When speaking about Sardinia they keep saying that their diet was mostly vegetarian:
"The classic Sardinian diet is plant based, consisting of whole-grain bread, beans, garden vegetables, and fruits. Meat is largely reserved for Sundays and special occasions. Sardinians drink wine moderately."
Truth is that the Shepherds (the centenaries are mostly found in this group) were actually eating more animal protein and fat compared to the rest of the population.
They can keep lying to most people just because you can't understand Italian but whenever people from those towns are interviewed they always repeat that they were not vegetarians.
Here a quick translation from this yt video:
Graziano who got to 102
got asked if he got to 102yo
because he had always followed a
mediterranean diet.
He asked what's that?
It means that you always ate vegetables.
Vegetables are bad for you, I
ate the grass of 100 sheeps because
I ate the sheeps. And indeed
he only ate meat, meaning that this whole
alimentation thing should be checked again.
Wait, when people (mainly Americans) say "Mediterranean diet" do they think it's mainly a vegetarian one? That would be so wrong in so many levels, I am from a coastal really Mediterranean city and we def eat meat and fish (both traditionally and currently).
The main differences I'd say from growing up with local food compared now with other international food is the extra use of olive oil (vs other oils or butter), that normally in our food it's easier to tell where the ingredients came from vs some other more processed diets, extra bread/wheat use, and that even when we eat meat, it's not a "meat fest" like American bbq, it's normally accompanied with other food. And of course the use of local ingredients, which is particular to our diet but I'd guess most "regional diets" have this in common (with their particular ingredients).
> Wait, when people (mainly Americans) say "Mediterranean diet" do they think it's mainly a vegetarian one?
No. They think it's less meat-heavy than the typical American diet. (Or less of a "meat fest," I guess you could say.)
From the Mayo Clinic[0]:
"Plant-based foods, such as whole grains, vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices, are the foundation of the diet. Olive oil is the main source of added fat.
"Fish, seafood, dairy and poultry are included in moderation. Red meat and sweets are eaten only occasionally."
That makes more sense, coca-cola until very, very recently (my generation is still a bit mixed about it) was considered a "kids' drink", not something adults would drink because it's too sweet.
I can't quickly find the paper but I recall having read something along the following lines: there were several areas in Greece where people consumed meat and cheese heavily but the life expectancy was decent. A subsequent investigation showed that the villagers had a very common SNP (mutation) which reduced the efficiency of LDLR (essentially making their bodies ingest less of the "bad" cholesterol into the bloodstream). And the theory went that since these populations had the same diet for centuries, everybody who was not very adapted to it sort of died out / was outcompeted in a Darwinian way by folks who had this genetic adaptation. So yes, a Sardinian villager may live to 102 eating solely mutton; it doesn't mean that the outcome would be as good if you took a random sample of Californians (for instance) and had them use the same diet.
Standard Darwinian competition wouldn't matter here - people generally finish breeding (ages <35) long before they have trouble from cholesterol (ages 40+) or other minor dietary issues.
You could consider in the same way as the explanation for altruism - that families and communities who can rely on helpful old people to raise the children perform better and out-compete families/communities without that resource.
We should also consider that any dietary pressure will have only existed for at most a few thousands of years which, in evolutionary terms, 1000 generations perhaps, is basically nothing.
That is not true. One of the many factors that make human tribes competitive is grandparents. Grandparents can help in many ways especially with child rearing and retain knowledge not available to younger people. Having more healthier and longer lived grandparents enhances the relative fitness of those of breeding age. There is a similar effect with homosexuals tending to contribute to tribal fitness thus enhancing reproductive fitness of the tribe.
>> similar effect with homosexuals tending to contribute to tribal fitness thus enhancing reproductive fitness of the tribe.
If they want to reproduce, don't they have to search outside their tribe for a sperm/egg donor and possibly surrogate? So at least 50% or more of their reproductive health comes from outside the tribe?
I'm talking about behaviors and you are talking about desires. These are very different contexts.
Attempts to characterize behavior show homosexuals more commonly staying with parents and supporting relatives. The usual explanation for this is that they are not interested or able to compete in the usual mating and paring rituals. It isn't that they want to reproduce so much as they want to contribute to the tribe and in doing so result in the reproductive capacity of the entire tribe being increased.
Not yet. My ex is a geneticist who studies the evolutionary basis of aging and this is one of the hypotheses for human longevity being what it is, but there isn't hard proof so far.
> people generally finish breeding (ages <35) long before they have trouble from cholesterol (ages 40+) or other minor dietary issues
You’re speaking to modern times. Rebeccu, for instance, is a gorgeous town abandoned by Sardinians in the 14th century because of famine. Furthermore, the children of a famished mother are less likely to survive to reproductive age, and a family whose elderly died of famine will be less stable than one with multi-generational structures in place. These prenatal, neonatal and group selection dynamics bias the dice.
You don’t need famine; a wealthy societal elder is better positioned to marry his or her children and grandchildren into situations where they will have more children and their children will be better provided for. An elder male could continue reproducing by finding additional mates. There is good evidence that male genetic diversity is much lower than we would expect if most of our ancestors were monogamous.
Bugs might reproduce primarily constrained by their LDL uptake but humans are far more complex.
1000 generations is plenty of time for a new mutation to potentially achieve fixation in a relatively contained, small-ish (in human terms) population.
This hypothesis is still part of some anti-meat propaganda. They start from the idea that red meat is bad, and then they retroactively try to adjust their "science" with creative solutions.
Research done in Italy about the Sardinians showed that the people who got to live longer where specifically the shepherds. They had a very peculiar life style which brought them to get much more exercise and to eat more animal sourced foods.
The remaining townfolks had a more "average" lifespan even though they shared the same genes.
You joke, but it has been going on for a while: The Global Influence of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church on Diet (https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/9/251/htm). And obviously as mentioned by another the processed food industry etc.
I'm half joking, but the lobbying power and subsidies meat and dairy industries command is a complete other ballgame than vegetable farmers and plant-based food companies.
Funny the agenda-laden downvotes I'm receiving as well, despite ample evidence. Only an artifact of folks perceiving a conspiratorial political bias before considering the damage the WEF is in fact doing to the world by installing unelected "young leaders" into any nation or corporation it can get its dirty hands on, determining policy and international direction without the consent of the governed, much less, not nearly enough consent if any exists at all, outside of the political elite who already endorse them for their obvious financial gain.
To expand upon this, Cholesterol is wrapped in lipoprotein, and pathogenesis is caused by malfunction of lipoproteins due to proximal oxidative and inflammatory effects upon them.
I agree with ApoB being the marker for CVD risk. What I'm disagreeing with is the statement that pathogenesis is caused by inflammation and/or oxidization; instead I'd say it's the number of particles that's the primary cause, with the rest of the mechanism following.
My bet as someone who has traveler to Sardinia often is that this is much less about meat consumption and rather more about stressors like lifestyle, quality of air, water etc.
Even if the people ate meat there at the same proportion as a modern city dweller did: no hormones, probably orders of magnitude less toxins, traces of pharmaceuticals etc.
A lifestyle that doesn't know many sources of anxiety or stress and includes daily physical activity (walking instead of driving for a start) and an air quality opposite that of any big city just remove a lot of sources of what mostly kills people that could live longer otherwise.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke and (possibly) Alzheimer's disease.
The Mediterranean diet also means you can strike diabetes off the list.
Recently there was a study on here that said the sun is good for you. And its effects were underrated.it threw a shadow over big pharma because 1 in very many gets skin cancer.
I think how "good" prolonged exposure to direct sunlight is might vary wildly between demographics. I'm of Viking extraction (pale as a ghost). I quite literally get sunburn indoors if I'm not careful, no exaggeration. I can't see that being good in the long-term, especially when my aunt had melanoma.
Following WWII, my gruncle lived in Africa as his skin grafts wouldn't take in the British climate. He was like a patchwork quilt of grafts following his plane being shot down. Most white expats in Africa got nose cancer from the sun eventually. He moved back eventually, but had stayed out of the sun and never got nose cancer.
I am pasty white and used to burn very, very easily. Sunscreen every day, burned if I walked in the sun half an hour. When we changed our diets to vaguely keto, I stopped burning. It is super, super weird. YMMV, this is not advice, etc. I offer it only as a fellow "the sun looked at me wrong and I got burned" traveler.
I've spent a bit of time in Sicily, Italy and Sardinia. I agree with what you're saying, but I bet the locals eat less meat and better quality meat than the average American. They're also active and outside a lot.
I can tell when I'm eating American beef because it stinks. As in there's literally a hint of feces in the smell and flavor. Pork also has an indescribably foul taste. I was born and raised in America and avoided mammal meat quite a bit because I couldn't stand the foulness. It wasn't until I moved out of the country that I realized beef and pork don't have to taste awful.
I can still tell immediately when I'm eating an imported piece of US beef. People I know who've traveled to American and find out that I'm American often mention the foulness of US meat whenever the topic of US food comes up (without me mentioning it).
