Add 24 years to your life with these 8 simple habits!

While humans have yet to achieve immortality, these 8 habits can help add up to 24 years to your lifespan.

On Monday, a new study was presented at the American Society for Nutrition’s annual meeting. It claimed that adding some simple healthy habits by middle age can help you immensely in the future.

Researchers studied the data collected from over 700,000 US veterans and observed the shift in their life expectancy based on the number of healthy habits they adopted.

On average, these habits led to an increase in males’ lifespans by 24 years and females’ by 21 years.

“We were really surprised by just how much could be gained with the adoption of one, two, three, or all eight lifestyle factors,” Xuan-Mai T. Nguyen, health science specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs and rising fourth-year medical student at Carle Illinois College of Medicine, said in a news release.

“Our research findings suggest that adopting a healthy lifestyle is important for both public health and personal wellness,” Nyugen continued. “The earlier the better, but even if you only make a small change in your 40s, 50s, or 60s, it still is beneficial.”

The habits are as follows:

• Being physically active
• Being free from opioid addiction
• Not smoking
• Managing stress
• Having a good diet
• Not regularly binge drinking
• Having good sleep hygiene
• Having positive social relationships

The data was collected from people aged between 40 and 99 years old and enrolled in the Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program between 2011 and 2019.

Scientists noted that factors like low exercise, opioid use and smoking were associated with around a 30% to 45% higher risk of death. Stress, binge drinking, poor diet and poor sleep hygiene were each associated with around a 20% increase in the risk of death. Meanwhile, a lack of positive social relationships was associated with a 5% increased risk of death.

Although it is never too late to adopt a healthier lifestyle, Nyugen did mention, “the earlier the better”.

“But even if you only make a small change in your 40s, 50s or 60s, it still is beneficial,” Nguyen said. “It is never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle.”