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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41195
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I agree with Cyn's answer. All I'd add is if you're worried about such sentences' clunkiness you can do three things:

1. Say what the list is about before presenting the list;
2. If this is likely to be an issue in multiple sentences, or a serious issue in at least one, consider a reference-as-number format if your publication context permits it (though conventions may be such as to not);
3. Make general improvements to the rest of the sentence, such as using further gerunds. (These "improvements" are not in the sense of grammatical "correctness" - everything you're likely to otherwise do would also be grammatically correct - but to make life easier for the reader.)

Assuming sources 1-3 are applicable, we'd get something like:

> Documented sources of health benefits that may increase life expectancy include exercise [1], laughter [2] and studying [3].

I thought about using _studies_ instead, but for whatever subjective reason I felt it wiser to allow myself a single gerund there. It may have been because "studies" could make it sound like I meant acts of scientific research.

Obviously, if the sources are footnoted we'd write a subscripted 1 instead of [1] etc.

Original score: 2