Don’t get me wrong: exercise is a good way to prolong life, there is no question about that. Just ask my family—I keep bugging everyone to do cardiovascular training. I have my reasons: research shows mortality reductions due to physical fitness in the range of 23 to 33 percent. And if you add several healthy lifestyle behaviours together—eating highly nutritious food, hitting the gym a few times a week, drinking in moderation, and not smoking—you can push your risk of death down by about 66 percent. That’s a lot. That’s also more or less the level of life extension you get from the Roseto effect, or from having a socially engaged and fulfilling life.
Imagine a Ms. A—a wellness junkie who dutifully attends her trampolining and Pilates classes several times a week, eats five or more servings of fruits and veggies a day, watches out for saturated fats, avoids sugar, and has never smoked. Now imagine a Ms. B—an overweight couch potato who loves cookies and chips and sometimes has a few shots of tequila too many.
Ms. A is also a slightly neurotic workaholic who feels like she is always running around. She is single, lives on her own and doesn’t know her neighbours. She also doesn’t have time to go out with friends and often feels lonely. She doesn’t volunteer, and if you were to ask her about the purpose of her life she would be lost for an answer. On the other hand, our cookie-loving Ms. B leads a very socially engaged life. She has two very close friends and a loving husband, and often pops over to her neighbours’ for a chat. She volunteers at a local charity and is very committed to its cause. She sings in a choir and does shopping for her elderly aunt once a week. She likes to sit on her porch enjoying sunsets.
Who will live longer? Of course, no one can ever predict the longevity of any particular person. But research that compares the effects of healthy eating and exercise on longevity to those brought by healthy social lifestyles shows that the lonely fitness freak Ms. A and the junk-food crazed yet very social Ms. B probably have a similar shot at becoming centenarians. That’s the Roseto effect at play.
* * *
If you are obsessed with superfoods, organics, vitamins, and supplements, you can stop now. If you measure your daily steps with a fitness tracker and rush from one hyped exercise class to another, you can relax, too. And please don’t freak out about every pound on your bathroom scales. From a health and longevity perspective these things matter far, far less than your social life and your mindset, and some of them can actually hurt your centenarian potential, not improve it.
My superfoods day made me realize how much time I would have to commit to chasing the best goji berries and following trends on the nutraceuticals of the day. And, according to research, I would be much better off spending that time playing Monopoly with my daughter or drinking coffee with my husband. My Portuguese longevity boot camp not only took precious days away from my family, it also cost money I could have donated to charity or spent on going out with friends. The hours I spend worrying about weight-loss strategies, I could commit to thinking about what matters to me in life or simply being more mindful. The supercentenarian Jeanne Calment didn’t obsess about gluten or superfoods. She wanted to live life to the fullest, to savour it. I could try to be more like her, more optimistic. As a result, I might have a higher chance of living many healthy years. Maybe not 122, but perhaps ninety or ninety-five?
It would be truly great if you ate your five a day and did your two hours and thirty minutes of moderate aerobic physical activity a week. But you can also tackle your health issues from another direction: by investing more in your mind, in your friendships, and in your community. The effects might be even more pronounced than those of the best wellness-junkie lifestyle. What’s more, easing up on nutrition and fitness obsession in favour of sociality and mindfulness could not only mean a life that is healthier, but also one that is more gratifying. A life worth living—something that no amount of kale or goji berries can give you.
Below you will find a table with an overview of studies showing the effects of different health behaviours on mortality. This can give you an idea of how much various things matter—or don’t—for your longevity. The data comes mostly from large American samples, but not exclusively. Besides, many of the studies I’ve included here are meta-analyses (the gold standard in research). Keep in mind that you can always find one or two studies that will show very strong effects of some diet or other on mortality, or weak effects of social factors on the risk of death—but these studies tend to be either very small or poorly designed. Altogether the majority of evidence points to the greater importance of social integration and mindset to longevity than that of diet or exercise alone. This is why the World Health Organization now lists “social support networks” among its “determinants of health”—alongside the more widely acknowledged “balanced eating, keeping active,” and “safe water and clean air.”
Yet the mortality risk data presented in this chapter are not to be used as a strict guide to what’s more important for longevity. Please don’t try to evaluate whether five portions of broccoli a week are more important than two hours of volunteering. It’s the general spirit that counts: being social and mindful affects health at least as much as do all of the traditional healthy lifestyle factors taken together.
The problem is, however, that in the twenty-first-century West, we all too often don’t get enough of that close personal contact with others. With loneliness rates on the rise, some of us have to go as far as to pay $52 an hour so that professional “huggers” can provide us with a potentially life-extending oxytocin boost.
