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What if we could do something to live longer, healthier lives?

Most if not all humans are interested in longevity and healthy aging. But we’ve developed certain beliefs about aging—that we deteriorate mentally, develop problems, experience loss of function, etc.—that seemingly hold us back from that Fountain of Youth. 

It’s a subject that contains a lot of subterfuge and misinformation. Industries such as pharmaceuticals and biohacking have come alive and prey on common fears related to aging and dying. And yet, they don’t consider key questions to get reliable answers. How long are we supposed to live? What’s our quality of life supposed to be like?

In this health report, we’re taking a look at the Blue Zones and longevity. You’ll understand where those zones are, what these cultures do to live vibrant lives well into their 100’s, and learn the most critical factors to increasing the human life span.

 

Listen now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify too!

 

Topics covered in this podcast episode:

• The misunderstanding of human life expectancy
• What biohacking is and involves
• What a 1970s National Geographic article revealed about longevity
• Why Blue Zone diets have been misreported
• Surprising revelations about the lifestyles of those living in Blue Zones
• What life should look like as a healthy aging human
• What is the appropriate age to expect to live to as a human
• The most critical factors to increase the human life span

This information should pique your imagination, spark your curiosity, and inspire you because you could actually maintain a high level of a functioning, healthy body, mind, and spirit for many more years than you ever believed possible. 

You just have to be willing to adopt a lifestyle that's a little bit healthier, more enjoyable, and more connected. 

I’ll see you in the next true health report.

Resources:

Dead Doctors Don’t Lie (book)

Visit the Shop

 

The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the True Health Report follows

Hello, and welcome to the True Health Report. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufman. Today, I'm going to talk about a subject that I think will be quite important to many, if not all of you, and that is longevity and aging.

Now, this is a subject that I feel contains a lot of subterfuge and misinformation because we have come to one, you know, believe that we have a certain life expectancy. And I think many of us associate that with the human life expectancy. And in addition to that, we have certain beliefs about aging that we are going to essentially deteriorate. We're going to develop problems, loss of function, et cetera.

And this, of course, is a concern for many because we always want the fountain of youth. We want to live as long as possible, stay as young as possible. And of course, this leads to the consumption of pharmaceuticals, for one, and also to a new field referred to as biohacking.

Biohacking is trying to use different processes and materials that have some kind of research that suggests they may increase your lifespan. But most of that is not very conclusive and probably mostly driven by profit and not really looking at, well, what are the factors and how long are we really supposed to live and what's our quality of life supposed to be like?

Are we supposed to become debilitated with arthritis and walk with canes? Are we supposed to lose our mental sharpness and stop being able to remember things or drive? Many of the circumstances that we've come to accept and regard as normal aging.

But what if we could look at other cultures, perhaps even ones before the influence of modern agriculture, modern medicine, technology, the chemical industry, et cetera, and see what kind of experiences they had? Did they live as long or longer than we did? What was their quality of life like throughout the lifespan?

Well, it turns out that I had been reading an author who wrote a book called Dead Doctors Don't Lie, and his name is Dr. Wallach. And in one of his lectures that I was looking at while I was reading the book, or maybe when I was waiting for the book to arrive, he mentioned an article in National Geographic magazine.

Now, I'm the one that's always skeptical, and I wanted to check the sources. So as soon as I heard that, I paused the lecture and then I went to see if I could find that particular article. Maybe it was published online somewhere. I thought of looking at archive.org and other places.

And it turns out that National Geographic itself actually has a website where you can order past issues. So I found the issue on there, and it does exist. However, it was out of stock.

I kind of felt like I wonder if this is permanently out of stock because I could not find the article anywhere else. In fact, many of the searches I looked for didn't even have that article. They just had something related to National Geographic.

So I talked about this before. I can't remember exactly where I mentioned it, but very fortunate for me that one of the listeners went into some old boxes somewhere in her house where the old National Geographic magazines were and found this particular issue from January.

