Four key lifestyle changes, including eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, can add as much as 14 years to your life, a study has found.
Researchers at Cambridge University monitored the health of 20,000 men and women from Norfolk, aged between 45 and 79, between 1993 and 2006.
They concluded that eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, getting active, giving up smoking and drinking in moderation can have a significant impact on life expectancy.
Professor Kay-Tee Shaw, who led the study, said: “There were substantial differences in mortality associated with the four health behaviours combined.
“The results strongly suggest that these four achievable lifestyle changes could have a marked improvement on the health of middle-aged and older people, which is particularly important given the ageing population in the UK and other European countries.”
Eating plenty of fruit and vegetables had the second-highest impact on health after smoking, with high vitamin C levels giving people a 44 per cent better chance of being alive by the end of the study.
The research showed that social class or body mass index (BMI) had no role to play in life expectancy.
The study was published in the journal The Public Library of Science Medicine.
The participants, none of whom was known to have cancer or heart disease at the start of the study, were awarded a point for each of their four healthy behaviours.
These were determined as not smoking, not being physically inactive, drinking less than 14 units of alcohol a week, and having a vitamin C level equivalent to eating five servings of fruit or vegetables a day.
The results showed that, over an average period of 11 years, people with a score of 0 - those who did not undertake any of these healthy forms of behaviour - were four times more likely to have died than those who had scored four.
The researchers calculated that a person with a health score of 0 had the same risk of dying as someone 14 years older who had scored four in the questionnaire for engaging in all four healthy behaviours.
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