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According to a report by the Japanese media outlet Toyo Keizai, Andrew Scott, Professor of Economics at London Business School who specializes in longevity and aging issues, points out that following a longevity lifestyle is of great help to healthy aging. He cites a report that gathered 12 European studies covering 116,000 people aged 40 to 75, examining four factors: alcohol consumption, smoking, physical activity, and BMI. Each factor scored 2 points for good performance, 1 point for moderate, and 0 points for poor, for a total score of 0 to 8. Results showed that those scoring 8 lived 10 years longer without chronic disease than those scoring 0; for every 1-point increase in total score, there was an average of about 1 additional year of life without chronic disease.
6 Major Principles for Healthy Longevity
How can you build a healthy lifestyle? Andrew Scott proposes 6 major suggestions, including aspects such as daily diet, exercise, and mindset:
1. Healthy Weight
What matters is not only how much you eat, but also what you eat. If you want to live longer, you should avoid highly processed foods, reduce intake of red meat and sugar, and follow the Mediterranean diet.
2. Diet That Improves the Gut
Having a rich microbiome in the gut is crucial for maintaining gut health. Scott recommends various probiotic-rich fermented foods from around the world, including Korean kimchi, German sauerkraut, Indonesian tempeh, Caucasian kefir, and Japanese miso.
3. Intermittent Fasting
Scott mentions that at longevity-related seminars, experts often exchange intermittent fasting suggestions during breaks. The "5:2 light fasting" approach, which advocates unrestricted eating 5 days a week and calorie restriction on the other 2 days, as well as the increasingly popular "16:8 diet," which claim various health benefits, are pursued by many longevity researchers.
4. Focus on Preventive Medicine
To avoid the body "suddenly" having problems in old age, the whole society should promote preventive medicine. Each person should actively monitor their own health status as part of a longevity strategy, including having a health checkup once a year, regularly checking blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar, self-checking for lumps, and using smart devices and apps to record personal health status.
5. Exercise
The importance of developing an exercise habit for healthy aging deserves repeated emphasis. Combining aerobic training and strength training is very important for maintaining balance and flexibility as you age, and exercise can also reduce the incidence of depression and dementia to help maintain cognitive function.
6. Mental and Social Health
Social and psychological factors also cannot be ignored. Spending time with family and friends and having a sense of social participation and purpose in life are all very meaningful. Many studies show that people with a positive attitude toward aging tend to live longer. For example, a study that measured aging-related biomarkers through blood tests found that people who felt lonely or unhappy had a biological age 1.65 years older.
Source: Toyo Keizai
