Lifestyle changes that increase health
To what extent do healthy habits now create healthy years later?
Graphic by Katie Peek; Illustration by Joelle Bolt
This series was created for Google, The Buck Institute, Optispan and Phenome Health by Scientific American Custom Media, a separate division of the magazine’s editors’ council.
WAnt to increase your own health? The genetic matrix can be sunk, but it is always possible to add healthy years with lifestyle changes. Two recently published studies, one on American veterans and one on British civilians, help quantify how much. Each study has watched nearly 300,000 people over a decade, following their lifestyles and looking for healthy habits. The point to remember: small changes can have big effects and big changes can have enormous.
Graphic by Katie Peek; Illustrations by Joelle Bolt; Sources: Nguyen et al., “Impact of 8 lifestyle factors on mortality and life expectancy among American veterans: The Million Veteran Program”, ” American Journal of Clinical NutritionDecember 2023; Liang et al., “Polygenic risk for the end of” healthspan “and its interactions with lifestyle factors: a prospective cohort study based on 288,359 participants”, ” MaturityJune 2023.
Explore emerging science of health in other stories in This special report.