PLANTING THE SEEDS FOR HEALTHY EATING

Picky eating has long frustrated parents. You want your child to eat healthy foods, but he or she won’t touch anything other than pizza, french fries, and chicken nuggets. How can you turn the tide?

Gardening is a great option. Studies show that it’s not just adults who eat healthier when they grow their own food: Kids who get involved in the growing process are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables than their peers who don’t garden. They’re also more apt to give new foods a try.

Having a hand in growing an unfamiliar food makes it exciting, not scary, and the magic of watching a fruit or vegetable grow from seed to plant renders it almost irresistible.

I can attest to this: My daughter, Diana, grew up with a large garden and from a young age would try any vegetable put in front of her. She has become a conscious eater and skilled cook.

I encourage you to involve your children in your garden, and to take the opportunity to teach them about health and nutrition in the process.

pastime contributes to my overall well-being. Now, science bears this out. A growing body of evidence suggests that there’s a consistent relationship between having hobbies and enjoying good health—even that engaging in a hobby may help us live longer.

For one recent study, Japanese researchers examined data from more than 4,000 elderly men and women to determine whether having hobbies and a purpose in life had an impact on their ability to perform daily activities, as well as on their mortality risk. They found that people who didn’t have hobbies or feel a purpose in life—a concept known as ikigai in Japanese—were significantly more likely to experience a decline in everyday activities and were at an increased risk of dying earlier than their peers.

Other research continues to link specific hobbies with a wealth of health benefits. Unsurprisingly, gardening is among them. For example, a survey of adults age 65 and older that examined the effects of leisure-time activities on well-being found that more than 84 percent of gardeners said they had plans for the future, compared with 68 percent of people who didn’t garden. Gardeners were also less likely to say they felt old and tired, to report being very physically active

(gardening is a great form of exercise; more at right), to say they ate more fruits and vegetables, and to describe their health as either very good or excellent.

As you can see, gardening is far from a trivial pursuit: It can help lift your mood, engage your mind, enhance your sense of purpose, and boost the likelihood that your life will be long and vibrant.

The Greatness Of The Great Outdoors

One specific reason a gardening hobby may have such a positive impact on your outlook: It happens outside. There’s no doubt that just being outdoors is good for the psyche. The sunshine, fresh air, and other natural elements all help improve mood.

Now, science suggests that exposure to “green space,” such as trees, plants, and grass, may also have positive effects on our physical health. Using data from more than 100,000 women in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study, researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, mapped the locations of participants’ homes. They employed satellite imagery technology to determine the level of vegetation within 250 meters and 1,250 meters

Fast Fact

Gardening is a well-rounded form of physical activity. In fact, the digging, lifting, carrying, pushing, and pulling it requires—all aerobic exercises—can help you burn between 200 and 400 calories per hour.

of those locations. Then they followed the women from 2000 to 2008, tracking changes in vegetation as well as any participant deaths.

By the end of the study, 8,604 women had died. The researchers found lower mortality rates in women whose homes were surrounded by trees and plants. When they compared women in the areas with the highest level of greenness to women in the lowest, they found a 41 percent lower death rate from kidney disease, 34 percent lower death rate from respiratory disease, and 13 percent lower death rate from cancer in the greenest areas.

Some might object that the greenest areas are also likely to be the wealthiest, and it was more money, not more trees and plants, that conferred longer life. But the researchers found that the green health benefit was there even when median neighborhood income was taken into account. In other words, low-income neighborhoods with more greenery were associated with longer life spans than low-income neighborhoods with fewer green vistas, and the same association was found within middle- and upperincome areas.

Even if you have a small yard where grass just doesn’t grow or no lawn and only a deck in the middle of the city, you can garden—and you can surround yourself with green for great health benefits.