Tables 1a and 1b: Things that lower mortality risk (examples of studies).
Food/Exercise Intervention
Change in mortality risk
Social/Mind Intervention
Change in mortality risk
Exercise
−33% to −23%
Happy marriage
−49%
Fruits & Vegetables - 6 or more servings/day
−26%
Large social network
−45%
Whole grain intake - 3 servings/day
−23%
Feeling you have others you can count on for support
−35%
Mediterranean diet
−21%
Living with someone
−19% to −32%
Cruciferous vegetables intake–min. 5.8 oz/day
−20%
Extraversion
−24%
Being overweight
−6%
Volunteering
−22%
Omega 3s intake
no effect
Agreeableness
−20%
Vitamin C intake
no effect
Having a purpose in life
−17%
At least 4 healthy life-style factors combined (alcohol consumption, smoking, diet, physical activity)
−66%
A complex measure of social integration
−65%
Tables 2a and 2b: Things that increase mortality risk (examples of studies).
Food/Exercise Intervention
Change in mortality risk
Social/Mind Intervention
Change in mortality risk
Red meat
intake
29%
Loneliness
26%
Obesity, grade 2 and 3
29%
Pessimism
14%
Vitamin A supplementation
16%
Unhappiness
14%
Beta-carotene supplementation
7%
Neuroticism
14%
A FEW SUGGESTIONS TO BOOST YOUR LONGEVITY
Ditch protein powders, expensive organics, and miracle foods (there are no miracles). Stop taking multivitamin pills—popping over for a chat in your neighbour’s kitchen, Roseto-style, will bring you more health benefits, without the potential side effects. Skip fitness trackers—it’s better to engage in some community gardening. If you are a bit overweight, stop obsessing: being social and mindful likely matters much more for your longevity.
5
THE GNAWING PARASITE OF LONELINESS
Why Feeling All Alone May Shorten Your Life
THE “CUDDLING ROOM” I walked into resembled a cross between an undersized bedroom and a psychotherapist’s office. It smelled of freshly washed floors and someone’s lingering perfume. Right away my eyes drifted toward a pull-out couch dotted with pillows. It looked soft, inviting. I perched on its edge and took in the rest of the room: a small table with a box of hankies, some IKEA-style paintings, a shelf stuffed with books, and Buddhist-themed knick-knacks.
I have to admit: I was rather tense and uncomfortable, despite the easy demeanour of my personal “hugger,” Katarzyna. She looked soft and, well, huggable. “Don’t worry, everyone feels a bit weird the first time,” she reassured me, asking me if I had a position in mind I’d like to start with. Before the visit I was sent a “menu” of cuddling positions I could choose from. There is the classic spooning position, one called “kitty” (in which the hugger sits on the couch while the client lies down with their head in the hugger’s lap), and the “sailboat” (both lying down, the client with their head on the hugger’s chest, the legs pulled up to cross the hugger’s thighs). Some of the positions were simple, like the bear hug, while others, like the “paddle,” looked as complicated as yoga. For $52 an hour I could choose how many cuddling positions I wanted, in whatever order my heart desired.
“Shall we start?” Katarzyna asked softly. She sat beside me on the couch and started smoothing out my hair, running her hand from the very top of my head down toward my shoulders. It felt awkward, very awkward. “Maybe let’s lie down on the couch side by side,” Katarzyna suggested. Once I was on my side, my face toward the window with Katarzyna behind me, I felt a tiny bit less weird (but still). She went on to gently pat my arm, then back to my hair. I felt very self-conscious. Although the website was very clear that the offer had absolutely nothing to do with sexual services, I kept worrying that I might have misunderstood something. But Katarzyna was professional, very massage-therapist-meets-psychologist. We kept chatting, which made the whole thing easier. Slowly, slowly, I began to relax. After a while, I had to admit it was actually quite pleasant, in a shampooing-at-a-hair-salon kind of way. My skin warmed up, and my heart slowed down. Oxytocin and serotonin must have been doing their job, making me calmer and healthier—and hopefully prolonging my life.
Warsaw’s Salon Profesjonalnego Przytulania is the first professional hugging salon in Poland, and one of the very few such places on the planet. There is a professional cuddling centre in Portland, Oregon, one in Austin, Texas, and one “cuddlery” in Vancouver, Canada (same thing, different name). California already boasts many professional cuddlers. The idea is simple: if you are not getting enough hugs in your daily life, you can come to a cuddling salon for a fix. It’s discreet, completely non-sexual, and quite likely effective at providing health-promoting oxytocin boosts. Katarzyna tells me that they have clients from all walks of life—young ones, old ones, middle-aged dads and twenty-something professional women. Some people come because their jobs leave them no time for social lives, and they want to feel a bit less alone in the big city. Others come because they want to get hugs they’ve never received from their mothers. Many come over and over again.
