Keep in mind that life expectancy is a statistical notion. Something specific is going to kill you. You won’t die or live 30 minutes longer or shorter as a result of a cigarette or a meal many years in the past.
Rather, these behaviors are correlated with outcomes, and average to 20 or 30 minutes or whatever. This sort of daily accounting is misleading.
Similarly, the notion that we are living longer largely has to do with less infant mortality. Specific people are not dying at birth that otherwise would have, pushing up the expectancy. Someone else’s not-dying-at-birth hasn’t made you healthier.
Now, is the “20 minutes a day” thing a noble lie, to encourage good behavior? Perhaps. But that should be put to scientific scrutiny too: to what degree have people changed their behavior due to these notions, and what’s the outcome?
Can I add two years to my life by regularly reading pop-sci recommendations?
Exercising for 20 minutes a day to add 60 minutes to my life sounds like a good plan.
I wonder if other things are reproducible. Is the "1 alcoholic drink" thing been replicated when correcting for income? Lots of rich people may have 1 drink a day, and so this pushes up the average of the "1 drink a day people", but it doesn't mean you can replicate it.
Consider that the alcohol thing isn't necessarily fantastic (in the difficult-to-believe sense). I've noticed that people on good terms with alcohol tend to be cheerful, sociable folks, and it seems to be fairly well established at this point that being relaxed, happy, and sociable are positive factors in both quality of life and longevity.
I do. I usually have one glass of alcoholic drink with dinner (beer or wine, depending on the food). I don't often drink when I go out, except on special occasions.
The fact that you 'go out' (especially often enough to distinguish between 'normal' occasions and 'special' occasions) puts you pretty firmly in the 'wealthy' class (at least as far as most of the world is concerned), and the other implications of your class will likely contribute to a longer life than someone who is less well off.
So, will you live longer _because_ you have one drink a day, or is the fact that you're able to have one drink a day simply a byproduct of a lifestyle that will naturally lead to a longer life?
Red meat is definitely correlated with shorter lifespans, see e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2803089/. Causes appear to include increased risk of certain types of cancer and cardiovascular disease.
The causal links are obviously much harder to tease out, but the correlation between eating red meat and a shorter lifespan is strong enough that it shouldn't be a controversial statement.
I'm not a big fan of the overweight argument either. If I can find it, I read an article just the other day[1] that said there was no expectation of untimely death from being in a BMI that is considered 'overweight'. So there is no lost time there. And a couple drinks a night isn't going to cost you any time either.
BMI is an absolute crap metric. It's vaguely useful for populations (and even there serious objections have been raised). It's utterly inappropriate for individuals, particularly when ready alternatives exist (waist size, for example, is a more robust predictor, despite its own vagaries).
For individuals, BMI suffers in that it generally understates obesity in unfit, but "BMI-compliant" individuals, while overstating obesity in fit, BMI-noncompliant individuals. Which means that interventions are not indicated for those who would benefit and are indicated for those who would not.
Generally, there's also the issue that there are large natural variations in healthy human weights, and no single target or designator will be appropriate for all. Fitness is multidimensional, and any attempt to reduce it to a single metric will likely fail.
My lay recollection is that slightly higher-than-prescribed BMI is positively associated with greater life expectancy. Rationales vary, but among them, sick or ill individuals typically have lower-than-average bodyweights (skewing life expectancy down for low BMI scores), and athletes typically have elevated BMIs. Studies of Scandinavian Olympic athletes shows a pronounced lifetime mortality benefit to having competed in games (which tends to balance out the notoriously poor life expectancies of US professional athletes, particularly football, many associated with cumulative injuries sustained).
In regards to drinks, it's probably indirect. E.g., the sort of person who has several drinks every night is probably the sort of person to have alcohol abuse issues at some point in their life. Alternatively, the data was averaged, and you are seeing the negative impact of binge drinking on weekends.
I would like to see a study that controls for meat production methods, particularly prophylactic antibiotic and hormone treated CAFO raised beef and pork, vs. grass-fed / free range animals raised without antibiotics and hormones, under organic certification.
One set of studies specifically noted precursors of colon cancer conditions immediately following ingestion of red meat, with seems like a bad thing.
That said, I'm cautious but not convinced by these studies. I eat beef, though not daily.
I used to be vegetarian and am eating modified paleo which means red meat and eggs (among other things, including lots of veggies, very little sugar and alcohol, fish, etc). Long-term health consequences worry me a bit but it seems like there is so much that we really don't understand about diet.
Read the criticisms and controversies section of the wikipedia article, it's a widely criticised study (perhaps not as much as Ancel Keys' study but close)
You asked for a study. I gave you one. I guess that any study worth its time has criticisms and some that don't. Evolution is also criticized. I'm not comparing or equating them, just reminding you a criticism doesn't mean something is not right. Now I did read that wiki section and it is pretty short for such a "controversial" study.
First let me just say that my opinion is that I don't think there is anyone on this earth who knows for sure exactly what red meat does to humans and whether it is good or bad. I choose to believe the study for now.
Now I can start rationalizing why, and reputing Denise's reputings. Unfortunately I don't have time for this. I wish I could spend all my time talking about red meat (I don't) but I can't.
As a side note/joke - Denise is 25. I'm 25. I don't recommend anyone take any health advice from 25 year olds :)
This is might be a helpful way to get people to care about making small, incremental improvements but the scientific basis is suspect.
There is no evidence that 20 minutes of exercise adds an hour to your life. Taking the aggregate information around years and dividing it into days is not a meaningful operation and I'm sure that Spiegelhalter knows that as he says that this method of displaying the data "seems to resonate with people".
