The 5 places are: 1. the Nicoyan Peninsula (in Costa Rica); 2. Loma Linda, California (with a high population of Seventh-Day Adventists (vegetarians)), 3. Okinawa (Japan), 4. Sardinia (Italy), and 5. Icaria (Greece).
I cooled on this topic when I saw that it was based on a new cookbook and that the first idea was: eat peas, lentils, or beans every day. That "every day" is such a downer!
Next we're told to eat "a handful of nuts" every day. Again, I loathe the "every day." That's a way to make it disgusting. And I hate the push to dump nuts into your hand and eat them from there. That can't be a health tip. I eat nuts, maybe 4 times a week — which is all, it says, the Seventh-Day Adventists do — and I put them on a small plate and almost never in my hand. I know "handful" is intended as a measurement, but I find the concept unappetizing. And my little aversions are only going to get more insistent as I inch toward the century mark.
The third suggestion is something I already do that's also something that might make you squeal in horror: Don't eat dinner. You get breakfast and lunch and then cut yourself off!
The fourth suggestion is just to sit down and eat with your family. That, of course, requires you to have family and to maintain enough closeness and warm feeling to be able to exercise this option. So that's a mark of many things you might want to try to accomplish — much more difficult than forcing down an endless succession of beans and nuts.
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please explain to me, WHY i'd want to live to a hundred?
My Dad's mom lived to 101
My Mom's mom lived to 99
My Dad lived to 92
I watched them All grow old, and die.. I SAW what they were like before they died.
Again.. please explain to me, WHY i'd want to live to a hundred?
Be born with long telomeres then eat what you want in moderation. Food tastes good…
Q: Please define the Althouse comments thread, ChatGPT.
A: An endless succession of beans and nuts.
Now do the top 5 places where people die happy regardless of what they eat and how old they are.
Many SDA are vegetarian but not all. Many who are vegetarian will still eat milk and eggs, sometimes fish.
A vegetarian diet is a recommendation of the church but not a requirement. On the other hand, the Levitican diet (no pork, shellfish etc) is required.
SDA church puts a big focus on healthy eating and healthy living (no booze, tobacco) lots of health care facilities & hospitals, food stores.
Son and daughter-in-law have always been pretty strict vegetarians. For those who say it is unhealthy, grandson and granddaughter are both world class volleyball players. (grandson national AAU championship 2022, granddaughter full vb college scholarship)
It's a good way to live, done properly. Emphasis on done properly.
John Henry
On the other hand, wondering about the nicoyan peninsula, I found this article
https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/costa-rica-land-centenarians/#gsc.tab=0
Their diet seems much the opposite of SDA.
John Henry
planetgeo said...
Now do the top 5 places where people die happy regardless of what they eat and how old they are.
Yes PLEASE! i'd be interested in hearing about Those Places!
The diet may help.
My Doctors tell me to spend some quality time choosing your parents. The defined geographic areas, with stable societies his a hint toward natural selection.
I’m suspicious of the behavior conclusion. These population sets sound like homogenous populations that won the genetic lottery. True you can wreck it eating cheese curds every day but I’d prefer an investigation of the genetics…
A likely bigger factor than food is avoiding known early life-enders: tobacco, alcohol, and unneeded drugs. @John Henry -- SDA effectively reforms for kicks out all smokers and drinkers.
The most important negative food factors may include the nitrates of cured meat and the recycled burned smoke that drips off grilled meat and reattaches to the food. I don't think this applies to simple smoked meats or true barbecue. Another big issue is excessive carbohydrates, to include the average fast-food meal of carbs in bread, carbs in french fries, and carbs in a sugary beverage. The meat delivers protein.
Any speciality health diet is subject to excesses and problems too. Be aware that nuts are a key cause of allergies and other digestive issues. They can cause bleeding gums, canker sores (witnessed), and internal sores/pain. If much or most of your diet includes nuts than you may suffer constantly while you live, even if you live longer.
Key concepts: 1. Avoid obvious health hazards, and 2.Eat a balanced and broad diet.
Get 7–9 hours of high quality sleep nightly.
Whatever happened to the yogurt eating oldsters in the Caucasus? They always used to show up on these lists.
Years ago it was Soviet Georgia - attributed by some to yogurt. I guess no more.
Meade said...Get 7–9 hours of high quality sleep nightly.
Easier said than done. I take all the suggestions on how to sleep well and consider myself lucky if I get 6 hours of broken sleep. But every bit of health advice includes “sleep X hours every night!” as though it were as simple as not setting your alarm too early.
Prof., why the aversion to finger foods? I can’t imagine eating nuts other than by hand. Once they’re on the plate, how do you get them to your mouth? Neither fork nor spoon seems practical.
