Research suggests that eating cheese can help you maintain your health as you age by enhancing your mental well-being.

According to a recent study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers have shown that one of the most significant variables influencing your health as you age is your mental health.

Accordingly, engaging in mental health-promoting activities, such as eating fruit and cheese and exercising, may help you age more gracefully.

“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 said in the report.

In the study, scientists detail how they examined eight datasets, each comprising data on 800,000 to 2.3 million individuals, to examine genetic patterns in order to ascertain whether mental health was linked to a better aging process. They found that longer lifespans, enhanced resilience, and higher self-rated health were all associated with better mental health, which led to healthy aging. Having more money or education did have an effect on well-being, but this was found to hold true regardless of a person’s financial situation.

Additionally, they discovered that eating more cheese and fruits was linked to higher well-being, while smoking, not exercising, and excessive TV watching were connected with lower well-being.

“We found that lifestyle factors such as sedentary behaviour (that is, TV watching time), smoking, 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 investigators reported.

“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 results imply that having stronger stress resilience as one ages and living longer are strongly correlated with mental health.

“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 stated.