And you can see that it's actually the cover story, or at least the photograph on the cover is from the article that we're going to look at. And it's called "Every Day is a Gift When You're Over One Hundred" by Alexander Leaf, M.D., with photographs by John Lanois.

And we're going to look at some of those photographs. And like I said, this is January, nineteen seventy-three, and it's volume one forty-three, number one.

Now, I was very tickled pink to receive this issue, and of course, I sat down to read it. But first, I decided I was going to scan the article in before I might have a chance to wrinkle the pages or perhaps tear something by accident. And so I scanned it in and archived it, and I'll bring it up on screen in a moment.

What happened in this article is that a journalist from National Geographic went on a long journey to three different places, three different places which are said to have people living a long time, specifically over one hundred years.

And that's what he focused on, meeting and interviewing a variety of people who were more than one hundred years old. And it turns out that many of them were considerably more than one hundred years old.

And they were from three particular places:

• Vilcabamba, Ecuador
• Hunza, Pakistan (formerly of Kashmir, in the mountains)
• Abkhazia, Georgia, in Russia, Southern Russia

These three areas have similar geographic characteristics:

• They're all in mountainous areas.
• They're all very difficult to get to.
• They are isolated.

And this is probably why they were able to exist without much influence from the modern world, at least until the 1970s, when this article came out.

Now, this is quite interesting. Actually, some of the information about these cultures has been slightly misreported because of the obstacle to getting to these remote areas to study.

For example, researchers from the West, like anthropologists and archaeologists, as well as physicians, always come in the summer months or the warm months because it's much easier to get there, even though it's challenging enough in those seasons.

And so, they see what the people eat there at a certain time of year. And there's been some misinformation about what the diet consists of throughout the year.

And I will get into that a little bit during this discussion, but that's not where the similarities end.

It's not just that they are all in the mountains and kind of harsh and remote conditions. But I will talk about some of the other similarities after we see a little bit of what these folks look like.

So I'm going to put this article up on the screen. And National Geographic is definitely known for its photography, and they really capture the human existence.

And so, here we see a woman who is at least one hundred and thirty years of age or older. She had only retired from picking tea leaves three years before this photograph was taken.

And she actually had been given the title of the fastest tea leaf picker in her community.

Even though she retired, she still remains active in community activities and her social life.

And she has a daily routine and ritual, which involves smoking a pack of cigarettes. And they estimated that she had smoked for over sixty years.

And also, the reporter noted that when he met her, she poured him a shot of vodka, and they had a toast. And she said that she drinks vodka every morning as well as a glass of wine before lunch.

So, not exactly the kind of lifestyle you might expect for someone of that age or someone who lived that long.

Now, you'll also notice from the photograph that she is overweight. Now, she is from the Abkhazian community in Russia, in Georgia.

And that location, interestingly, has some obesity. Whereas in the other two areas, Vilcabamba in Ecuador and the Hunza people in Pakistan, there generally is no obesity among those peoples.

But they all have, you know, very long lifespans. So we're kind of going against a convention here.

Now, another interesting finding—because there have been some doctors, including a cardiologist, who have gone and studied these people—is that when they do some of the tests, like EKGs, for example, they find evidence often that these people had heart attacks.

But when they interviewed them, they had never experienced any symptoms of a heart attack.

So I wonder, are we, one, diagnosing heart attacks correctly? But two, if they never experienced any symptoms, then was it really a condition?

But nevertheless, so we see smoking, drinking, obesity, perhaps some kind of heart disease, yet living very, very long lifespans.

Let's look at some other pictures.

This gentleman is one hundred and four years old on horseback, and they're going to also show him bathing in the river.

And if you look at his body, you can tell that he does not look like someone who is one hundred and four years old.

His skin is not completely atrophied and wrinkled and hanging down.

He looks quite vibrant, more like a man in his sixties.

And you'll see that there is a theme of a very active lifestyle among these people.

Here's another gentleman—that's the same gentleman who is one hundred and four.

