Thirteen things to do now to improve your life
From eating broad beans to switching up your stride – try these instant good health hacks.
Health advice moves apace, with scientists producing a seemingly endless stream of evidence showing how you can refine your daily diet and activity to live a healthier and longer life. Not every gain requires an overhaul of your existing lifestyle, as in some cases tiny tweaks can have a dramatic effect on mood, fitness or disease prevention. From small dietary changes to daily health hacks, the following promise to enhance your wellbeing.
1. Eat more broad beans to beat the blues
The key to happiness could come from the humble broad bean, or vicia faba, which according to the Cambridge University researcher and botanist Dr Nadia Mohd-Radzman is rich in protein and iron but, more importantly, the compound levodopa, or L-dopa, which has been linked to improvements in mood. A 2022 study in Nature’s Molecular Psychiatry showed that drugs containing L-dopa can help to treat a condition known as anhedonia, the inability to feel or experience pleasure. “The broad bean could do so much good for people in this country if they could be persuaded to eat it,” Mohd-Radzman says.
2. Go vegan for eight weeks to slow ageing
Going vegan can change the way your body ages, reducing biological ageing by as much as 0.63 years in two months, according to a study published this week in BMC Medicine. It tracked 21 pairs of identical twins, with one of each pair asked to follow a strict vegan diet while the other ate a diet that included meat, eggs and dairy. By the end of the trial the new vegans had decreased the estimated ages of their heart, liver and metabolic systems but had also slowed their biological ageing clock, as measured by DNA methylation, by 0.63 years.
“Anyone who chooses a vegan diet can improve their long-term health in two months, with the most change seen in the first month,” said Christopher Gardner, professor of medicine at Stanford University and a lead author on the paper.
3. Take sodium bicarbonate to boost your workout
The idea that an ingredient used as a raising agent in baking can also boost athletic performance is not new – we first reported on its use in 2008 – but its reputation has reached a high point with the news that many of those at the Paris Olympics are taking it.
“Bicarbonate is found in our blood but loading with supplements of it increases the pH of blood to make it more alkaline,” the sports nutritionist Anita Bean says. “This helps to buffer the hydrogen ions produced during intense exercise that lead to fatigue, allowing you to keep going for a bit longer while also neutralising lactic acid to help you recover faster.”
Dissolving bicarbonate of soda into water as a drink is one option but Bean says that can be harsh on the gut lining and lead to diarrhoea and stomach issues. The most sought-after brand for athletes is the Maurten Bicarb System, launched last year and reportedly used by the 800m medal hopeful Keely Hodgkinson among others. It provides gel sachets of the ingredient to limit tummy issues.
4. Exercise vigorously for a long-lasting brain boost
Any activity helps to prevent dementia, according to the latest report by the Lancet Commission, but evidence for the effects of adding more vigorous workouts from midlife onwards is growing. Researchers from the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute recently assigned a group of people in their sixties and older to either low-intensity workouts of balance and stretching exercises, medium-intensity brisk walking on a treadmill or a high-intensity session of four four-minute bouts of hard running on a treadmill at near-maximum exertion. Each group repeated their prescribed workout three times a week for six months, during which time scientists carried out brain scans and cognition tests. In a five-year follow-up only the HINT workouts boosted cognition and prevented cognitive decline.
“In high-resolution MRI scans of that group, we saw structural and connectivity changes in the hippocampus, the area responsible for learning and memory,” says Dr Daniel Blackmore, a research fellow in ageing and dementia studies. It follows a study last month in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, that showed how people with high blood pressure, who are at a higher risk of dementia, can lower their risk of cognitive impairment by doing vigorous exercise at least once a week.
5. Eat baby carrots three times a week for an antioxidant boost
Carotenoids, the antioxidant compounds that give carrots, squash and sweet potatoes their characteristic colour, and which are converted by the body into vitamin A, are known to prevent inflammation and protect heart health. Last month researchers at the American Society for Nutrition conference reported that eating one serving of baby carrots – equivalent to 8-12 tiny carrots – three times a week was better at boosting carotenoid levels in the body than a supplement alone.
Suresh Mathews, professor of nutrition and dietetics at Samford University, Alabama, found that adults asked to eat the carrots recorded a 10.8 per cent increase in carotenoids in their skin whereas those taking a carotenoid-containing multivitamin saw no changes. Those who consumed both the carrots and the nutrient capsule saw the biggest gains with a 21.6 per cent spike in carotenoid levels. The message? That “the food first philosophy always works”, Matthews says, and that supplements are not always the answer.
6. Cut down on even moderate drinking to protect brain health
We are advised by the NHS to limit alcohol intake to no more than the upper limit of 14 units per week (one unit of alcohol equals 10ml or 8g pure alcohol, about the amount an adult can process in an hour) and, ideally, to spread drinking over three or four days. Yet even that is likely to be too much, with a WHO statement in 2023 suggesting that no level of alcohol is safe when it comes to human health and the latest Lancet Commission suggesting that cutting it out is better than merely cutting down.
