The Lifestyle Changes That Increase Healthspan
How much 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 division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
Want to increase your own healthspan? The genetic die may be cast, but it’s still possible to add healthful years with lifestyle changes. Two recently published studies, one on U.S. veterans and one on U.K. civilians, help quantify by how much. Each study monitored nearly 300,000 people over a decade, tracking their lifestyles and looking for payoffs to healthy habits. The takeaway: small changes can have big effects, and big changes can have huge ones.
Graphic by Katie Peek; Illustrations by Joelle Bolt; Sources: Nguyen et al., “Impact of 8 lifestyle factors on mortality and life expectancy among United States veterans: The Million Veteran Program,” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, December 2023; Liang et al., “Polygenic risk for termination of the ‘healthspan’ and its interactions with lifestyle factors: A prospective cohort study based on 288,359 participants,” Maturitas, June 2023.
Explore the emerging science of healthspan in other stories in this special report.