Improving your mental well-being by eating cheese could help you stay healthy as you age, research has found.

Scientists have discovered that mental well-being is one of the most important factors that influence your health as you get older, according to a new paper in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

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This means that any activities that improve mental well-being—including eating cheese and fruit, and being active—may help you age better.

“To achieve healthy aging, it is imperative to bridge the gap between health quality and lifespan. Mental well-being, which encompasses emotional, psychological and social well-being, correlates with multitudinous lifestyle behaviours and morbidities, and underpins healthy aging,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

In the study, researchers describe how they analyzed the genetics of people across 8 datasets—each containing information on 800,000 to 2.3 million people—to determine if mental well-being was associated with healthier aging. They discovered that people with better mental well-being tended to experience improved resilience, higher self-rated health, and longevity, all culminating in healthier aging. This was found to be true regardless of how rich or poor a person was, though having higher earnings or a higher level of education did have an impact on well-being.

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They also found that lack of activity, smoking, and watching too much TV were associated with poorer well-being, while eating more cheese and fruits were associated with better well-being

“We found that lifestyle factors such as sedentary behaviour (that is, TV watching time), smoking (that is, age of smoking initiation and cigarettes per day), and dietary intakes of cheese and fresh fruit, as well as behaviours and performances such as medication use (that is, antihypertensive medication and NSAIDs), cognitive performance and age at menarche, each mediated 1.82 percent to 9.54 percent of the total effect of the well-being spectrum on [healthiness of aging],” the researchers wrote.

“Most of these mediators were well-established risk factors associated with aging-related outcomes, and our findings extend their roles in linking mental well-being to healthy aging.”

The findings suggest that mental health plays a key role in living longer and having better stress resilience in aging.

“These findings underscore the importance of mental well-being in promoting healthy aging and inform preventive targets for bridging aging disparities attributable to suboptimal mental health,” they wrote.

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