How can you feel seven years younger?

A new study called Neighborhood Greenspace and Health in a Large Urban Center found that people who live on a street with 10 trees more than average feel as healthy as someone seven years younger — or as if they were making an extra $10,000 a year. As more people come to live in urban centers — the United Nations predicts the city-dwelling population will double by 2050 — the importance of plants and trees grows. 

"We felt that there is a need to quantify the relationship between individual trees and health in a way that the size of this association can be assessed and compared with other well-known factors such as income and age," Omid Kardan, lead author of the study, told Fast Company. "This way, planners will have a better sense of this relationship and hopefully consider this factor more seriously in their urban development and public health policies."

Researchers compared maps containing 530,000 trees in the streets of Toronto, Canada, with satellite imagery of people’s backyards. All else being equal, researchers found that trees made a difference. More trees, they found, meant a lower incidence of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. People who live around trees also reported feeling healthier.

The study concludes that adding 10 more trees to every block in Toronto would amount to a 4 percent increase in tree density, which the researchers believed would be “logistically feasible.”