The benefits gardening brings to your health
Wednesday 31st July 2013
A recent study in the Netherlands suggests that gardening can fight stress even better than other relaxing leisure activities and extend far beyond the obvious rewards of exercise and fresh air.
You need only a window box or a few houseplants to see these improvements in your health:
1. Improve your satisfaction with life.
It's hard not to enjoy life when you're surrounded by flowers, vegetables and all the wildlife they attract — and now there's science to back that up. Professors from the University of Texas and Texas A&M asked 298 older adults how they would rate their "zest for life," levels of optimism, and overall resolution and fortitude and found that gardeners had significantly higher scores in all those areas than non-gardeners.
2. Lower your osteoporosis risk.
It's probably no surprise that gardening, and all the physical activity that goes along with it, leads to weight loss and better overall physical health. But that physical activity can improve your bones as well. In a study of 3,310 older women, researchers from the University of Arkansas found that women involved in yard work and other types of gardening exercises had lower rates of osteoporosis than joggers, swimmers and women who did aerobics.
3.Lower your diabetes risk.
One of the primary components of managing diabetes is getting enough physical exercise. Active gardeners easily get more than the recommended 150 minutes per week of exercise, and those who garden just for fun get just slightly less than that, according to research from Kansas State University.
And if you grow food in your garden, you have another diabetes-management tool at your disposal: fresh produce. A number of studies have found that diabetes rates are lower in areas with community gardens, or places where backyard gardening is more common.
4. Better sleep.
The mental health benefits of gardening are so strong that a field of medicine called horticultural therapy has been developed to help people who have psychiatric disorders deal with their conditions. Studies of people with dementia and anxiety have found that gardening helps calm their agitation, leading to better sleep patterns and improved quality of their rest.
5.Brain health
Some research suggests that the physical activity associated with gardening can help lower the risk of developing dementia.
Two separate studies that followed people in their 60s and 70s for up to 16 years found, respectively, that those who gardened regularly had a 36% and 47% lower risk of dementia than non-gardeners, even when a range of other health factors were taken into account.
These findings are hardly definitive, but they suggest that the combination of physical and mental activity involved in gardening may have a positive influence on the mind.
And for people who are already experiencing mental decline, even just walking in a garden may be therapeutic. Many residential homes for people with dementia now have "wander" or "memory" gardens on their grounds, so that residents with Alzheimer's disease or other cognitive problems can walk through them without getting lost.
The sights, smells, and sounds of the garden are said to promote relaxation and reduce stress.
