Once the researchers confirmed that the “yoga rats” did start breathing more slowly as a default, it was time for some extra stress for the animals. One such classic test entails letting the rodents out into a large arena. This may sound like a reprieve after the confines of plethysmography chambers, but for rats it’s not necessarily fun—a wide, open space brings to mind soaring hawks and other dangers swooping from the air. That’s why the more a rodent is stressed, the more time it will spend hugging the walls instead of exploring the centre. Here is where the difference between the yoga rats and the rest showed up: while the control animals spent on average seventy seconds cowering away from the scary vastness, the rodents trained in slow breathing started exploring after less than half that time. In another stress test, once more involving equipment with a wicked name (“rodent restrainer”), the rats were held in claustrophobic cylindrical tubes for ten minutes. And once again the yoga rats proved less stressed by the experience.
Remarkably, it’s not just chilled-out rats that breathe more slowly—mindful people do so, too. While at rest, long-term practitioners of mindful meditation inhale and exhale fewer times per minute than your typical human. They also blink less and in a different pattern. Look at an average person and you will see that their eyelids go up and down quite erratically: sometimes they’ll blink in a rapid succession, other times they will stare at you as if playing the who-will-blink-first game. Long-term meditators, on the other hand, have a very regular blinking pattern, and a much slower one at that. These slow-breathing, slow-blinking meditators are not just a curiosity. Spontaneous eye blink rate is a reflection of how the dopamine system works in your brain (abnormal blinking is a sign of Parkinson’s disease, for example). Fast breathing, meanwhile, can signify anxiety.
By now you may be wondering what it takes to become a “long-term meditator.” In the eye-blinking study, it meant a minimum of 1,439 hours of meditation experience. In the respiration rate study, it was at least three years with daily routines of thirty minutes or more. This may seem daunting, but the truth is that with meditation and yoga the more you practise, the more benefits you will likely reap. It doesn’t necessarily mean that if you can’t commit to a daily half-hour of practice for years on end you should just throw in the towel and go shopping for goji berries instead. Short bursts of mind-body exercises work too—just less well. Even though the activity of the enzyme that protects the tips of chromosomes, telomerase, can increase after just a few weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction, it may take as long as a year to see the results in telomere length. In a similar vein, the effects of mindfulness meditation on the immune system seem dosage-dependent, too: the longer you do it the more your anti-infection troops profit, and the more your inflammatory markers decrease.
But don’t rush just yet to squeeze pratyahara into every spare minute you have. Doing yoga while cooking dinner or brushing your kids’ teeth won’t necessarily do you that much good. The quality of your engagement counts as well. Kabat-Zinn once wrote, “Five minutes of formal practice can be as profound or more so than forty-five minutes…the sincerity of your effort matters far more than elapsed time.” What does it mean to practise “well”? In mindfulness, it means attempting to return to present-moment experience, no matter how pleasant or unpleasant it may be. It means telling yourself that “It’s okay to experience this.” It means trying to feel all sensations in your body, including the lousy ones (itchy noses, hurting knees). It means that you don’t zone out completely or doze off on your couch.
Of course, the more you practise, the more the quality of your meditation or yoga tends to improve as well. One good way to give yourself a quick mind-body experience boost is to sign up for a retreat. Choices abound—from Zen meditation gardens in Arizona and asana classes in the forests of Bhutan to ten-day Vipassana courses taught in over 165 centres around the world. For cold lovers, there are even snow-yoga retreats in the Alps. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be expensive—the Vipassana meditation retreats are free of charge (sponsored by voluntary donations from previous students). No matter what you choose, studies show that meditation and yoga retreats tend to be particularly helpful, and it’s not simply because they make for a relaxing holiday—the “retreat effect” goes beyond “vacation effect.”
