Cigarettes and alcohol will take 10 years off your life
40-year survey of 19,000 men reveals benefits of healthy living in middle-age
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Smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are the three major killers of middle-aged men
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Doctors have for the first time quantified the effect of the three major killers of middle-aged men: smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Men who smoke and fail to give up, or to control their blood pressure and cholesterol (where necessary) are sacrificing 10 to 15 years of their lives.
Results from the 40-year Whitehall study, landmark research into 19,000 civil servants begun in the late 1960s, shows that men who reached the age of 50 with all three risk factors lived on average to the age of 73, while those without any of the risks lived till 83. When other risks were included, such as diabetes and obesity, they found the least healthy lived until 70 on average, while the most healthy lived till 85.
Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director at the British Heart Foundation (BHF), which helped fund the research published in the British Medical Journal, said: "This important study puts a figure on the life-limiting effects of smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. It provides a stark illustration of how these risk factors in middle age can reduce life expectancy."
He added: "The good news is that all of us can make changes to help us live a healthy life for longer, even after 50. We know that stopping smoking and reducing blood pressure and cholesterol, by lifestyle changes and/or tablets, can prevent the onset of heart disease – and these findings suggest it could make a decade of difference to our lives."
The finding comes after the Care Quality Commission (CQC) yesterday called for improvements in the treatment of heart disease. One in four GPs are failing to manage cholesterol levels or prescribe appropriately and an estimated 350,000 patients are missing out on the treatment they need, the commission said.
The CQC report called for changes in the way doctors are paid for treating heart disease to encourage them to identify more patients. Currently, GPs get maximum payments when they record acceptable cholesterol levels for 70 per cent of the patients on their register.
The CQC said further payments should be introduced to capture the one in three patients who may not be being seen by their GP once the practice has received its maximum payment under existing rules. It said action was needed to cut inequalities between people living in deprived areas and those in more affluent parts of the country. One reason for the discrepancy is that GPs do not follow "proven practice" consistently.
Researchers analysed the performance of 8,300 GP practices and 152 primary care trusts and found that, while incentivising GPs with specific payments to manage cholesterol levels in their patients was working, there were further improvement to be made.
Too many GPs were prescribing expensive branded statins when equally effective, cheaper non-branded ones were available. The CQC estimated that £62.5m could be saved if GPs mostly switched to prescribing generic statins.
Family doctors were not doing enough to record cases of cardiovascular disease in deprived areas. They were also less likely to prescribe nicotine-replacement products to patients.
CQC chair, Barbara Young, said: "This disease is likely to touch every single one of us at some point in our lives. We have to raise the bar of acceptable performance."
73
Average age of men who smoked, drank and ate poorly.
83
Average age of men without all three risk factors.
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Comments
Just common sense really.
I aim to live till I'm at least one hundred and ten-hence my diet of lettuce leaves,filtered water,raw carrots,and the blandest food I can possibly muster,that is devoid of salt,sugar,or saturated fat.Now if only i could get my hands on some breast milk............
No doubt that the last twenty five years of that one hundred and ten will be spent swimming in my own urine,being spoon fed,and looking like a living corpse-while some nursing home collects every penny of that which i saved over a lifetime-yep no inheritance for my kids.
Smoking is madness.
Alcohol should be a small restricted pleasure taken with food.
High blood pressure,and high colesterol should be controlled.
and take some moderate exercise-swimming probably the best.
And most of all try not to get too stressed-put problems in context.because protracted stress causes catastrophe for the body.
And F**k everything else off that these health 'stazi' types tell you to do.
Quality-not quantity of life,three score and ten is about right.
Is that all?
Why all the fuss?
I eating shit, drinking and smoking all at once means you live past 70, I think I should take up drugs!
And those who say "Well, 70 years is enough, I don't want to spend 20 years sitting in a nursing home..." probably aren't aware of how horrible it is to catch lung cancer and die a slow, lingering, excruciatingly painful death which can stretch over one or two years. Those one or two years with lung cancer, in which your body suffocates itself, is like death by drowning but spread over 1 or 2 years. Those two years of hell will seem like a century, as anyone who survived lung cancer could tell you - if it was a survivable disease. So if you start smoking at 20, you can enjoy 50 years of gradually declining health and quality of life, followed by two years of hell with terminal lung cancer - or 1 year, if you're lucky - which will seem like a century of suffering. If you didn't smoke and donated the money you spend each week on cigarettes to good causes, think how much you could improve the world. Is your life so meaningless and empty that you want to end it prematurely, when you could be putting your precious years on this planet to good use by helping others, or at least being there for your family? To those who smoke, you may not see your grandchildren born, let alone grown up, so you'll die a bitter and unfulfilled soul with many regrets, tormented by the indescribable drawn-out agony of lung cancer. You know what you've got to do.
And all done from whilst paying corporation tax into the western treasuries ; yet I've never heard the "I dont want people smoking round me" brigade ever campaign against that - seemingly their wallet comes before their principles.
And unless you are presently dying a slow, lingering, excruciatingly painful death which can stretch over one or two years from lung cancer - you don't either; anymore than you know what it would be like to die a slow lingering death abandoned and isolated in a care home; cared for by strangers who don't give a monkeys and are doing it solely for a job
Well why don't we take the money we pay in duties and do exactly what you suggest; or better still ask everyone who doesn't smoke to kick up the equivalent - Imagine how much that would improve the world? Mind you I doubt we could erradicate self-righteous sanctimonious pillocks
British GPs have never tested patients for their blood pressure nor cholesterol.