Some people probably don't notice it or they're so acclimated to it that it tastes good. But when I see "finest US beef" on a menu, I'm ordering local chicken. And definitely not US chicken since that stuff is pumped full of saline and "flavor enhancers" to the point it looks like a breast implant.
I strongly doubt that. I am in Europe right now the meat is the exact same quality if not slightly worse than what I am used to in America barring fast food.
In the UK at least virtually every town has the option to buy locally farmed possibly organic meat direct from the farm which is almost always fantastic. It might cost twice as much as supermarket meat (which is also ok at times), but at least you have a choice. UK / Europe also have several small private butcher shops in each town some of which give great quality and can provide exactly what you want, suggest cuts and recipes, same goes for fruit and veg - often cheaper than supermarkets. I didn't see much of these kind of options in the US.
Yeah, nah. Once I saw the sacks of red powder to dye the meat in the back room, I was out when it comes to UK butchers. Jesus Christ. And I quote, "you have to dye it or you'd never sell any, it can be all sorts of colours, including green".
I agree, I've been all over Europe and never saw any significant difference in the quality of raw meat and poultry. I do know there is a lot of misinformation about US meats over there though, like the "chlorinated chicken" nonsense you hear all the time from the brits which is thinly veiled protectionist propaganda by the domestic meat industries (who have no problem importing their poultry from Brazil!).
Yes, meat consumption in the USA is huge. But I think the greatest difference between the 2 countries is our distrust towards food processing.
Italy is a country very resilient to innovations which can be sometimes a sin, but some other times a blessing.
But we are losing that too. When I was a kid mcDonalds could barely survive here. Nowadays new ones are popping everywhere, and young people completely lost this culture we had about genuine foods.
I never tried any American meat, but I grew up in Sardinian and worked in UK and Lithuania. Quality of meat in Sardinia is vastly superior to the UK one but also more expensive, also we in Sardinia is almost impossible to find dry aged meat, I didn't knew aged meat existed until I did go out of the island ( we have Salami etc..., I'm talking about an aged steak ).
Because all high-quality scientific evidence points to eating less meat making a big difference, and there being no evidence that different quality meat makes any significant difference whatsoever.
As someone raised in India I didn't get the American dislike for organ meats. I love the liver, the tongue, the brain, and pretty much all the parts of the animal in their various forms. Most American meat preparations taste bland and uniform with really minor variations.
What are you considering as "American meat preparations" though? It's not all salt/pepper/butter/lemon here. Not even considering immigrant cuisines (which is doing a disservice because that's our entire thing, like ) there are hundreds of local meat preparation styles from southern barbecue variations to cajun food to native tex-mex and southwest styles and beyond.
Every once in a while, there's a news interview with a 100-year-old who swears that their secret to a long life was to drink enough whiskey to take the edge off all the cigarettes. I can't help but think that all these individual anecdotes are little more than confirmation bias.
People from the anglosphere comes with their own idea of health, which is for the most part originated by their past religious idea of purity more than rock solid science.
Many of them can't accept studies which prove that a good life can sometimes also come out from what they view as a "sinful" behavior.
Old Italians never saw meat eating and alcohol consumption as a negative aspect of life and enjoyed it just because it was part of their culture.
And, against all these calvinist principles, they still enjoyed a pretty long life.
The meat is bad for you propaganda.
Cannot believe people buying that.
It is known for millennia that a varied diet including vegs fruits and yes meat and fish is healthier then skipping any of those.
But somehow now when overpopulation makes our hunger for meat less convenient it becomes suddenly unhealthy.
Of course I understand that the antibiotic and and heavy metal infested meat and fish we eat is way less healthy then the meat our ancestors would eat.
If you live in 1500 north europe and your diet in winter is mostly grain in the last months, then a bit of meat and dairy is very important for not getting nutrient deficient.
If you live in modern day north europe the typical meat and dairy you get is heavily polluted and often processed. You can get veggies, fruits, seeds, nuts, legumes, mushrooms all year round. You can be fully nutrient complete based on the and skip the toxins in meat and dairy (and i forgot fish, especially sea fish is usually very toxic with mercury nowadays).
The gold standard tool is cronometer.com; try to make a diet there with only plant/fungi source and you probably only lack some b12 (which we used to get from drinking untreated surface water).
Saying we need animal products is simply not backed up by science. You are commenting on a book that has shown that some of the healthiest+longlived groups of people on the planet are vegan or near-vegan (okinawa and the adventists in calif).
What you sprout is unfounded "meat is needed for a balanced diet" propaganda. The plant based diet is backed by lots of research.
While for some people a plant base diet might well be good if well constructed and supplemented this is not always true on a population level.
The average person isn't drs Greger disciple and will not wake up early in the morning to be measuring his foods to be sure that his intakes are following the RDAs.
Combine that with the fact that nutrients from vegetables are not as easily accessible by our bodies, meaning that for some people with digestion problems it could cause dangerous deficiencies.
And last but not least, yes meat can be contaminated or polluted, so you should be very careful when choosing your cuts. But the same can be said about vegs and fruits I'm afraid:
"European citizens have been exposed to a
dramatic rise in the frequency and intensity of
residues of the most toxic pesticides on fruits
and vegetables sold in the EU. This report
and its primary conclusion contradict official
claims that toxic pesticides use is declining
and that food residue levels are under
control. This report also exposes a complete
failure by Member States and the European
Commission to implement EU Regulation and
protect consumers. "
> While for some people a plant base diet might well be good if well constructed and supplemented this is not always true on a population level.
The majority of meat eaters also have vitamin and micronutrient deficiencies, I don't think plant based diets are the issue here but general culture. Bread and salt have iodine added, but when B12 gets added to plant milks it's suddenly "supplemented". No, most diets have vitamins supplemented, and most western people are having sub optimal diets.
What meat eaters? If we are talking about health conscious people the ones eating meat will always have an advantage compared to people who eliminates food groups.
If you are comparing a health conscious vegan to the average fast food freak then yes, I can agree with you.
Still, the deficiencies caused by meat avoidance are usually more dangerous with worse consequences.
The Blue Zones book shows that people in all times where able to eat healthy. You are commenting on a post about this book.
Toxins are bad. But all research has shown that persistent toxins are much more common in animal products than in plant foods. In some German research they found glyphosate concentrations were lowest in vegetarians and vegans.
I'm not aware of those studies so I can't judge. What meat are you talking about? From which country? Was it cheap supermarket meat or locally sourced from a trusted butcher?
I hope all of those questions are taken into consideration when judging which foods we should avoid.
But still I don't buy this whole meat avoidance stunt. Most studies show only small effects linked to meat avoidance which can be usually be well explained by the fact that vegetarians are usually health conscious people:
The problem with the evidence and research around the "plant based diet" is that there is an ulterior motive for most of the research (legitimate ethical concerns around meat eating) which taints a lot of the data.
For example, Dan Buettner (the author of Blue Zones) suggests that Okinawans eat a 98% plant based diet which is...I won't say "fraudulent" because I think it's possible it's an honest mistake but it's definitely not "correct" at all. It's based off of some sketchy anecdotal accounts of WWII starvation diets where the only ate potatoes. Western centenarian researchers and health gurus repeated that factoid a bunch and it became "the okinawan diet is basically a potato-heavy vegan diet" in some twisted game of telephone.
In actuality both modern and ancient Okinawans have the highest meat consumption in Japan. Lard is the go-to frying oil even for vegetable dishes. The largest proportion of calories come from animal products. The Okinawan diet is a high fat, high carb, moderately high meat diet whose main "secret" is conscious portion restriction (the local "eat until you are 80% full" mantra). They do eat plenty of fish too, just not as much as the mainlanders (the idea that the okinawan diet is low in fish is crazy because the okinawans have a super unique and proud local history of fishing and seafood foraging traditions).
You can get veggies, fruits, seeds, nuts, legumes, mushrooms all year round
Idk about production methods, but am forced to eat vegetables due to a medical condition. First concern, it is still not healthy after half a year and few consultants. Second, all highly available fruits and vegetables are so identical piece-wise that their semi-synthetic origin isn’t even a question to me, please correct me if I’m wrong. I think that access to really healthy/natural vegetables is as expensive and nontrivial as to healthy meat. I even know where I can get healthy meat in bulk (village economies), but have no idea where to start with plants.
for meat it is different, usuallu people do not like to eat it without applying technology (heating (baking), salting, spicing with plant products, saucing with plant products) to it.
we do not actually like meat in its raw form, or when we have to manually strip it from animal bones.
I am sorry but your comment is ridiculous. You're commenting on article that represents part of "lots of research" and it just shows to be propagandistically skewed.
Correlation is not science. It has its place in science but it's pretty limited tool. Sardinian research shows the longest living people there are meat eaters.
Why did I say your comment is ridiculous, because it simply is for anyone who has basic understanding of macro and micro nutrients and their presence in food. Especially amino acids. Plant based diet may work only if you are an office worker with minimum activity and access to synthetic vitamins.
