As life expectancy increases, more and more people are living longer, but equally more and more people are suffering from diabetes, cancer and heart disease, and the quality of their long lives is declining. However, many of these diseases are associated with lifestyle factors such as poor diet, being overweight and smoking. A study of more than 110,000 people evaluated five healthy habits and measured whether people with these habits lived longer and how many of those years were disease-free. The study found that women who adopted four or five of the healthy habits lived 10 years longer without cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke), cancer, or type 2 diabetes compared to women who did not adopt any of the healthy habits, and the corresponding time for men was seven years. The markers of a healthy lifestyle used by the researchers were: not smoking, having a healthy body mass index (BMI) of 18.5 to 24.9 getting 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day, drinking no alcohol or only a small amount, and having a healthy diet score. The researchers who conducted the study were from the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School in the United States, Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. It was published as open access in the peer-reviewed BritishMedicalJournal. The researchers used information from 2 cohorts of men and women studied in the U.S. between 1980 and 2014, with 34 years of follow-up for women and 28 years of follow-up for men. Over the course of the study, participants completed questionnaires every two years that included information on weight, height, smoking status, physical activity, alcohol consumption, and diet. They were also asked if they had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease or cancer (researchers examined medical records to confirm the diagnosis). Diabetes was the disease most closely linked to lifestyle, with 90 percent of those diagnosed with diabetes in the study estimated to have the disease due to an unhealthy lifestyle. Cancer was the least strongly linked, with an estimated 50% of cancers being due to poor lifestyle. Conclusion There is no doubt that adopting a healthy lifestyle may lead to living longer and having less chance of developing diabetes, cancer or cardiovascular disease. This study adds to the existing evidence suggesting that not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, exercising, eating a balanced diet and not drinking alcohol may increase our chances of a disease-free survival. Overall, it’s better to adopt a healthy lifestyle early if you don’t want to live a hard life in your later years.