Okinawans, subject of a book by gerontologist Craig Willcox, eat three or more servings of fish each week, along with whole grains, vegetables, soy products, tofu, and seaweed. The Californians of Loma Linda-Seventh-Day Adventists-forego smoking and drinking, but stick to a vegetarian diet. They drink, on average, three cups of coffee and two to four glasses of wine a day, eat fish twice a week, and consume a lot of olive oil, fresh fruits and vegetables, and herbal teas.
Icarians eat six times as many beans as Americans do, and just a quarter as much refined sugar. In general, blue zone diets are low in saturated fats, as in such western cardiac banes as red meat. They have close relationships with family and friends. Blue-zoners garden, walk to the post office and the local shops, and climb stairs. They exercise in moderation-none of those obsessive workouts at the gym. They get a good night’s sleep, wake up when they feel like it in the morning, and take naps in the afternoon. People in the blue zones live in small supportive communities. The truth is that they don’t seem to do anything much. Gerontologists-and all the rest of us-naturally want to know just what blue-zone dwellers do to make it into robust old age. One out of every three Icarians lives into his or her nineties. Icaria-named for the famously short-lived Icarus, he of the unstable wax-coated wings-has the highest percentage of nonagenarians on the planet. Worldwide, there are at least five such pockets of spectacular longevity: Sardinia, Italy Okinawa, Japan Loma Linda, California the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica and the Greek island of Icaria in the north Aegean Sea. This all seems to come together in ideal proportions in regions known as “blue zones,” originally identified by researchers Michel Poulain and Giovanni Pes as areas of the globe where people live impressively long, happy, and healthy lives. The rest is the result of a mixed bag of environmental and lifestyle factors, among these social interactions, physical activity, and food. Scientists estimate that about 20 percent to 30 percent of a person’s lifespan depends on genetics. In other words, chances are that Alice had lucked into a set of good genes. Her father, writes Locke, lived to the age of 83, her mother to 96, and her grandmother to 111. She was in good health, he reports, could see well enough to thread a needle, and lived primarily on bread, cheese, and beer.Īlice came of a long-lived family. In 1681, philosopher John Locke recorded in his journal an account of his meeting with Alice George of Oxford, said to be 108 years old. This doesn’t mean that some people in each generation didn’t beat the depressing odds. Diet for a Long Lifeįor much of human history, life expectancy at birth has hovered somewhere between the late twenties and early thirties. One story holds that the Chinese invented gunpowder by mistake in the process of searching for an elixir of immortality. Juan Ponce de Leon was searching for the legendary Fountain of Youth in 1513 when he discovered Florida-now, in an ironic twist of fate, the state with the oldest population in the U.S. He finally does, in the shape of a thorny plant that grows at the bottom of the sea, but it’s stolen from him by a serpent before he gets a chance to use it.Īlexander the Great’s aggressive career is said to have been inspired as much by the hope of discovering a river that could reverse aging as about world domination. In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates at least to 2,600 BCE, Gilgamesh braves lions, scorpion-men, and giants to find the source of eternal life. People have been obsessed with longevity for millennia, ever since it dawned on us that life has an unwelcome endpoint.
#WAYS TO BEAT ELIXIR OF IMMORTALITY CRACKED#
And he was convinced that carrots held the secret to longevity.Īt one point, to promote his favored vegetable, he hosted an all-carrot dinner, which began with carrot soup and proceeded through carrot mousse, carrot salad, pickled carrots, carrots au gratin, carrot loaf, and carrot ice cream, all washed down with glass after glass of carrot juice.įord also touted soybeans, cracked wheat, and buckwheat pancakes. He shunned sweets and would drink only tepid water.
Henry Ford was funny about food. He was anti-milk (“the cow is the crudest machine in the world”) and anti-meat (“chicken is only fit for hawks”).
0 kommentar(er)
