04 March 2024 , 16:28
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Professor Tim Spector's podcast has discussed an exercise that's even 'better than the gym' for living a longer life.
Dan Buettner, who explores places where people live really long lives, talked about how their way of life helps them. On the ZOE Science and Nutrition podcast with Prof Spector from King's College London, he shared that loving to garden is something many people who live into their 90s and 100s have in common.
He explained: "Almost everybody who is making it into their nineties and hundreds, not only garden their whole life but continue to do so. And it might be because it's low-intensity physical activity." He also said that gardening makes you excited to eat what you grow, which gets you outside every day to take care of your plants. "When you have a garden and you've planted something you can't wait to eat," he said. "It gives you an incentive to go out every day and weed and water and harvest and they're bending over.
"It's a range of motion. I've seen the studies that show that when you're gardening, your cortisol levels or your stress hormones drop. You get your hands dirty and you wipe your mouth and you're getting the microbiomes, there's a little bit of dirt. But I argue that gardening is probably much better than joining a gym. The best longevity exercise you could do."
Mr Buettner is the creator of the 'Live to 100' Netflix series and has referred to rare global hotspots where celebrating your 100th birthday is common as the world's blue zones, reports Gloucestershire Live. When asked by hosts Jonathan Wolf and Prof Spector how people could change their lives to live longer, he explained: "The first thing is to shift away from the 'silver bullet' mentality which most of us have to what I call the 'silver buckshot' mentality."
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Dan Buettner said that in communities he has studied gardening is a key indicator for whether someone will live longer (Zoe)This refers to a 'scatter pattern' of lifestyle alterations. He added: "I wrote a book called the Blue Zone Challenge, where I aggregated about 40 or so evidence-based ways for you to set up your kitchen, your bedroom and your home so you mindlessly move more, eat less and eat better, and socialise more.
"In your kitchen I'm a big believer that we're all on a seafood diet - we eat the food we see. So if on your counter in America, if we start eating a bag of chips [crisps], we don't finish it, we put a clip on and we put it on the counter. Bad idea! Instead you go out and buy yourself the most beautiful fruit bowl you can afford and put that in the middle and keep that full. So when you walk through the kitchen the default is the fruit rather than the chip."
And he said a very popular kitchen appliance should be consigned to history. He explained: "The Cornell Food Lab did a study on toasters - very little of what we put in toasters produces something healthy.
"So taking the toaster off the counter occasions people losing about 2 kilos after two years as opposed to those who don't. People who have plants throughout their homes move more because they're actually watering plants. There are little things you can do to nudge yourself into moving more."