Attending church services may open the door to eternal life—but it will also extend your life on Earth more than diet or exercise, according to the foremost expert on global longevity.
Don Buettner, who won three Emmy Awards for his groundbreaking 2023 documentary “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones,” revealed the deep benefits that faith in God renders to those who want to live a long and prosperous life. Although America faces an epidemic of chronic diseases, “only about 20% of how long you live is dictated by your genes,” he explained. “A healthy lifestyle incorporating diet, exercise, and stress management means the average person can live “12 more years in good health.”
But the statistics he shared proved that an active faith in God, including weekly church attendance, had potentially the biggest impact on extending earthly life.
Buettner’s documentary investigated regions in the world known for having the longest average lifespan. Researchers interviewed 263 centenarians—people who had lived to the age of 100—and found all but five “belonged to some faith-based community.”
The healthiest elderly had a common characteristic: “having a faith. We know people who go to church and show up four times per month are living four to 14 years longer than people who aren’t.”
That number dwarfed other, more intuitive lifehacks, including regular exercise and diet. “For a 20-year-old, if you move away from the standard American diet towards a Blue Zone diet—which is to say whole food, plant-based—it’s worth about 10 years of extra life expectancy, and for a 60-year-old, it’s still worth about six years,” he said.
One food, particularly, stood out above others: beans. “If you’re eating a cup of beans a day, it’s worth about four extra years of life expectancy over getting your protein from less healthy sources,” he said, as he raved about minestrone soup. “Every time that you mix a grain with a bean, they come together, they make a whole protein. … These are cheap foods, they’re shelf stable, and every American can afford them.”
Anyone can benefit from simple exercise, such as walking. “If you have zero physical activity in your life, you can raise your life expectancy three years if you just walk 20 minutes a day,” Buettner said.
Strong family relationships also put years in your life. Centenaries agree on “putting family first, keeping your aging parents nearby, investing in your partner, investing in your children,” he continued. “People who are in a committed relationship are living anywhere from two to six years longer than people who are alone in life.”
If you’re keeping track, you can add three years to your life with exercise, four years by eating beans, six years by being in a committed relationship, 6-10 years by eating a whole foods and plant-based diet, and 7-14 years by going to church every week.
Another aspect of church life that may lengthen your life is stress management. A key factor in living to 100 is “downshifting: either through prayer, meditation, simply expressing gratitude before a meal.” Regular prayer incorporates “making sure our day has certain times where we lower the stress of the human condition, lower inflammation,” said Buettner, a 2011 fellow at National Geographic and muti-time grant awardee.
The study is but one of many that have found physical, mental, and psychological benefits of faith, Bible reading, and church attendance:
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report in March 2023 stating that an epidemic of loneliness has produced health impacts “even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.” Americans “health may be undermined” by their declining participation in “[r]eligious or faith-based groups.”
Regular “religious practice has significant effects” in reducing the faithful’s odds of dying from suicides, drug poisonings, and alcoholic liver disease, according to a 2023 study.
“Religious Americans tend to believe their life is meaningful more often than do those who are not religious,” found a 2023 study. Americans who believe in God and value marriage are more likely to be “very happy” than isolated secularists, according to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll taken last March. While only a thin sliver of Americans (12%) consider themselves “very happy,” 68% of the happiest people surveyed say they believe in God.
Women who attend church at least once a week had a 68% lower chance of dying a death of despair than non-churchgoers; men who go to church frequently lower their risk by one-third, according to a 2020 Harvard study.
Americans who attended religious services regularly were 44% more likely to say they were “very happy” than the religiously inactive, concluded a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.
A 2017 study found church attendance significantly lowers the body’s reaction to stress and cuts the worshiper’s chance of dying in half. “More frequent churchgoers (more than once a week) had a 55% reduction of all-cause mortality risk compared with non-churchgoers,” reported the study.