This gentleman, I believe, is one hundred and twenty-five years old.

No, I'm sorry, his father lived to be one hundred and twenty-five, and he is ninety-eight years old.

But as you can see, he's still out in the fields and gathering tea leaves.

And he has a fondness for wine as well.

And, you know, there seemed to be a theme that the folks living in these communities have celebration and community.

And generally, I think that's when they drink wine and vodka or brandy or some other liquor.

But the thing about these alcoholic beverages is that they make them themselves from local products.

So it's not something made in a factory.

It's not made with crops sprayed with herbicides and pesticides.

But nevertheless, it still is alcohol.

And, if we go on to the next page, I think we're going to see one of the feasts that was attended by this journalist.

And you can see it's quite a nice spread.

And notice that there is no processed food on the table.

There are no condiment jars.

There's no sodas or anything like that.

I think everyone is drinking wine.

And there's a pitcher of water, and then you can see that there’s actual real food ingredients.

And this is still in Georgia.

This gentleman is one hundred and seventeen years old, and he's carrying potatoes home for lunch.

And he still works half a day.

And he still maintains interest in romantic life, another theme that we’ll talk about.

So I just want to show a few more pictures of these folks because, as you can see, while some of them look older and some of them look younger, they're all engaged in activities.

They're all with people.

And they don't have any, you know, nursing homes or care homes in these communities.

I wanted to just see how old this woman is.

She’s only ninety-five, but works at a bakery.

So they did eat some bread in these communities.

All right, so I think we've seen some good imagery to have a little further discussion here.

And, you know, my reason for bringing up this topic is really because I want to point out where I think we should be looking to find the answers about what our lives should be like throughout our lifespan.

And what is an appropriate human age to live to?

And I think we would learn this information by looking at actual people who have lived to that age.

And, for example, in the southern area of Russia where Georgia is, it's not just those Abkhazian people featured in the article.

But there are other people that were in the Soviet Union at the time that were not allowed to be interviewed or studied by Westerners.

And they had very high rates of living to be over one hundred.

An Astonishing Case of Extreme Longevity

In fact, they had someone who had lived to be one hundred and fifty-four years.

And he was well known to the research community in this area at the time.

So, since we have so many of these examples of living that long, it's, you know, far different than what we kind of think in the West.

That if you get to one hundred, you're, you know, one in a million, and you're going to be dead pretty soon after that.

But seeing people into their one hundred and twenties, one hundred and thirties, one hundred and forties, and even one hundred and fifties—

Well, that's a really different ballgame.

I mean, that's living almost fifty percent longer potentially than we previously thought.

So what if we all really are supposed to live to about one hundred?

And maybe some of us to one hundred and fifty?

Maybe we’re all supposed to live to one hundred and twenty, and some of us a little bit longer.

But something in the way that we are living our life is interfering with this

And also, if you look at these folks, even if their body habitus was overweight, they were active and functional.

They were not strung up in wheelchairs and using walkers and bedridden.

They were maintaining their social interactions.

They still had normal cognitive function, even at those ages.

And every example really was like that because those cultures didn't have a way to care for people who were infirm and debilitated like that.

So it's like they wouldn't have been able to survive there, but also I think they never needed that because that's simply not what they were experiencing.

So let's look at what are the main common factors that we can learn from these people, which could lead us in further directions to find out what really are the most critical factors to live this type of lifespan.

And I think it may not be that hard to adopt many of these things because I think we know—we kind of have an idea what they are already.

Nutrition and Diet as a Key Factor

So obviously, nutrition and diet has to be important for this purpose.

And, you know, one thing that is definitely true about all these people is that they did not have any kind of ultra-processed or highly processed food, other than what they processed themselves.

• They did make bread of different types—some from corn in some of the cultures and some from wheat.
• But they harvested and ground it themselves and processed it into and baked it.
• It was not grown with GMO crops.
• It didn’t come from a factory.

