Healthy Lifestyle & Diet - fascinating article about a Greek island & its inhabitants

[Rosemary]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people-forget-to-die.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all
By Dan Buettner, author of the Blue Zone study of longevity.

[awakenedsoul]

Great article. A lot of the other cultures live this way.

[Gardenarian]

"My doctors were all dead." Ha! Great article.
I think all of us SLers should get together and form a community like that!

[JaneV2.0]

I love that he didn't allow himself to be "boned*" by doctors here. The smartest thing he did was to refuse their "help."

*"Cannon also shares the example of a young man who had fallen ill when the local witch doctor had pointed a bone at him, a societal taboo that meant a curse of death..." (Wikipedia)

Community closeness seems to be supportive of health; Roseto was a good example in this country.

All in all, there's plenty to take away from this article. I'll be passing it along. (My SO touts the benefits of napping on a regular basis. He's a genius!)

The following comment below the article made my head spin:

Alice Mark
Brookline MA

What a nice lifestyle that contributes very little to our global society. I would love to sleep late, drink wine and chat with my neighbors but I traded in my garden when I went to work for justice. My chip eating, early rising neighbors advance science, increase knowledge and create capital. Living forever seems attractice, but when your hundred years are up, what legacy are you leaving behind?

[cdttmm]

Great article. I had the pleasure of meeting Dan Buettner this past weekend at a conference on positive psychology.

[Suzanne]

Very interesting. I knew a man who was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, in Canada, at the age of 62, and told he had less than six months to live. He went home to his Croatian island to die. He lived another 35 years, and when he returned to Canada for a check-up, could get no answer as to what had happened, but his doctors agreed that the diagnosis had been correct. He ate salty cheese at every meal, prsut several times a week, chicken or fish every evening, usually with a couple of glasses of island wine, and followed it up with a chaser of rakija. Beef two or three times a week. He wasn't a legumes or veggies kind of guy, though he did like salad. He drank several cups of extremely black, extremely sugary Turkish coffee every day; no herbals teas - but the local rakija is often flavoured with wild herbs, so that might count. Like most Croatians, he ate a lot of white bread - but it's very different to white bread in the USA. It has no extenders, improvers, conditioners, flavourants, or preservatives. It barely lasts one day fresh; at 48 hours old, it has to be soaked in milk or soup if you want to eat it. Most people don't bother; it gets broken up for goats or chickens to eat. He gave up smoking when he went home to die, after about 45 years of chain-smoking. Walk? Not on your life! He had a van and drove it everywhere; he was, however, very active in his woodwork shop. Like the protagonist of Buettner's story, my friend had a very strong support system; he spent hours sitting on the waterfront with his friends, chatting interminably about nothing; spun out a cup of coffee for an hour while reading a newspaper at a cafe; discussed world events and local politics with varying degrees of heat and arm-waving; went to Mass every Sunday although he was not exactly devout. I met him several times over 12 years, and he just never seemed to age! His sister died at 100 years old. My husband's uncle died at 98. A lot of people there are living to very old, very healthy ages - despite most of them smoking as if they depend on nicotine instead of oxygen. Whether or not the population data are skewed because young folks leave to seek jobs, the old folks are living a very long time.

[JaneV2.0]

I love these stories! Nir Barzilai has studied healthy centenarians for years:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/24/health/a-conversation-with-nir-barzilai-it-s-not-the-yogurt-looking-for-longevity-genes.html
The most common thing this group had is that they did not reveal any particular lifestyle secret for their own longevity. When asked specifically, none has exercised. None was a vegetarian. Not a single one ate yogurt throughout his life.

In fact, 30 percent were overweight. Some smoked. The fact that they had a strong family history of exceptional longevity seemed to be the main commonality. This supports the notion that they have special genes protecting them from their environment.

[Polliwog]

I loved reading Dan Buettner's "Blue Zones" and he has also written a great book about where people are the happiest and why they are so. Top on his list: Denmark.

[awakenedsoul]

That's so interesting Polliwog. There's a lot to be said for feeling enthusiastic about life. I think the social connections really make a huge difference. It also sounds like they are not financially stressed.

[Suzanne]

I think the financial thing is more that everybody is equally, or nearly equally, poor!

[Birchwood]

Although I think that people from that island in Greek live longer due food, lifestyle and genes, let me just say that
the Lung cancer diagnosis may have been most likely an error and that he actually had a benign tumor and not malignant.
Rarely a histological diagnosis is wrong. There are not a lot of spontaneous recovery from lung cancer, and if he survived, it was not because of his greek interlude, but most likely from a wrong diagnosis. Another possibility is that he had a very early stage lung cancer and he had surgery and ws thus cured. His trip to Greece did help in his healing, but it was gone after treatments.