Two Secrets to Longevity

Hi, I’m Dr. Craig Primack from Scottsdale Weight Loss. Today, I’m going to talk about longevity.

The first question is what is longevity? Longevity is living longer.

Along with living longer, we want to live healthier or better.

One of the things that is most beneficial for longevity or living a long time is movement.

Exercise to Live Longer

There are several exercises that have been shown to really help people live longer. This comes from the Copenhagen City Heart Study, where the number one exercise for living a long time was tennis. Number two was badminton. Badminton is not a sport we play a lot here in the US. And number three was soccer. If I would have asked you to name those three sports, most people would’ve come in with running and such. And running was in the top eight or at least jogging, but not in the top three.

Movement

And we believe that these led the list because of a couple of reasons. One, it is movement. And some movement not marathon running most likely does help us live longer. And the second is social connection. With social connection we have people we can talk to, people we can share our happy times, and our sad times, our stressful times and such. And so human connection is actually also very important to living a long time. At the end of the day, being sedentary or sitting is probably the worst thing we can do.

You may have heard the term, “Sitting is the new smoking.” I do believe that’s true. We do need to have some movement throughout all of our day. If you work at a desk, which most of us do. Then working for 50 minutes, from the top of the hour till 50 minutes after, and then spending 10 minutes getting up, walking around your home or your office. When we did work in offices.  Getting a drink of water, going to the bathroom, all simple things, checking sports scores. It doesn’t matter.

But get up and walk around and then sit again for an hour. Our brains were not designed to work at a high level for three and four and five hours at a time. Take that from someone who’s spent a few hours studying throughout their medical career.

Summary: Movement and Social Connection

And so longevity, as I started out to say is living longer and along with that we want to live healthier. Weight loss and movement are two of the best things we can do.

At the end of the day pick a sport you like, find friends to do it with and live longer and healthy.

Have a great week. I’ll see you soon. Bye-bye.