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Common Sense, Health, and Longevity
(Thursday April 09 2009)
 | The things that common sense tells us are good for long term health are in fact mostly good for long term health. Good diet and exercise will do more for you in the long term than any presently available therapy - which is all the more reason to get behind the wheel to push for the working medicines of rejuvenation that we know enough to create in the decades ahead. Here, Forbes looks at the basics: "Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England followed 20,000 middle-aged men and women in England for 11 years and found that nonsmokers with the healthiest eating and exercise habits at the outset had a 14-year-life-expectancy edge over the people with the worst habits. This followed a 2001 Loma Linda University finding that Seventh-Day Adventists who kept good habits lived to an average age of 88, versus 78 for those who behaved less well. ... Seventh-Day Adventists [have] a life expectancy four to seven years longer than that of average Americans, probably because their faith preaches a vegetarian diet and exercise. ... Researchers at the Pacific Health Research Institute in Hawaii who followed 5,820 Japanese American men for 40 years found those who avoided risk factors such as obesity, heavy drinking, smoking and high blood pressure in middle age had a 69% chance of living to be 85, versus just 22% for men with six or more risk factors." |
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