The island where people forget to die
October 26, 2012
Ikaria (credit: Man77/Wikimedia Commons)
For a decade, with support from the National Geographic Society, I’ve been organizing a study of the places where people live longest, Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones, writes in The New York Times.
The project grew out of studies by my partners, Dr. Gianni Pes of the University of Sassari in Italy and Dr. Michel Poulain, a Belgian demographer. In 2000, they identified a region of Sardinia’s Nuoro province as the place with the highest concentration of male centenarians in the world.
Social structure might turn out to be more important. In Sardinia, a cultural attitude that celebrated the elderly kept them engaged in the community and in extended-family homes until they were in their 100s. Studies have linked early retirement among some workers in industrialized economies to reduced life expectancy.
If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. …
The Second Edition of The Blue Zones will be released Nov. 6 2012.
Comments (36)
by NakedApe
This science information is free and delivered to your email box regularly. Why are people bitching about this? Give me a break already!
by Editor
I for one welcome our new bitchy overlords…. seriously, though, we actually appreciate all suggestions.
by Tyx
Just one more hazardous event in this world… which could lead to what ? We don’t even have the ressources to live longer, why bother on this matter ?
by George
What a narrow perspective you have. Longer healthier life means less drain on social and medical resources. If you want to die at the common age fine, I don’t and I plan to do everything possible to live a longer, healthier and more productive life.
by Vlad
I would like to know what is their typical diet? Is it Mediterranean diet or something else?
by Gorden Russell
They eat a lot of legumes with wild greens, fish, goat meat, a little larded pork, and wash it all down with four glasses of red wine a day. I would guess it’s retsina (their oak trees were all deforested in ancient times).
by Gorden Russell
I clicked on the link of blue text in the first paragraph and found the article in the New York Times. It was seven pages, but I was glad I read it. When finished I went out for red wine, garbanzo beans, and black-eyed peas. Now if the regulars on this comment board formed a close-knit community where we don’t stress each other, we would all be better off.
by John Pahl
Nutrition, yes, but the major emphasis in the report–and presumably in the culture–is that being old isn’t a stigma and that the elderly stayed active in meaningful work for their families and the community.
That’s one reason I’m still teaching after 47 years.
jp
by Gorden Russell
Yes, the article did mention that they kept up their gardens and went out to play dominoes with their friends every night while sharing that red wine which is probably retsina. I’m gonna see if they sell that here in Syracuse.
by YourNameHere
Another 47 years bring you to the Singularity… Good luck.
by Bob Vasquez
Just change the oil in your Mercedes every 3,000 miles without fail, keep the car fluids up, check the tire pressure frequently (especially when the weather changes), drive the speed limits plus 3 mph, park it in the garage every night, keep it waxed and vacuumed; and, walaa, you’ve extended its life.
by Stupid Smart People
This article is a stub. You can add to this article by putting in missing information or correcting the information already here.
by Dr.Pratt
I signed up for this newletter, to get information from it,not to go elsewhere for it. I guess im lazy. I spend most of my non-working time reading, and doing searches on the computer for information…im not sure why, but I like to have it all in one place if I can get it that way.
by Mr.X
Almost everyone would like it that way because s/he can focus his/her attention on other, more important things instead of having to “worry” about this.
If that means being lazy, than this isn’t something bad but a synonym for being practical.
by godot
I subscribed to this newsletter many years ago, because it was the best tool to minimize the time I had to invest to keep current with new breakthroughs in science. At the time, KurzweilAI were the best aggregator at doing this job. N.B. that minimizing the subscriber’s total time spent on this task means minimizing both the number of stories, and the length of the descriptions of them. But without losing information or generating false information! (Yes, it’s a difficult, but much appreciated, task!)
This newsletter was so good at this task that I cancelled my subscription to “Science News” within the first 6 months of reading this newsletter.
I prefer that the KurzweilAI staff NOT invest their time in attempting to rewrite original articles better than the original researchers and authors. I am sure that all people involved are reasonably competent and intelligent, so duplicating their work would seem to be wasted effort. That the editors provide a way for us to “drill down” into the actual articles and source material, should we be interested, is an unnecessary, but much appreciated, convenience!
The main service I look for this newsletter to provide is that of selection of material. And by that I mean alerting us to the most important breakthroughs of the day, while filtering out and protecting us from the unimportant, and often repetitive, chaff.
My advice to the editor would be as follows: If you are going to err, err on the side of leaving out one article too many. After all, that only means that we must wait a few days longer to encounter that single piece of material in the commercial media. But to include one unimportant article too many every day means that many many person-hours will be invested in wading through lots more stuff every day.
Or, worse yet, we look at a long list of articles, perceive their reading represents too large a time investment “for today,” and elect, instead, to skip reading any of the newsletter “today.”
