Want to Live Longer? Change Your Lifestyle!
It’s impossible to predict when you’re going to die. But if you’re aiming for a long and healthy life, it pays to worry less about your genes—which you can’t change anyway—and more about your lifestyle and surroundings. That’s the conclusion of a new study in Nature Medicine that takes a broad look at the longstanding environment-vs.-heredity debate, and comes down firmly in the environment camp.
The work was based on data from more than 490,000 people, all of whom are registered with the UK Biobank, a massive collection of participants’ detailed medical histories including gene sequencing; MRIs; blood, urine, and saliva samples; family health stories; and more. Researchers used this rich data to study the influence of genetics and more than 100 environmental factors on the risk of 22 diseases that make up most of the major causes of death.
To do that, they focused especially closely on a subset of 45,000 people whose blood samples had been subjected to what is known as proteomic profiling: an analysis of thousands of proteins that help determine physical age compared to calendar age.
Excerpted from Time
