What is the difference between health span vs. lifespan? It's all about quality of life.

Recently, I was involved in a discussion concerning health span vs. lifespan. There is a subtle but crucial difference.

Although we have conversations about how long we think we’ll live — our lifespan — rarely do we address what that health span might look like.

In that conversation, I learned about a man who had a sudden catastrophic stroke while attending a medical conference. Because he received immediate lifesaving medical attention from his peers, they were able to save his life. But the result was that he spent the remainder of his life — 10 years — completely incapacitated. Life is precious, but if I were given that choice, I might say, “Let me go.”

Quality of life is a real issue, and perhaps we have some control over it. To think of the extra years of life that we want as a health span instead of a lifespan puts some responsibility on us. What am I willing to do today that would make me healthier tomorrow and the next day and the next? How can I live long and die short?

Researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health studied the impact of health habits on life expectancy, using data from the well-known Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. This includes over 120,000 participants, 34 years of data for women and 28 years of data for men.

Five healthy habits to add 12-14 years to your life

The conclusion of the study was that by practicing these five healthy habits, women gained, on average, 14 more years of life, and men gained 12 years as compared to the general public. The five habits were as follows:

• A healthy diet consisting of plant-based sources, with healthy fats, and avoiding red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, trans fats, and sodium.

• Healthy physical activity is described as 30 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous movement.

• Healthy body weight, defined as a normal body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 24.9.

• No smoking.

• Moderate alcohol intake as described as 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits per day. Men get double that.

The research reported that even adopting one of these habits increases health span by two years for men and women! What’s our problem? We’d rather depend on medicines than take some measure of control to prevent disease! The top two killers of Americans over 65 are heart disease and cancer, and these five habits directly affect those conditions.

My friend and mentor, Jerry Old, the medical director of the hospice I worked for, taught me an important medical term called "compressed morbidity." As it implies, it means to compress the amount of time that you are frail, diseased or incapacitated before you die.

He described it as a 90-year-old man beating his son at tennis and dropping dead on the court — that’s compressed morbidity!

Let’s turn our attention to our health span and work towards compressed morbidity in the years ahead. It’s never too late to start.

Find Connie’s book, “Daily Cures: Wisdom for Healthy Aging,” at www.justnowoldenough.com.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: What is difference between health span vs. lifespan? Quality of life.