Every supermarket in italy sells bottles of pure alcohol. It's used for conserving fruit etc. Nobody would dream of drinking it.
You couldn't do that in the UK where the only thing people can think of to try and escape their emotional self-repression is to get drunk. Which doesn't work anyway.
Consider:
Slim, vegetarian, teetotaler, non-smoker. Cue: Adolf Hitler.
Obese, meat eating, champagne for breakfast, brandy and cigars Cue: Winston Churchill!!
End of argument.
I don't cough any more and I am going to have a medical soon. According to the stats having not smoked for so long now my lungs and heart should be in a state no different from a non smoker.
Alcohol is a slightly different matter. I have been having beer or wine almost every day for decades. When I quit smoking I stopped drinking alcohol for a month too. I had tripped over my coat on the stairs and I knew it was because I was drunk. I thought about it and was disgusted with myself and I wanted to see if I was an alcoholic. Maybe I was? I still went down the pub to see my mates. I didn't lose any weight as pints of orange juice and lemonade contain sugar and I actually continued alcohol free for about 4 months and then I decided that I was missing the taste of some lovely British ale and started to enjoy beer on the weekend. I have been the same weight now for about 12 years.
I don't do any form of organised exercise other than walking around town and almost never catching taxis and find that I can outwalk many friends who go to the gym regularly. Several of these friends have put on quite a lot of weight in the last decade. For my height on the BMI I am about half a point short of being considered overweight, I am just in the healthy bracket.
I eat red meat, a bit less than I used to and not enough vegetables but maybe more than twenty years ago.
I just have the feeling my body is at peace with me. I have never had a cholesterol test, have no idea about my blood pressure and so maybe this is my last post. Bye, thanks for reading.
I will be very interested to see what the doctor thinks of my body. I am going to ask him to tell me what he thinks I eat, drink, smoke, exercise without telling him my history. If I am still alive I will post the results. Why this rambling story? Well I think there's a bit of stating the obvious around, a bit of nanny state and I think many Indy readers may do the same as me. I'm not worried, are you?
Anyone think my time's up?
That smoking, alchol, and stress shortens your life is no big news as many surveys have come to the same conclusion. There are peoples on this planet whose lifestyle - fresh air, exercise, low calorie diet, no stress - enables them to live to be on average 110-120 years old, such as The Hunzas. They have no dentists or medical doctors, rarely get ill and die peacefully, remaining fully active. One would think we have something to learn from them. For them retirement is a foreign word.
Or perhaps as I saw on an episode of QI we should all become castrati as apparently they "enjoy" on average 13 more years of life. How far are you prepared to go in the name of longevity?
For a while there, I thought i mistook you for someone deeply passionate about the well-being of the middle-aged. Heck I expected you to follow up with calls for greater investment to support our pensions while we dribble through our senility?
Anyhow, you can stop pretending now, that you really give a flying fig ... maybe do a motoring piece.
Start drinking and you might get up to 10. If that doesn't work stand on a busy street corner, breath deeply for a few hours every day and you will definitely get your ten.
I am a going to eat cholesterol ridden food until the cows come home.
They say it's a privileged to get old. Who are they trying to kid. My memory is bad now by the time I am a hundred I won't have one at all. I would be one of those zombies propped up in wheel chairs tied in to keep you from falling out and drugged so you can't move. Diaper ridden, wrinkled old prune with drool running down my chin. No sex, no memory, no wondering, no nothing to look forward to except maybe a good game of "BINGO" which I passionately hate.
Yup gonna take up smoking, drinking and eating high Cholesterol foods, for sure.
No way I wanna live to be a pathetic old fart, rotting at some old folks home.
There are many thinkers around today - futurists, physicians, transhumanists, etc. - who believe something along the lines of the following (exact figures vary): Due to continuing progress in gene therapy, organ replacement surgery, artificial/cloned organs, anti-ageing drugs, anti-ageing diets, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the like, we may be on the threshhold of a series of breathtaking medical advances which could potentially extend the human lifespan almost indefinitely, within a few hundred years at most.
In 20 years time, we will have extended the average human lifespan by 30 years.
In 20+30 = 50 years, we will have extended it by 50 years.
In 50+50 = 100 years, we will have extended it by 100 years.
In 100+100 = 200, we will have extended it by 200 years.
In other words, if you can survive for the next 20 years, you could potentially survive for the NEXT 300 YEARS at least (barring fatal accidents, of course). And in 300 years, you could survive for another 600, and so on...
Indeed, there are many thinkers in this field today, such as the gerontologist Aubrey DeGray (Google some of his video talks) and the futirist Ray Kurzweil (ditto) who believe that the first person to live to 2000 years old has ALREADY BEEN BORN!
And if the scientific progress in arresting - and even reversing - the ageing process continues at the same exponential rate at which other technologies - such as computer technology - historical have done, then there may come a point when HUMAN IMMORTALITY becomes scientifically feasible (although there may be social, political and economic aspects to address, of course).
So - perhaps - if you start making healthy lifestyle choices now, and extend your lifespan by another 20 years, youl could potentially live FOREVER (if De Gray and Kurzweil are to be believed).