Scientists believe they’ve identified 25 key factors linked to living longer, including whether or not people have an open fire in the home or eat cheese.
The large-scale study, conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford and published in the journal Nature Ageing, pinpointed the more than two dozen key environmental and lifestyle exposures that either raise or lower the risk of dying younger.
The team analysed data from nearly 500,000 UK Biobank participants to assess what influence 164 environmental factors and genetic risk scores for 22 major diseases had on ageing, age-related diseases, and dying prematurely.
Some of the results were startling, with researchers finding that environmental and lifestyle factors affect health and the ageing process around ten times more than genetics.
Longer lives were linked to things like going to the gym, living in a house rather than a flat, and living in a house with an open fire.
The exposures most significantly associated with decreased mortality risk were living with a partner (as opposed to living alone or with other non-partners), the number of household vehicles, being employed and household income, the report says.
The stresses and strains of life had a clear impact, with things like feeling fed-up or tired and having financial difficulties in the past two years linked to shorter lives, as was smoking.
Other contributing factors identified include excessive sleeping and napping, as well as childhood factors like body weight at the age of 10, having a mother who smoked around birth, and renting accommodation (as opposed to home ownership).
The exposures were determined to influence survival with various diseases, including, cancers of the breast, lung, prostate, ovaries, colon, pancreas, liver, oesophageal cancer, and leukaemia.
The authors of the study determined that 23 out of the 25 important factors they found were “modifiable”.
Professor van Duijn said: “Studies on environmental health have tended to focus on individual exposures based on a specific hypothesis.
“While this approach has seen many successes, the method has not always yielded reproducible and reliable findings. Instead, we have followed a ‘hypothesis free’ exposome approach and studied all available exposures to find the major drivers of disease and death.
She went on to stress that there are “a lot of questions still to be answered related to diet, lifestyle, and exposure to new pathogens (such as bird flu and COVID-19) and chemicals (think of pesticides and plastics), and the impact of environmental and genetic factors in different populations”.
Professor Bryan Williams, 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.
“We have long known that risk factors such as smoking impact our heart and circulatory health, but this new research emphasises just how great the opportunity is to influence our chances of developing health problems, including cardiovascular disease, and dying prematurely.”
The study was led by Oxford researchers in collaboration with the Departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology at the University of Oxford; Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Broad Institute, Boston; the University of Amsterdam; Erasmus University, Rotterdam; and the University of Montpellier. Technical support was provided by the China Kadoorie Biobank team.
You can read the full study here.