Poor diets and lifestyle choices have become the biggest threat to life expectancy, playing a part in roughly 70 percent of deaths, according to a study out of the United Kingdom.
For their study, researchers looked at life expectancy and mortality information of individuals in nearly 200 different countries to determine what factors played the biggest role in a person’s health. Overall, the Global Burden of Disease study examined 249 causes of death, 315 different diseases and injuries, and 79 health risk factors across 195 countries between 1990 and 2015.
Globally, we’ve seen a great reduction in deaths from infectious diseases like malaria, but we’ve seen a large uptick in the proportion of people whose deaths are caused by lifestyle choices, like poor diets, lack of exercise and smoking.
“Countries used to worry about the impact of infections like HIV, malaria and measles on people’s health, but now it’s the fallout from poor diets, smoking and drinking too much,” said professor John Newton, chief knowledge officer at Public Health England. “On one hand, it’s a sign of successfully preventing infections, but on the other, it tells us how much more we have to do.”
Cause Of Death Findings
Here’s a closer look at other findings from the study:
- 71.3 percent of deaths in 2015 were caused by non-infectious diseases. Back in 1990, the percentage of deaths caused by non-infectious diseases was 57.6 percent.
- High blood pressure – fueled by lack of exercise and obesity – was the top risk factor for deaths, contributing to over 9 percent of global deaths. Other leading factors were smoking (6.3 percent), high blood sugar (6.1 percent), and high body mass (5 percent).
- On average, women can expect to spend their last 10 years in ill-health, while men will spend their last nine years suffering from health issues.
- Despite the concerning trends in lifestyle factors and deaths, life expectancy increased in 191 of the surveyed countries between 1990 and 2015, adding an average of 6.1 years to a person’s life since the start of the survey.
The findings are interesting, but not all that surprising. We wrote about the four pillars to live a long and healthy life on the blog in the past. Not surprisingly, the four pillars of health include:
1. Following a healthy diet.
2. Getting regular exercise.
3. Maintaining a healthy weight.
4. Avoiding smoking.
Those are essentially the same factors that are the mortality risk factors in this study. If you want to live a long and healthy life, eat a healthy diet, always make time to exercise so you can keep excess weight off, and avoid unhealthy habits like smoking of excessive drinking. If you do that, you’ll be well on your way to decades of physical fitness.