Majority of pro-vegan drives are ideologically charged or have business intent behind them.
Why wouldn't people buy it? It's put forth by reputable science whereas the "meat is good for you" position is mostly preached by the jordan petersons of this world. At least I have better things to allocate my energies than figure out whether obvious charlatans are actually correct.
There are MULTIPLE factors involved in getting to a population that is high in centenarians. Diet is only one factor and finding some meat-eating-only shepherds in such a population doesn't prove THAT MUCH unless, I guess, someone simply wants to confirm that a fad-diet "can work" for some folks (while ignoring other factors like physical activity, stress, and lifestyle).
"People from the anglosphere comes with their own idea of health, which is for the most part originated by their past religious idea of purity more than rock solid science.
Many of them can't accept studies which prove that a good life can sometimes also come out from what they view as a "sinful" behavior.
Old Italians never saw meat eating and alcohol consumption as a negative aspect of life and enjoyed it just because it was part of their culture.
And, against all these calvinist principles, they still enjoyed a pretty long life."
Thanks, I have admit that imagining an early 1900 shepherd "following a fad diet" made me laugh.
Seems to me that this kind of article always comes to the conclusion that the best / healthiest / longest lived / etc. diet is one that the authors feel is virtuous in some way. It might just be coincidence but it's an odd one if so.
I'm Sardinian and I can confirm we are the opposite of vegetarian, big majority of typical Sardinian dishes are meat based, the most famous of them being "Porceddu" that is simply slow cooked on open fire baby big.
In the mountain areas is typical to eat sheep and on the costal area is typical to eat fish
This is a running theme for Blue Zones and centenarian research data, just a bunch of really blatant falsehoods packaged as trendy diet advice (e.g. suggesting that the Okinawan diet is low in meat, which is based on some weird game of telephone around discussions of WWII starvation diets, when in reality the Okinawans get a large proportion of their calories from lard and have the highest meat consumption in Japan). I wouldn't quite call it a "scam" but I would call it extremely misleading.
Centenarians are really a special group. My doctors assure me, independently, that even though applied nutrition science is in general very poor once you are past any basic nutrient deficiencies, that a plant based diet is overwhelmingly correlated with better health outcomes. Perhaps not vegetarian, but definitely limiting animal products.
Most doctors unfortunately have zero education when it comes to nutritional science. I recommend listening to actual leading edge nutritional researchers before forming a strong opinion. A good source is the “low carb down under” channel on YouTube.
Is a dude and his company hawking a bunch of books and a diet/lifestyle plan really related to "trust in the media"? I don't tend to think of self-help salespeople and reporters, journalists, or even TV talking heads in the same way, though maybe more related to the latter, I suppose.
By the way, I am also under the impression that he doesn't mention that Okinawans eat, on average, way more Spam than their less Blue-Zoney(R) counterparts.
Also they could be eating local, fresh ingredients without the processed preservative-filled junk food and sugary drinks we get on demand for $1 in the western world on every street corner.
- To respond to one criticism seen widely here, the authors claim to have validated ages with historical municipal birth records in all the Blue Zones. I cannot speak to these particular zones, but I've been doing genealogical research on my own ancestry and I am absolutely blown away by the ubiquity and detail of both municipal and Catholic church records in Sicily in the 1800s. Preunification Italy was under the rule of various northern European countries and was heavily influenced by their standards of record keeping. I cannot say if this applies to the other countries in the book, but generally speaking, just because these records are old doesn't mean they are bad.
- One thing that was very notable in the books but isn't discussed very much is that, with the exception of the Loma Linda cohort, the Blue Zone areas are all quite poor. They all primarily eat food they are able to grow or harvest themselves, out of necessity, which encourages simple and consistent diets. They have routine, simple lives that are made fulfilling by concentrating on community, family, and friends. They are content with what little they have and do not strive for more than they need.
I found the books quite inspiring. I think the lessons learned are good, even if they won't get me to 100. In any case I've felt much better and lost weight on a closer-to-Blue-Zone diet than I did before.
> Preunification Italy was under the rule of various northern European countries and was heavily influenced by their standards of record keeping
The only part of italy under rule of northern european countries was the northeastern portions which were part of the Austrian empire (if you consider austria as northern european, which it usually isn't)
Sicily was last under "northern european" control in the 13th century
Well, that "Registered trade mark" '®' mark added to the "evocative anchor" does give a strong sense (with much of the rest in the communicational side) that somebody is exploiting a way to pay the mortgage.
...In some cultures.
Edit:
Disambiguating in case of confusion, having written «Communicational style comes from environment, inclination, choice and target, and may suggest but not prove (low) quality of content» just before:
style does not remove potential for good content - yet, to some cultures, if you present your work that way you give a strong image that you are there to pay a mortgage.
One Ikarian in particular, Stamatis Moraitis, moved to America when he was 22 years old to pursue the American dream. He was a painter, and immediately started having success, bought a house, married, and had 3 kids. At the age of 66 years, he developed terminal lung cancer. Instead of dying in America, he decided to move back to Ikaria and moved in with his parents. He started breathing the air, drinking the wine, and eating a Mediterranean diet. After a few months, he planted a garden not planning on ever getting to harvest the vegetables; 37 years later he has a vineyard producing 200 L of wine a year. His secret he says? “I just forgot to die.”
This is where I think the article loses its credibility significantly.
This was likely tuberculosis and not lung cancer. Autopsy series have shown that TB is easily confused with cancers. 40 years ago the diagnostic tools available were very crude.
There is a crackpot promoting weird cancer therapies in my country who claims to have cured himself of metastatic sarcoma, but a peer reviewed medical analysis of the details suggests that was also TB.
These days lung biopsies are performed with CT scan guidance (CT was only invented in 1974, widespread use came much later), endobronchial ultrasound (post 2000), or surgical exploration. Minimally invasive surgical techniques have only been around for 20 years. Patients sometimes cough up cancer cells in sputum, so a definitive diagnosis could have been done that way. But faced with the prospect of a major surgical procedure, he or his doctors may have declined to pursue that, particularly as there wasn’t really any treatment.
I don’t have the necessary evidence to say for sure, but misdiagnosis is at least an order of magnitude more likely than spontaneous/Ikarian lifestyle induced lung cancer regression.
The story is repeated all over the internet but even reasonably thorough articles fail to bring medical clarity. It’s always “nine doctors agreed”, “x-rays showed terminal cancer”, etc. In 1976, when he was diagnosed its possible, though somewhat unlikely he had a chest CT since scanners were just becoming available then. More importantly, what no accounting of this history mentions is a biopsy. Without a tissue diagnosis and without sophisticated imaging the story is sketchy.
Japanese women have 1/8 the occurrence of breast cancer compared to American women. This changes when they relocate to the US. One study found the seafood diet to be a big factor. Most of these blue zone places are islands and coastal areas and the low meat intake mentioned probably doesnt consider fish a meat.
BTW the anti-cancer component of sea food is Iodine.
Yes, it changes, and rates are rising in Japan as well, but this much lower rate isn't dietary, it's genetic. Cancer is the leading cause of death in Japan.
The Japanese are a long-lived people generally, whether in Brazil, Hawaii, or Japan. It's not diet; Japanese in Hawaii have higher rates of obesity and don't live quite as long as a result.
The breast cancer? Genetic. The longevity? Genetic.
Dying earlier from unhealthy lifestyle? You guessed it, genetic! That particular genetic response is common to the human species. A person of a given ancestry has a healthy weight for their height, and exceeding it will shorten their lifespan on the average.
Metabolism is genetic, though, no doubt about it. A different species might simply be unable to put on excess adipose tissue, eating too much would lead to purging from one or both ends. A different species might be cold-blooded. A different species might have an exoskeleton, which precludes obesity for mechanical reasons.
Isn't that equivalent of saying, dying from drowning is not because of environment but genetic as a different species will very happily take dissolved oxygen from the water, technically true but useless analysis.
The Salt Fix outlines how restricting sodium intake causes kidney issues and disturbs insulin response. It is causing iodine deficiency as well, which leads to thyroid problems. The author suggests HFCS and white sugar caused the obesity epidemic along with the associated health problems. This has been suppressed for decades by the industry. The Mediterranean diet is only a basic hypothesis.
Jarring that after years of lurking HN I come across a reference to someone I know personally. While I can’t speak to the legitimacy of the original cancer diagnosis, I can say that family oral history from long before the Blue Zone popularization is filled with this kind of story. Immigrants (usually first or second generation) returning to the island to get well. Anecdotal to be sure, and there are stories in the same vein about many old country birthplaces, but the supposed healthful qualities of the island have a long history, stretching back into antiquity.
Still anecdotal but more personal: the original immigrant generation that I descend from all died nonagenarians or over 100. There seems to be diminishing returns on that sadly, as each successive generation’s life expectancy seems to be more “normal.”
Literally every story about kooky shit is like this. If you walk around SF's Sunset District on a Sunday, you'll get like 5 flyers in 10 minutes telling you that with Falun Dafa you can cure leukemia or some such shit.
