of vegetables can add six months to an individual’s life if they currently have poor sleep, exercise and eating habits. An excellent lifestyle with seven to eight hours of sleep, more than 40 minutes of vigorous exercise and a healthy diet can lead to nine extra years of healthy life. However, knowing that small changes make a noticeable difference shows that perfection isn’t needed to see improvement. That may help people start making changes in their lives!
“Sleep, physical activity and nutrition are all factors known to be linked to healthier lives, but they are usually studied in isolation,” said lead researcher Dr. Nicholas Koemel of the Charles Perkins Centre. “By investigating these factors in combination, we can see that even small tweaks have a significant cumulative impact over the long-term.”
So much of health is about the cumulative impact of activities. Our small habits can add up to healthy, or unhealthy, results. “Adding five minutes may not help you that one day, but ... at the end of the month, it will add up to a lot of hours,” said Dr. Maha Alattar, medical director of the VCU Health Center for Sleep Medicine, who wasn’t involved in either study. “That can translate to long-term better health because I look at it the other way, and that’s how we look at sleep deprivation.”
The second study found that small increases in daily movement can change the risk of an early death. Researchers from the University of Sydney, led by Prof Melody Ding, studied 135,000 adults from Norway, Sweden, the U.S. and the UK. Their work found that walking five extra minutes a day at a moderate speed lowered the risk of early death by 10 percent.
If you spend most of your day inactive, you are not alone; 80 percent of adults spend 10 hours a day sitting. Getting 30 minutes of standing time into your day is linked to about a seven percent lower risk of death. Adding an additional 30 minutes of light exercise further reduced the mortality risk by five percent. Or, five additional minutes of moderate or vigorous activity was linked to a 10 percent reduction in mortality risk.
“The message here should not necessarily be that making these small tweaks is a silver bullet,” said Dr. Koemel. “It’s more so about where we take that first step and trying to look at how we can make sustainable opportunities that are more achievable for some people.”
