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No one knows just how long they're going to live, but there are things that you can do to help prolong your given lifespan, like following a healthy diet and living an active lifestyle. There are also places you can live where you're more likely to live longer. The Blue Zones, as they're referred to, are Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece and Loma Linda, California.

"The Blue Zones refer to five areas of the world where longevity rates are longer than the average human lifespan," says registered dietitian Sarah Schlichter."Specifically, people reach age 100 at 10 times greater rates than in the United States."

Maybe it's some sort of magic that leads people in these five locations throughout the world to live longer lives, but it's more likely that they follow active lifestyles and make healthy dietary choices.

"While genetics likely account for some of this, this is largely believed to be due to their dietary and lifestyle habits," says Schlichter.

While we can't all move to one of the Blue Zones, we can follow some of their eating habits to see what they do and what they never do. Here are some of the best breakfast habits to follow if you want to live like the world's oldest people.

This one seems like a no-brainer, but sometimes it can be hard to pass up an extra serving of food if you're eating a really delicious meal, even if you already feel full. This isn't the best practice to follow if you're trying to live the longest life possible, as those who live in the Blue Zones of the world, where people live the longest, rarely tend to continue eating meals after they begin to feel full.

"People in the Blue Zones are believed to follow the Confucian mantra of stopping eating when they feel 80 percent full," says Schlichter. "Of course, to do this, they are likely eating regular, balanced meals and not allowing themselves to get too hungry either."

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You've definitely heard it before: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. People who live in the Blue Zones, who are 10 times more likely to live to 100 than residents of the United States, take that to heart.

According to Schlichter,"[people in the Blue Zones] also allegedly eat their smallest meal late in the afternoon or early evening, which is counterintuitive to the ways that many Americans eat."

Plant-based diets are rising in popularity throughout the country, making this habit a bit easier to follow. The diet consists of eating mostly, or entirely, foods made from plants, which still leaves plenty of options for breakfast, like whole-wheat pancakes or sheet-pan veggies.

"A cornerstone of the Blue Zones diet is including many fruits, veggies, sweet potatoes, nuts, beans, lentils and legumes daily," Schlichter says.

That doesn't mean that you have to go completely vegan, as the world's oldest people also eat meat and dairy, although at far lower levels than in the United States.

"They do eat meat, but about once a week, and they stick to a 3-4 oz serving size. They do encourage eating fish daily," Schlichter says.

It's hard to cut out sugar entirely, as it's naturally found in many foods, including an abundance of fruits. But if you want to live like the world's oldest people, it's important to not eat excess sugars that are found in a majority of junk foods.6254a4d1642c605c54bf1cab17d50f1e

"Many Americans know we should reduce added sugars but don't know where to start," Schlichter says. "In many of the Blue Zone areas, they have less access to added sugars so it's an easier task. Their traditional foods don't have added sugars, except maybe the honey they add to their tea."

She adds that the world's oldest people do consume sugar, but it's not a regular occurrence and it's not added into every meal that they eat.

"People in the Blue Zones consume sugar intentionally, not by habit," Schlichter says.

For the most part, residents in the world's Blue Zones follow very healthy diets, but that's not because they feel they're being forced to follow a certain diet, or because they're restricting themselves from eating what they really want. Instead, they celebrate the food that they're eating in moderation, rather than banning themselves from eating certain foods.

"In the Blue Zones, they don't worry about counting calories or reading food labels," Schlichter says. "They eat intuitively from the land and listen to their bodies, rather than external signals of the diet culture around them."

When you're trying to emulate the world's oldest people while making breakfast, you should use ingredients that you enjoy in moderation, and enjoy your breakfast rather than being concerned about what diet you should be following.

"Here in the US, we are bombarded with new diets all the time, and reasons why we should eat one way, or cut out foods entirely," Schlichter says.

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5 Breakfast Habits to Live Like the World's Oldest People Eat This Not That - Eat This, Not That

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Insecticide resistant Anopheles gambiae have enhanced longevity but reduced reproductive fitness and a longer first gonotrophic cycle | Scientific...

Science has left no field to alter and make it human-friendly. Medicine, architecture, teaching, cooking, cosmeticsevery aspect is easy to blend into our modern high-tech lives. Nowadays, even reversing the process of aging is possible.

Every individual has his/her own ideas about life, aging, and death. Some find it a thing to cherish, an experience, a vital path that is to be traversed to reach the final destination, death. Some believe it as a sign, a time in life where you introspect your position in your life, your journey that has completed many stages of life and youre about to go through the last one. Some believe that aging is as crucial as going through the adolescent phase, teen life, and adult stage.

An extract from the book Ikigai reads:

At 80 I am still a childWhen I come to see you at 90Send me away to wait until Im 100The older, the stronger.