I lived in Loma Linda for a few years (in Southern California, 60 miles east of LA), which is one of the blue zones
It is predominantly a 7th day Adventist community. Notably they prioritize healthy lifestyle and typically are vegetarian as well as avoiding alcohol, caffeine, etc.
There is also a big medical school and hospital complex in the city and many people that live there work in the healthcare field.
Another fun fact about Loma Linda is that it was one of the last places in the country to get USPS service on Saturdays. Up until around 2010 they had regular mail deliveries on Sunday instead.
That paper has not been published, despite being posted several years, and the top comment under it seems to supply a decent counter claim with evidence. My guess is it's not as accurate as to support your claim of "pure nonsense."
It’s also super common to use memorable names and phrases in scientific literature/presentations. It’s common in my field (biophysics). I don’t know why “blue zone” is so pseudoscientific.
Communicational style comes from environment, inclination, choice and target, and may suggest but not prove (low) quality of content.
Many are irritated e.g. by the style (apparently very frequent in the USA), in articles and books, using the pattern "John one day left the house and a number of things happened; he had graduated there and does this for a living. Now, the science" - odd conflations of narrative and data following the sequences of a novelist instead of theoretical structures: nonetheless, they do frequently have juice to extract.
I bet it’s a bit of column A, a little of column B. Healthy diets and lifestyles will earn you a few extra years, and fraud gets you the rest of the way.
I was a 4th generation Seventh-day Adventist myself. My great grandparents and grandparents all lived very long lives, and so did many people we knew. For them, living a physically healthy life is part of their religion, and it does increase longevity.
My family left when I was a teenager, and I never looked back -- but I'm writing to say that at least the Loma Linda site isn't nonsense.
Does exercise play an important role in Seventh-day Adventist healthy living, or is the healthy lifestyle more about diet, and not smoking/drinking/drugs?
Your posted article highlights a really great statistical principle that I also discovered on my own owning a really rare car: if someone (company) claims to have parts in stock, it was most likely due to a database error, not the actual parts, because the probability of having the parts was so low. Reports of highly improbable events are probably not true in general.
That seems to explain incredible longevity also- if it basically doesn't actually happen, then instances of it are therefore actually instances of error/fraud.
But there are loads of people who hit 100. The random google search talks about 450k centenarians.
100 years ago is 1922. Perhaps the 100 year old person in the 70s is hard to believe, but 1922 is well into major bureaucracy existing, and where it is harder to just make up a person. There are of course loads of stories of identity fraud and the like, but by the time you would want to execute the fraud (I guess in your 40s?) you're looking at trying to do ID fraud in the 1960s.
For the super extreme cases, it maybe feels worth trying to pull this trick off. But at one point we have confirmed that getting to 100 is a thing.
I didn't literally mean that people don't ever make it to 100, just that it seems plausible that incorrect reports (fraud, error, etc.) are orders of magnitude more common on a global level. Imagine trying to study longevity with data that has 4M or 40M erroneous centenarians and only 450k real ones.
Some of these isolated 'blue zones' are cults/small communities that may also have a conflict of interest in convincing people that their way of life leads to longevity.
Compare to the total number of records, very, very few were destroyed in WW2. It's not like every building on the planet were burned down.
And lots of people have their own records in family bibles/other books. Modern genealogy sites (and even general web searches) have (and still are) digitizing old records, news papers, graveyards, and lots of other historical records, and this data is being fed into all sorts of databases/AI/analysis tools, making really precise records of giant family trees possible, with original photos, handwritten notes, census data, and on and on.
So there's likely a better, more accurate records of all of this, back hundreds of years, aggregated than ever before.
I know in my case, it doesn't take long now to trace parts of my family back 400-500 years into ancient France (I'm in the US). The number of original records I can see is astounding. It's only getting better.
And it's pretty easy statistically to count % of people making age 100 in countries or regions where records are very, very good, get a good model of how that works, including as many relevant variables as people want to study, and use that to get a good estimate of how many are in places where records are poorer quality. That is how science is routinely done.
This is what I commented last time this rebuttal paper made the rounds on HN:
While I've also conjectured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do not think that the paper support the thesis well.
For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan).
Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution.
It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology.
Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extreme outliers should have been a tell. The rest of the Italian provinces are in a tight uniform cluster.
Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces).
Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor).
A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.
The Danish Twin Study established that only about 20% of how long the average person lives is dictated by our genes, whereas the other 80% is dictated by our lifestyle.
And then lists 9 things that fit with the idea of moving back to the passive solar design vernacular architecture and walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that used to be more the norm before we became victims of our own success and began tearing down SROs left and right and zoning Missing Middle housing out of existence (in the US, at least).
I think we need to also remember that people cannot focus on healthy living without financial security. Financial insecurity forces people to sacrifice health, safety and wellness to make ends meet.
Fortunately permissive zoning not only facilitates the emergence of densely populated and walkable mixed-use neighborhoods, but also significantly increases incomes. [1]
Other policies that I advocate to this end are a focus on law and order to prevent the emergence of ghettos (Thomas Sowell explains how the 1960s riots and subsequent normalization of criminality contributed to the ghettoization of many inner city neighborhoods [2]), a focus on building public transit and bike infrastructure, and market friendly policies like a light tax burden, and an absence of centralized (regulatory) control over market interaction.
In the US, walkable mixed-use neighborhoods, more bike infrastructure and better access to healthcare for the masses would be a huge improvement and also reduce financial stress for people of limited means.
Those are bits I know. This is not a rebuttal of anything. I'm simply unfamiliar with some of your points.
That heritability was estimated based on Danes born 1870-1900. It's likely that heritability has increased since then because there's less variability in the environment: health care has improved, there are fewer accidents, poor Danes are unlikely to be malnourished, etc.
TL:DW; They go to a Blue Zone village Seulo in Italy's Sardinia Island and spend some time there. The village looks pretty normal in general, they use technology they have plastics all over the place, they eat meat drink wine - albeit locally sourced. On thing that stands out is, maybe, the active lifestyle of the old people and strong community.
Because it creates a conflict of interest, where their income depends on the continued significance and validity of their research results.
And when a researcher this fanatically believes in their own research, were they properly free of biases going into the research? Is writing the book the consequence of amazing research results, or did they plan to write the book from the start (maybe seeing it as the only way to make investment into the research worthwhile)?
The conflict of interest is always there since almost any scientist wants to discover something and be right. That doesn't mean everyone does bad science, but it's not possible to be unbiased.
I'd say the motivation to name a phenomenon and make a mark in the science history might be much higher and more widespread then to sell a book.
Science cannot depend on scientists being unbiased about their work. It has to depend on verification, reproduction of experiments, meta analysis and so on.
Scientists are likely to be assessed on the basis of their general credibility, not the standing of a single paper.
Maintaining general credibility typically requires not overstating your claims, especially when dealing with sparse data.
Publishing a single paper and then making money on promoting lifestyle changes based on your discovery is not science, and would be (I would say correctly) side-eyed by many scientists. The author’s credibility is now inexorably bound up with a single statement that has been reduced to marketing.
There's an incentive for the work to be right, explainable and having transposable advice.
A common thread I see in discussions about age and about weight gain is about how a lot of it is determined by genetics. If you are trying to sell a diet book, are you going to dig into the genetics part a lot? Probably not![0]
Flavors of this exist in all domains, of course, and it's not that the causal relation is "writing a book on the effect makes the research bad". But when you show up with a problem and the solution in one package, there is a question about whether this is research or whether this is a sales pitch (likely something in between).
[0]: not taking a position on the actual veracity of the genetics back-and-forth.
If one does a good deed, but does so with the intention of telling others about the good deed to gain social status, is the deed still good despite the ulterior motive?
Isn't the point of starting a business to make money off a product that is useful to people and makes their lives better, hence people willing to trade their money for that product? If healthy living can be a product, what's wrong with monetizing it?
I think the problem is that there is an obvious incentive for the author to achieve research findings that support their enterprise, and ignore the facts that are contrary. It's an opening for corruption/conflict-of-interest.
That's not to say that it's not possible that they are both correct in their findings and able to make money off it, but it does reduce their credibility.
Who's advice do you take more seriously, the guy with a horse in the race, or the guy without?
The problem is trying to monetize something new and unproven by claiming some kind of significant virtue.
Charging money to provide value under conditions where it's a proven and known means to add value is not controversial. But merely virtue signaling on something you can't prove is a common tactic of con artists.
The Bible seems to think that not a good thing.
"But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing"- Mathew 6:3.
"The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes."
Currently the top comments are what pg was worried about (I'd say). This is an old concept. The top comments are not pulling out any big guns to say why it's wrong but are getting upvoted.
Interesting how #1 seems to imply but not explicitly call out the relationship (or lack thereof) with motor vehicles. Their widespread usage in the US is one of the contributing factors in obesity.
Love how headline is ambiguous, makes it sound like that from birth in Blue Zones, it only takes a decade to reach 100yo, as if only in the Blue Zones, the Earth orbits the sun 10 times faster, or there is some other effect causing rapid aging there.