I don’t get the endless fad diets with their own weird or silly rules. Absent accident or genetic time bomb, living well into old age is not hard or complicated. Eat moderate amounts of a wide variety of foods and get some exercise every day. Not coincidentally, that’s also how you avoid being overweight. (Sorry about the “every day,” but it needs to be a habit if you’re going to actually do it. Like your your morning run—yes, you do take days off, but only when you have to, you don’t casually skip it.)
Ambrose said...Years ago it was Soviet Georgia - attributed by some to yogurt. I guess no more.
I remember that. It turned out the village wasn’t full of centenarians. They lied about their ages to avoid serving in the Czar’s army in WWI.
Enigma said..
the average fast-food meal of carbs in bread, carbs in french fries, and carbs in a sugary beverage.
A McDouble has 400 calories, and 33 grams of carbs
A Cheese Burger Value Meal (2 cheese burgers, large fries, large coke) has:
300+300+480+290 = 1170 calories
32+32+65+77 = 206 grams of carbs.
Am i saying that a McDouble and a diet coke is a Good Lunch? NO!, i AM saying that
a) it's an ~okay lunch
b) Large fries and large coke, is a DEATH TRAP
c) a McDouble and large diet coke costs about $4.37 (ask me, how i know?). a Cheeseburger meal costs about $7
Fries and Sugarwater are nails in Your Coffin!!!!
@mezzrow
LOL
My wife does fundraising for a major charitable organization. One of her regular donors is now 106 and going strong. (A pretty remarkable guy).
When he was 103 he told her that there was a very nice woman at his local bank; her birthday was coming up. He wanted to give her some flowers but "didn't want her to think that I was hitting on her."
My wife's comment:"Men. Even at 103 he thinks he's still in the game."
Used to I could sleep fine on an empty stomach but now I just toss and turn. Wonder if I could train myself out of that.
I notice a lot of people skipping lunch now. My GOP club has a weekly luncheon with guest speakers and the more prominent they are the more likely to just pass on the meal.
Keeps 'em lean and hungry.
"The third suggestion is something I already do that's also something that might make you squeal in horror: Don't eat dinner."
That would be intermittent fasting. I do it, but skip breakfast. I eat between noon and 8PM.
not that it matters (of course, it DOES!)
i typo'd the calorie count for the value meal, it's 200 cals too low. It's 1370 calories.. In One Meal!
If the phenomenon is geographically isolated then it is due either to (1) something genetic, or (2) something environmental. Also (3) something epigenetic linked to a particular environmental stimulus. With the likelihood favoring #3.
The stomach wants what the stomach wants. If vegetarians lived forever, I would be a vegetarian, but that's not the case. Like Achilles before me, I have chosen the risks and glory of BBQ over the monotony and virtue of avocados.....I'm not for foolhardy risks though. I don't see much to favor a diet of Big Macs and Coke. I'm referring to the power and glory of brisket and burnt ends. I'm undecided and wavering about risk/rewards of french fries.
Sometimes I skip them. What's the inside word of air fries?....Stalin was poor health for most of his later life. He used to talk wistfully about how long lived the people of his native Georgia were. People nearly always overestimate their lifespan.
My so far successful plan for living to an old age is never to think about what it would take diet or exercise wise to live to an old age and just eat what ever strikes my fancy and exercise whenever that same fancy is struck. I know I'm going to die, but like pretty much everyone else on the planet I don't know when. I also don't care. I think worry and stress about how you should eat to live longer is a prime contributor to unhappiness and an early demise.
Cause and effect are backward. The genes of the homogeneous population was selected to match the available nutrients. And it seems quite beneficial. But there is almost no chance a person with a significantly different genetic background would benefit in the same way b
The more obvious thing all those places have in common is the absence of a real winter. Winter is deadly.
That "every day" is such a downer!
Once again, people want to take something that might be beneficial and make it a mandatory.
They don’t see the problem because it’s for your own good.
I know someone who was raised in a Seventh Day Adventist community in Oregon. Very long-lived people. The problem is, of course, what's the point of living long if you're denied many of life's greatest pleasures?
"Jogging can add ten years to your life?" "Yeah, but it's ten years of jogging."
I think worry and stress about how you should eat to live longer is a prime contributor to unhappiness and an early demise.
Reminiscent of the old line (I forget who said it): "I get my exercise as pall-bearer at the funerals of all my friends who exercise."
See the Howard Families. What evidence is there that the diet is what does it?
Memo for the no-doubt-lovely Mrs. Boatbuilder: When you stop believing you're "in the game", you're not in the game and you're not getting anywhere near 100.
A lot of men are out of the game by the time they're 30. As long as they have an endless supply of Bud Light, chip and dip and batteries for the remote they can "watch" all the games they want. Why get off the couch?
