New Delhi, Jan 14 || Just five more minutes of sleep, and two minutes of moderate exercise like brisk walking or climbing stairs can add a year to your life, according to a study on Wednesday.
Adding half a serving of vegetables per day more could also lead to an extra year of life for people with the worst existing sleep, physical activity, and dietary habits, revealed the study that followed 60,000 people for eight long years.
The study, published in The Lancet journal eClinicalMedicine, suggested that seven to eight hours of sleep per day, more than 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day, and a healthy diet were associated with over nine years of additional lifespan and years spent in good health.
“The combined relationship of sleep, physical activity, and diet is larger than the sum of the individual behaviours. For example, for people with the unhealthiest sleep, physical activity and dietary habits to achieve one additional year of lifespan through sleep alone would require five times the amount of additional sleep per day (25 minutes) than if physical activity and diet also improved a small amount,” said the international group of researchers from the UK, Australia, Chile, and Brazil.