The 3 Traits Responsible for a Longer Life-Span in the Blue Zones
Aman Negassi
If you sit at your desk all day, you are dying! Let me get you up and active at work! DM me!
If you haven't watched the Netflix 4-part series, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zone, I highly recommend you guys watch the series. Although if you plan to read this article, there may be no need as I don't beat around the bush when it comes to summarizing.
There are 5 blue zones in the World: Loma Linda (United States), Nicoya (Costa Rica), Sardinia (Italy), Icaria (Greece), and Okinawa (Japan).
While each zone practiced their own daily routine, the same behaviors were practically the same which attributed to their longevity.
The Japanese are a great example.
The elderly in Japan are still dealing with PTSD as a result of the atomic bombs dropped during WW2. Despite that, they propel themselves forward.
"No matter how poor you are, you can survive. Endure everything."
They still deal with stress, if not worse than Americans, they are better in dealing with it.
A study led by Dr. Koichiro Shiba, Assistant Professor at Boston University's School of Public Health in Massachusetts found having a purpose lowers the risk of all causes of mortality, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, but the effects were more pronounced among women.
A sense of purpose was found to be responsible for driving healthy behavior and making a person more resilient to stress. The study was published in Preventative Medicine.
Many of the people in the Blue Zones don't even realize they are exercising. They don't go to the gym but they are either walking uphill or downhill.
Its quite the contrast where in the United States we have engineered most of the physical activity out of our lives. This dates back to post WW2 where we built new homes outward from the cities leading to building highways to get to work. With the growing dependency on cars, the streets that were once designed for pedestrians were now expanded to make more car lanes.
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Today, Americans spend twice the amount of time in cars than they did in the 1980s. As most people are spending half if not most of their day sitting down, the rise of diabetes and heart disease has been the response to it.
A study by the Harvard Study of Adult Development that was started in 1938 followed the lives of more than 700 original participants and over 1,300 of their descendants. The main goal was to identify the key factors that contributed to human happiness and well-being.
The study found that it was the quality of our relationships that had the most profound impact. It was so profound that it was the most significant factor in predicting who would enjoy a fulfilled and healthy life in old age.
Robert Waldinger, the study director shared that Relationship satisfaction at age 50 was the single greatest predictor of physical health at the age of 80.
This stands in contrast to the effects of Loneliness and Social Isolation where the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report last year that found it had the same effect on human health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, shortening life span by up to 15 years.
The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography reported in 2022 that 38% of widowers were living with family as opposed to 70% in 1922. It was reported in the Series that when you put an older parent in a retirement home, their life expectancy drops between 2 and 6 years.
Part of the reason Singapore has had success with slowly creating a Blue Zone is incentivizing close proximity through the housing development than just merely forcing living together.
In watching the Series and writing this article during Mental Health Awareness month, I can't help but think the biggest lesson is taking care of your mental health in ways we know but are not practicing.
When you scroll through social media about longevity in the United States, it always seems to be squarely on anti-aging drugs, diet, and exercise while ignoring the drop in life expectancy and happiness on top of 3 quarters of the country being overweight/obese.
Instead of focusing on preventing death, we can just learn how to live starting with our environment.