Poor lifestyles costing UK workers years of life

The report is a survey of 10,000 UK employees by PruHealth and Mercer, the biggest study of employee health in the UK.

PruHealth's Vitality Age algorithm gives people an idea of their true level of health by assessing if a person's health-risk age matches their actual chronological age.

It found 86% of British workers have an average Vitality (health) Age of 4.1 years older than their real age due to unhealthy lifestyles.

Men aged between 40-49 years old are the riskiest group. Those with a higher Vitality age than their real age are 12% more likely to visit the GP and 13% more likely to be hospitalised.

Nearly a third (31.2%) have three or more risk factors, putting them at serious risk of ill health, and the biggest contributing factors for a higher Vitality Age are lack of physical activity and being overweight.

Mercer has noted it is being asked by more and more clients to help them implement health and wellbeing strategies.

John Anderson, UK market business leader for Health and Benefits at Mercer, added: "The first step on this path is to embrace employee health improvement as a potential route to improving engagement and productivity.

"The next step is to understand the size and nature of the issues, which can be understood by collating and analysing available data.

"This will then allow for the creation of targeted health and wellbeing initiatives and a review cycle that will ensure the initiatives remain current and in tune with the changing working population."

Neville Koopowitz, chief executive of PruHealth, said: "For many decades it has been accepted that children will live longer than their parents but for the first time in generations, there is mounting evidence that this trend of longer life is now reversing, in no small part due to lifestyle factors such as obesity and smoking.

"Our research backs-up this trend showing that today's workforce are losing over four years off their lives."