A lot of people tend to think that getting healthy requires a massive effort, but a recent study indicates that even small changes in 3 key areas can have significant long-term benefits in lifespan and healthspan (the age at which you’re still healthy and able to carry out your daily activities without assistance).

This triad of health is physical activity, sleep, and nutrition. The study in question combined them to generate what they called a SPAN (Sleep, Physical Activity, and Nutrition) score. The combined SPAN score predicts that someone on the lowest end of the scale who improves their lifestyle to go to the highest end of the scale raises their expected lifespan and healthspan by 11 to 12 years. Now, that type of improvement does require significant changes and commitment, but even much smaller changes can bring substantial improvements.

For example, the researchers looked at those in the bottom 5% of SPAN scores averaging 7 minutes of physical activity per day, 5.5 hours of sleep per night, and eating a low-nutritional value diet. They found that such people adding just 2 minutes of physical activity per day, 5 minutes of extra sleep, and adding half a serving of fresh vegetables or fruit or one and a half servings of whole grains to their diets could increase their lifespan by a year. Those small changes done consistently over time add up!

Now, the three pillars of lifespan and healthspan improvement are not created equal.

Although diet is probably the one people get most passionate about, but diet was found to be the least important of the three factors in terms of lifespan/healthspan – if you look at it as diet components independent of their effects on body weight and blood sugar. If you’re overweight and/or have poor blood sugar control, then diet becomes much more important until such time as those issues have been normalized.

Sleep was found to have more of an effect than diet, but physical activity clearly had the largest effect. So, if you really want to improve your long-term health, exercise is really the key to making dramatic differences long-term.

The amount of sleep that was found in this study to be ideal for the majority of people was between 7 and 8 hours.

The ideal for physical activity (enough to produce at least moderate increases in respiration and heart rate) was 45 minutes to an hour each day.

The main takeaway here is that small improvements in physical activity, sleep, and diet made over time can dramatically enhance your lifespan and healthspan. So, rather than trying to make drastic changes all at once that may be challenging to keep up with, it may be better to start slowly with small steps that are easier to commit to – and hopefully maintain and build on.

Until next time…

George F. Best, D.C.