Now, in terms of what practice you should pick, the jury is still out. In some scientific reviews, all meditation and yoga styles come out as interchangeable. One such comparison based on over three hundred trials, which included an astounding fifty-three yoga types (there really are that many), found that all brought similar health benefits. On the other hand, neuroimaging studies report that different meditation techniques activate and deactivate different parts of the brain. A few hints exist as well that for preventing some illnesses, some practices could be more effective than others. If you want to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, for instance, transcendental meditation may be a particularly good idea.
Apart from that, many researchers agree that at this point the best option is to simply choose the practice that you find the most appealing. It may be mindfulness meditation, hatha yoga, tai chi or even qigong—ancient Chinese exercises that are supposed to balance the flow of qi through the body. Whether you believe in harmonious movements of energy or not, both tai chi and qigong have the potential to bring health benefits: tai chi has been linked to the reduction of severity of fibromyalgia, while qigong may help with fatigue and boost the activity of telomerase. Admittedly, however, research on tai chi and qigong is quite limited, and we still have absolutely no idea if any of these practices can actually prolong life.
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Long-term meditators reap some very real profits from their practices—from longer telomeres to improved immune systems. Does that mean we should all be getting “prescription meditation” from our doctors? It’s too early to tell. Certainly there are promising indications that even short-term engagements in yoga or mindfulness could boost the levels of neuron-growing proteins in your blood, make pain less painful, and possibly even slow down your epigenetic clocks. Yet the evidence for the life-extending powers of meditation doesn’t seem as strong as that for marriage or for fighting loneliness. We also don’t really know how the effects of yoga or mindfulness-based stress reduction might compare to those of other interventions such as exercise and super-healthy nutrition. On the other hand, the research that we already do have suggests that just a few minutes of mind-body practice a day could make it easier for you to achieve all your other longevity goals: it could improve your romantic relationship, help rid you of loneliness, or ease nicotine cravings. Since most studies on the health effects of mindfulness or yoga control for diets, exercise, smoking, and so on, the benefits of such practices could be underestimated (a mindfulness buff might be eating lots of vegetables precisely because they picked up mindfulness in the first place).
What’s more, meditating or doing a few yoga asanas is cheap and easy. There is no need to rush to a gym or buy any special gadgets. No need to buy anything, in fact: just find a quiet spot and relax. Feel your breath. Let your brain rewire. Even if some Pinterest-based promises of what mind-body routines can do for you are exaggerated—certainly your life is unlikely to get completely, miraculously transformed—your health will benefit and so will your mind. You may become calmer, more focused, emotionally stronger. You may grow—and not just younger.
A FEW SUGGESTIONS TO BOOST YOUR LONGEVITY
Choose the mind-body technique you find the most appealing, be it yoga, mindfulness, or tai chi, and try to practise regularly and long-term: the more you stick with it the more benefits you will get. If you are striving to change other health-related things in your life—to eat more veggies, stop smoking, stop fighting with your spouse—meditation can make it easier, too. If you want a quick boost, sign up for a retreat. And don’t watch horror movies if you are down with a virus: it could make your immune system less efficient. Try mind
fulness or a few asanas instead.
11
LONGEVITY LESSONS FROM JAPAN
Ikigai, Cherry Blossoms, and Working Till You Drop
IT’S A GREY, DRIZZLY AFTERNOON in the Greater Tokyo area, yet seventy-year-old Fujita Masatoshi seems undisturbed by the weather. Clad in blue overalls, he is busy at work at his post-retirement employment—clipping trees around the parking lot of the Silver Human Resources Center in Matsudo City. The pay is poor, but Masatoshi says money is not an issue. After years behind a desk at a transportation company, he has more than enough saved up for a lazy retirement. But lazy isn’t something that Masatoshi is after. He may like tennis and baseball, but, he says, “that isn’t enough.” What he needs is ikigai, purpose in life, and that’s why one day at the age of sixty-five he showed up at the Silver Human Resources Center and asked for employment—joining 49 percent of Japanese men this age who work at silver-hair jobs.
