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- Mary Ní Lochlainn researches the habits that lead to better health in older age.
- She incorporates some of these habits into her own life to be as healthy as possible as she ages.
- She does strength training, takes vitamin D, and does intermittent fasting.
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A researcher who studies aging shared what she does to help her stay healthy as she grows older.
Mary Ní Lochlainn, a researcher in geriatric medicine at King’s College London, told Business Insider that developing certain healthy habits when you’re young can help maintain your health and strength into older age.
“People think ‘I’ll do all of that later,’ but actually, it’s much better to just be doing it now,” she said, because people are more likely to maintain healthy behaviors throughout their lives if they start early.
As people live longer, more products and services are popping up that promise better health and longevity. Some of these, such as the buzzy plasma exchange procedure, can cost tens of thousands of dollars. But the habits that Ní Lochlainn, 34, thinks are most important for healthy aging aren’t expensive.
Ní Lochlainn, who has degrees in medicine from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD in geriatric medicine from Kings College London, shared some of the habits that she has incorporated into her own life with BI.
Resistance training as well as cardio
Ní Lochlainn cycles 10 kilometers to and from work every day and takes tennis lessons weekly, as well as resistance training once a week for an hour with a personal trainer.
While aerobic exercise, such as cycling, is great for your cardiovascular system “resistance training is one of the best things you can do for healthy aging,” she said.
We start to lose muscle mass in our 30s, and maintaining it into older age helps to prevent falls and frailty. It’s important to build up muscle mass when you’re younger so you have less to lose as you age, she said.
This chimes with the research: a 2022 study on 99,713 men and women aged between 55 to 74 by researchers at the National Cancer Institute found that participants who did resistance training once or twice a week on top of cardio had 41% lower mortality rates than sedentary participants over a seven to 10 year follow up period.
Taking vitamin D
Vitamin D is important for bone health and preventing osteoporosis, Ní Lochlainn said, but it is “one of those things that people forget about until they get old.”
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She takes vitamin D supplements because people in the UK, where she lives, don’t tend to get enough. This is the case in the US, too — according to the Office of Dietary Supplements, one in four Americans don’t get enough vitamin D.
The ODS recommends that adults between ages 19 and 70 get 15 micrograms of the vitamin every day, whether that’s from supplements, exposure to the sun, or foods such as milk, cereals, and fatty fish.
Ní Lochlainn takes vitamin D.
Science Photo Library/Getty Images
Intermittent fasting
Ní Lochlainn does intermittent fasting by not eating between her dinner and her breakfast in the late morning.
She said the evidence for it being helpful for longevity is “fairly convincing.”
Evidence for the benefits of intermittent fasting comes from animal studies that have suggested that it can extend lifespans in rodents, worms, fish, and monkeys, BI previously reported. But while experts think that it helps reduce mindless eating, there’s not enough evidence to confirm it is longevity-boosting for humans.
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