Written by Kathryn Savage

	Two Costa Rican elders we met on our BlueZones expedition to the Nicoya peninsula.

Friendship is a wonderful part of life at any age, and having friends by your side, especially in old age, may help you live longer!

Ok, a nursing home or retirement community is not the golden age answer to the college dorm experience. There are no keggers and hot hookups. I mean, retirement is not a time we generally associate with loads of fun, with social bonding.

But there is something about the nature of community living that we can all get behind. Studies suggest that community building and bonding with friends, especially in old age, may lead to a longer life.

Written by Kathryn Savage

Ever wish you could live past 100 in the most sustainable, environmentally friendly way?
Ever lust for this while driving to work, talking on your cell phone, and drinking a vanilla latte from Starbucks? Maybe it’s time to stop wishing and start living, sustainably that is. A good place to start is to change your diet, that’s right, your diet, and learn how to consume less. What and how we eat has a huge affect on our longevity and the longevity of the planet. The golden rule is actually pretty simple: eat green.

Green, leafy, longevity!
A diet rich in leafy greens like romaine lettuce, kale, spinach and avocado is a healthy way to eat a low calorie, high fiber diet packed with monounsaturated fatty acids and antioxidant substances.

Eat green close to home.
Buying local and organic leafy veggies is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint by supporting the sustainable farmers near you. Better yet, ride your bike to the nearest coop or farmers market, and the only emission you’ll be giving off is sweat and calories!

Give up the frappe and the quit the bottle!
We’ve all seen the commercials by now, the one with the water bottle on the desk? Some voice over says “one hour in a meeting, forever in a landfill?” Well it’s true. If you must, can it. Aluminum cans can be recycled very easily.

Get an organic-buzz on.
A full range of organic wines, beers and spirits are more readily available now than ever before. My organic drink of the week? Prairie Organic Vodka.
It's from Minnesota like me dontcha know, and it's gooooood...

Eat less
Okinawan centenarians remind themselves before every meal to eat until they are 80 percent full. Consuming less is an important factor for living a long healthy life. Preparing less food cuts down on packaging, transportation costs and emissions and waistlines. I know it’s hard but try this, eat meat half as much this week as you usually would, and eat at home more often. You’ll be increasing your nutrition count, and decreasing your carbon footprint one Boca burger and fresh green salad at a time!

Written by Michelle Albert

You are confronted with a stressful situation, so what do you do? Fight or flight, right? Not if you're a woman, according to new research. Women’s bodies, when under stress, release a hormone (oxytocin) that seems to encourage them to nurture friendships and family. Men don’t receive the same positive effects, mainly because of how the testosterone in their bodies. (It’s more complicated than this, of course.)

The scientists coined a term for this -- the “friend and befriend” response -- and they suggest it has important relevance for women’s health. Why? Studies show that friendships foster long life by lowering blood pressure, cholesterol, and heart rate. So don’t feel bad the next time a stressful situation sends you to a friend for camaraderie. In fact, seek friends out when times get tough.

Source: http://www.pwn.org/content.asp?ID=1564&I=2548

Written by Siddarth Saikia

In the third part of our From the Experts series, we question Robert N. Butler, M.D., President and CEO of the International Longevity Center and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Why Survive? Being Old in America, about how much do vitamin and omega-3 fatty acid supplements help increase longevity.

Today's Questions:

Are vitamins good for us?

Robert Butler:

"Of course, you should maintain your basic vitamin requirements. But you shouldn't get carried away. People sometimes recommend what I think of as excess vitamin D, which would be more than 400 IU (International Units) per day. If you get too high a dose, you're going to get nausea, vomiting. With too much calcium, you can get brain confusion, intellectual confusion, and cardiac arrhythmias. Vitamin A, too, has its problems. Vitamin E was under study by the National Institutes on Aging, in hope that it would prove to be very valuable on Alzheimer's disease. But it was not. So I think, like so many things in nature, it's a matter of amount, what might be called proportionality, or just plain wisdom. Grandmothers used to think if a multivitamin was good for their grandchild, then more of it would be even better, but that's just not true, unfortunately.

So vitamin supplements are best achieved by eating 6 to 9 fruits and vegetables a day. Very few people do that, so probably the cheapest, least expensive multivitamin you can buy is not a bad idea. If you're an older man, you should not have it with iron, because iron accumulates in the heart and there's a condition called hemociterosis. There are vitamin supplements for men on the market that do not have iron.