Women who scoff at kind gestures and words from those who dare shun invisibility and continue living full lives beyond arbitrarily imposed "use by dates" deserve all the misery coming their way by eagerly going all-in on "young" Slugs and Thugs with "so much potential".
I am an unrepentent 80. Anything I enjoy doing and can still do with competence and confidence... well, why in the world would I stop doing it?
My Significant Other of many years would heartily agree with Mrs. Boatbuilder and frequently asks, "What the hell are you thinking?".
Imagine my delight when several weeks ago a young worker at our usual supermarket scolded her for poking fun at me. She'd finished paying for something and snarkily mentioned that I was taking my sweet time talking with my cashier instead of moving smartly along. The unexpected response was something like: Why would you say that? He's everyone's favorite. He always says our names and always has a kind or encouraging word and leaves us smiling.
Tonight we're having dinner with two of our favorite people; a 40-something single mom (who's been there and done that and whose political and social views don't exactly mirror my own) and her 13-year-old genius daughter. It seems the dinner visit was prompted by one of the daughter's school assignments (Interview the most interesting person you know and write a report). I think this is going to be fun :-)
Whatever happened to the plain old balanced diet over time? Not gimmicky or newfangled enough for too many. People want a quick fix without thought...fad diets have been the norm for far to long. Too many "diet lemmings out there".
Eat to live, don't live to eat.
Looked up the food of Sardinia. I would have no problem with that diet. Keep feeding people on beans and nuts and the methane level (thus CO2 problem) will increase exponentially.
cassandra lite said...
"Jogging can add ten years to your life?" "Yeah, but it's ten years of jogging."
Agreed. I much prefer running. Sure, it's a bit more painful, but much more rewarding.
Protein and dietary fat for quality energy, animal flesh for B-12 and mental acuity,and vitamins and minerals to digest them in a fluidic harmony. Don't forget physical activity to ensure proper passage and complete digestion through the intestines, and rectum, which will facilitate clean expulsion through the back hole... anus.
Now do the top 5 places where people die happy regardless of what they eat and how old they are.
My epitaph
1990>>>>quit smoking
199>>>Stopped having one night stands
2010>>>.gave up red meat
2015>>>> stopped drinking
2024>>> Died anyway.
Go right ahead and eat like them. If you want.
Anecdotally, like the article, my paternal grandfather lived to 92 and he buttered his eggs. Grandma lived to 96. Dad will be 93 this year and he still drives.
I don't butter my fried eggs, but I am not living life in a state of perpetual panic. Life has too much in it to do that.
People who get a lot of sun have high levels of vitamin D and tend to be healthy and live long.
So doctors recommend everyone to take D supplements. But it's the sun that causes the good health...the D is just a marker.
Who knows if it's the food giving these people longevity. It could just as well be the weather or the water they drink. More likely it's hereditary.
The ignorant and ineffectual always, always, always believe in an elixir of life.
Statistics is full of traps set for the unwary. In 1914 the Great Powers went to war wearing cloth caps of various designs that made the soldier look jaunty but offered no protection from anything except a bit of rain. By the summer of 1915, most were wearing protective steel helmets, the British Brodie, the French Adrian, and the German Stahlhelm.
By issuing the new helmets, the generals hoped to see a dramatic decline in head wound statistics. But they were shocked to see the numbers soared drastically higher! What's wrong with our troops, they cried? Are they so stupid that they assume a thin metal hat makes them invulnerable? We must take away those helmets immediately.
Of course, they didn't recall the helmets. Someone pointed out that numbers taken out of context can be as deceptive as the Devil himself -- as Disraeli quipped, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. The curious increase in head wounds is an example of a well-known statistical trap called survivor bias that is evidently unknown to the editors of The Washington Post, one of America's hotbeds of stupidity. (What statistical trap is at work here? Does working at The Post make you dumb? Or does the management specifically recruit the credulous and narrow-minded?)
In WWII, survivor bias almost caused the United States Army to significantly reduce the already restricted performance of the B-17 (almost 200 mph slower than a Bf 109) by increasing the armor protection of the most frequently battle-damaged parts of the airplane. However, someone smart pointed out the fallacies before the crippling superfluous armor could be added. And a WaPo war correspondent (surprise!) set off a minor ruckus with an article suggesting the Air Corps valued pilots more highly than gunners because he noticed that the B-17's cockpit was more protected than the waist gunners' position.
Teach a man to fish and you've fed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to type and you'll wonder why you didn't just give him a grenade.
Quaestor,
In 2002or so there was a similar argument (b17) about armoring himvees.
Armor them to give more protection but at the cost of slowing them down, making them less nimble, more prone to breakdown because heavier
Tradeoffs to everything.
John Henry
Give a man a grenade and you feed the whole village
John Henry
We see this in horse breeding. Secretariat was a fantastic racer. He won the Belmont running each furlong faster than the previous furlong! Yeah! Let's breed our mares to him! Yeah! We'll get rich! Yeah...
