Also smoking has a large effect so you do notice it in every correlative study too.
So, for some lifestyle change to reliably be reproduced by observational studies, it would have to be a 'true effect' of 4 years. I would say that 3 years, or even 1 year, is something to worry about.
You can’t prove a negative, but you can define limits on the effect size.
You can show that the maximum possible size effect size is so small that you’re not going to worry about it.