“Great grandmother Jean Dawson celebrated her 100th birthday on February 20, and she credits her longevity to a simple habit she picked up when she was 67: yoga”.

It’s a lovely story and there is lots of evidence that yoga adds to quality of life. It also feels like it should be good for you. But as I’ve said in a previous post there’s surprisingly little hard evidence that yoga leads to a longer life. The best I could find was this small study from India which suggests that there may be health benefits and they might improve longevity. However a larger review into the health benefits of yoga in preventing cardiovascular disease concluded that the few positive studies were ‘small, short term and low quality’.

So until we have some positive results from large, long-term and high quality studies you should probably continue with yoga for the sense of wellbeing rather than any extra years.

Source: 100 year old British woman credits longevity to yoga