Podcast reveals ‘best exercise for living longer’ – and it’s not going to the gym

Professor Tim Spector has shared an exercise that is ‘better than gym’ for living longer. On a podcast, he revealed that gardening can help you live a lot longer.

Dan Buettner, an American National Geographic fellow who has written about long-lived communities around the world, joined him on the ZOE Science and Nutrition podcast.

Buettner said that people who live the longest often love gardening. 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.”

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He added: “When you have a garden and you’ve planted something you can’t wait to eat. 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.”reports Wales Online.

Mr Buettner, the creator of Netflix’s ‘Live to 100’ series, spoke about special places in the world where people often live to be 100. These places are known as blue zones.

When asked by hosts Jonathan Wolf and Prof Spector how we can change our lives to live longer, he said: “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.” He explained it meant a ‘scatter pattern’ of lifestyle alterations.

“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.”