Living the Longevity Lifestyle - overview of healthy habits beneficial for your patients

Highlights

• The Longevity Blue Zones are places where the population lives longer than average
• The healthy habits shared by many centenarians are regular exercise, a healthy diet, nurturing social circle, and the purpose in life

Life’s Simple 7 initiative distinguished cardiovascular risk factors to be smoking status, low physical activity, weight, diet, blood glucose, cholesterol, and blood pressure

But it does not mean that we are born with a certain number of days to live. It is estimated that only a third of the phenotypic variation associated with longevity is due to genetic factors, and the rest is influenced by epigenetic and environmental factors. In other words, longevity can be affected by the way we live, how we care for ourselves, our longevity lifestyle (1) which will be the topic of the series in which we will discuss all the most important aspects that can be altered to prolong our life. We want to create a short guide for those of you who want to make a change and live longer and healthier. We will cover in detail recent studies on diet and fasting, physical exercising, sleep, well-being, mindfulness and stress, dental health, exposure to cold and hot and provide advice on each of these aspects and healthy habits that you could suggest to your patients to build a longevity lifestyle.
‍

The Longevity Blue Zones

There are few special places on Earth where people live especially long and healthy. The so-called Blue Zones are regions where the population has exceptional longevity, shares a common lifestyle and environment, and has been precisely researched and documented by reliable governments. Those places, such as Nicoya in Costa Rica, Sardinia in Italy, Ikaria in Greece, and Okinawa in Japan are remote compared to each other but people living there have few things in common. They constructed the longevity lifestyles that they adhere to, and we can learn the most important basics from them as they have many features in common (1).

The first essential aspect is the diet. Diets common in The Blue Zones are mostly plant-based, rich in non-processed foods, legumes, and greens. People there do not overeat and are used to calorie restriction by eating smaller portions. Such eating habits might reduce the build-up of the reactive oxygen species damaging the cells and reroute the body to focus on the maintenance of the cells while supporting healthy body weight (2). Even though there are common characteristics of Blue Zone diets, each of them is unique and the important particular foods vary from one culture to the next. For example, each Blue Zone highly values local types of beans in their diet: black beans in Nicoya; lentils, garbanzo, and white beans in the Mediterranean, or soybeans in Okinawa. Nicoya has one more secret: calcium- and magnesium-rich water, beneficial for the bones and cardiovascular system. Ikarian people never skip their coffee while citizens of Sardinia enjoy their glass of wine, both of which are especially rich in flavonoids and antioxidants (3).