Winning the lottery can help you live longer, and I have the proof — Silver Lotto

But it triggered something way in the back of my memory…

A queen bee, though larger, is genetically identical to the worker bees in her hive. And even though she just sits around laying eggs, she lives 10 times longer.

So I went to my bookshelf and pulled out a book I had bought at an anonymous airport somewhere in the world many years ago.

It was how to live longer through laziness.

Written by two French doctors, it confirmed other strange facts about longevity:

• Animals live up to 20 times longer in a zoo than in the wild. Part of this is attributed to ‘meals on wheels’… they don’t have to spend most of their time hunting for food.

• Large animals, the ones that move slower than the others… elephants, tortoises, whales, and bears have a vastly longer lifespan than hummingbirds, mice, and other quick-moving animals.

• Most athletes have a short life. But slow-moving gardeners live long.

It seems that the amount of vigorous exercise we do can play a big part in how long we live.

According to this slim book, a long life boils down to this startling fact… we all have a certain amount of life energy allotted to us for our lifetime.

If we use up this pool of energy with excessive activity, we don’t live as long.