Want to live longer? Open the door, step outside and move
Undeniably most of us would like to if not live longer, certainly have a better quality of ageing. The question is what might be the best indicator. Is there anything we can or should be measuring to helps us figure out how we’re faring? Turns out there just might be and in another twist it’s not that complicated.
A team from University of Colorado, John Hopkins University and Virginia Commonwealth University tried to objectively measure the strongest predictor of all-cause mortality by using a subset of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2011-2014 data consisting of participants 50 to 80 yr old. The study tracked 3,600 people and tracked them to see who died in the years following their baseline measurements. In addition to physical activity, the subjects were assessed for 14 of the best-known traditional risk factors for mortality: basic demographic information (age, gender, body mass index, race or ethnicity, educational level), lifestyle habits (alcohol consumption, smoking), preexisting medical conditions (diabetes, heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, cancer, mobility problems), and self-reported overall health.
The best predictor: physical activity. Followed by age, mobility problems, self-assessed health, diabetes, and smoking.
Turns out how much and how vigorously you move are more important than how old you are as a predictor of the years you’ve got left.
Incredible.
The inevitable questions are: how much movement, what type, what’s the target we should be aiming for? The challenge remains about how to translate the data into simple advice regarding how many minutes of daily exercise you need, how hard that exercise needs to be, and how much you should move around when not exercising.
Regardless of whether we are ever able to answer these questions the simple fact is that all we need to do is open the door, step outside and move. Sometimes slow. Sometimes quickly. Sometime for hours and sometimes in bite sized chunks. It doesn’t really matter. Just move.
This research has profound implications for how most of us in knowledge work spend our time. Invariably sat down, stuck behind a desk, tapping away on keyboards for hours on end. Whilst we can’t all change our jobs we can consciously take steps to move more often. Bike to work or get off the tube/bus early and walk a few stops. Take the stairs not the lift. Have a stroll at lunchtime. Do a class after work. We all need to move more.
It also means that the wearable trackers telling us to move shouldn’t be ignored. We should all zero in on the key metric of daily movement/activity and make it our goal to hit or exceed our targets.
You can access an abridged version of the published research via the link below:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38949152/#full-view-affiliation-3