As an aside, I've heard Dr Spiegelhalter regularly contributing to More or Less[1] and he seems to be a well informed scientist.
I'll assume these figures apply to only established daily patterns.
I find exercising lonely, painful, boring, and stupidity inducing - although I completely believe others obtain opposite results. If I had a choice for myself between exercising for 20 minutes, then dying, or dying immediately, I'd choose the latter.
The non-exercising part of my life is spent pleasantly or sleeping, so I see a net gain of 27 minutes ((60 minutes life extension - 20 minutes exercising) * 2/3(awake factor)) for the first 20 minutes/day of exercising, but a net 7 minute loss for the next 40 minutes ((30 minutes life extension - 40 minutes exercising) * 2/3(awake factor)).
Even if you don't like exercise, it isn't necessarily a loss. Have you considered the potential quality-of-life improvements you could enjoy during the time you aren't exercising? E.g. better mood, better health, more energy/vigor.
Having seen some of Dr Spiegelhalter's talks in person, he most certainly knows that the units are not based on a meaningful operation.
He is extremely passionate about explaining uncertainty and risk to ordinary people. As an example, plenty of people think that "you either get cancer or not, so it's 50-50, and might as well leave it to chance". In other cases, politicians ask scientists for the "worst possible outcome" of an event, and then react as if it was a certainty or at least 10% probability, while in reality the risk might be extremely small.
Most people have trouble with the very concept of uncertainty. Microlives, and their opposite, micromorts (1-in-1M chance of dying while doing something) are helpful in comparing improbable-but-terrible events in terms of certain-but-insignificant, easier to understand concepts.
Silly system. Takes very broad and multivariable dependent statistics and tries to parse them down to micro lifestyle criteria.
Red meat is a perfect example. There are no convincing studies that demonstrate that it as an independent factor reduces life expectancy. If anything, quite the opposite is true, based on previous generations or the health of populations where red meat is very heavily consumed but suffer few other adverse major health factors.
I have a hard time believing I could start smoking 1 cigarette per an hour if I stood at my desk instead of sat, and the bad (smoking) would be balanced out with the good (standing)?
Is sitting really that bad? Or is smoking really not that bad?
I have a script on my work computer that runs once every hour, reminding me to get up and making suggestions on things I can do: make some tea, do some situps, do some pushups, do some leg lifts, go up and down the stairs, take a walk around the block, and so on.
I lack self-discipline but am very obedient, so it has been extremely successful for me.
I'll post it in the morning when I'm back at work. It's just a dead-simple Tkinter app in Python that tells me to take a break. My work computer is Windows and I scheduled it using the Task Scheduler. At home I'd add it to my crontab.
Sitting for the prolonged periods of time that's expected in today's desk jobs with no intermittent stretching/getting up for a few minutes every hour or so is what's most dangerous.
Not sure why you are being downvoted - this type of comparison fails spectacularly as you are not dealing in concrete events. From statistics, we know that on average over a large number of deaths, smokers tended to live slightly shorter lives. This is largely because of emphysema and similar which shortens the lives of smokers in aggregate.
Exercising every day is not going to keep you alive if you die from emphysema, so there is no 'cancel out effect' in practice.
On the one hand, isn't that bad. People have survived 50+ years of smoking multiple cigarettes a day (some of them will have smoked 200,000+ cigarettes)
On the other hand, smoking not only shortens your life, it also makes (part of it) less enjoyable. Statistically, smokers are ill more often and get chronic health problems earlier.
Also, I bet the 'sitting is bad' meme will see some nuance added to it in due time. Even ignoring that, this message talks of sitting for two hours, without break. That, IMO, is very rare. Lunch, coffee, toilet breaks?
I found myself sometimes sitting for 4 hours without realizing it. When you get sucked into what you're working on, don't have meetings in the morning, and are sitting on an Aeron like any proper tech worker, it's not so hard to imagine.
Here's a tip: keep yourself very well hydrated. My goal is always 1L water before lunch, 1L after. No software tricks needed!
These articles always seem to ignore quality of life - they assume that more life is necessarily a better thing. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that an extra ten years of life isn't much to look forward to if your mental and physical faculties are degraded to the point that you're a shadow of your former self. Better to burn out than fade away...?
You're assumption is that you get a fixed amount of functional life, followed by a variable amount of less- or non-functional life. OTOH, you might get a variable amount of functional life, followed by a more-or-less fixed amount of non-functional life. In general, I think the second option more closely matches how we understand aging and disease.
(Also, watch the TED talk by the referenced professor. He doesn't ignore quality of life.)
Why are you concerned? Things we have always known are healthy- vegetables, moderate activity levels, etc- tend to improve your quality of life too.
It isn't like all humans, upon hitting 80, automatically have low quality of life. My grandparents are not as spry as me, but they are always cheerful and probably get out more than I do.
Prior to reading the article I thought it was going to be about the way smokers get an hourly break of 5 mins at work while non-smokers don't. That's always an interesting subject.
I'm sure they wouldn't mind - the timing would obviously be dependent upon business but that isn't a consideration for the smokers I work with, they just leave their colleagues to take up the slack.
Rather, these behaviors are correlated with outcomes, and average to 20 or 30 minutes or whatever. This sort of daily accounting is misleading.
Similarly, the notion that we are living longer largely has to do with less infant mortality. Specific people are not dying at birth that otherwise would have, pushing up the expectancy. Someone else’s not-dying-at-birth hasn’t made you healthier.
Now, is the “20 minutes a day” thing a noble lie, to encourage good behavior? Perhaps. But that should be put to scientific scrutiny too: to what degree have people changed their behavior due to these notions, and what’s the outcome?
Can I add two years to my life by regularly reading pop-sci recommendations?