So what are the real Blue Zones if there are any? Where do people actually live the longest in other words?
Seems like getting treatment when you're sick, and having regular check ups to induce lifestyle changes are what makes a place a blue zone.
More likely that those areas have society level positive lifestyles by default, especially relating to foods (eg Okinawa eating until 80% full, Italy and the mederteranian diet, Loma Linda plant heavy diet, etc).
Plenty of people get at least an annual covered checkup, but that doesn't mean they will make lifestyle changes. Even the ones that try end up like a new years resolution - not being strict about it or giving up after a month or two.
Edit: why disagree?
I didn't see that claim in the article. What I did see is that the data on centarians was shown to be invalid. It's certainly possible that the overall life expectancy stats could be distorted. In most cases (excluding Okinawa), I doubt that the mistakes or fraud are that rampant. The problem with the blue zone studies is that they explicitly focused on outliers from the beginning. Any mistakes or fraud become a big impact in a small population like that. If you use population level life expectancy, the impact should become much smaller, or at the very least any systemic fraud and mistakes should become readily visible and be able to be corrected in the numbers if further studies are done to measure it.
The article is very emotional and seems to mischaracterize some things, such as claiming that every blue zone must fit each piece of the suggestions. The idea of drinking every day is probably not a good suggestion as there is some research contesting the benefits of a glass of wine a day. But let's take Okinawa as an example. It's uncontested that the records have problems, it's trending in the wrong direction (younger generations, probably better records), and it doesn't fit all the practices (eg religion). But does this invalidate the longevity recommendation of eating to 80% full that comes out of the blue zone recommendation? No. There are independent studies showing the benefits of this practice to reduce cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance, and obesity.
So even if the blue zone centarian data is wrong (it is), that doesn't say anything about the suggested practices. Those have always needed their own studies to validate the suggested practices anyways. Fot example, there are numerous studies on the mederteranian diet that shows it is beneficial compared to a typical western diet and especially compared to the typical American diet.
The problem will always be that you need to find places that keep good records, and have done so for the last century.
What they set out to do was to find correlations between lifestyle and longevity, and what they ended up finding was a great tool for spotting pension fraud.
The glass of wine recommendation has had many studies done and the results are conflicting.
The eating guidelines like heavy in plants, mederteranian, eating to 80% full all have multiple studies showing benefits over the typical western diet and especially the typical American diet. It's a no brainer that if you want to live a long life you have a better chance of doing that if you have a reduced risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, etc.
There are also many studies that suggest other kinds of diets are beneficial, and many populations that consume significantly different diets and have even better health than the average person around the Mediterranean. For example, inuit populations also display generally low obesity and risks of heart attack, stroke, diabetes etc - while consuming almost the opposite of a Mediterranean diet or of plant heavy diets.
That doesn't seem to be true.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30578133/
The studies backing up specific diets are not population level, but rather specific study groups. And yes, there are other healthy diets too.
I mean, that’s not nothing, y’know?
The numbers probably look better in the Affluent Alliance versus the Protectorate of Poverty, for starters.
Some lived long but on average their lives were short because they didn’t have antibiotics or emergency medicine and lived in harsh environments that few of us would be able to survive today.
Their wisdom appropriately coupled to a modern less harsh environment might lead to greater longevity. But the harshness is what ensures exercise, movement, unprocessed food, etc.
> Advancing age is the most important risk factor for cancer overall and for many individual cancer types. The incidence rates for cancer overall climb steadily as age increases, from fewer than 25 cases per 100,000 people in age groups under age 20, to about 350 per 100,000 people among those aged 45–49, to more than 1,000 per 100,000 people in age groups 60 years and older.
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
I lost my wife to melanoma that spread to the brain. I don’t know how some hunter gatherer society would detect a brain tumor.
Sorry for your loss. We all have lost loved ones to cancer today. It didn't used to be that way. Cancer is one of the many afflictions known in academic literature as "Diseases of Civilization". It's incidence is increasing in our society at any given age, so it's not because we are living longer.
Well yeah because their life expectancy is about 45 years
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/early-onset-cancer-in-youn...
And on your "had a life expectancy of about 45 years", you have a math problem. The average life span was closer to 25 years but was dragged down but the huge amount of infant mortality which is normal in humans.
The Tsimané of the Amazon are know to live well into their 70s.
Some of them do, but those are filtered to the most healthy if the lot. It's not really surprising that if you lose the sickly ones while they're infants the ones who make it to adulthood are less likely to get sick.
This is further confounded when you have generations that have lived longer, as we do in the first world, because now not only do the sickly ones live long enough to get modern diseases, they also live long enough to reproduce and pass on the previously-non-viable genes. So generation after generation gets added that would never have survived without modern medicine.
I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution for different traits now besides raw survivability, but it does mean that we should expect our disease numbers to be higher.
> I consider it to be a good thing that we can optimize our evolution
We cannot "optimize" our evolution for different traits. Evolution is optimization to the environment. We cannot use human thought to optimize evolution, and that is eugenics anyway so no thanks.
I took a look at the Hutterites in Canada because while they live a simpler lifestyle with a more traditional diet, no smoking, and minimal alcohol consumption, they are generally much less averse to modern conveniences where they supplement their lifestyle. Combined with Canada's public health system, that means they have few barriers in the way of receiving modern medical care.
It's a bit old, but I found a study from the 80s[0] that found men have significantly lower rates of lung cancer (yep, not smoking helps) but they found an increased risk of stomach cancer and leukemias. Women had lower rates of uterine cancer. This was fairly consistent across all three traditional groups in North America.
Other sources seem to show their life expectancy is in line with the general population, removing that as a factor.
So not smoking helps. If I had to take a wild guess, the lower rate of uterine cancer could potentially be explained by lower rates of HPV as we now know that's the main risk factor for developing cervical cancer. I can't find any reports on the rates of STDs among the Hutterites, but I would hazard a guess it's "lower".
Which, on the surface, makes it look like the lifestyle and diet (besides not smoking!) isn't having a lot of impact.
Except the Amish have access to modern medicine and there are modern studies investigating their population level disease rates.
As well, I found they self-fund access to healthcare, and I have no idea what the dynamics would be like with that--would you decide not to see a doctor so you're not placing a burden on your neighbours?
Neither's a factor with Hutterites in Canada. They're very willing to use and rely on modern technology (they probably have some of the most technologically advanced farming setups you've seen, have cell phones, etc) and there's no cost barrier to accessing healthcare.
I was curious, shared what I found. Take from it what you'd like!
In a harsh environment how many die of a tumor that saps their energy before causing any specific effect that causes them to seek out a doctor and presents with something the doctor can find without the million-dollar machinery?
Let's grab our Mr. Fusion and head back a quarter century. My father came to visit. He had definitely declined since the last time we saw him but had no known major health issues. There wasn't anything in particular, yet what my wife saw was enough that she said we wouldn't see him again. Half a year later the big machines found the cancer. Would he have made it that half year in a harsh environment? No.