Just minutes more sleep and exercise can add a year to life: Study

Small improvements in sleep, physical activity and diet can significantly extend lifespan, studies published in The Lancet show. Even a few extra minutes of sleep, walking or reduced sitting time can lower death risk and improve population health.

New Delhi: Just five more minutes of sleep, and two minutes of moderate exercise like brisk walking or climbing stairs can add a year to your life, according to a study on Wednesday.

Adding half a serving of vegetables per day more could also lead to an extra year of life for people with the worst existing sleep, physical activity, and dietary habits, revealed the study that followed 60,000 people for eight long years.

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The study, published in The Lancet journal eClinicalMedicine, suggested that seven to eight hours of sleep per day, more than 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day, and a healthy diet were associated with over nine years of additional lifespan and years spent in good health.

“The combined relationship of sleep, physical activity, and diet is larger than the sum of the individual behaviours. 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,” said the international group of researchers from the UK, Australia, Chile, and Brazil.

In a separate study, published in the journal The Lancet, researchers from Norway, Spain, and Australia showed that adding just 5 minutes of extra walking to the daily routine can cut down the risk of death in the majority of adults by 10 per cent.

It will also help the least active adults to reduce their risk of death by around 6 per cent.

Further, the study based on data from more than 135,000 adults found that reducing sedentary time by 30 minutes per day was associated with an estimated 7 per cent reduction in all deaths if adopted by the majority of adults (who spend 10 hours being sedentary per day).

Around 3 per cent of all deaths can be reduced if adopted by the most sedentary adults (who spend 12 hours being sedentary per day on average).

“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, from the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Oslo.

The researchers cautioned that the findings should not be used as personalised advice; rather, they highlighted the potential benefits for the population as a whole.