Even if your social ties are drinking buddies?
People in the Greek or Italian blue zones, would let you take away their daily wine drinking with buddies over their 100+ year old dead body...
(Though for the "blue zones", I've read some suspicions that the true secret of them is plain old corruption - with some of the "supercentenarians" having died long ago and only living on in the records, so family, friends or complicit buerocrats can collect their pensions. Not sure if this is widespread enough to explain the entire effect though)
But… there is one thing that seems to hold up. One of Buettner claims is that as western ultra processed diets came to these enclaves and displaced traditional diets, incidence rates of obesity and metabolic disease has spiked. That’s real.
I bet we could measure a parallel effect on social media displacing real social activity wherever it goes.
Yeah, no disagreement here. It would be a miracle if a food that is designed and produced with the only intention to have people eat as much of it as possible had no bad consequences. That's before all the biological evidence we have.
The processed food/obesity debate seems similar to me to the climate debate. The evidence is well-researched and mostly very clear and most of the "debate" around the topic is with people who want to muddy the waters because they have personal stakes in it in some way - be it financial, political or psychological.
I mean, I've met old but still active Italians - it's not the wine that enabled them to stay healthy this long. Italians by and large drink less than other Europeans anyway.
That's just racist (those lazy-cheating southerners) bullshit "myth-busting" attempt that does the rounds. There was no different between these areas and others nearby with regards to pension fraud (or with regards to them being specially prone to it) that explains this. And there were no pensions to be had for those people well into the 1980s anyway, meanwhile everybody in those rural places knows everybody else since children...
Hailing from a much poorer country than Italy I can assure you, you can have everyone in on it.
I've spent four years in (northern) Italy and was impressed by the level of cleverness they displayed going around their overbuilt bureaucracy and tax system. It was both impressive and familiar really.
Not something normally admirable, but the Italian government (whichever might be in power at the moment) seems to think it's still 2005 or so and that the middle class will just take whatever is thrown at them.