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Showing posts from August, 2008

Get a second wife and live longer!

Forget long walks and calorie-controlled diets, the sure shot way to live a longer life is: Get a second wife! That's the conclusion of a new research, which has suggested that men from polygamous cultures outlive those from monogamous ones. After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12 percent longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK. The latest research might solve a long-standing puzzle in human biology: Why do men live so long? This question only makes sense after asking the same for women, who - unlike nearly all other animals - live long past the menopause. One answer seems to be a phenomenon called the grandmother effect. For every 10 years a woman survives past the menopause, she gains two additional grandchildren, Lummaa says. It seems that doting on and spoiling grandchildren aids their survival