National Geographic Magazine - UK January 2023

AS I WRITE, it’s one year to the day since my father died, at the age of 79. When I was growing up, my dad was my role model, my best friend, my teacher, my confidant. His passing happened quickly, a bout of pneumonia turning within days into systemic organ failure. It shook me. My family has been blessed with some good longevity—I knew my father’s grandparents, who lived to nearly a hundred, and both my mother’s parents lived well into their 90s—so perhaps I took it for granted that my dad had more time too. Science has made tremendous progress in helping us live longer. Since the dawn of the 20th century, human life expectancy has more than doubled, but for much of that time, research and medical advances…

IN 1929, A TEAM carrying a sun compass and a National Geographic Society flag soared above the Antarctic wilderness in an extraordinary scientific feat. Explorer Richard E. Byrd led the perilous first flight over the South Pole, and photographed at least 150,000 square miles of Antarctica along the way. Nearly a century later, glaciologist and National Geographic Explorer Alison Criscitiello embarked on her own arduous journey, harnessing technology in grueling conditions to unlock secrets of the Earth’s past and insights about today’s climate challenges. She and her team ascended Canada’s highest peak and excavated an ice core containing perhaps 30,000 years of data, as part of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Mount Logan Expedition. The feat broke barriers for women and science: “No deep ice core … has…

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE…

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, “fly on the wall” was Esther Ruth Mbabazi’s approach to photography. Be invisible. Don’t influence the scene. Then, in 2019, the 28-year-old Ugandan had an opportunity to do just the opposite. That’s when Mbabazi learned of the Gulu Women With Disabilities Union, a vocational and social center in a small city in Uganda’s north. Over one year, she made four trips to Gulu and photographed women she met, including a land mine survivor missing a leg, a deaf mother of four, and a blind musician. They posed in custom dresses, created by a Kampala-based designer, against backdrops of art and handiwork they had made. When Mbabazi asked the women how they wanted to be seen, they told her: as capable, equal, intelligent. In other words, accorded the…

ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY WHAT’S THE SECRET to living an extra 10 years? It’s never one thing. Rather, it’s a set of environmental factors that reinforce each other and that keep people reflexively doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things for long enough not to develop chronic diseases. For the past 20 years writing for National Geographic, I’ve identified and studied the world’s longest-lived areas, which I call blue zones. These places—Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaría, Greece; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and the Seventh-day Adventist communities in Loma Linda, California—have the most centenarians and the highest middle-age life expectancy. Why? Residents live purposeful lives in walkable settings that keep people naturally active and socially connected. And they eat a diet that’s largely plant-based whole foods.…

If you’re eating like a typical American, you’re probably going to die prematurely. This year more than 678,000 Americans will die from diseases or conditions associated with what they eat. These include common conditions such as high blood pressure, high blood sugar (type 2 diabetes), and high cholesterol. Collectively, we’ll spend more than four trillion dollars on health care, 20 percent on diseases linked to unhealthy diet choices, according to one study. It’s been estimated that we lose at least 13 years by eating a typical U.S. diet. This may not come as a shock when you consider that each year the average American consumes a total 264 pounds of beef, veal, pork, and chicken; 123 pounds of sugar and caloric sweeteners, including some 39 gallons of soda pop; 16…