It also leads you to ignore important questions. Like.. if people know fast food is "bad" for them, but they still eat it at a higher rate than some other part of the country. WHY?
It's insane to think you can just go in there, remove things that have been established for one reason or another, measure weight loss and then call it success. You have no idea what you've just manipulated.
I have no idea why this is in a journal. This should be on a "PR Newswire" type site.
No, the author, Dan Buettner has a consulting practice around helping companies, orgs, municipalities implement the lessons from Blue Zones to help build healthier environments. https://www.bluezones.com/ Where the Blue came from I'm not sure.
Guys, one of they key points seems to be too that all blue zones will have great weather and a lot of sun. There is another study which shows that more people die in the winter. Therefore if your winter is mild then it is less likely that you die https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/07/10/more-people-die-winter-...
As a Sardinian living in London, it is actually not too bad. Winter in the Sardinian coast can be very very mild, but it is a large island and inland, in the mountains it can snow for weeks in the winter and be much colder than London.
> Wine @ 5. People in all Blue Zones (except Adventists) drink alcohol moderately and regularly. Moderate drinkers outlive nondrinkers. The trick is to drink 1 to 2 glasses per day (preferably Sardinian Cannonau wine), with friends and/or with food.
I thought that the “one glass on wine per day” recommendation had been debunked. Is it still debatable?
My maternal grandparents are in their mid 90s and my paternal grandmother lived to 97 (minus one week).
My maternal grandfather's 8 siblings are alive - save for one who died in a car accident.
One thing they all have in common is that they survived a war which took 15% of the population of this country at the time. Generations after them didn't have nearly the same life expectancy.
This is all anecdata, but perhaps there's some selection bias contributing to the result here.
"One thing they all have in common is that they survived a war which took 15% of the population of this country at the time"
I think what you are hinting at here is that war was an artificial selection event that operated on and increased the prevalence of some trait related to longevity, say "robustness" or "ability to resist deprivation" or "quality".
It is an hypothesis that could be tested, and one that is based on the theory that genes primarily determine longevity and not "lifestyle", as those years of food deprivation, physical and emotional trauma, rampant spread of diseases and general "bad times" could be very well be, according to a theory that sees "lifestyle" as the major factor in the observed variation of longevity, determinants of earlier, but post-war, deaths of the affected population.
While I agree with most of the critics towards the article and the author (who by the way, is a friend of Peter Diamandis who also happens to run a scammy longevity clinic), (some) reasons behind the longevity of many of those centenarians have been identified: low mTOR activity and high omega 3 intake. mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) is a nutrient sensing enzyme particularly sensitive to some amino acids like Leucine found in meat and whey protein.
Rapamycin (Sirolimus), an immunosuppressive drug was found to considerably inhibit mTOR activity. Past clinical trials recently showed considerable lifespan extension in multiple animal models and will likely work in humans. It’s one of the too drugs found in the ITP trials (1). If I’m not wrong, they are even starting trials now and new ones will come soon. That’s because, as the name implies, that enzyme is part of all mammals.
Lots of people experiment with safe dose ranging from 5 to 10mg once a week and report lots of benefits, few side effects (doses aren't as high as if used by organ transplant receivers).
I’m in my 30s so I’m not willing to take any risks with those. I move, I eat a Mediterranean-ish diet, take Vitamin D3, K2 and Omega 3d and eat no sugar. But if I was past 60 I’d definitely ask my doctor.
That being said, this is not radical life extension. That would likely be possible with upcoming therapies like partial reprogramming or senolytics. But it definitely is promising and will possibly help living a longer and healthier life if repurposed for other diseases than simply immunosuppression.
Either way, I agree that IF is the best inhibitor of mTOR. My guess is that there is much we don’t know still about the effects of Rapamycin and mTOR itself. Clearly mTOR inhibition extends lifespan considerably in mammals, but we also know that protein intake is crucial to retain muscle mass in old age. Seems like a double edged sword.
Question is, using rapamycin, can you still consume adequate protein amounts and retain muscle mass?
My 90 year old great uncle got Omicron when vaccinated and is still alive and kicking. A recent fall which he almost fully recovered from was probably harder on him.
I'm not sure I buy their list of what makes people live longer, but I found it interesting that 3/5 locations seem to be ~40 degrees north latitude (and 3/5 islands, all locations are very near oceans/seas). It makes sense that all locations would be in warmer areas, as that vastly reduces the dependency on meat consumption, but more bias towards the equator would be expected if that was all. 40 south only touches the edge of Australia and the tail of South America, but I wonder how the life expectancy compares?
> It makes sense that all locations would be in warmer areas, as that vastly reduces the dependency on meat consumption
Are you implying causation or correlation? For example, I can imagine northern latitudes having more variable stocks of animals (and other food) during bad winters, so averages matter less than extremes.
I'm just reasoning that if crops don't grow half the year, you're much less likely to eat a plant-based diet, which is one of their points for living longer.
The idea of people living that long doesn't sound outrageous. Asian American women today have an average life expectancy of 89 years. That's the average.
But this shit
> One Ikarian in particular, Stamatis Moraitis, moved to America when he was 22 years old to pursue the American dream. He was a painter, and immediately started having success, bought a house, married, and had 3 kids. At the age of 66 years, he developed terminal lung cancer. Instead of dying in America, he decided to move back to Ikaria and moved in with his parents. He started breathing the air, drinking the wine, and eating a Mediterranean diet. After a few months, he planted a garden not planning on ever getting to harvest the vegetables; 37 years later he has a vineyard producing 200 L of wine a year. His secret he says? “I just forgot to die.”
LOL if you have ever traveled in poor places like India, you'll find a living armada of people who are all telling you this. But when the moment comes, they go to the hospital. There are no believers in foxholes.
My understanding is Buettner is a story teller who doesn't know much about science. His 'findings' are then often portrayed as having some scientific basis but really are much more comparable to 'case studies' in business school-- there's potentially some insight but there's a huge dose of arbitrariness (and lack of rigor) introduced by the author.
In addition to survivorship bias and random variation issues (esp with isolated population's genetic) my understanding is there are arguably many more 'blue zones' than 5; but Buettner chose those 5 as they fit a narrative he wanted to give. E.g IIRC there is a town in Sweden that has very high rate of 90 plus years olds and centenarians, etc. but their dietary (and perhaps climate) pattern didn't fit the story Buettner wanted to tell so he left it out.
1 Move naturally.
All these activities were not widely done up to 100 years ago. I'd expect they're not much worse so just get exercise.
2 Purpose.
Sure good advice have a reason to live
3 Downshift.
relax and don't be a workaholic check
4 80% Rule.
effectively intermittent fasting?
5 Plant slant.
already disproved by other comments. anti meat propaganda
6 Wine @ 5.
but is this causal or just correlational, probably goes with downshift above
7 Belong.
Really seems this is just a subpart of social (below) and purpose (above)
8 Loved ones first.
Free elder care is going to add years on it's own. Can try to find that other ways but get cared for when you're old.
9 Right tribe.
create peer pressure to promote positive habits
Wasn't there some study that showed one of the main reasons the average life expectancy in Okinawa was so high was because many people had just made up their date of birth after records were destroyed in the war in order to maximize government benefits etc.?
Any statistic calculated over a large enough number of places will yield some outliers, even if nothing actually distinguishes these places other than luck. It is unclear that the characteristics described have any predictive value.
1. Is just generally not really true. They are referencing debunked science. My strong suspicion is that these communities probably drink the same or less than average overall.
2. Carbs are unfairly vilified. Unless you are doing something very particular like keto or you are a powerlifter or something then a big majority your diet should be carbs. You need just a bit of fat and a bit of protein. But not all carbs are created equal. They probably aren't slamming back a liter of coke a day.
Re 1: the "average" may not matter all that much. The study's suggested 2 drinks per day is the same as the American average, which according to some web sources I found is 1.94 drinks per day (among adults). [1]
The difference may be that the variance is not that high. 16% of Americans binge drink [2], which drags the average up - a significant plurality doesn't drink at all. The truth in this case could be consistency. No binge drinkers, a consistent level of wine purchasing indicating a high level of wealth in the community.
Looked this up. A standard serving of wine is 5 fl oz. Two servings a day makes 10 fl oz, and let's say we're talking about a household of two adults for 20 fl oz. At $20 per 750 mL bottle, that's $15.77 a day or about $5757 a year. I think that's well beyond the range of affordability for the median household, even in wealthy countries like the United States.
1. Indeed a controversial finding as 1-2 drinks a day being favorable was a classic finding which somehow got debunked about a decade ago. I suspect not because it isn't true, but instead because of the wildly different context. Stressed out people in a high productivity country drinking a few glasses of wine per day may soon turn into more. The alcohol acting as some kind of pain relief, rather than something to enjoy in moderation during a two hour lunch.
