Call them a guilty pleasure (or educational and fun) but I’m a big fan of (legitimate) online health quizzes, so when I learned about the Vitality Compass on bluezones.com that borrows from what other cultures can teach us about health, I was all over it.
The premise of the blue zone concept is that there are certain ‘zones’ or regions of the world where people live long and well.
One of those spots, according to the Web site is Sardinia Italy, which boasts a mountain culture that has, proportionally, 20 times as many 100-year-olds as the United States does. Their magic bullet is apparently wine with “staggering levels of antioxidants and a tradition of celebrating old age.”
Adults in Northern Costa Rica have the longest life expectancy in the world. Scientists have apparently found eight factors that make this region one of the longest-lived in the world.
America even has its own blue zone – in Loma Linda, Calif., where researchers think the Seventh Day Adventist church gives the community a well-defined sense of purpose.
After taking the test, which took only a few minutes, here’s what I discovered about my health:
Biological age is 31.9 – (About seven years younger than my actual age.)
Life expectancy is 98.1 (I might be the sole inhabitant of earth)
Healthy Life is 88.4 – which means I should be free of diabetes, cardiovascular disease or cancer up to that point. (Those last 10 years might not be so fun, though)
The questions on the test were the standard questions about eating, exercising, smoking, etc, and not so sure about its predictions but a few things did surprise me. Try it out and share your results. Were the answers what you expected them to be?