People who adopt four principles for a healthy lifestyle can add as much as 14 years to their lives, a study revealed on Tuesday. 

Researchers found that not smoking, taking exercise, drinking in moderation and eating five servings of fruit and vegetables a day can have a huge impact on life expectancy. Academics at Cambridge University monitored the health of 20,000 men and women aged between 45 and 79 from Norfolk between 1993 and 2006.  The study concluded: “The results strongly suggest that these four achievable lifestyle changes could have a marked improvement on the health of middle-aged and older people, which is particularly important given the ageing population in the UK and other European countries."  The research showed that a person’s social class or body mass index (BMI) had no role  in life expectancy.  The study, published in the journal The Public Library of Science Medicine, is one of the first to look at the combined impact of the four factors on life expectancy. Participants, none of whom was known to have cancer or heart disease at the start of the study, were awarded a point for each of their four healthy behaviours.

These were determined as not smoking, not being physically inactive (defined as having a sedentary job and not doing any recreational exercise), drinking less than 14 units of alcohol a week, and having a vitamin C level equivalent to eating five servings of fruit or vegetables a day. 

After factoring in age, the results showed that, over an average period of 11 years, people with a score of nil - those who did not undertake any of these healthy forms of behaviour - were four times more likely to have died than those who had scored four. 

Smoking had the biggest single impact on people’s health, with smokers 77 per cent more likely to have died during the study.  Eating plenty of fruit and vegetables came next, with high vitamin C levels giving people a 44 per cent better chance of being alive.  A low alcohol intake improved people’s chance of survival by 26 per cent.

LIFELINE

* Do not smoke
* Take a lot of exercise
* Drink moderately
* Eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day