The other set of population finds aging as the root cause of many diseases. People feel they should be able to live longer in a happy and healthy state along with their partner or companion and continue doing what they love. They find the notion tempting to live a life that would undo their disorders, a life that will offer a fair chance to keep exploring. According to National Geographic reporter Dan Buettner, having a purpose in life is so important in Japanese culture that the idea of retirement simply doesnt exist there. People never really grow cold towards doing what they love and they want to continue it forever. Aging, they believe, makes people dependent on others.

But is delaying or stopping aging even possible? According to nutritionists and fitness coaches all over the world, regular exercise and keeping a balanced diet is the only key to delaying aging. But as the world is progressing, scientists have come up with ways to delay, stop, and even reverse aging with the help of biotechnology and gene therapy. Making changes up to the microscopic level is speculated to be the ultimate solution to a disease-free long life and eternal youth.

Also read: Heres a guide to smart workouts and good health

Telomeres are sections of our DNA that are present at the edges. As we age the length of these telomeres drops. A laboratory experiment by the team of Maria Blasco in the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre was held on mice that increased the length of telomeres in them. This resulted in increasing longevity by up to 20 per cent. Although this theory has visible results, it also causes cancer in organisms.

Other scientists believe that removing senescent cells from our bodies may transform aging. Senescent cells are those cells that have stopped dividing in our body. This was also performed on mice in an experiment at Unity Biotechnology Centre that resulted in not only an increase in the life span but also reduced heart diseases, cataracts, arthritis, and other diseases related to aging.

However, it is not easy to cause mutations in such a complex body organization as that of a human. Nevertheless, we are not far away from what now seems magical to soon be an ordinary operation done by humans.

The author is a student at Mount Carmel school, New Delhi. Views are personal

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There may be a way to stop or delay aging. But science is divided - ThePrint

A taxidermied Cumulina holds a block of toy cheese. Cade Martin

It was a sad day in the department of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. On May 5, 2000, an elderly mouse named Cumulina, whose birth had captured international headlines, died of natural causes. She was special, Ryuzo Yanagimachi, the laboratorys principal investigator, said at the time.

Born on October 3, 1997, Cumulina was the first successfully cloned mouse and the second mammal ever cloned from an adult cell. She was also the forerunner of a technique that would establish once and for all that the long-awaited possibility of cloning animals could be readily accomplished. Her birth came just 15 months after the birth of Dolly the Sheep, the worlds first mammal cloned from an adult cell, had shocked scientists and the public alike, raising ethical questions in some quarters about the science fiction-like possibility of human cloning while also inspiring worldwide hopes of coming breakthroughs in biomedicine.

Dollys success proved complicated, though; of the 277 embryos her stewards at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh cloned in 1996, Dolly was the only one born. The teams method involved removing the nucleus from a Scottish Blackface sheeps egg cell and electroshocking it with a mammary gland cell from a Finn Dorset sheep to enable the two to fuse. They then implanted this unusual egg cellwhich contained a full complement of DNA but had never been fertilizedinto a ewe, who brought it to term.

The Roslin scientists would produce two more cloned ewes in 1997 using a similar technique. But in the meantime, Teruhiko Wakayama, one of Yanagimachis postdoctoral researchers in Hawaii, came up with another idea.

Wakayama had been galvanized by news of Dollys birth, and spent free time in the lab to try to create a mouse clone. He removed nuclei from egg cells and replaced them by injecting nuclei taken from adult mouse cumulus cells, which normally play a role in egg maturation. He then implanted these special eggs into surrogate female mice to see whether they would successfully give birth.

After a number of failed attempts in the fall of 1997, Wakayama and Yanagimachi produced a stunning result: a healthy female mouse pup. He named her Cumulina, after the cells he had used to create her. Celebrated internationally for his achievement, Wakayama went on to become a professor at the University of Yamanashi in Japan and Yanagimachi founded the Institute for Biogenesis Research at the University of Hawaii.

In the year after Cumulinas birth, Wakayama and Yanagimachi made 84 more cloned mice, putting to rest lingering skepticism over whether cloning was practicable. Wakayamas method proved more efficient than the one the Roslin scientists had used to produce Dolly. Cumulina truly represented a breakthrough in the cloning technique, says W. Steven Ward, director of the University of Hawaiis Institute for Biogenesis Research.

So far scientists have cloned more than 20 types of animals. Mice created through the nuclear transfer method that was used to make Cumulina are now the most abundant cloned animals in the world. Nonetheless, some of the more spectacular scenarios from the 1990s about cloning have not come true. Researchers still have not managed, for example, to replace a dying persons failing organ with a new one generated from cloned cells. But the early work that produced Dolly, Cumulina and other cloned animals has contributed to advances in stem-cell technologies that are now helping scientists explore regenerative medicine, investigate the underpinnings of diseases ranging from leukemia to diabetes and research new pharmaceuticals.