I am reminded of this situation: When I worked at Apple many moons ago, contract technical writers were hired via a standard contract which paid them by the word. I wanted our team to build a product which was as convenient as possible for the customer to install. This meant the shorter the accompanying documentation was (but which still communicated everything necessary), the better. (As Einstein said, “We must make it as simple as possible, but no simpler.”) I wanted my writers to invest a significant portion of their time REDUCING the length of their product. (At the time, it was a crazy idea antithetical to past endeavors.) Luckily, I managed to get a new writer’s contract accepted by management, and I am sure it has subsequently saved time for many of us.
I see the KurzweilAI Newsletter editor and staff in a similar situation. In most jobs, journalists have been rewarded to some extent for the length of their publications. In this job, I suggest that “shorter is better.”
I hope this is perceived in the humble and constructive spirit which it has been offered.
Thank you.
by Ian Clarke
“I’m sure that all people involved are reasonably competent and intelligent”
Hopefully, they won’t let that go to their heads. :-D
Good post. Personally, I think the site gets the balance about right. It can’t be easy.
With regards life extension, I think the role of the mind is too often underplayed. It’s possible to think yourself into an early grave, just as it’s possible to think yourself into a long life. Of course, mental faculties diminish with age and it is the fight against this decline that (barring cures for cancer) I believe will have the biggest initial impact on life extension.
I have a friend who’s a spritely 87 – he is still curious about the world and marvels at all the modern scientific advances. His outlook on life is inspirational. One of his favourite sayings is: “Why worry?”
I’m sure genetics, diet & environment are important factors, but I wonder just how much of their importance is in simply maintaining a healthy mind, and thereby a healthy outlook.
by dbamford
TLDR
by Gorden Russell
If you have the energy to key in this comment, you have the energy to twitch your index finger on the mouse button and click on the link printed in blue letters in the first paragraph in the article. ” …The Blue Zones, writes in The New York Times.”
by Dr.Pratt
Great start….where is the rest of the information? Low population, keeping the elderly involved in life, with close family ties, etc. Maybe a lot of red wine thrown in…so far, I have learned nothing.
by Editor
Click on the link for the full story: “writes in The New York Times”: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people-forget-to-die.html
For legal copyright reasons, we do use more than the standard “fair use” 150 words in excerpts.
by gabriele carboni
wooww!!! my island!!!
by Gus
The article, (If you can call it that.) is more like a teasing commercial. You know, leave the rube wanting more.Never does it go into anything specific.
by Mr.X
May digital distraction make my memory go away, so that I may forget.
by Henry Olders, MD
Perhaps the remarkable longevity on Sardinia is because the reproductive rate is so low (the lowest in Italy, according to Wikipedia). As Dr. August Weismann pointed out in the 1880s, the duration of life of a species is inversely proportional to its rate of reproduction, given that the species population in a given area tends to remain relatively constant over time.
by Peter the printer
Stess kills, pollution kills, bad diet kills, in short an unhealthy lifestyle in a polluted, stressful society [ring any bells?] shortens life. There’s nothing new in the fact that small Mediteranean communities lack all those things and people live longer. It’s not about remembering or not remembering anything. Expect China’s life expectancy to be plummeting soon.
by Gabriel
Roflmao, your words hit the nail on the head Peter
by Mr. Kirk
@ Peter and Gabriel. Environment certainly plays into early death and deterioration. I think you guys are missing the subtlety of the title. Our beliefs about aging change the way we age and can even change the way our genes express to a limited extent. Checkout the connection between death rates of widows and widowers. See also psychosocial dwarfism. The title’s reference to ‘forgetting’ is used in a loose sense. (Unless the editor is implying “remembering” in a Neal Walsch kind of way. In that case, I’d say it’s a bit too covert.)
The book “Timeless Mind, Ageless Body” is a bit hokey, but has useful information about the connection between our perceptions and aging.
by peter g
“I had one last question for him. How does he think he recovered from lung cancer?
“It just went away,” he said. “I actually went back to America about 25 years after moving here to see if the doctors could explain it to me.”
I had heard this part of the story before. It had become a piece of the folklore of Ikaria, proof of its exceptional way of life. Still, I asked him, “What happened?”
“My doctors were all dead.”
by peter g
vitamin d from sunlight increases lifespan apparently
by tesla111
So people who live in the dessert should all be 200 years or more or maybe — 6 months in the Arctic & 6 months in Antarctica and we live forever!
by Marcos Marin
By being on this site at all should be evidence you ceased thinking linearly and yet…
by Timothy
Seriously. “My grandmother smoked 3 packs a day and lived to be 90″ and “it’s 10 below zero at this moment, where I’m standing, so therefore climate change is a hoax” are typical for Yahoo. I would hope to find something a little less moronic here.
by Giulio Prisco
Sorry to sound moronic, but most of my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles etc. smoked 3 packs a day and lived to be very old. And here is windy and freezing cold.
by Mr.X
And where is your point?
by Smart teen of the 21st Century
Any of cancer?
Smoking is like breathing, only more poisonous.
by Marcos Marin
but of course! How could anything not after influencing over 2000 genes?