Can Healthy Habits Help You Live Longer—and Enjoy Those Years?

There’s an old question about healthy living:

Does it actually add life to your years—or just years to your life?

A remarkable long-term Finnish study offers an encouraging answer.

Researchers followed 2,690 men who were originally examined in midlife, when their average age was 42. The men were assessed on five cardiovascular risk factors: smoking, body weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar.

Decades later, researchers looked at longevity, frailty, quality of life, happiness and psychological well-being.

The differences were striking.

Among men who had all five low-risk factors in midlife, about 42% reached age 90, compared with about 7% among those with none of the five.

And longevity wasn’t the only difference.

At an average age of 79, the men with all five favorable factors had substantially less frailty and better measures of psychological well-being and quality of life.

Their reported happiness was also somewhat higher, although that particular difference was not statistically significant.

But this isn’t a magic formula.

This was an observational study of Finnish men born between 1919 and 1934.

It can’t prove that changing one particular risk factor will produce a specific number of extra years—or that the results apply equally to women or every population.

And people with healthier risk profiles may differ from others in ways the study can’t completely account for.

Still, the basic message is encouraging.

The things we associate with cardiovascular health—not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, controlling blood pressure, managing cholesterol and keeping blood sugar in a healthy range—weren’t associated merely with living longer.

They were also associated with being less frail and reporting better quality of life later in life.

That’s a pretty good bargain.