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Manfred comments on Health/Longevity Link List - Less Wrong
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My current top-of-the-head list.
Exercise is good, sitting is bad, moderate consumption of alcohol is probably good, smoking is bad, fresh vegetables are good, refined sugar is bad, family and friends are good, stress and disrupted sleep are bad. You may have noticed a trend, which is that all of these (except for the alcohol one, maybe) , are thoroughly mainstream. If this trend represents the state of research, I'd suggest a national public health agency's website for the really good interventions.
Also on the "mainstream/obvious list":
Being obese is bad. Being overweight probably bad. Being underweight is probably also bad. Vitamin D good. Getting enough micronutrients in general good. Excessive red meat consumption probably bad. Excessive processed meat consumption bad. Laughter good.
(That's all I can think of off the top of my head that's not yet been mentioned.)
Edit: Oh! Forgot one. Sunburn bad.
Do you refer to how indulging in red wine confers to one the benefits of its polyphenols? I have many objections even if that was your intended meaning, but I've a feeling you've other reasons of which I'm entirely ignorant.
I couldn't find the meta-analysis that was going around last year but this one seems to show the same thing. Low dosages of alcohol are reasonably correlated with longevity in the general population.
Did these studies control for socializing?
I don't know, if you are interested read them. Their models definitely control for things like 'social class'. Furthermore I am not really convinced whether the small amount of extra socializing that alcohol brings has a significant effect on longevity (it might do, I am just not convinced).
My understanding is that the decent longitudinal studies fail to take account of the fact that a fair proportion of people who don't drink AT ALL are ex-alcoholics. But I haven't seen these studies in particular.
To be honest, in the UK, not drinking at all is a very strong signal for either being a Muslim or having some reasonably serious personal whackiness and non-conformism. Both of those seem likely to me to be at least as likely to explain health effects as the booze itself.
Some studies say that red wine is better than white and that wine is better than other types of alcohol, but mostly the evidence is that type of alcohol doesn't matter. The evidence is observational with no causal mechanism. However, short term RCT show that alcohol affects cholesterol levels.
I'm dubious of the "vegetables are obviously wonderful" meme. We almost never see hunter-gatherer groups pursue leafy or cruciferous veggies as a source of significant calories. Instead we see a lot more calories coming from starchy sources, tubers etc. In my investigation of micronutrient content, I haven't seen much evidence that there are any substances you get from leafy/cruciferous veggies you can't get elsewhere pretty easily. I think the reason they show a link to longevity is that the person who eats lots of vegetables is either consciously or inadvertently optimizing their diet for high micronutrient content*, and I think there are other ways to get there. I wouldn't mind being wrong about this if anyone has some contrary evidence.
*A study on seasonal fluctuations in the micronutrient contents of foods correlated very well to mortality and sickness in New Zealand, this area of research deserves a lot more study than it is currently getting.
I don't think humans have a digestive system capable of using leafy or cruciferous veggies as a major source of calories... nearly all of their calories are in the form of fermentable fiber which supplies energy by fermentation in colon to short chain fats. Unlike hindgut fermenter herbivores our colon isn't large enough to supply much energy this way.
Eh, but they still ate some, and ate plenty of starchy stems and root vegetables. Also, in modern first-world diets, I'd say the biggest thing vegetables provide is fiber, which was also provided in hunter-gatherer diets by un-domesticated grains or seeds.
Every hunter gatherer culture was/is different, but I don't think any consume large quantities of grains or seeds- that was mostly only made practical as a major source of calories by the development of agriculture.
It's not clear that humans actually need much insoluble fiber (what's mostly found in grains and seeds) for good health. Starchy tubers (which make up as much as 70% of calories in many equatorial hunter gatherer societies such as the Kitvavans) are a good source of soluble fiber, which acts as a substrate for gut bacteria.
Compared to agricultural diets, I suspect that most hunter gatherers had much higher consumption of soluble fiber (primarily from leafy vegetables and tubers), and much lower consumption of insoluble fiber.
Oh, okay. I was thinking of un-domesticated seeds like sumpweed when I said that, but wikipedia ways it was "cultivated," so I was wrong.
We know a lot less about hunter-gatherers than most people think, and hunter-gatherer tribes fluctuate a lot in terms of their diets/lifestyles, as one would expect with the diversity of the world.
Vegetables tend to be low calorie, so you wouldn't expect tribes to expend a lot of effort getting them. That doesn't really apply to a modern environment where getting enough calories isn't a concern and vegetables can be bought at your local supermarket.