What would you give for an extra year of life?
If you were to rub a magic lamp and conjure up a genie who promised you an extra year of life, no strings attached, would you take it?
What if that extra year included 12 months of good health?
If you’re thinking, this sounds too good to be true, you’d be right to view such a claim with a healthy dose of scepticism.
Except, in this instance, the offer is real.
The Holy Grail of Longevity
With all the noise online about longevity and bio-hacks, you could be forgiven for thinking the way to a longer life means having to adopt the Bryan Johnson method. Cool, if you’ve got a few million US in your back pocket and nothing else to do other than spend every moment of your day working on increasing your lifespan.
Let’s get real.
It’s true we are living longer. Life expectancy in Australia has increased by 13.7 years for men and 11.2 years for women over the last 50 years with the average now being 81.3 years and 85.4 years, respectively.
However, that increase is the result of a number of factors, including improved access to healthy nutrition, clean water, medicine and better public health.
Our improved understanding around the ageing process and the human body has meanwhile spawned a new industry of longevity experts keen to ensure you are aware of all the things that can help you live longer.
I don’t know about you, but I’m finding the noise around this where we’re encouraged to take buckets of expensive supplements along with checking out our longevity factors like our VO Max, ensure we go to the gym at least three times a week and only eat organic food somewhat exhausting.
Let’s examine the latest research and look beyond the headlines.
The BIG Question: What makes for a Long (and healthy) Life?
A recently published paper in the Lancet, reported the findings of an 8-year review of 59,000 participants in the UK Biobank study that showed how an extra year of healthy life is readily achievable and essentially cost-free.
The question asked being,
“What is the minimum combined improvement in sleep, movement, and diet needed to meaningfully extend both lifespan and health span?”
In other words, how much benefit a modest improvement in three activities undertaken concurrently could bring to longevity? Sleep duration, physical activity and nutrition collectively known as SPAN, are known to contribute substantially to lengthening healthy life.
The findings were significant.
Overall, it’s possible to gain an additional 12 months of life through
- An additional 5 minutes of sleep at night
- An additional 2 minutes of physical activity per day
- An additional half-serving of vegetables a day
If you’re thinking – that sounds too simple, it is! Simple, that is.
The Bigger Message
What this means is,
- You don’t need a radical overhaul to how you live your life to achieve meaningful health outcomes. Small tweaks are often sufficient to get good results.
- This is about honouring what your body and mind needs most for optimal functioning. If you know you feel better when you get more sleep, get more regular exercise and eat more healthily you already have the toolkit you need, you just have to use it.
- While the results indicated how modest improvements can bring a significant short-term benefit i.e. an additional year of life, think what the potential benefits could be from consistently applying these measures?
But you knew that already, didn’t you?
This is why Lifestyle as Medicine is so important. The focus here is to do what keeps you well and prevent the onset of chronic disease.
Because fundamentally, chronic disease is what we tend to die from.
In Australia, chronic diseases are responsible for 90% of all deaths and 85% of the total burden of disease.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that up to 80% of premature heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes, and over 40% of cancer could be prevented by eliminating shared risk factors.
Yes, you read that correctly.
The economic cost of not engaging with preventative measures is mind-boggling.
Deloitte’s Healthcare Savings Analysis found that adopting strategic investments in disease prevention, early detection and other proactive measures could potentially save the US health care system up to US$2.2 trillion dollars pa by 2040.
Here in Australia, it’s recognised that every dollar spent on prevention has an associated ROI of $10-14 in lower health care and related costs and yet we continue to spend AU$200 bn per year on preventable conditions equivalent to 2/3 of the total disease burden.
Getting Back to Basics
When working with overstressed, exhausted individuals, my mantra is “Small is Big.” I encourage small meaningful and positive behavioural changes that lead to bigger outcomes in health, happiness and well-being.
- Like Yvette, who struggles with her sleep. She started going to bed 10 minutes earlier and ensured she switched off her laptop and phone an hour before bed.
- And Jo, whose busy life meant she rarely had time to cook at night and relied heavily on take-away. She chose to change her take-away choices to include more vegetarian options and started pre-preparing more meals on Sundays to keep in the freezer.
- And Phil, who knew he wasn’t getting enough exercise and hated the thought of going to the gym. He joined a local parkrun group where he met new people and started looking forward to his regular Saturday walk.
Chronic disease doesn’t pop up overnight, it evolves over time without our noticing, until it starts to impinge on our health like heart disease, osteoarthritis or impaired cognition.
Choosing to work on your SPAN (Sleep, physical activity and nutrition) is an easy way to improve your life and health span.
How good is that!
The problem is we’re very good as humans at overcomplicating things, and hectically busy lives means we often look for what we think is the quick solution – a pill, a takeaway or gadget rather than slowing down to consider, what would really work best to stay healthier for longer?
Magic lamps and genies are not required.
I’m curious to know, what are you prepared to pay for to increase your longevity?