But we did that, and our foals didn't do so good. That no-good Secretariat...
In the matter of animal athletes, there are a thousand unknown and uncontrolled variables in operation that distinguish the winners, a minority of one in each race, from the losers, a majority of the entire field minus one. But the only legacy a winner can pass on to its offspring are genetic, its genotype. But are these "winning genes" likely to appear in the phenotype? Statistics says no. Statistics says "winning genes" are likely recessive and therefore unlikely to be expressed in the first generation.
And then there's diet. I remember Secretariat brand feed supplements. How are you gonna raise a champion without 100,000 IUs of selenium daily, you uninformed punter? And what about phenylalanine? You ain't even in the ballpark, son.
The elixir of life. Emperor Qin Shi Huang swallowed mercury and lived 49 years, ten years longer than the average 3rd-century BC Chinese peasant. Yeah, mercury. That's the ticket! If it's colloidal.
In human evolution, longevity is far less favored than fecundity. The very old are always the outliers, the rare beneficiaries of a genetic lottery of often recessive traits. The dominant genes that are expressed in the majority favor fecundity and an average lifespan, i.e. make room for your numerous children by dying, you greedy fucker.
If you want to benefit from the example of Okinawanans, don't adopt the diet of the tiny minorty who live to advanced ages, avoid the factors that kill the majority.
John Henry,
The case of the B-17 is similar but significantly different. The proposal to up-armor the B-17 was based on an analysis of bombers that survived the hostile attentions of German fighters and flak batteries sufficiently to successfully RTB where the necessarily non-fatal damage could be examined and reported to the War Department desk jockeys who fell headlong into the statistical trap. The bombers that suffered fatal damage either crashed in Nazi-controlled territory or fell into the North Sea, in either case beyond the pencil-pushers' analytic efforts. Without firm data comparing lost B-17s to the survivors, no valid conclusion regarding the benefits of additional armor could be reached. Given the data that could be accessed, the U.S.A.A.F. decided the considerable weight of a chin turret (introduced in the B-17G) was worth more than the equivalent weight of additional armor applied anywhere. However, the arrival of the G models roughly corresponds to the adoption of 250-gallon drop tanks for the P-47 and the first appearance of the Merlin-powered P-51B in Europe, so it remains an unresolved problem.
In the case of HMMWVs lost to landmines and IEDs, they were often recovered, and the fatal vulnerabilities therefore available for analysis. I believe some additional ballistic protection was implemented in the seats and floor, but the Pentagon resisted calls for armored doors and glasswork that would have degraded their high mobility aspect. No point in trading a humvee for a lumvee.
Is an “endless succession of beans and nuts” the hill YOU’D want to die on?
“See the Howard Families. What evidence is there that the diet is what does it?”
Curly, Moe and Shemp?
Japan is an invalid example. They found out when the japanese government tried to honor those over 100 that none of them were alive. It is common and not penalized to hide deaths to keep getting pensions. In Japan so much fish is smoked and salted that stomach cancer is big and smoking causes lots of lung cancer. Sorry, a myth.
three of the areas faced hunger in World War II, and may have had the ones with weaker genes die off from infectious disease and TB.
So are these populations who lived longer than normal, or is it because the weaker part of the population died off when they were younger, so the percentage of those still alive at an old age is a small percentage of the birth cohort and these articles ignore that fact?
It's a known fact that the rate of heart attacks went down in Europe during WWII due to the fact they didn't have enough to eat.
>>Curly, Moe and Shemp?
That one made me laugh. Some 50-60 years later, I still remember "Calling Doctor Howard, Doctor Fein, Doctor Howard."
--gpm
Of the five locations listed in the article, the only one I can comment on is Loma Linda, California and the Seventh-day Adventists. I suspect that having a top ranked teaching hospital, the Loma Linda University Medical Center in the city might have an influence on the longevity of the local population. Loma Linda University is part of the Seventh-day Adventist education system.
Rural, poor Minnesotans are among the longest lived in the US. They eat bacon and eggs fried in the bacon grease with white bread toast every morning.
It's the genes every time. Also, don't eat sugar and don't be fat. Eat all the eggs and meat you like. My father is 99 years old and my mother is 90. They live alone quite happily and she still drives. Their parents were similarly long lived and ate balanced diets that included plenty of butter and eggs. None were overweight or had a sweet-tooth. Go to any retirement community and look at the really old ones. They're all skinny. My girlfriend calls me (affectionately, I think...) a gristley old man. There are no sure things when it comes to longevity, but you won't go far wrong to stay thin and run a lot. Oh yeah, do deadlifts if you want to keep being able to get up off the couch. That and the good genes...
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
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