An endless stream of research shows that just one drink a day can raise the risk of heart disease and brain shrinkage associated with dementia in women. Dr Richard Piper, CEO of the charity Alcohol Change, says that 18 to 25-year-olds are leading the way, with 30 per cent of them now classed as non-drinkers, whereas midlifers still adhere to the “one more glass won’t harm” approach. “People aged 45 and older are the heaviest drinkers in history,” Piper says. “If you are drinking more than you should, cut down is the advice.”
7. Chop and change your stride to burn more calories
Walking faster or uphill can ramp up energy expenditure and enhance your health but you can also increase calorie output by chopping and changing your stride, according to one new study from the University of Massachusetts. For every 1 per cent rise in step length, there was a 0.7 per cent rise in energy cost of walking, the researchers said. By varying the length of your stride throughout the day you will incrementally – but significantly – help to burn more calories.
8. Try the 5:2 diet to ward off type 2 diabetes
It’s best known as a weight-loss diet but the 5:2 intermittent fasting approach, in which calorie intake is cut to 500 for women and 600 for men for two days a week, and you can eat what you like (within reason) on the other five, has now been shown to bring additional health gains.
In June German researchers showed that the approach, popularised by Dr Michael Mosley, protects against liver inflammation and disease, and last month a study in Jama Network Open reported that it helped to slow type 2 diabetes in its tracks. After four months, participants on the 5:2 diet fared better than those on diabetes medication, with better blood-sugar control and faster weight loss than those on the medication. The 5:2 diet “may serve as an initial lifestyle intervention for patients with type 2 diabetes, providing an alternative to the use of metformin and empagliflozin medications”, write the scientists from China.
9. Stop smoking to reduce your risk of dementia
Unsurprisingly smoking is ranked highly as one of the modifiable risk factors for dementia in the latest Lancet Commission report. Tobacco smoke is known to cause oxidative stress that damages cells in the body and might be connected to the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. It also damages the structure of blood vessels, reduces circulation of blood flow to the brain and raises the risk of stroke and hypertension, which are both linked to dementia. The charity Alzheimer’s Research UK cites a large study that found people who smoke heavily in midlife more than double their risk of developing dementia two decades on, and a review of 37 research studies showed smokers were 30 per cent more likely to develop dementia and 40 per cent more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than people who had never smoked. Time to stub it out.
10. Walk briskly (or do heel drops) to build your bones
The faster you walk – 100 steps a minute is generally accepted to be a brisk pace – the better it is for your bones, particularly those of the femoral neck in the hip joint that are particularly prone to fracture as we age. For a recent study in the journal Bone, Finnish researchers tracked 299 older adults as they took part in 12 months of activities designed to test the effect of muscle strength, endurance, balance and flexibility training on bone health. Throughout the year the team used Dexa scans to check changes to bone density of participants and found that, while all moderate and intense activity reduced the decline in bone density of the hip joint, brisk walking, stair climbing and jumping was associated with better preservation of bone mineral density. “Jumping-like impacts can also be achieved without the actual jumping by first raising up on your tiptoes and then dropping down onto your heels,” suggested Tuuli Suominen, a researcher at the University of Jyvaskyla and one of the authors.
11. Climb five flights of stairs daily
You don’t need a gym to improve your fitness, and Dr Sophie Paddock, a researcher at the University of East Anglia and Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital Foundation Trust, recently told the European Society of Cardiology that daily stair climbing will make a significant difference. In her review, which involved 480,000 participants, she found stair climbing to be associated with a 24 per cent lower risk of dying from any cause and a 39 per cent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. At least five flights a day is a start – that was shown to cut heart disease by one fifth in a study in Atherosclerosis journal.
12. Stand on one leg for ten seconds every day
Test your balance by timing how long you can hold a one-legged balance on each side while keeping arms at your sides and gaze fixed straight ahead. If you are middle-aged or older and wobble after less than ten seconds, your risk of dying from any cause within the next decade almost doubles according to a recent study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. In the study by the Clinimex exercise medicine clinic in Rio de Janeiro and the Bristol Medical School, participants were allowed three attempts. Balance wanes in later life but can be maintained with practice: standing on one leg while brushing your teeth every day, progressing to doing so with eyes closed, is the simplest way to improve it.
13. Drink two to three cups of coffee a day
Coffee is packed with healthy antioxidants that could extend your life, according to a 12.5-year study of 450,000 healthy middle-aged adults in the UK in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. All types of coffee helped drinkers to live longer compared with abstainers, and the biggest benefits came from two to three cups a day. Freshly ground coffee had the strongest effect, reducing risk of early death by 27 per cent but decaffeinated was life-enhancing (14 per cent reduced risk) and even instant coffee (11 per cent) had a positive effect. “Drinking modest amounts of coffee of all types should not be discouraged but can be enjoyed as a heart-healthy behaviour,” the researchers said.
The Times
