The Blue Zones by Dan Buettner

Author:Dan Buettner
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2008-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

BENEFITS OF A LIFESTYLE

So what were the key Blue Zone lessons about longevity from the Adventist studies? Fraser and Butler listed five things we can do to add as much as an extra decade to our lives.

“First, vegetarian status will get you about two years,” Fraser said. “Not eating meat is clearly important, and our studies have shown us it is because it seems to have an impact on heart disease and some cancers.

“Second, we found that nut eaters also had a two-year advantage, which seemed to relate largely to heart disease. Of course there are causes of death not related to cancer and heart disease, and we suspect some of these behaviors might also be protective for some of those causes.”

“Third is being a smoker,” added Fraser. “Or even a past smoker, as we found among the Adventists. If you have ever been a smoker, it has a moderately strong impact on lung cancer and some impact on heart disease.”

“Fourth is physical activity,” he continued, “which again accounted for an extra couple of years, and that seems to run very clearly to heart disease and to certain cancers like breast and colon cancer. The evidence is fairly clear that most of this benefit comes from modest but regular physical activity. It really flattens out once you get to the marathoner level, which is not necessary for longevity.”

The fifth and final recommendation is to maintain a fairly normal body weight, an increasingly important issue in the United States. “It turns out a lot of the very active chemicals that relate to inflammation probably have some impact on increasing the likelihood of cancer developing,” Fraser said. “Those chemicals could well come from fat cells. One huge advantage of a vegetarian diet is how much it is associated with lower body weight. In fact we just cracked some numbers from AHS-2 that show that Adventists who are what we call lacto-ovo vegetarians, meaning they eat eggs and other dairy products, still are an average of 16 pounds lighter than Adventists of the same height who are nonvegetarian. And Adventists who are strictly vegan, which is only 4 percent, are 30 to 32 pounds lighter than nonvegetarian Adventists of the same height. That has a huge impact on cardiovascular disease, on blood pressure, on blood cholesterol, on inflammation related to hormones and the way it stimulates cells in the body.”

I noted with a pang of regret that my nonvegetarian body was starving and could also still use a shot of caffeine. I drained my second glass of water, hoping that one of these good gentlemen would break out the nuts. But Fraser wasn’t quite finished. “If I could stress just one point to you, it would be this,” he said. “The Adventist experience, or lifestyle, we are studying doesn’t have to be that unique. In many, many ways they are fairly typical Americans. I think the most exciting thing about our results is that even with modest changes there is no reason why non-Adventists can’t benefit from these things in the same way.

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