2. One thing that shouldn't be missed from the study is portion control. To never be full. I can personally attest that I feel at my best when empty. It's not the same as hungry, I'm talking about the state of having your last meal digested. I remember an older study about these centurions concluding that they were almost always "slightly hungry".
Having a diet high in carbs is fine so long as it is reasonably well balanced and you aren't getting fat on it. It just really easy to get fat on carbs.
The sister in law gave us a blue zones cook book. My wife asked me to look at it and pick two recipes. I couldn’t. I would not want to live to 100 if that was what was on the menu.
I don’t know about the other 4 locations, but regarding Sardinia, yes, it’s true. No frauds involved. It’s the climate, the food and the simple living style.
One issue that I have is that article uses 100 as an arbitrary cutoff vs. say 99 or 97 whatever. What areas have higher than average let's say 95 year olds? Nothing special about 100 vs. let's say 99 or 101 other than people love that number like they love 1 million.
Further factors not discussed here that I think bear importance are gun and automobile use in these cultures. Speaking for America strictly, guns and cars account for a significant number of deaths. I wonder how those two factors look in these communities.
The largest factors seem to be purpose and community:
> Belong. All but 5 of the 263 centenarians interviewed belonged to some faith-based community. Denomination does not seem to matter. Research shows that attending faith-based services 4 times per month will add 4 to 14 years of life expectancy.
> Loved ones first. Successful centenarians in the Blue Zones put their families first. This means keeping aging parents and grandparents nearby or in the home (it lowers disease and mortality rates of children in the home too.). They commit to a life partner (which can add up to 3 years of life expectancy) and invest in their children with time and love. (They’ll be more likely to care for aging parents when the time comes.)
> Right tribe. The world’s longest lived people chose—or were born into—social circles that supported healthy behaviors, Okinawans created moais—groups of 5 friends that committed to each other for life. Research from the Framingham Studies2 shows that smoking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness are contagious. So the social networks of long-lived people have favorably shaped their health behaviors.
I've always wondered how many poorly documented people have registered themselves as a decade or more older than they are, to start collecting senior benefits sooner.
For an expat like myself, the community aspect is the most difficult part. How can you create a community if you are hopping countries every 4-6 years?
> How can you create a community if you are hopping countries every 4-6 years?
Stop hopping before you get old and infirm. Become part of the local support network helping those older and less fortunate than yourself. In turn, you get helped by those around you.
Learn Argentine Tango. If you live in a big enough city, most likely there will be a tango community. Classes 2 times a week, one practica and one milonga and puff most of your week is covered.
Religion. I’m as atheist as you can get but I still go to Catholic Church on weekends just to form community. Religious people are also generally good upstanding people (if you ignore their bigotry against LGBTQ people)
community and also I suspect (but cannot prove) that various rituals which engage the "spiritual" parts of the brain (e.g. prayer, meditation, certain controlled substances) have an anti-inflammatory effect.
It’s not impossible. I’ve got a friend who is 84 and still traveling the world and sexually active, and everyone in his immediate family has made it past 100. He also got covid twice. Really depends.
Despite all the media attention and even research on the "Blue Zone diet" or "Blue Zone exercise regime" or other lifestyle aspects, I think the real missed point is often missed.
The thing that all of these Blue Zones have in common isn't diet or exercise but community. The 7th Day Adventists of Loma Linda California are extremely communal. Icaria is a Greek Island where a bunch of Catholic communists got expelled to during the Greek Civil War. In Nicoya, Costa Rica intergenerational households are by far the norm and extremely important. I could go on about the rest
The effect is called the Roseto Effect by sociologists (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell). It's likely the same effect as another sociological term called the "Health Immigrant Effect" which shows how immigrants to the US often have much better health outcomes for a few generations before matching up with the rest of the population. It also is significantly confirmed by the results of possibly the single longest running study in Sociology: The Harvard Happiness study. Which finds that the strongest predictor of good health is good social relationships
It turns out community makes you live longer, have much fewer chronic health conditions, etc. It shouldn't really be surprising given humans are probably one of the only 2 known eusocial mammals
Meanwhile, Okinawa has consistently had some of the nation's lowest COVID vaccination rates and worst per-population infection numbers since the start of the pandemic.
Move naturally. The world’s longest-lived people do not pump iron, run marathons, or join gyms. Instead, they live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without thinking about it. They grow gardens and do not have mechanical conveniences for house and yard work.
Purpose. The Okinawans call it Ikigai and the Nicoyans call it plan de vida; for both, it translates to “why I wake up in the morning.” Knowing your sense of purpose is worth up to 7 years of extra life expectancy.
Downshift. Even people in the Blue Zones experience stress. Stress leads to chronic inflammation, associated with every major age-related disease. What the world’s longest-lived people have that others do not are routines to shed that stress. Okinawans take a few moments each day to remember their ancestors; Adventists pray; Ikarians take a nap; and Sardinians do happy hour.
80% Rule. Hara hachi bu—the Okinawan 2500-year old Confucian mantra said before meals reminds them to stop eating when their stomachs are 80% full. The 20% gap between not being hungry and feeling full could be the difference between losing weight or gaining it. People in the Blue Zones eat their smallest meal in the late afternoon or early evening, and then, they do not eat any more the rest of the day.
Plant slant. Beans, including fava, black, soy, and lentils, are the cornerstone of most centenarian diets. Meat—mostly pork—is eaten on average only 5 times per month. Serving sizes are 3 to 4 oz, about the size of a deck of cards.
Wine @ 5. People in all Blue Zones (except Adventists) drink alcohol moderately and regularly. Moderate drinkers outlive nondrinkers. The trick is to drink 1 to 2 glasses per day (preferably Sardinian Cannonau wine), with friends and/or with food. And no, you cannot save up all week and have 14 drinks on Saturday.
Belong. All but 5 of the 263 centenarians interviewed belonged to some faith-based community. Denomination does not seem to matter. Research shows that attending faith-based services 4 times per month will add 4 to 14 years of life expectancy.
Loved ones first. Successful centenarians in the Blue Zones put their families first. This means keeping aging parents and grandparents nearby or in the home (it lowers disease and mortality rates of children in the home too.). They commit to a life partner (which can add up to 3 years of life expectancy) and invest in their children with time and love. (They’ll be more likely to care for aging parents when the time comes.)
Right tribe. The world’s longest lived people chose—or were born into—social circles that supported healthy behaviors, Okinawans created moais—groups of 5 friends that committed to each other for life. Research from the Framingham Studies2 shows that smoking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness are contagious. So the social networks of long-lived people have favorably shaped their health behaviors.
And "drinks one to two servings of alcohol a day" is a pretty good proxy for "has enough money to afford to drink wine regularly, but is in a stable enough community to not slide into alcoholism".
Some religions aren’t really over the moon with dogma and mostly just loosely hold a community together. Try a Friends meeting sometime and see what you think.
Going to a community event on a regular basis is a way to meet people and build relationships.
Faith is a way to incentivize going to a community event on a regular basis, and faith communities provide quite a lot of the supply of community events.
Former born-again evangelical Christian here, stopped believing about 10 years ago. I haven't yet found anything like the communities within the churches I was deeply involved in. But I do think it's possible to find outside religion, and I'm getting closer every year.
I've been lucky to live for the last 10 years in a place* where it's easy to form lasting friendships with like-minded, earnest people. For me, I know I'm in the right place when I have friends with whom I can share my insecurities, and they can share theirs, and there's no judgment.
From here I think it's just a matter of prioritizing community whenever it's time to move next, whether it's seeking out groups of friends from our little diaspora or making new friends. That makes sense to do whether I have a partner or not.
(*never expected that Beijing would be so great in this way. I don't know if the expat scene in other major cities is similar; maybe it's just because the community is small here and the city attracts people who prefer not to coast through life)
Did they control for marriage and divorce? Maybe religious people are just more likely to marry and remain married when older. Lonely elderly people are at increased risk of death, as loneliness increase risk of mental disease and death from disease and accidents, when nobody is around to call help
Maybe, but in that case they could just say "married couples live longer".
I really think they're referring to the communal feeling of religion. Forget about the religion itself, it's an incredibly effective way to get to know hundreds of people, which enriches your life.
We're social creatures and religion is social on steroids.
Makes a strong case for us atheists to form some sort of community and chat about STEM and acknowledge our science gods like Einstein. Now that I think about it, we will probably end up entering into some sort of debate. haha..
I'm religious and this seems like some serious causation/correlation confusion. Maybe attending services/having purpose is correlated, but establishing causation for such a thing afaik is impossible.
lol! I needed that laugh, thanks. I know you're being funny, but if you already hold similar belief systems and also practice healthy living / thinking on your own, you'll be fine.
I'm technically a Roman Catholic. My parents told me that if I performed the rituals, like communion, I'd get a new bike and it would make grandma happy. My father's belief system:
Dad: "It's freezing in this church".
Mum: "Shhhht! We're in session, have some respect".
I saw the headline and I seriously assumed someone was claiming to have discovered that people in some areas of the world experienced accelerated aging.
