What determines whether you live to be 100 or not? Some of it is just luck—your genes have a lot to do with it. If you’re born with certain genetic traits, you might be naturally set up for a longer life. But if you don’t have those genes, you could be facing an uphill battle.
The good news is that your lifestyle—the choices you make about things like diet and exercise—can also have a big impact. A healthy lifestyle might even cancel out as much as 60% of the effect of genes that could shorten your life, adding about five extra years. This is according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal.
Big Data, Big Insights
To understand how genetics and lifestyle together affect how long we live, researchers collected data from over 350,000 people and tracked them for about 13 years. The participants were put into three groups based on their genetics: those with genes linked to a longer life, those with an average genetic setup, and those with genes that could mean a shorter life.
The researchers also gave each person a “lifestyle score” based on factors like sleep, alcohol and tobacco use, diet, and exercise. The healthiest lifestyle included no smoking, regular physical activity, a balanced diet, and getting eight hours of sleep each night. People were categorized into favorable, intermediate, or unfavorable lifestyle groups.
The results were pretty clear: people with “short-lifespan” genes were 21% more likely to die early compared to those with “long-lifespan” genes, no matter their lifestyle. However, people with unfavorable genes could counteract some of this risk by living healthily, reducing their risk by more than 60%, which could add up to five years to their lifespan.
On the flip side, people with an unhealthy lifestyle were 78% more likely to die early, even if they had favorable genes. Combining bad genes with an unhealthy lifestyle was the worst combination, more than doubling the risk of an early death compared to those with good genes and healthy habits.
What This Means for You
Even though you can’t change your genes, you can change how you live your life. This study shows that lifestyle choices play a huge role in how long we live. While good genes can give you a head start, bad habits can cancel out that advantage. Fortunately, the opposite is also true: living a healthy life can help mitigate the effects of unfavorable genes.
From a broader perspective, we should be doing more to make it easier for people to live healthily. It’s not just about individual choices—many people live in places where healthy food is hard to find, exercise facilities aren’t accessible, or health insurance is too expensive. A long, healthy life shouldn’t be something only the privileged can afford. We need to start looking at health and longevity as social issues, not just personal ones.
