How to live longer: The 8 healthy lifestyle habits that can slow your ageing process by six years
Regular exercise can reduce your biological age
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Making small tweaks to how you eat and sleep are among the best ways to get anti-ageing results.
In fact, doing this could knock as much as six years off your biological age.
Following the 'Life's Essential 8' checklist created by the American Heart Association (AHA) can help improve cardiovascular health.
A new survey showed following these rules results in a drastically lower biological age.
A healthy diet should be adopted
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The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey used 6,500 participants who self-reported their adherence to the checklist.
The eight points of the checklist are to eat better, be more active, give up smoking, get healthy sleep, manage weight, control cholesterol, manage blood sugar and manage blood pressure.
The adults who took part had an average age of 47.
However, those who followed the eight steps well were shown to be, biologically, six years younger than their actual age.
“These findings help us understand the link between chronological age and biological age and how following healthy lifestyle habits can help us live longer," chair of the writing group for Life’s Essential 8 and a past volunteer president of the AHA's Donald M Lloyd-Jones said.
“Everyone wants to live longer, yet more importantly, we want to live healthier longer so we can really enjoy and have good quality of life for as many years as possible.”
The AHA suggests eating better means having plenty of whole foods, lean proteins, nuts, seeds and vegetables.
Experts recently shared what to eat in your 50s, 60s and 70s to improve health.
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A healthy lifestyle can slow down the ageing process
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Britons are recommended to take part in 2.5 hours of moderate exercise a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise.
When it comes to sleep, healthy sleep can be achieved by getting seven to nine hours of shut-eye a night.
This comes as Britons were warned of disruptive health problems of not getting enough sleep.