(In case it's changed, the headline when I read it: "Blue Zones, where people reach age 100 at 10 times greater rates")
Yeah, I came here for the obligatory Doppler shift joke. I don't see one, so I'll give it a try:
Maybe they're called Blue Zones because they're moving towards us so quickly that we can see all their wrinkles more clearly. So they're not really centenarians, but they just look older!
That's right - I was definitely thinking of the twin paradox! (For those that don't know, the twin paradox is a theory of relativity thing - one twin travels out into space and back to Earth near the speed of light and afterward the stationary twin is older than the travelling twin, so the blue-shifted twin "lives longer" at least from Earth's point of view).
My bet is blue zones are just places where they don't have good longevity records so you get a bunch of fake centenarians. That turned out to be the case in Japan: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11258071 and I think also in Greece.
People were just keeping dead relatives "alive" for the social security or rent control.
Spending a lot of time in greece in rural areas in the 90ies in my teens. Quite a lot of older greek did not even know or care about their birthday, as it was not celebrated. Name day was the big thing.
And I loved the stories when the government introduced a new land registry (based on reality) and the chaos the ensured, as suddenly lot of land was owned 2 or more times, officially unknown villages were officially discovered ...
I would definitely question the validity of the historic birth register, a lot.
The researchers questioned these details, too. Any place labeled a blue zone has to have excellent records they could trace. One of the blue zones is in California. It’s worth looking at their process
7th Day Adventists have food and lifestyle differences from the surrounding population. They are the ones living longer. There have been a bunch of ongoing long term studies on them.
One of the findings is that diet matters. They’ve looked at diet differences and certain characteristics show up for people who live longer and have more good years. Those same things show up in the other blue zones.
I guess as time progresses, centenarians will come from cohorts with records that can be better trusted. This will confirm or invalidate the blue zone findings.
> In Christianity, a name day is a tradition in many countries of Europe and the Americas, among other parts of Christendom.[1] It consists of celebrating a day of the year that is associated with one's baptismal name, which is normatively that of a biblical character or other saint.[2] […]
> The custom originated with the Christian calendar of saints: believers named after a saint would celebrate that saint's feast day. Within Christianity, name days have greater resonance in areas where the Christian denominations of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Orthodoxy predominate.[1]
Some French I knew followed this and received gifts(IIRC) --or at least they referenced these things as the source of their names --they did not ignore their actual birthdays though.
Indeed. I had no idea it was so exotic.
It’s kinda of a old people thing. It’s associated with your name a specific saint for it. ( multiple saint are named James or John or Anthony, your name day is specifically for one of them. Anthony of Assisi is not the same day as Anthony of Padou and so on on so forth.)
You usually get a card from your religious grandma and a 20$ bill.
having spent a good part of my life with Greek relatives, I beg to differ.
Birthdays might not be accurate due to difficulties in registering births, civil wars and fascist coups (they burnt every record so that people from, for example, Macedonia had to take Greek names) but the difference from on paper age and actual age is on average a few months off (plus or minus, so they balance in the end).
They also care a lot about celebrating birthdays with very big family gatherings.
On other note: if we believe that somewhere they kept false records of births, what should make us believe that in other parts of the World they kept perfect records?
What should make us think that birth records in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Ohio or Fiji are more accurate?
The traditional land registry was from 1853 which seems was just a good enough description of what one owns.
In 1995 a land cadastre was created and it came into law in 1998 to replace the old system. A land survey was started to move presume land ownership from the old into the new system. This land survery / chaos was definitely still going on end of the 2000 years in Crete.
I have read the same thing about Greece's Ikaria island centenarians.
As an anecdote my grandfather born in remote mountain village in mainland Greece in the 1900 was actually registered by his father having been born in 1906 as to avoid being drafted as long as possible to fight in the multiple wars fought at the time.
So birth records and certificates from that time are not really trustworthy.
I knew someone who came over with "the boat people" from Vietnam when he was six or seven; but his parents adjusted his birthday so he would start kindergarten instead - and he still didn't know for sure his actual birthday day.
But it conforms to many of the others... it's only 20 miles inland from the pacific, and has an (albeit warmer than normal) Mediterranean climate... "winter" lows are rarely below the mid 40s.
I grew up in the Loma Linda area as a Seventh-day Adventist (though my family left Adventism when I was a teenager after reading some books that explained why some of its core teachings are unbiblical). My grandparents all lived past 90, and my great-grandfather died at 100.
Epidemiologically speaking, I think SDAs in general live longer because they don't smoke, don't drink, and don't eat meat -- and have a religious community in which doing so is against God's law. It also doesn't hurt that they keep Sabbath, which means everyone who doesn't work in healthcare or emergency services has a mandatory day off, no work allowed.
Smog in the whole Inland Empire area is still pretty bad, especially in the summer. It gets pretty hot in the summer, not very cold in the winter - a lot like LA, but hotter :)
Which makes sense, if you assume that any given cohort will have some percentage hit 100 years; and then the cohorts that somehow have people removed "early" will have lower percentages.
For example, the cohort that includes people sent to WWII will have many that died in that war, even if they would have hit 100 otherwise.
And a group that "outlaws" some of the major causes of premature death (alcohol, smoking) would then have more cross the line.
Interesting correlation: Eating more meat seems to cause people to grow larger, but there is no strong evidence that being physically larger has intrinsic benefits outside of physical strength (which is arguably not very important). You do however need to eat more, you're more likely to get cancer, heart disease, suffer from chronic inflammation, etc.
Interestingly, statistics about growing larger are often used to support more meat eating by meat advocates. There is a lot of talk about protein quality, and the implication is that smaller people are disadvantaged – as though they must be growing less by all measures, not just stature. It isn't so clear that this is true though, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest we shouldn't strive to grow larger (either in stature or in lean mass).
I'm not saying there is a certain truth in there at all. I do find the correlations fascinating though. It defies a lot of what I understood about nutrition for most of my life so it's definitely something I'd like to see more data on. I'm open to a meat-based diet being superior overall (or any tasty diet, really).
My health-obsessed doctor friend told me that muscle mass is a good predictor for health in later life, which was surprising to me (I thought fitness, heart/lung etc was the thing). I wouldn't dismiss it. :)
It makes me think of all those reports that claim that having a single glass of wine per day makes you healthier.
It's probably the case that people who have just one glass of wine are drinking socially, and therefore have friends, and having friends is an indicator of having status and health. The alcohol itself is poison but one glass is more than offset by otherwise living a good life.
Oh they studied this! It's because if you're the kind of person who can afford a glass of wine every day, you're also the kind of person who can afford health care. In USA at least.
Here's the best source I can find right now:
> The study authors write that “the observed cardiac benefits of alcohol have been hypothesized to be the product of residual confounding because of favorable lifestyle, socioeconomic, and behavioral factors that tend to coincide with modest alcohol intake.”
It's harder to keep muscles as you grow old. More muscles is indication of good metabolism, which correlates with good health (less chance of getting metabolic syndrome etc, somewhat relevant: https://betterbodychemistry.com/obesity/metabolic-syndrome-m...)
Muscle mass in that equation would be relative to stature, so being smaller wouldn’t be a disadvantage in that regard.
In my comment above I didn’t mean to suggest strength is useless or irrelevant so much as that scaling it up by a few percent doesn’t appear to confer meaningful benefits. Someone 5’6” is probably strong enough to do everything someone 6’ can do in every day life, even without modern technology. You can generally scale down what you need to, and for exceptional things, you can likely recruit and partner to solve the problem or apply intelligent solutions.
I’m open to being wrong. Like I was saying, this is just based on correlations I’ve been reading about lately and far from peer reviewed study results.
Of course. I’m speaking from a biological rather than cultural perspective (as much as you can separate the two, at least). I’m more so interested in what supports longevity as opposed to what supports dating prospects.
I suppose my question is, all other things being equal, would we be healthier if we were of smaller stature? Some data indicate this might be the case, and that’s interesting to me. I suppose my upbringing and culture encourage a “bigger is better” mentality.
A lot of data indicate this could simply be a case of people growing larger because they have access to more food. Genes express, people grow, but the main issue isn’t stature so much as having so much food readily available after they finish growing. Perhaps we eat too much and stature has little to do with it; it’s just a byproduct of access to calorie and protein rich food.
How is physical strength unimportant? Stronger people are harder to kill (h/t Rippetoe) and improved strength also helps to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome and neck/back pain for those of us at a computer all day.
I can't think of much a human can accomplish with exceptional strength that will aid them in normal day to day life (generally speaking). There are exceptions, but those exceptions would apply only to rare circumstances. Sort of like, say you're going to be murdered by some totally jacked guy, hypothetically, and all you have to defend yourself is your bare hands. Okay great, it would be nice to be ridiculously strong. But how often does that happen to you? Or anyone?
Most predators will kill us even if we're ridiculously ripped, so that's not important either. In most cases, intelligence seems a lot more useful for avoiding or navigating these situations.
