Want to Live Longer? You Better Start Moving—All Day Long.

Scientists crunched the numbers to come up with the single best predictor of how long you’ll live—and arrived at a surprisingly low-tech answer

To predict your longevity, you have two main options. You can rely on the routine tests and measurements your doctor likes to order for you, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels, weight, and so on. Or you can go down a biohacking rabbit hole the way tech millionaire turned longevity guru Bryan Johnson did to live longer. Johnson’s obsessive self-measurement protocol involves tracking more than a hundred biomarkers, ranging from the telomere length in blood cells to the speed of his urine stream (which, at 25 milliliters per second, he reports, is in the 90th percentile of 40-year-olds).

Or perhaps there is a simpler option. The goal of self-measurement is to scrutinize which factors truly predict longevity, so that you can try to change them before it’s too late. A new study from biostatisticians at the University of Colorado, Johns Hopkins University, and several other institutions crunched data from the long-running National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), comparing the predictive power of 15 potential longevity markers. The winner—a better predictor than having diabetes or heart disease, receiving a cancer diagnosis, or even how old you are—was the amount of physical activity you perform in a typical day, as measured by a wrist tracker. Forget pee speed. The message to remember is: move or die.

How to Live Longer
It’s hardly revolutionary to suggest that exercise is good for you, of course. But the fact that people continue to latch on to ever more esoteric minutiae suggests that we continue to undersell its benefits. That might be a data problem, at least in part. It’s famously hard to quantify how much you move in a given day, and early epidemiological studies tended to rely on surveys in which people were asked to estimate how much they exercised. Later studies used cumbersome hip-mounted accelerometers that were seldom worn around the clock. The new study, published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, drawson NHANES data from subjects recruited between 2011 and 2014, the first wave of the study to employ convenient wrist-worn accelerometers that stay on all day and night.

of 50 and 80, and tracked them to see who died in the years following their baseline measurements. In addition to physical activity, the subjects were assessed for 14 of the best-known traditional risk factors for mortality: basic demographic information (age, gender, body mass index, race or ethnicity, educational level), lifestyle habits (alcohol consumption, smoking), preexisting medical conditions (diabetes, heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, cancer, mobility problems), and self-reported overall health. The best predictors for how to live longer? Physical activity, followed by age, mobility problems, self-assessed health, diabetes, and smoking. Take a moment to let that sink in: how much and how vigorously you move are more important than how old youare as a predictor of the years you’ve got left.