Eating and drinking too much makes us lose hours of life

In this work Spiegelhalter has wanted to find a simple way to communicate the impact of our behavior on life expectancy and for this he has used a new measure which he has called "microlife" and which he defines as half an hour of life expectancy: " It is equivalent to a millionth of life after 35, "he explains.

Using data from various population studies, Spiegelhalter estimates that we lose a "micro-life" every time we smoke two cigarettes, due to being five kilos overweight, by drinking a second or third drink in a day, if we choose to watch television for two hours. or we eat a hamburger . On the contrary, you can earn "microlives" by not drinking more than one alcoholic drink a day, eating plenty of fruit and vegetables and exercising, he adds.

According to Spiegelhalte, demographic factors can also be expressed in "microlives." For example, just for being a woman they earn four "microlives" a day compared to men ; and Swedish men have 21 more 'micro-lives' per day than Russians. Living in 2010 instead of 1910 means a gain of 15 "microlives" a day.