Study calculates effect on lifespan of healthy habits | Hacker News Reader

Study calculates effect on lifespan of healthy habits

theguardian.com

43 pointsspking26 comments

One thing you realize by practicing healthy "life extending" habits is that you feel better and actually find value in the present. The extra life if it happens is just a bonus. The real win is quality of life now while it matters.

Well said!

How much more research do we need to say people will live longer if they "[consumed] a healthy diet, controlled their weight, took regular exercise, drank in moderation and did not smoke."

Most of what you quoted has no meaning.

Don't smoke is probably true (does vaping nitiotine increase life expectancy?)

The rest not at all.

What's moderation. Some say 0%.

What's regular exercise and how do you do that? Or do we believe telling people is enough. It's also not true as far as I know. I though a lot of light activity is much more healthier than exercise.

There's evedence fatter people later in life live longer. What's the graph of weights for my DNA and how do I manage life long changes as I move between the weight I should be at parts of my life.

What's a 'healthy diet'? it's rubbish that some things are 'healthy' it's just somethings are not bad for you.

This article is next to useless.

Avoid facebook, instagram, twitter, youtube, reddit, TV and hackernews (which I couldn't). One can easily recoup another decade of life

People should definitely do this no matter what.

But I don’t think it’s so simple. You also have to develop a long-term habit of minimizing wasted time.

As long as daydreaming, play and leisure aren't considered wasted time.

Quora was my past addiction. Now its HackerNews :)

Not exactly proud though.

I’d imagine you could guess these, not much surprising.

> The five healthy habits were defined as not smoking; having a body mass index between 18.5 and 25; taking at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day, having no more than one 150ml glass of wine a day for women, or two for men; and having a diet rich in items such as fruit, vegetables and whole grains and low in red meat, saturated fats and sugar.

Does anybody knows what is "...rich in items such as fruit, vegetables and whole grains" and "...low in red meat, saturated fats and sugar"? This is way too vague for me and I couldn't find it in the paper.

Don’t eat processed food.

In today's day and age, its tough to escape sugar. Surely you would agree.

Don’t eat processed food.

Does that mean they're comparing people who do all these things:

> followed a healthy diet, controlled their weight, took regular exercise, drank in moderation and did not smoke ...

> ... Compared with people who adopted none of them

To people who smoke, drink too much, don't exercise, don't control their weight, and don't follow a healthy diet?

I thought saturated fat wasn’t bad?

Right, and I suspect the trouble is this: normal people often get their saturated fat from things like hot dogs cooked over a fire. If that sort of thing is the source (rather than coconuts and hard-boiled eggs), then it comes with harmful substances. The more saturated fat you eat, the more polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons you eat.

So bacon is out?

Normal bacon is out.

You can get bacon without nitrites/nitrates. Watch out for hidden nitrates/nitrites though, for example "celery juice". Celery picks up lots of nitrites/nitrates from the fertilizer it is given. Depending on what you like about bacon, you might prefer thin salted slices of pork, which might be called "bacon" or not depending on your supplier.

You can cook bacon without burning it. I happen to think it tastes much better baked at low temperature, without browning it. The best choice is probably a pressure cooker, and steaming would be quite good too.

Who cares? As always, correlation!=causation. The causal effect of alcohol is notoriously the topic of fierce debate for decades now, diet is known confounded by things like healthy user bias, and exercise actually has been the subject of randomized experiments and the effect on mortality is less than the naive correlation. These results are already known to be wrong when interpreted the way they want them to, and beating a dead horse won't extend its lifespan.

Josh Mitteldorf's nascent project using the Horvath Clock might be of interest to some people here.

https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2018/04/08/the-mother...

So where are the numbers? The article only mention cancer and heart issues. But the way to tell it was weird. No timespan is mentioned. Did I miss it?

Asking, because if they less likely die from cancer they more likely died from something else.

Oh, found it: +12y for men, +14 for women. No data per habit.

On a similar note - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16959472

Making correlation vs causation mistakes could add years of health-related articles to a journalist's portfolio.

They must have done quite a large study, if they're able to detect any effect at all. There's a huge amount of variation in human lifespan that cannot be attributed to lifestyle choices.

123.000 people according to the article

Reply on news.ycombinator.com