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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ).
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.
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
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.
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 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."
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.
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)?
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.
Readit News
"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
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).
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."
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
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.
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.
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.
Both of these are probably true but the latter is more likely the significant margin.
Also may be worth noting the type of meat: e.g. the Sicilian staple I'm most familiar with myself is spleen.
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.
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 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.
Any citations? I have one for your with a different evidence: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee....
"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.
In the mountain areas is typical to eat sheep and on the costal area is typical to eat fish
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.
- 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.
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
This is where I think the article loses its credibility significantly.
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.
BTW the anti-cancer component of sea food is Iodine.
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.
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.”
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.
There are of course plenty of other explanations.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2
“Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud”
And it is utter bullshit, published in a fourth tier journal by a non-scientist with something to sell.
“Blue zone”, “power 9”, “vitality compass” — please spare me. This is pure pseudo-scientific crap.
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.
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.
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.
Although in this case the paper's authors did attempt to account for such errors.
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.
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).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
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.
[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
[2] https://youtu.be/dvbzIwOECmY
Those are bits I know. This is not a rebuttal of anything. I'm simply unfamiliar with some of your points.
This study shows that heritability is basically zero below the age of 60, but increases a lot thereafter: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00439-006-0144-y
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.
There are many more studies linking diet and health.
Here is a non-profit presenting them.
https://nutritionfacts.org/
And so... https://www.amazon.com/dp/1426209487
They usually also have a company with the same name that sells speaking engagements or consulting... https://www.bluezones.com/
And of course, you need a modestly astroturfed Wikipedia article... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone
And don't forget a TED Talk! https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100
Why shouldn't a person who believes they discovered some phenomenon name it, write books and give talks on it?
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)?
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.
> In 2004, Dan Buettner, CEO of Blue Zones LLC, was determined to uncover the specific aspects of lifestyle and environment that led to longevity.
You could have just read that
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?
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.
See: Theranos, for example.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
pg famously talks "middlebrow" comments on this specific Blue Zones topic 10 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692598 -
"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.