A healthy lifestyle can prevent an early death — regardless of bad genetics

“A healthy lifestyle could slash the effects of life-shortening genes by more than 60 percent, a new genetic study reveals. While genes can certainly impact lifespan and chronic illness risk, an unhealthy lifestyle is independently associated with a 78-percent increased risk of premature death , regardless of genetic factors, researchers add.

The polygenic risk score evaluates multiple genetic variants in order to come up with a person’s overall genetic predisposition for living a longer or shorter life. Aside from these gene variants, tobacco use , alcohol consumption, diet quality, sleep , and physical activity level are all important factors for determining life expectancy as well.

Still, it has been unclear how well a healthy lifestyle offsets genetic factors that may shorten someone’s lifespan. To find out, researchers used data from 353,742 adults participating in the UK Biobank between 2006 and 2010. Each person had their health tracked until 2021.

That review created polygenic risk scores for long (20% of participants), intermediate (60%), and short lifespans (20%), pulling on data from the LifeGen cohort study.

Researchers also created a weighted healthy lifestyle score that included no current smoking, moderate alcohol consumption, regular physical activity, healthy body shape, adequate sleep, and a healthy diet — organizing the participants into favourable (23%), intermediate (56%), and unfavourable (22%) lifestyles, according to data from the U.S. NHANES study.

> https://studyfinds.org/healthy-lifestyle-death-genetics/ <

Muhdo Health and Epigenetics

It’s strange that the above article and study fails to mention Epigenetics and the influence and power that leading a healthy and/or unhealthy lifestyle can affect the way your genes express themselves and function.

For simply having “Good genes” will offer no guarantees to our health and wellbeing, nor does it on living to 100 . Epigenetic methylation and modifications after birth do not change what a gene originally codes for, but how they express themselves or if they are expressed at all.

How you live your day to day life both in terms of your lifestyle and environment will then go on to affect those modification markers sitting above your genes, which will then cause a multitude of outcomes with regards to your health and wellbeing.

Muhdo Health is pioneering Epigenetics . Allowing each of us the ability to understand our genetic blueprint and then be able to see how our day to day lives such as their diet , exercise , sleep , and environment are affecting them at a cellular level.