Parent Time

While you have a very good chance of celebrating your 80th birthday, it’s debatable whether you’ll spend it cruising the Caymans or wheeling through a nursing home. Canadian women now live on average to the amazing age of 82, but the age to which they’re living without disease and disability — called active life expectancy — is just 70.

Turns out the majority of the illnesses that drag us down when we’re elderly are preventable. “Your health when you get older is a product of what you do earlier in life,” says Arlene Bierman, a doctor specializing in women’s health at the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital. So though that 80th birthday seems a way off, here’s what you can do now to make it a happy one.

1. Be Social
“Making time for your friends protects your health as you get older,” says Bierman. There’s solid medical proof that people who have strong social circles live longer and better. Great friends help lower your blood pressure, cholesterol and heart rate. The Harvard Nurses’ Health Study even concluded that having no friends was as detrimental to your health as smoking or being overweight.

No one knows for sure why friends are so powerful health-wise. They might lower your stress level, give you more word-of-mouth health advice or keep your brain’s pathways more active.

Getting started: Nothing wrong with talking on the phone, if that’s all you have time for. Or keep your social network alive with a monthly girls’ night out or brunch. If you want to add even more years to your active life, join up with a buddy for regular walks or visits to the gym and get social while you get fit. (See The Power of Pals.)

Originally published in Today's Parent, February 2006