Which Lifestyle Factors are Most Important for Healthy Aging?
In this blog article, we break down a 2024 research study that looked at lifestyle and genetic data from over 147,000 people to determine lifestyle behaviours that are the most important for healthy aging and health span.
Key points
This study reinforces the importance of healthy lifestyle behaviours on our health and wellbeing. Exercise, diet and sleep all have a major role to play in how well we age and our wellbeing, and are things that are within our control to change if health is our main priority. If someone wants to optimise their lifestyle to improve their health, they may want to focus on the following:
Include plenty of fresh vegetables, whole grains, and omega-3 rish fish in their diet.
Limit eating highly processed foods containing added sugars, added sult, and foods with high levels of saturated fat.
Aim to get a minimum of 300 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week. This might look like 5 hours of brisk walking per week.
Limit amount of time sitting and being inactive.
Aim for 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep per night.
Maintain good sleep hygiene practices to improve both sleep quality and quantity.
What was the study about?
Finding optimal lifestyle behaviours that slow down biological aging and improve health span is a question many public health experts are interested in researching. Measures of biological age provide a more accurate measure of someone’s health status compared to their age in years. Looking at genetic markers of health is an effective way to determine someone’s biological age. For example, someone may be 60 years old, but have the biological health of a 55 year old. Alternatively, someone can be 45 years old but have the biological health of a 60 year old.
Researchers of a 2024 study wanted to examine the impact of diet, physical activity, and sleep on biological markers of aging and health. To do this, they looked at lifestyle and genetic data from over 147,000 people in the UK Biobank to analyse these associations. The UK Biobank is a large-scale biomedical database and research resource that contains anonymous genetic, lifestyle, and health information from over half a million UK people who have willingly enabled their health information to be available for research purposes.
What did the study show?
The researchers used advanced statistical analyses to look at how different diet, physical activity, and sleep behaviours impact biological age and overall health. The researchers took things like age in years, biological sex, smoking status and alcohol consumption into account, as these variables are known to have an impact biological age. Meaning, the results apply regardless of a persons age, sex, smoking status or alcohol consumption levels.
Diet
The researchers looked at dietary behaviours by way of the types of foods people were eating and categorised dietary habits as either “pro-inflammatory” or “anti-inflammatory”. Pro-inflammatory diets increase levels of inflammation in the body, while anti-inflammatory diets reduce levels of inflammation in the body. Levels of inflammation are thought to have an impact on biological aging.
The study showed a pro-inflammatory diet was linked to poorer health span and an acceleration of biological aging. Researchers labelled pro-inflammatory diet patterns as diets high in foods containing added sugars, added salt, and foods high in saturated fats.
On the other hand, anti-inflammatory diet patterns were associated with improved healthy aging and health span. Diets that were counted as “anti-inflammatory” were diets containing foods with high levels of anti-oxidants such as dark coloured vegetables, whole grain foods, and food with omega-3 rich fish.
Physical activity
The researchers used step-count and heart rate to measure time spent being physically active, as step count and heart rate are a good way to get an idea of someone’s day-to-day activity levels.
Higher step counts of at least moderate intensity were best for improving healthy aging and health span. Moderate activity can be described as an activity that you can sustain for a long period of time, but still feel your heart and breathing rate increasing and muscles working (think of a 45 minute brisk walk).
People who achieved the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended levels of physical activity - 150-300 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity, or, 75-150 minutes of vigorous intensity physical activity - did a good job of slowing down biological aging and improving health span. What’s more, people who exceeded the recommended physical activity levels achieved greater improvements in their biological age and health span.
On the other hand, people who had very low levels of physical activity, or who did not regularly achieve at least moderate levels of physical activity, were more likely to have an accelerated rate of aging and poor health span. The researchers suggest that the WHO recommendations act as good minimum number to reach to start optimising healthy aging, as greater improvements can be seen beyond these recommendations.
Sleep
The researchers looked at sleep quality in terms of sleep duration, insomnia, snoring, and daytime sleepiness scores. Time spent in quality sleep, that is 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, is thought to have an impact on the biological aging process. Many processes like memory consolidating, food digestion and processing, and body recovery are done during sleep time, and are important factors of health.
Having a poor sleep scores for all measures of sleep quality was associated with an accelerated rate of biological aging and poor health status, according to this study. And as with diet and physical activity behaviours, better sleep quality was shown to help delay biological aging and improve health span.
General good sleep hygiene behaviours to improve sleep quality and duration include keeping a routine bedtime schedule, keeping the bedroom cool, completely blocking out sources of light, not having alcohol or coffee some hours before bedtime and reducing screen time some time before bed.
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