Health and Medicine
PUBLISHED
Do you eat paleo, or carnivore? Do you stack and supplement? Are you into Japanese walking, or do you stick to 10,000 steps? Do you HIIT it? Or maybe you just sit in the freezer and shiver. The fact is, there are so many diets and exercise regimes being thrown at us each day that keeping as healthy as we would like can sometimes be overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. According to new research out of Australia, it doesn’t take a lot to make a big difference to your health – and it could come down to just 11 minutes of extra sleep, and some other small changes to your diet and exercise.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.“Combining small changes in a few areas of our lives can have a surprisingly large positive impact on our cardiovascular health,” said Dr Nicholas Koemel, lead author and research fellow at the University of Sydney, in a statement on the research. “This is very encouraging news because making a few small, combined changes is likely more achievable and sustainable for most people when compared with attempting major changes in a single behaviour.”
The findings come from an analysis of data from tens of thousands of adults in the UK Biobank – more than 53,000, to be precise, collected over eight years. The researchers looked at the combined SPAN behaviors of participants: their Sleep, Physical Activity, and Nutrition, all “major lifestyle behaviours that influence cardiovascular disease risk,” the paper explains, “often studied in isolation despite their behavioural interdependence in daily life.”
Now, that’s a hefty sample size, but it’s important to recognize what the methodology means. It’s an observational study – the authors basically took a huge lump of data and figured out the associations between various factors – which makes identifying causation tricky. Take sleep, for example: is it that getting a regular good night’s sleep is good for your heart health, or is there some other factor – anxiety, drugs, or medication, something like that – which might be affecting both? The team were as careful as possible to rule things like that out, they stressed, but it can’t be 100 percent ruled out.
Also, while sleep and physical activity were recorded as objectively as possible, using wearable devices, the final quarter of the acronym was not. Nutrition was self-reported, which is notoriously inaccurate – and the authors do caution that this might have led to misleading correlations.
Still, with all that in mind, what do the results say? Well, forget about busting your ass on the treadmill for hours each day. “The optimal behavior combination was eight to nine hours of sleep per night, 42 minutes or more of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, and a modest diet-quality score,” the researchers state. “This combination was associated with 57 percent lower risk of major cardiovascular events compared to people with the least optimal health profile.”
But that’s not all. What was striking was how tightly connected each factor was – meaning that small changes to each could result in a big difference overall. The impact was such that for those in the fifth percentile of sleep, exercise, and diet, it would only take an increase of 11 minutes in bed, 4.5 minutes out of breath, and an extra quarter cup of vegetables each day to reduce your cardiovascular risk by a full 10 percent.
“I would encourage people not to overlook the importance of making a small change or two to your daily routine,” Koemel said. “No matter how small they may seem.”
The study is published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.
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