Live longer and love it

Do you remember an ad campaign a few years back that promoted yogurt as the key to a long life?

No kidding. A yogurt company tried to convince people that the superannuated Russians appearing in the commercial were well over a hundred years of age, and ascribed it all to gobbling yogurt all the time. 

Well, you can imagine what happened. Instead of looking a little further into that cup of bacterial milk fermentation, Americans raced to the BuySumMor to load up on the miracle elixir of long long LONG life.

I hate to break it to you, but I don't see a lot of 127-year-olds spooning six-ounce cups of Mixed Berry down their necks, so perhaps the answer to superlongevity lies elsewhere.

Maybe that elsewhere is Trinidad, Bolivia, where an isolated tribe has been found to have the healthiest brains on earth. The tribe is known as the Tsimanès, and science believes that their lifestyle and its salubrious benefits could lead to a cure for diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

In 2017, a study showed that the  Tsimanè people had healthier hearts than the rest of us. Scientists broke their necks to race to Bolivia to see what was going on, and did CT scans on 746 Tsimanè adults. Comparing those scans to adult brains from Germany, Holland, and the United States gave results showing that these people's noggins were in much better shape, too!

One finding was that our brains are 70% smaller than those of the tribespeople, and this is said to be because of atrophy owing to the poor diets of the western world.

Daily exercise and a diet rich in natural health foods are said to prevent brain atrophy among the Tsimané tribespeople.

“Our sedentary lifestyle and diet rich in sugars and fats may be accelerating the loss of brain tissue with age and making us more vulnerable to diseases such as Alzheimer’s,” said Hillard Kaplan, professor of health economics at Chapman University, who led the study. “The Tsimané can serve as a baseline for healthy brain aging.”

The message seems to be that if you want to live longer and live better, with a sharp older mind not hampered by confusion, paranoia, and forgetfulness, the same lifestyle that prevents heart disease is the ticket.

On the other, completely unscientific, hand, I know plenty of people who lead dissolute lives well into their 80s and beyond, and Jim Fixx, literally wrote the book on running for good health, dropped dead of a heart attack at age 52 while out for a jog. To quote the great sage Porter Wagoner (right), "What is to be will be, and what ain't to be just might happen."