# Give up cigarettes vs. living healthy, but not giving up cigarettes **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 18, 2018, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/give-up-cigarettes-vs-living-healthy-but-not-giving-up-cigarettes/809046 "2018-02-18T14:30:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2018, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/give-up-cigarettes-vs-living-healthy-but-not-giving-up-cigarettes/809046/21 "2018-02-19T21:06:54Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > Maybe it just seems longer. You don’t want to eat tofu and rabbit food so you can live long enough to develop dementia? Quitter. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2018, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/give-up-cigarettes-vs-living-healthy-but-not-giving-up-cigarettes/809046/22 "2018-02-20T00:57:48Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > You don’t want to eat tofu and rabbit food so you can live long enough to develop dementia? Quitter. I want to live a healthy lifestyle _not_ primarily to live _longer_ (other than the not smoking the gain in life expectancy is modest) but in order to live pretty much those same years without dementia or other disability. Living more years is not the main point; living the years I live better is. ---
**Author:** ![Corry\_El](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Corry\_El](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Corry_El)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2018, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/give-up-cigarettes-vs-living-healthy-but-not-giving-up-cigarettes/809046/23 "2018-02-20T03:05:33Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > This article mentions vegetarians living 3.6 years longer than meat eaters. > This claims smoking takes 10 years off life expectancy. Not really comparable figures. The second one is a result similar in many different studies. Moreover medical science can to a significant degree say how smoking causes ailments which shorten life. With diet (vegetarian or other) it’s much more of a morass of differing results from different studies and trying to separate correlation from causation. Here’s just one example, account of a recent re-study of ‘the Mediterranean Diet’, albeit not vegetarian but long held as being ‘shown’ to have significant health benefits. A recent study, in Italy, found it did for high income/education groups, but showed no benefit for lower income/education people who followed it, with only quasi-speculative explanation why (quality of food). > **[The Mediterranean diet doesn’t benefit everyone | CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/health/mediterranean-diet-heart-benefits-socioeconomic-study/index.html)** > > Following a Mediterranean diet, people of high socioeconomic status experienced cardiovascular benefits, but their lower socioeconomic peers did not. There’s all kind of social factors in the effect of diet, which is itself hard to define (as in the issue raised in the study above _exactly_ which diet, if that’s even really the reason for the difference). It’s just much harder to study as a stand alone causal factor than smoking. Again, something like a person being far overweight might be a reasonable factor to compare to whether they are a smoker in effect on life expectancy. Some superficial description like ‘eats meat’ or even ‘goes to McDonald’s often’ (how much is often? and orders what?, etc) just doesn’t tell you very much that science can accurately map to life expectancy. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2018, 3:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/give-up-cigarettes-vs-living-healthy-but-not-giving-up-cigarettes/809046/24 "2018-02-20T03:54:44Z")
Nonetheless, my impression is that diet alone has an impact on life expectancy of less than 5 years, while smoking is closer to 10 years. So smoking is the bigger risk factor than diet or exercise. On the subject of the Mediterranean diet, I saw this study once. It compared a control group, Mediterranean diet with olive oil, Mediterranean diet with peanuts. [http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200303](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200303) > [@](#): > > The multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios were 0.70 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.54 to 0.92) and 0.72 (95% CI, 0.54 to 0.96) for the group assigned to a Mediterranean diet with extra-virgin olive oil (96 events) and the group assigned to a Mediterranean diet with nuts (83 events), respectively, versus the control group (109 events). No diet-related adverse effects were reported. It appears the gap between the control group and the olive oil group was as big as the olive oil group and the nut group. Which begs the question, can’t you just eat the nuts and not totally revamp your diet? > **[Eating nuts linked to healthier, longer life - Harvard Health](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/eating-nuts-linked-to-healthier-longer-life-201311206893)** > > Move over, apples: A handful of nuts a day keeps the doctor away—and might help you live longer, according to new results from two long-running studies. Writing in tomorrow’s New England Jo... [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/give-up-cigarettes-vs-living-healthy-but-not-giving-up-cigarettes/809046.md?page=1)