Now, I didn’t get into the process. I don’t know if it was fermented, but I do know that they almost all had a lot of dairy content in their diet.

And for many of them, it was sour dairy or fermented dairy.

So that would be similar to a kefir-type drink.

And in some of these cultures, they seem to have dairy at just about every meal.

Seasonal and Local Food Consumption

Also, all their food was local from the area.

They weren’t bringing in fruit from Central America in the middle of the winter, for example.

So they had a seasonal diet because of that.

They were able to preserve things in various ways, but they really had access to a lot of dairy and some meat throughout the year, with very limited other things, and then a more bountiful experience during the harvest season.

So it was kind of like a cyclical diet—except for bread, which was, I guess, a staple to some degree, but always with a variety of whole foods at the meal.

So this is very different, obviously, from the standard American or Western diet, which has many sugary things and processed foods and such.

Another commonality among these cultures is that they did not have any access whatsoever to the Western allopathic health care system.

So they did have traditional and herbal medicines that varied between the different cultures.

And they actually—all of them, I think—reported eating a lot of different herbs and using a lot of different leaves from trees and plants:

• For nutritional purposes
• For seasoning
• For medicinal purposes

They all continued to work and have a role in their community throughout their lifespan.

And in fact, the elders in these cultures had a higher social status.

So, not like in Western culture, where they’re kind of a burden and left out to dry and the younger generation takes over.

But they were actually more like in Asian cultures, where elders are seen as:

• Respected leaders
• The most wise individuals

Also, in Native American cultures, that’s more true as well.

So they, you know, had to stay active.

They had to stay sharp.

And physical activity or work was present throughout their life, even into old age.

They really didn’t slow down very much at all.

They mostly lived with extended family.

So there was a built-in support system.

And this also was part of what gave them their status as the wise elder of that family, but also of the community.

Like I said, all of these cultures were somewhat geographically isolated, and I think that kind of protected them against modern civilization and culture.

Everyone lived independently.

So, like I said before, there were no nursing homes or care homes or anything like that that these folks could depend on.

And to the surprise of many, alcohol and tobacco use were more common than one might think—

Alcohol being more ubiquitous.

Although it did mention in some of the communities that the most elder people may have turned down the vodka sometimes.

But they drank it previously throughout the first hundred years of their life.

They stopped drinking it after that, perhaps.

But these things—so in other words, what I’m saying is that they didn’t adhere to some extremely ascetic type of monk’s lifestyle.

They engaged in the community.

Many of them had multiple marriages.

In fact, it was very important that they had good marriages.

It seemed that the people themselves expressed that they felt that that helped them live longer.

But very different from our cultural experiences.

So I think we can take away some things here:

• If we want to improve our lifespan, we do have to address our diet and stay away from processed foods, no matter what.
• We can moderately drink some alcohol, but maybe make our own potentially, or get something that is of a good quality, not the cheap stuff.
• It’s important that we maintain physical activity—and it doesn’t have to be sports, or it doesn’t have to be going to the gym to work out.
• It could be gardening. It could be cleaning. But it’s got to be enough of it and on a regular basis.
• It can’t just be once in a while. It needs to be ongoing.
• We need to nurture our relationships.
• We need to be part of communities.

And I think all these folks spent a great deal of time in nature.

Something that many of us miss these days because of our circumstances—working and perhaps the climates we live in—

And that we don’t have the necessity to go outside all the time.

But it’s important to do that and to do it in a natural setting as much as possible.

So this information, I think, should pique your imagination—spark your curiosity.

And inspire you that you could actually maintain a high level of functioning, a healthy body, a healthy mind, a healthy spirit, and live many more years than you ever believed possible.

If you’re simply willing to adopt a lifestyle that’s a little bit healthier, and also seems more enjoyable than many people’s average forty-hour workweek lifestyle.

Final Words

All right. Well, this has been a very interesting topic, and I’m definitely going to be speaking more about this.

But until then, I’ll see you on the next True Health Report.