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New Delhi: Studies show how small improvements in physical activity — two to five minutes or more of brisk walking — and sleep and diet can meaningfully impact one’s lifespan and reduce deaths in a population, offering a more feasible starting place for making healthy behavioural changes.
An increase of five minutes of sleep, two minutes of brisk walking and an additional half a serving of vegetables per day could add a year of life for those with the worst sleep, physical activity and dietary habits, according to a new study published in The Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine journal.
The findings suggest that when combined, small improvements in sleep, physical activity and diet could result in meaningful changes to lifespan, offering a sustainable, more feasible starting place for making behavioural changes, an international team of researchers from the UK, Australia, Brazil and Chile said.
The study defined the worst combination of behaviours as five-and-a-half hours of sleep per day, physical activity of under 10 minutes and a poor score in diet quality.
The most optimal combination — seven to eight hours of sleep per day, at least 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day and a healthy diet — was associated with over nine years of additional lifespan and years spent in good health.
The team highlighted that the combined relationship of sleep, physical activity and diet is larger than the sum of the individual behaviours.
For example, to gain one year of lifespan through sleep alone, people with the unhealthiest combination would require five times the additional amount of five minutes — or 25 minutes — per day, than if physical activity and diet also improved a small amount.
“A minimum combined improvement of five minutes per day of sleep, 1.9 minutes per day MVPA (moderate to vigorous physical activity), and a five-point increase in diet quality score (e.g., additional (half) serving of vegetables per day or additional 1.5 servings of whole grains per day) was associated with one additional year of lifespan,” the authors wrote.
Nearly 60,000 participants from the UK Biobank recruited between 2006 and 2010 were followed for about eight years. A sub-group wore a wrist wearable device for seven days between 2013 and 2015 that measured physical activity.
Another study, published in The Lancet journal, has found that an extra five minutes of moderate physical activity, such as walking at a speed of five kilometres an hour could be linked with a 10 per cent reduction in deaths among the majority of adults and that of six per cent among the least active ones.
Cutting sedentary time by 30 minutes per day was related with a seven per cent drop in all deaths, if adopted by a majority of adults who spend an average of 10 hours being sedentary per day — a one-hour reduction related with a 13 per cent fall in all deaths.
Greatest benefits were noted if the least active 20 per cent of a population increased activity by five minutes a day.
The study provides important evidence on how small improvements in physical activity can have wide-ranging public health benefits and highlights benefits for a population as a whole — the findings should not be taken as personalised advice or exercise recommendations for an individual, the researchers said.
They added that more research using wearable activity trackers is required in low and middle-income countries, where people’s ages, activity and health risks may differ significantly from those of the study’s participants.
Data from more than 1.35 lakh adults from seven cohorts across Norway, Sweden, the US and the UK Biobank, who were followed for eight years, was analysed.
“Small and realistic increases in MVPA of five minutes per day might prevent up to six per cent of all deaths in a high-risk approach and 10 per cent of all deaths in population-based approach,” the authors wrote.>