Search for a book on longevity and, chances are, you will come across something with “Japan” in the title. There is a good reason for that. At the time of writing, Japan held the title of the longest-living nation on earth, with their record life expectancy at birth at 84.2 years. That’s almost six years longer than the average American can expect to live, a year and a half longer than a Canadian, and almost three years longer than a Briton. Japan also tops the charts with the highest number of centenarians per capita, and while I was travelling across Japan researching this book, the oldest person in the world, a Japanese woman, died there at the age of 117—older than the country of Australia.
Yet Japan hasn’t always been a longevity paradise. Right after World War Two, an average Japanese man could expect to live a mere fifty years, and a woman fifty-four years. By 1986, however, the country had already climbed to the top of the world for female life expectancy. What happened? Before the twentieth century, hunger was the norm, and only the rapid post-war economic growth made malnutrition a thing of the past for most. Moreover, as the country developed, the health care system received a tremendous boost. Now basically everyone had medical insurance and was guaranteed regular checkups. Mortality rates for communicable diseases such as tuberculosis plummeted, extending average lifespans.
If you’ve ever had sushi or miso soup for dinner and felt the next day as if your body had doubled in size overnight, you’ve experienced the dark side of the Japanese diet—its saltiness (the post-sushi puffiness is the result of water retention). Back in the 1950s, a typical Yamada Tarō and Yamada Hanako, the Japanese equivalent Mr. and Ms. Smith, ate on average thirty grams of table salt per day—that’s a staggeringly high number compared to the current USDA recommendations of less than six grams. Almost everything savoury, it seemed, contained salt: soy sauce, tsukemono pickles, ramen noodles, miso soup. As a result, high blood pressure and strokes were ubiquitous. It was in large part due to public awareness campaigns that the diet has shifted away from such high sodium levels, and average lifespan lengthened. Yet even today, at ten grams per day, the Japanese still eat quite a lot of salt.
All that blood pressure–raising sodium notwithstanding, the Japanese diet is certainly one of the main reasons for the country’s remarkable longevity. It’s based on high consumption of seafood, vegetables, seaweed, and soy, with minimal dairy or meat. What’s more, the Japanese have a saying, hara hachi bu—eat only until you are 80 percent full. From a research perspective, it makes perfect sense. Experiments on many animal species show that calorie restriction can prolong life—suggesting it might also work in humans.
This unsurprising advice coming from Japan—don’t stuff yourself, eat more vegetables and less meat—has inspired some people to look for more wonder-like Japanese foods that could add years of life without too much effort. Some have said it’s horse meat. Others have suggested ginger. Yet others have pointed to resveratrol, the polyphenol found in grapes, which are particularly popular in Japan’s longest-living prefecture, Nagano. If dining on horse meat stewed in ginger and grape sauce sounds like a disturbing longevity-boosting idea, rest assured: just like with many other miracle foods, from turmeric to moringa, there is not much science to support it.
In general, Japanese people are obsessed with health—although their obsession may be of a different sort than the North American one. In Japan it’s far less about gluten-free eating and miracle foods and more about blood tests and colonoscopy (although I myself would take goji berries over intestinal exams any day). Across the country, about three million people each year undergo what is called there the “human dry dock” screening. They check into hospitals for at least a day and submit themselves to a whole series of tests, such as chest X-rays, weight measurements, blood tests, urine tests, radiography, and yes, colonoscopy. Among Japanese men age forty-five to fifty-four, over 70 percent have some form of checkup at least once per year.
Admittedly, Japanese people have been obsessed with health and hygiene long before colonoscopy tubes were invented. Valuing purity is a tradition in Shinto, where evil is associated with all things dirty. Already in the third century, Chinese historians were commenting on the extraordinary cleanliness of the Japanese—now imagine how the locals must have perceived the stinky Europeans who began arriving in the sixteenth century.
