United States: A new study shows that American adults over the age of 40 could live 5 extra years if they were as active as the top 25% of the most physically active people. The study also says that if the least active 25% of people did more exercise, they could live 11 extra years.
This study was published on Thursday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The more active you are, the healthier you stay, which could help you live longer!
‘Our results indicate that [physical activity] is associated with significantly greater health improvement than has been estimated earlier; this arises from the fact that better ways of quantifying [it] are employed’, the researchers concluded.
As reported by the newsweek.com, it is common knowledge that people should move to be healthy, but in this case, these scientists sought to find out specifically how this physical activity might affect life span and generated an equation of the effect different levels of activity on life expectancy.
The scientists also applied data of NHANES 2003-06 as the last comprehensive physical activity data among adults over the age of 40, the population estimates for 2019 from the United States Census Bureau, and the mortality data for 2017 from the National Center for Health Statistics.
With that information, the scientists’ model calculated that the sedentary 75 percent of Americans get as much total physical activity as the most active 25 percent for two and a half hours of walking per day.
If all over 40s in the U.S. got this much movement each day, the scientists concluded that their lives expectancy, on average, would shoot up from the current life expectancy average 78.6 years to almost 84 years.
If the sedentary last quarter of Americans over 40 moved at those rates—just walking over 7 miles a day—they would add almost 11 years to their lifespan.
‘Participants’ basal increment per hour of walking was greatest for those in the lowest activity quartile; an hour’s walking was equivalent to a gain of 6 hours of life,’ the authors of the study noted.
Nonetheless there were several limitations about this study. Because it is merely a speculative plan grounded on observational study, we could not know for definite whether that much added exercise would translate into the addition of precisely that many years of life expectancy.