For those in developed countries, extending life expectancy can be mostly an issue of tuning lifestyle according to the latest report from the World Health Organization that takes a long hard look at preventable death. Their findings are that relatively few factors are having a tremendous impact on human health and life expectancy world wide. Nearly all of them are readily modifiable.

According to the WHO report, “Eight risk factors (alcohol use, tobacco use, high blood pressure, high body mass index, high cholesterol, high blood glucose, low fruit and vegetable intake, and physical inactivity) account for 61% of cardiovascular deaths.” This applies only to middle and high income nations since low income nations are still wrestling with problems as basic as clean water. The report goes on to make the following claim, “Reducing exposure to these eight risk factors would increase global life expectancy by almost 5 years.”

Five years extra for things that are relatively simple to fix.

Dietary change is easy enough to accomplish, there are even various supplements so that the truly lazy in wealthier countries can duck out on actually eating fruits and vegetables. Of course, eating more fruits and vegetable means eating less red meat and other sources of dietary fat which would reduce cholesterol and knock out another one of the risk factors.

High blood pressure and high body mass index high blood glucose and physical inactivity can get wrapped together too since a plan of diet and exercise will improve all of these issues. It’s not to say that medical intervention isn’t necessary but in the early stages all of these conditions respond well to fixing the inactivity and tweaking the diet.

Smoking and drinking are no brainers. Eliminate tobacco, and moderate drinking.

Ding. All eight of the WHO’s big risk factors can be eliminated or at least moderated with a general plan to age against the machine.