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Eating cheese plays a role in healthy, happy aging – who are we to argue?

A massive study of 2.3 million people has found that, independent of socioeconomic factors, mental well-being may be the most important single aspect to healthy aging and living longer lives. But a surprise finding was that those who reported the best mental health and stress resilience, which…

"To inform meaningful health policies, we need fine-grained causal evidence on which dimensions of socio-economic status affect longevity and the mediating roles of modifiable factors such as lifestyle and disease," the researchers noted in the paper. They looked at eight datasets encompassing a total of 2.3 million genetically diverse Europeans, using DNA-driven, two-sample Mendelian randomization to not just link a multitude of factors to healthy aging, but identify stronger, causal impacts. Interestingly, while socioeconomic status has many impacts on how long we live – from being able to access healthcare to having lower work stress and better food and nutrition availability – the results of the study showed well-being and healthy aging was not absolutely determined by how rich or poor someone was.

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