The Potential Hidden Factor in Longevity

Biohacking seems to be all the rage these days. Everyone is trying to figure out what little tips or techniques they can do to improve their health and lifespan.

We all have a good idea of the basic ‘biohacks’ such as good diets, exercise, lots of sleep, lower stress etc.

There seems to be one that nobody talks about. And a study came out backing it up.

It was a study conducted in the UK that just came out in February 2025 and published in the journal Nature. The study compared environmental and lifestyle factors among approximately half a million people over about 12 years in their National Health Service database.

The database has an extensive amount of information on these people. They could tell a lot about them such as their socioeconomic status, how many cars they had, whether they smoked.

They wanted to see what environmental factors contributed the most to premature (less than 75 years of age) death.

Something to note is that they excluded diet. The authors believed there were too many variables associated with different diets to make any conclusive analysis.

Here are the factors they found most contributed to premature death:

• Smoking

• Renting public housing

• Townsend Deprivation Index

The Townsend Deprivation Index is a census-based measure of material deprivation, developed by sociologist Peter Townsend, that uses four variables: unemployment, non-car ownership, non-home ownership, and household overcrowding, to assess the level of deprivation in a specific area. In other words, poorer people tend to die earlier.

Probably not shocking data to you.

The environmental factors that contribute living the longest included:

• Living with a partner (as opposed to living alone or with non-partners such as roommates)

• The number of household vehicles

• Being employed

• Household income

Again probably not shocking data. Wealthier people tend to live longer. At first glance they may be the ones who have access to better medical care. Or they may not have as much stress in their lives. Or lots of other benefits.

I want to focus on the longevity ‘hack’ they mentioned first - living with a partner.

Living with a partner that is more than a roommate has a lot of additional benefits:

• Married men have the highest labor force participation rate (employment is a longevity factor)

• Married people tend to have higher wages, higher homeownership and (I’m guessing) more household vehicles - another factor in living a long life

  

We are hearing about the overall life expectancy dropping in the US population. Sure there are a lot of things that contribute to it.

However, consider the trend in the living situation of adults world wide. In 1940 only 7.7% of US households were single-person households. In 2022 the percentage was 29%.

They are predicting by 2030 around 45% of women aged 25-44 will be single and childless.

I see it in my assisted living homes. The people who can afford my ‘private pay’ homes which are more spacious and receive more therapies are generally widowed or still married.

The people on Medicaid very frequently have been single for pretty much their whole lives or had a very short marriage. Lots of them don’t have any kids.

Maybe changing the incentives to stay in a committed relationship could have a lot of health benefits as well?