Dan Buettner is a superexplorer and world record-holding endurance athlete. One of his feats was biking 15,500 miles from Alaska through Argentina. He has also cycled through Africa and the Soviet Union.
Along the way Buettner stumbled on pockets of people with amazingly long life spans. Teaming up with National Geographic, Buettner began an organized search through the world for groups with exceptional longevity. He identified five hot spots where people regularly live to be 100 years old with almost no dementia, depression and anxiety and with much lower incidence of the diseases that kill most first-world people — cancer, pulmonary and heart disease, diabetes and complications of obesity. Buettner called these areas “Blue Zones,” a demographic term denoting places where people lead exceptionally long and healthy lives. The five Blue Zones are on the island of Ikaria, Greece; the Sardinian mountains in Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica, and Loma Linda, California, among the Seventh-day Adventists.
The factors common to Blue Zone people are stated in Buettner’s Power 9 principles, including strong family and social ties, a lifestyle of frequent moderate physical activity, a simple “plant slant” diet rich in legumes, nuts and soy or whole grains, with little meat and salt. Smoking, sugar and chronic unresolved stress are no-nos.
In a speech I heard in San Diego last year, Buettner told about another especially powerful common factor in longevity. He pointed out that it is daunting for medical science to add any meaningful time to broad-based longevity. Adding six months takes something of a medical miracle. But religiously active people add an astonishing four to 14 years of quality living by attending religious services four times a month. U.S. life expectancy is currently 76 for males and 81 for females. Churchgoers may beat those terms by a mile.
Melissa Binder of The Oregonian recently highlighted an extensive study of 9,000 older Europeans by the London School of Economics and Netherlands' Erasmus Medical Center. Their four-year study gauged the effect of several factors on the subjects’ mental health: volunteering and charitable work, sports, activity in political or social organizations, taking educational courses and participating in religious organizations. The only activity to provide a lasting positive influence on mental health was religious involvement. Over time, the other activities provided either no positive benefit or even created a negative influence on mental health.
Science tells us that religion and going to church make people happier, healthier and more purposeful. Certainly the social dimension of religion is influential. But there is much more to it. Faith lifts our view above the paltry affairs of men. Looking to God gives hope of a better life — here and hereafter. Faith pulls one out of oneself.
My faith is a comprehensive and defining influence on my life. It shapes my worldview. It provides guideposts and guard rails to direct my life’s course. Perhaps most importantly, it gives me the unmatched pattern of how to regard people and how to treat them. Every serious Christian agrees to choose kindness over harshness, forgiveness over anger, humility over ego, amity over enmity, and selflessness instead of selfishness. Faith teaches me that each man is my brother, each woman my sister. The totality of these religiously created influences creates a host of salutary effects.
All these positives I knew. What I didn’t know is that believers are likely to enjoy meaningfully longer and better-quality life by actively pursuing faith and religion.
Of course, not all religious people escape earlier mortality. Other harmful lifestyle behaviors can cancel out the “faith dividend.” Probability is not destiny. In general, however, members of the churchgoing population will generally prolong their lives by four to 14 enjoyable and productive years.
Greg Bell is the former lieutenant governor of Utah and the current president and CEO of the Utah Hospital Association.