Researchers report that turning over a new and healthy leaf even when your middle aged will lower your risk of heart disease and premature death within years of adopting new habits.
Middle-aged individuals who ate five or more fruits and vegetables daily, exercised at least two-and-a-half hours a week, kept their weight down and did not smoke decreased their risk of heart disease by 35% and risk of death by 40% in the four years after they began.
Dr Dana King at the Medical University of South Carolina, who led the research, said "The adopters of a healthy lifestyle caught up. Within four years, their mortality rate and rate of heart attacks matched the people who had been practicing good habits all along."
He added that it does not mean people should wait until their 40s or 50s to get back on track.
“But even if you have not had a healthy lifestyle previously, it’s not too late to adopt those healthy lifestyle habits and gain almost immediate benefits.”
Dr King and his team aimed to find out if late-starters were able to benefit from habits like eating vegetables and walking 30 minutes a day.
In the late 80s, they began tracking 16,000 Americans between 45 and 64 years of age. During the study, only 8.5% of the 16,000 individuals were following all four habits which they were studying, they reported in the American Journal of Medicine.
From the other individuals, 8.4% practised all four habits within six years after the study started. The 970 health converts were most likely to adopt the the fruit-an-vegetable habit at that late stage. The least popular change which researchers considered one of the healthy habits was to lose weight within the healthy to overweight range.
When the individuals they studied picked up all four habits, they benefitted with a sharp decline in heart disease risk and death from any cause. The benefits could only be attained by practising all four habits – having only three of the healthy habits yielded no heart benefit and a modest decrease in death risk.
It was noted that men, blacks, less educated individuals, lower income groups as well as people suffering from diabetes or high blood pressure were in particular less inclined to follow the health guidelines from the beginning or practise them later in life. – Reuters
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