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It on your goal.
By Dana G. Smith
When Dr. Nir Barzilai met the 100-year-old Helen Reichert, she was smoking a cigarette. Dr. Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, recalled Mrs. Reichert saying that doctors had repeatedly told her to quit. But those doctors had all died, Mrs. Reichert noted, and she hadn’t. Mrs. Reichert lived almost another decade before passing away in 2011.
There are countless stories of other people who succeeded at the age of one hundred and whose daily behavior is rarely based on traditional recommendations related to diet, exercise, alcohol consumption and tobacco. However, decades of studies show that ignoring this recommendation can maximally harm other people’s health and shorten their lives.
So how much of a person’s longevity can be attributed to potential lifestyle choices and how much is simply luck or lucky genetics?It depends on how long you expect to live.
Research suggests that reaching 80, or even 90, is largely within our control. “There is very transparent evidence that, for the general population, a healthy lifestyle” extends life expectancy, said Dr. Sofiya Milman, a professor of medicine and genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
A study published last year, looking at the lifestyles of more than 276,000 U. S. veterans, both men and women, found that adopting eight healthy behaviors can improve people’s lives for up to 24 years. smart sleep, stress management, strong relationships, and smoking, opioid abuse, or excessive drinking.
If the veterans met all eight behaviors, the researchers estimated they could expect to live to about 87 years. To most people, this probably sounds pretty good; After all, that’s at most 10 years longer than the average life expectancy in the United States. But for Dr. Milman, who was not involved in the study, the effects showed that “even if you do everything right,” you still can’t expect to live to be 100 years old.
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