Although focus on hygiene certainly does play a role in Japanese longevity, some researchers have also looked for answers in the DNA of the local population. We are talking about an island nation, after all, one that was basically closed off to the world for centuries. Maybe people here evolved some special mutation that allows them to have these extra years of life? Indeed, there may be something to this line of thinking. Take a gene called ApoE, of which one particular allele, ApoE4, is rarely found among the Japanese. Carriers of the ApoE4 allele, many of whom are of Scandinavian descent, are at about 40 percent higher risk of heart disease than those with variants of the gene that are more common in Japan. And then there are the FOXO genes, implicated in longevity of hydras, whales, and Jeanne Calment—and American men of Japanese ancestry.
Another genetic variation that may be helping the average Yamada Tarō and Yamada Hanako live long is something that’s easy to spot the moment you set foot in Japan. For me, the realization hit me over the head, literally, when I banged my forehead on a regular door frame for the first time in my life. As a five-foot-six-inch (168 cm) woman living in Europe, I’m used to being on the short side of society. Not in Japan. Suddenly, I could reach top shelves in the kitchen of my Airbnb rental and had to mind low-hanging lamps. I was about four inches (10 cm) taller than average! Meanwhile, studies suggest that being short is good for longevity (which could also help explain why men on average die earlier than women). For example, generally shortish Greeks and Italians who move to Australia tend to outlive the taller locals by about four years. So here is a tip: if you are a young woman and you want your future kids to live to a hundred, don’t go for the super-tall guys—pick the Tom Cruises of the world instead.
Yet although the height and meat-eating ApoE genes may be playing for Japanese longevity, other genes are playing against them. The Japanese are, for example, more genetically susceptible to developing diabetes and becoming overweight (although you wouldn’t know it from checking out people on the streets—only 2.2 percent of Japanese men and 3.5 percent of Japanese women are obese). One way or the other, genetics contribute only in part to the overall good health of the inhabitants of Nippon. When the Japanese relocate to California, rates of heart disease among them double.
Diet, genetics, dry dock checkups, and hygiene are all surely important factors in Japanese longevity. But they are not the whole story—far from it. There is a saying in the land of cherry blossoms: yamai wa ki kara—“sickness and health start with the mind.” Research shows it does indeed, and that no amount of miracle foods can replace social cohesion or having ikigai.
The Longevity Village
I pulled my car over into the tiny parking spot by the narrow r
ibbon of the Kohachiga River, tucked in between the lush bumps of the lower Japanese Alps. The day was cloudy, the air moist and smelling of greenery. I took a few steps toward rocks marked with characters I couldn’t decipher. Out of one mossy stone, water gushed, disappearing through a rather unappealing metal grate below. But this was not just any water—according to a local legend, it’s longevity water. It seemed that with the help of Google Maps, I had found the elixir of life. If only Ponce de Léon had been there.
I reached for a cup that had been conveniently left nearby and poured myself some of the water. I took a gulp, waiting for magic to happen. Nothing happened. Unless, that is, some local waterborne bug was already installing itself in my stomach, preparing for an assault. Yet I was certainly no younger and didn’t feel any renewed energy. I put the cup away and got back into the car. I was on my way to see more convincing reasons than miracle water for the outstanding longevity of people who live among the peaks of the Japanese Alps.
The Nagano prefecture, famed across the world for the Winter Olympics of 1998, has in recent years overtaken Okinawa as the Japanese epicenter of longevity. While in the early 2000s there were many publications with the words “Okinawa” and “Diet” in their titles, you might soon start seeing books about the “Nagano Diet.” Without doubt, diet is part of Nagano’s success. Because the area is mountainous, it was hard to grow rice here, and because it’s away from the coast, seafood wasn’t easily available. Instead, the locals ate plenty of vegetables and soy. Today, the people of Nagano still top the nation’s charts when it comes to vegetable consumption—they down 27 percent more greens than does an average Yamada Tarō.
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