Cuddling shops may be quirky oddities, but judging from social isolation statistics, there seems to be a huge need for them. Considering the shrinking numbers of our friends and family, we can infer Westerners to be severely under-hugged. In Canada, the percentage of one-person households soared from 7 percent in 1951 to 28 percent in 2016. In the US, over a quarter of the population lives alone, too. That is still nothing compared to the European capital of solitude: Oslo, Norway. Here 52.9 percent of households are run by singles.
Of course, living alone doesn’t necessarily mean not getting enough hugs or having low social support. But it might. Other stats support the view that becoming a professional cuddler may be a job of the future (and one unlikely to be stolen by robots, which is always a perk these days). In 2004, as many as a quarter of Americans didn’t have even a single friend in whom they could confide. Recent years saw the average number of confidantes in our personal networks, including both friends and family, shrink from three people to two.
From a health and longevity perspective, that’s disastrous. A large, high-quality study conducted in Alameda County, California, has shown that people who score low on social integration—have few friends and relatives, aren’t married, and don’t belong to community organizations—are as much as three times as likely to die over the next seven years than those blessed with close-knit relationships. You might think that such effects of friends and family on longevity might only apply to seniors. It could be, after all, as simple as having someone check up on you regularly to make sure you haven’t fallen down the stairs and broken your hip. But that’s not the case. It’s been shown over and over that people of any age who have poor social relations suffer more heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and even pregnancy complications—hardly something regular family visits could prevent.
The positive effects of social capital on longevity are not simply due to wellness-related reminders from your loved ones, either—to mothers, brothers, and besties talking us into eating better, exercising more, or giving up those stinky cigarettes. Although people who share accommodation with another person tend to eat a larger variety of fruits and vegetables, in general their diets don’t differ all that much from those who are lonelier. Also, things like nicotine habits proliferate in social circles. Some people find it simply too hard to resist a smoke if their friends light up.
Admittedly, there is one way in which reminders and nudging by friends and family clearly do contribute to longevity: compared to loners, people who are surrounded by caring others are over three times as likely to listen to their doctors and take their pills as prescribed. But this, too, is not enough to explain the staggering influence our interpersonal relationships have on our health. In epidemiological studies, controlling for patient compliance with medical treatment is the norm, and yet, the effects persist. What’s more, fascinating lab research provides additional evidence that the links are not merely cultural or behavioural, but also physiological.
Imagine over three hundred people coming into a research lab and getting voluntarily infected with cold viruses squirted directly into their nostrils (the motivation must have been the $800 each person was paid for participation). During the month before the infection, the volunteers received six phone calls from the researchers on six separate days, during which they were queried on their social interactions on each day. With whom did they hang out? For how long? Was it pleasant? Then, after the virus-squirting exposure, the brave volunteers were kept in quarantine for five days and were repeatedly assessed for cold symptoms (for instance, t
heir used hankies were weighed for “nasal secretions”—also known as snot).
When the results came in, a clear picture emerged: loners had a 45 percent higher risk of developing a cold than did more gregarious people, even though everyone was exposed to the exactly same dose of the virus. In other words: hanging out with your friends can protect you from sniffles.
The biological links between our social connections and health are, once again, largely due to the interplay of neuropeptides such as oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin, as well as the HPA axis. Sometimes, though, they can be far more straightforward. When scientists compared the gut microbes of wild baboons, they discovered that the closest buddies had the most similar gut microbiomes—just like Aura Raulo’s mice in the forests of Oxfordshire. And since healthy gut microbiome has been linked to a lower risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and so on, such microbiome-diversifying exchanges between friends could boost longevity. Of course, social contact can also function as a route for parasites and deadly pathogens. As Raulo tells me, finding balance between healthy microbe-diversifying transmissions and escaping risky transmissions is a challenge social animals deal with all the time.
Although having physical contact with others, as well as being integrated in the community—meeting friends, being married, participating in clubs—are vital to our health and longevity, the objective quality of our relationships is only a part of the story. What matters almost as much is what we think about our social lives, how we perceive them. On paper, you may seem to be doing well in the friendship and family department, but if you consider yourself lonely, your centenarian potential will suffer nevertheless.
Growing Young Page 11
