Where you live and what you eat: a new study relates life expectancy to some unexpected factors.
Eating cheese and living in a house with an open fire have been identified as key factors linked to an increased life expectancy.
In a major study,
The 25 things linked to a long life – and why having an open fire is one of them
By Sarah Knapton
Daily Telegraph UK·
4 mins to read
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Eating cheese was one of the 25 factors identified as being linked to increased life expectancy. Photo / Getty Images
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The study found there was a positive benefit from eating cheese and, surprisingly, no significant correlation between a shorter life and alcohol, meat, salt, vegetables or fruit.
Cornelia van Duijn, St Cross professor of epidemiology at Oxford Population Heath, said: “Do we think that diet is not important at all? Of course that’s not a statement we can make in this phase, in the sense that diet is extremely difficult to measure.”
Van Duijn said the findings did not mean diet was unimportant with regard to life expectancy and pointed out that “cheese-eating is related to socio-economic status”.
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Her team used data from nearly half a million UK Biobank participants to assess the influence of 164 environmental factors and genetic risk scores for 22 major diseases on ageing, age-related diseases and premature death.
They found environmental and lifestyle factors affect health and ageing around 10 times more than genes.
Factors found to be linked to an increased risk of premature ageing included being relatively shorter or plumper at the age of 10, having a mother who smoked around birth, smoking oneself, being unemployed, and living in a council house.
A good education was linked to longer life, as was tanning easily, physical activity, living with a partner, staying in education longer and having a high household income.
Professor Bryan Williams, the chief scientific and medical officer at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Your income, postcode and background shouldn’t determine your chances of living a long and healthy life. But this pioneering study reinforces that this is the reality for far too many people.”
He added the study showed “how great the opportunity is” to stop people from developing health problems and dying prematurely.
The team determined 23 out of the 25 factors they identified as important were “modifiable”.
Other factors which were not deemed to have a significant impact on ageing and mortality included pollution, noise pollution, being breastfed as a child, sleeping less than seven hours a night, and loneliness.
Commenting on the research, Aimee Aubeeluck, a professor of health psychology and head of school of health sciences at the University of Surrey, said: “The finding that childhood factors, such as maternal smoking, can influence mortality risk 80 years later is particularly staggering.”
“We should be treating early-life health interventions with the same urgency as genetic therapies.”
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But Kevin McConway, the emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, said it was hard to see how some of the “modifiable” factors could be changed.
“How do you modify things so that you are living with a partner, if you currently aren’t? How do you modify how often you feel fed-up, or how often you feel unenthusiastic?
“These potential modifications could maybe be done, but saying they are ‘modifiable’ is too much of a simplification.”
The research was published in the journal Nature Ageing.
Environmental factors linked to a longer life:
- Cheese intake
- Employment
- Ease of skin tanning
- Gym use
- Living with partner
- Level of household income
- Physical activity
- Level of education
- Asian/black/other ethnicity compared with white
- Using open fire for heating
Environmental factors linked to a shorter life:
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- Feeling fed-up often
- Deprivation
- Relatively shorter at 10 years old
- Relatively plumper at 10 years old
- Living in a flat
- Maternal smoking around birth
- Being unemployed
- Financial difficulties in the past two years
- Unenthusiasm
- Napping too much/sleeping more than nine hours a day
- History of smoking/currently smoking
- Tiredness frequency
