Blue Zones - Places In the World Where People Live to 100 and Stay Healthy

http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/20/blue-zones-places-in-the-world-where-people-live-to-100-and-stay-healthy/

by kkleiner • 17 years ago

27 18 17 years ago

wmeredith• 17 years ago

How is their no map in this post?

noodle2• 17 years ago

because i think the point of this post is that location doesn't actually matter. the "blue zones" are places where culture and/or circumstances have forced all of the people in the area to live a healthier lifestyle. makes it impossible to live there and not be healthy, so the area's statistics improve.

benmathes• 17 years ago

Given how much one's behavior is impacted by external constraints, location does matter quite a lot. I suspect that if you moved the newborn offpsring of two morbidly obese Americans into a family on Okinawa the child would most likely live a rather healthy lifestyle.

michaelawill• 17 years ago

Thanks for this, very awesome!

huhtenberg• 17 years ago

Virtually the same material was presented on "How to Live to 101" episode of a BBC show called "Horizon" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband...

One notable difference was that the whole part about Sardinia revolved around a group of people roasting whole lamb and then washing it down with copious amounts of wine. "Low on meat" diet, right :-)

As far as I remember their conclusions were (a) eat less (b) stay active (c) keep an interest in life. With (c) being the most important part.

manifold• 17 years ago

do they have special genes? ... the answer is no

That's not true. In Sardinia and Okinawa studies have shown that genetics play a significant factor in longevity. For example, Sardinians have historically tended to reproduce later in life. This has favoured genes that contribute to longevity, or at least it has selected against those that contribute to early mortality.

A healthy lifestyle will contribute to a longer life, but it's misleading to imagine that everyone could achieve 100 if they just made the effort.

derefr• 17 years ago

Wait, wait... so you're saying that all we have to do to make ourselves live longer as a species, is to not let anyone procreate until they hit whatever that generation considers "old age"? Interesting; I'm surprised this has never been a part of any sci-fi description of a utopia...

jerf• 17 years ago

The Heinlein "Howards Families" comes pretty close: http://sciencefictionbiology.blogspot.com/2007/07/heinlein-a...

That link doesn't reference your exact idea, but I thought that was part of that. However, since I can't grep my collection I can't prove if that's actually something Heinlein said, or a confabulation on my part.

davi2• 17 years ago

Not sci-fi, for flies at least:

Genetics of life history in Drosophila melanogaster. II. Exploratory selection experiments. Genetics. 1981 Jan;97(1):187-96. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6790341?ordinalpos=139...

...and a long line of work following from there.

jimmybot• 17 years ago

I'm not sure it's a utopia. An increase in longevity coupled with an increase in age at which you have kids would put enormous pressure on government welfare systems. Actually, this is already happening in many places in the world--Europe, Japan, Taiwan... China, with their one child policy will be in a very tight spot much sooner than might be thought as well.

Besides these more direct effects, I wonder what other unintended effects mass-increased longevity would have. Imagine everyone retiring around 75 instead of 65, 30+ years of retirement instead of 20. The younger generation, either through private sense of obligation or government taxes are going to be facing a huge burden. With that kind of economic burden, there may be even less incentive to have children, especially at younger ages, and thus even fewer tax payers to support the retired masses. At the same time lot of the jobs that would've been available to younger rising stars remain occupied by a group that is retiring later and later. So there would be a squeeze on both the expenses front and the income front. For an individual, especially if you could _expect_ and _plan_ for a longer life, it may be individually fulfilling, but on the whole, I'm not sure that it would result in some kind of ideal society, especially in the transition.

helveticaman• 17 years ago

I wanted a map.

kingkongrevenge• 17 years ago

With nothing on how exactly he identified the groups this is just silly pop sci. You can't arbitrarily select your subjects.

The whole thing immediately looks very suspicious if you go to http://www.bluezones.com/ Obviously somebody is out to build a cult and make a lot of money.

GrandMasterBirt• 17 years ago

The lesson I walked away with is: live a stress free happy life with plenty of continuous low stress excersize and a healthy diet not consisting of fried fatty sugary foods.

Sub points Excersize can lead to stress - incorporate a lifestyle of excersize Have good relations with family -- less stress but out of your controll often Organic food is good.

davi2• 17 years ago

Anybody know how many 'hot-spots' like this would be predicted due to clustering at levels predicted by chance?

"The only way to determine whether a cluster is a "real" cluster or just a "chance" cluster is to do a full scale epidemiological study, which is an expensive and time consuming process, and may still give disappointing results." http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/TIB/epidemiolo...

araneae• 17 years ago

So basically... anyone who wants to do YC is doing it wrong.

Sure, if you have a stress free life you'll live longer. If you eat 30% fewer calories, you'll live longer as well.* But you'll be poor and hungry.

*Although that was a really crappy study. They excluded all the primates that died from the statistical analysis.

zimbabwe• 17 years ago

There're a lot of philosophies that say poor and hungrier is in some ways a happier way to live.

Perhaps there's no "wrong" way to live life, and the people who die young and the people who die old are both happy with the choices they made.

rw• 17 years ago

Yet perhaps many are frustrated by never having agency to make those choices in the first place.

Blue Zones - Places In the World Where People Live to 100 and Stay Healthy

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