Can These 8 Habits Really Add 20 Years to Your Life?

Lifestyle medicine should be prescribed along with or even in lieu of drugs to promote longer life and better health, researchers and doctors say. But two decades? Seriously?

Image: Pexels/Joshua Abner

New research promises eye-popping life extension for people who adopt one or more of eight healthy behaviors collectively called lifestyle medicine. The projections are so astounding — up to 20 years or more of additional life — that one might question their veracity and wonder if it’s just a fresh twist on health hype.

There are caveats, for sure.

You might already be doing some of these things and can therefore wring only so much benefit from the remaining tactics. Or you might find them impractical, onerous or distasteful. Or you might engage in all of them today and then be hit by a bus tomorrow.

But the findings, representing averages across the population, piggyback on mounting evidence revealing the outsized value of lifestyle medicine as a vital complement to drugs and other conventional medical treatments, and in many cases an outright replacement that does a better job preventing illness and also treating symptoms after the onset of disease, sometimes even reversing diagnoses…