Laboratory mice typically dont reach old age, but Yanagimachis crew made every effort to ensure Cumulinas longevity. They even threw birthday parties for her. She was a pretty pampered mouse, says Kristen Frederick-Frost, curator of modern science at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Cumulina lived well past age 2, the equivalent of over 90 in human years. After she died, Yanagimachi preserved her in a freezer until a local high school teacher offered to taxidermy her body. The teacher posed Cumulina holding a block of fake cheese, and the stuffed mouse sat on display in Yanagimachis lab for a couple of years before being relegated to a closet. In 2004, she barely escaped being washed away in a flood, and has since spent most of her time in storage.

Yanagimachi retired in 2005, and last year, Ward contacted curators at the National Museum of American History. The decision to accept Cumulina was a no-brainer, Frederick-Frost says. The collection also includes OncoMouse, the worlds first patented genetically modified animal, who, along with his successors, was used for cancer research.

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Why the Cumulina Mouse Is Headed to the Smithsonian | At the Smithsonian - Smithsonian Magazine

Christianity is often regarded as a staunch opponent of veganism after all, most Christian denominations are highly carnivorous in their dietary ethics. Many proclaim liberty to consume animal flesh as they assume animals to be a gift created for food by God.

The Bibles depiction of human-animal relations has been used to justify this position. According to the book of Genesis (1:26), God entrusted humans with dominion over the animal kingdom. For centuries, this text was used to justify slaughter and meat consumption by many who understood it to imply rulership.

However, there have been some contemporary challenges to this interpretation. Several Christian communities teach that instead of ruling and dominating, humans should think of themselves as having stewardship over the planet and every creature. Among these is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which highlights that right next to the Bibles text on dominion is a passage saying that God created plants, seeds and fruits to be human food, and therefore human diets should be entirely plant-based (Genesis 1:29).

I am fascinated by this topic as I am both an Adventist community member and an academic who researches food and sustainability in spiritual communities. So heres why Adventists came to be often entirely plant-based or vegetarian, and what others might be able to learn from them. How do they challenge and impact dietary choice across the world, and what more could they do?

First registered in the US in 1863, the Seventh-day Adventist Church today claims more than 20 million members worldwide across nearly 100,000 different churches. Through its history, the church has paved the way in the promotion of meat-free lifestyles.

Founding member and prolific writer Ellen White encouraged the community to abstain from animal products to maintain good health. Although her focus was on human health and wellbeing, her statements about compassion towards animals as sentient beings were almost unprecedented at the time. For example, she wrote in a 1905 book chapter titled Reasons for Discarding Flesh Foods:

[The animals] manifest sympathy and tenderness toward their companions in suffering. Many animals show an affection for those who have charge of them, far superior to the affection shown by some of the human race. They form attachments for man which are not broken without great suffering to them. What man with a human heart, who has ever cared for domestic animals, could look into their eyes, so full of confidence and affection, and willingly give them over to the butchers knife? How could he devour their flesh as a sweet morsel?

Since the 19th century, Seventh-day Adventists have established hospitals, educational institutions and lifestyle centres worldwide. Historical health businesses such as Kelloggs (cornflakes were first developed for patients at an Adventist-run sanitorium), Loma Linda Foods, Worthington Foods and Granovita were formed. Although not mandatory, a vegetarian or entirely plant-based diet is followed by many of its members, making the community a special sampling target for medical research.

A longevity study conducted by the churchs associated university and published in 2001 showed that Seventh-day Adventists live around six years longer than the average citizen (for specifically vegetarian Adventist males, its almost a decade). Demographers have even identified Loma Linda, a small city in California where about a third of the population is Adventist, as one of five so-called blue zones of the world where people live the longest. Many Adventist centenarians living in the town testify to the benefits of a plant-based diet among other lifestyle practices related to prayer, sports or work.

Apart from the focus on personal health, the churchs official statements on environmental protection talk about the threats caused by emissions of destructive gasses and the depletion of non-renewable resources. Leaders of the church call for respect of creation, restraint in the use of the worlds resources, reevaluation of ones needs, and reaffirmation of the dignity of created life.

However, despite these occasional messages, it seems that Adventists themselves still most commonly cite human interests as their reason for plant-based diets. I recently conducted a pilot study involving 12 health professionals employed by the worldwide church. The following results are due to be published in a peer-reviewed journal later in 2022.

I showed all these people a photograph of a pig with her piglets confined in a tight cage in which she could hardly turn around. Asked to express their diet-related opinion by reflecting on the photo, ten of the 12 solely mentioned health-related concerns about eating such an animal, while only one referenced animal compassion and another one environmental problems. These proportions also appear to reflect the churchs publications and online communication channels relating to diet and lifestyle.

So while there may be room to learn from Seventh-day Adventists if youre aiming for a longer life, Adventists themselves could also extend their sphere of interest and influence to include animal compassion and environmental concerns into their communication about a meat-free lifestyle. By fostering conversations from a wider range of perspectives, plant-based practitioners could attract a higher number of friends and followers willing to benefit people, animals and planet all at once.

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Why Seventh-day Adventists are so often vegan or vegetarian - The Conversation Indonesia