There's also a lot to be said for having moderate strength in a wide range of motion. That can matter a lot in a much broader variety of situations where physical strength matters, and it's far more realistic to attain and sustain.
Avoiding carpal tunnel doesn't require special levels of strength so much as normal fitness. It requires regular movement and preventing weaknesses. I'm not saying we should all vegetate at a computer, I'm saying that the evidence seems good that being 5% larger/stronger (or whatever the figure was) is not particularly helpful, and instead potentially harmful.
For example, regular yoga will probably resolve most (not all) people's mobility and repetitive stress issues. They will not need to be large or strong for this to work.
Although it would help if they were stronger, this isn't the result of them needing to begin a Starting Strength program. My original point was more so that stature and muscle mass might not benefit you beyond a certain point – I don't doubt at all that being fit is still tremendously beneficial.
It's also pure speculation. I read about this stuff for fun and I know just about nothing about anything. Maybe being larger really is a net positive and I just need to be pointed to the right data.
I'm not going to argue this with you. I'm not up for being dragged into a stupid internet fight with a random internet stranger. But this might interest you:
Right, and I think an important distinction here is sheer strength from general physical fitness.
If someone is relatively weak with below average lean mass, lower than average markers of muscular strength, etc. it seems like the consensus is that they are statistically likely to die or get diseases earlier in life. On the other hand, being on the other side of that seems to yield diminishing returns. It’s great to be fit, but being abnormally strong on the other hand doesn’t appear to increase your lifespan proportionally to your strength.
It helps avoid frailty and it allows you to continue exercising well into old age, for two things. It delays the downward spiral of poor fitness and weak bones that eventually does most of us in.
That’s also an interesting anticorrelation with how we normally relate metabolism and body size; smalller organisms tend to have faster metabolisms and live shorter lives versus much larger organisms.
Maybe the key is being smaller but also having slower (or rather, “calmer”) metabolic rates.
I believe what you want to be is a small member of a large species. Large dogs live much shorter lives than small dogs. Women tend to live longer than men (height or mass probably isn't the only factor here, but this fits the general pattern so one imagines it helps). Giants -- people well over six feet -- tend to live shorter lives than people of ordinary stature. My grandmother was about five feet with a straight spine. With a curved spine in her early hundreds she was probably less than 4'6", but she was still there. She had about two giant lifetimes. If you stacked her on top of herself you would have one giant (until her ever more flexible spine folded in two).
> but there is no strong evidence that being physically larger has intrinsic benefits outside of physical strength (which is arguably not very important).
Actually remember reading that a number of studies have linked short stature with heart disease. I’m not up-to-date on the latest research on this. But whether shorter or taller you do the best you can with the factors within your control - nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc. Anecdotally two friends’ fathers in elementary school died way prematurely, both quite short of stature.
In the people that use meat’s superior satiety to stay lean, you see lower inflammation, IGF-1, insulin … etc. On a purely meat diet with loads of protein, my IGF-1 was 90, a z-score of -1.
That's an interesting point. I'm not sure how much genetic overlap we have with whales, but I suspect it's significant. I wonder what allows them to live so long without getting cancer, for example. I can see why they wouldn't get cardiovascular diseases (in humans this seems to be mostly induced by diet and sedentary lifestyle), but it seems likely that there's more to it.
No it isn't? Elephants develop cancerous cells at the same rate per cell as every other animal, but have better biological methods of destroying them when those cells do turn cancerous.
If I may posit an idea. It's not that poor record keeping leads to blue zones.
It's that not caring about the trivialities of paper pushing and imaginary rules that current Western governments use to exert their power, helps one live longer.
Now why do guys like you and me know what a land registry is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?
Sometimes people were assuming a parent's name to avoid paying inheritance tax. I remember speculation about the oldest woman in the world may have in fact been her daughter.
Andrei Codrescu had a monologue once, about how the world is in truth peopled by two-thousand year old men who "arrived at their great age with the aid of daily doses of yogurt, cigarettes, vodka, and dubious birth records. ... With the exception of their eyelashes, which reach to the ground, they are in very good shape."
ha, my grandpa said (this would have been mid 1980s) there were 150-year old people living in communes in russia and I asked how they lived so long and he said they ate yogurt. But I think he must have been referring to this: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/09/archives/soviet-centenari...
In modern times it dissolved due to diet changes. Looking at the blue zone in California is one of the most enlightening because they can control for so many factors, the records are excellent, and the people seem to be generally open to being studied. There they have found how diet and lifestyle plays a huge role in longevity
In modern (record keeping) times it - might - dissolved due to diet changes.
Nobody disputed that a healthy diet is healthy. And a healthy lifestyle is healthy. Whereby lifestyle is such a broad word that its in fact meaningless.
Maybe the record keeping in Okinawa was correct.
If you look for outliers, you will find outliers.
If you look for correlation, you will find correlation.
Does not mean they are the causation for all the outliers.
So maybe Okinawa just had a lucky streak, which is now over.
Well, record keeping and also an American occupation. From your link:
"We believe that current loss of longevity advantage in Okinawa is a result of diet westernization"
Glad to see this up at the top. Here is another article that specifically talks about Sardinia and Okinawa, 2 of the identified "Blue Zones", and really puts it down to poor record keeping: https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-...
On the other hand, we know from other research that physical activity, social engagement, low alcohol consumption, and the Mediterranean diet are all healthy. Can it be just coincidence all 7 blue zones exhibit these things?
The assumption being that poor longevity records resulted in fake centenarians. But what if it resulted in missed centenarians?
On the flip side and more seriously.
From your link: "Officials have found that hundreds of the missing would be at least 150 years old if still alive." That's just silly, Japan celebrates their oldest on a regular basis. The false claims would and are scrutinized, not just by Japan.
The link is from 2010. My point being yes, the absurd claims are investigated and debunked. It's a known problem.
> team of demographers, scientist and anthropologists were able to distill the evidence-based common denominators of these Blue Zones into 9 commonalities that they call the Power 9
Incredibly embarrassing for all involved if your bet is correct. None of them considered that possibility?
Another common reason is evading the draft during war due to old age.
In my country the region with longest living people is infamous with high corruption rates and general poverty. It also has the highest natal mortality rate which might be a contributing factor too
That's an interesting potential correlation, as I'd guess some percentage of Loma Linda CA are likely to have been "conscientious objectors" like this SDA fellow the movie Hacksaw Ridge was made about:
The other thing interesting about my family members from the Loma Linda lifestyle is they remained healthy, active, and slim, until their 3-digit expiration dates.
Most were still going on long walks in late 90s, only slowed down by vision degeneration.
Joining a group that believes in magical sky dwelling beings that grant eternal life in utopia provided you worship them enough isn’t the only path to community and purpose.
Whether by force/dogma or voluntary, a uniformly religious community connects at least weekly and includes all. Through this meeting, you get to know pretty much everybody, what they do, their families, their businesses. Which serves as a platform for making friends, finding partners, business opportunities, the like.
But it's one of many, and is one of the simplest ways to join a community as they are literally everywhere.
For the time/effort needed to join this community (plural), its pretty much free, maintenance isn't all that much either. People a few hundred years ago already did the hard part.
Not a bad deal. And all you have to do is suspend a little disbelief in something for a while.
It isn’t but we haven’t found another system that works as well yet. The delusion really gives purpose to life. We haven’t found another way to provide a comparable delusion.
This has been debunked in general if I recall. It turned out only to be true for the majority religion in a region (and not help for others), and then turned out to be the social connections got people better services and health support. Religion was not useful for the effect.
It sounds weird they say 4 to 14 years. What does that mean? Does it mean on average it adds 8 years? But since this is all about averages anyway why not just state the average?
Per the SSA actuarial tables a 100 year old man has a 95% chance of being dead 6 years later and a 100 year old woman has a 92.5% chance of being dead 6 years later.
Two years ago my grandmother took a photo with 3 other centenarians at her assisted living center. She was the oldest by 3 years. I just searched their names and two of the others passed away within a year of the photo.
Terrible take. How old were they when they died? Of course, if you are 95+, you are very likely to die soon, but you you are still part of a 2% percentile of longevity, and that's with western actuarial tables that don't reflect at all longevity in other places.
"The classic Sardinian diet is plant based, consisting of whole-grain bread, beans, garden vegetables, and fruits. Meat is largely reserved for Sundays and special occasions. Sardinians drink wine moderately."
Truth is that the Shepherds (the centenaries are mostly found in this group) were actually eating more animal protein and fat compared to the rest of the population.
https://snipboard.io/gbi9JY.jpg
They can keep lying to most people just because you can't understand Italian but whenever people from those towns are interviewed they always repeat that they were not vegetarians. Here a quick translation from this yt video:
Graziano who got to 102 got asked if he got to 102yo because he had always followed a mediterranean diet. He asked what's that? It means that you always ate vegetables. Vegetables are bad for you, I ate the grass of 100 sheeps because I ate the sheeps. And indeed he only ate meat, meaning that this whole alimentation thing should be checked again.
https://youtu.be/LQTocSMm7tw?t=647