[Kevin]
Hey, and welcome back to another episode of Nutrition for Noobs. I'm the head noob, Kevin. And I'm Michelle, the nerd.

So how are you doing, Michelle, the nerd?

[Michelle]
I, you know what? I had a glorious, glorious weekend. I got an opportunity to attend my favorite nutrition conference of the whole year.

And I'm gonna get the name of this wrong because it's a really long name, but it's the Canadian plant-based Healthcare Professionals and Lifestyle Medicine Conference. Yeah, so it was just so cool. I got to see, so you've maybe heard me mention Dr. Michael Clapper before. He was one of the keynotes. So as my husband likes to say, I got to meet the Clapper. It's actually the second time I met him.

I did get to meet him one time when I went to the conference in Anaheim for plantrition. So it's just always so good for my soul. It's so invigorating.

It's just, you know what? This is so unique that when you go into this conference facility, there's a buffet for breakfast, there's a buffet for lunch, and you don't have to question anything on the menu at all. It's just all like delicious, whole food, super nutritious.

And the room is full of like-minded people. So it's, and I just really love too that they're not only like-minded, they are all in some way or shape or form involved in healthcare. So there's people like me who are more community-based, holistic nutrition trained.

There's also tons of registered dietitians, there's nurses, there's hospital administrative staff, there's chefs, plant-based chefs, there's physicians, surgeons, researchers.

[Kevin]
You name it.

[Michelle]
Yeah, yeah, so it's really the community because everybody shares, you know, even though we're coming from a different aspect of healthcare or healthy communities, we all recognize this problem that there's too much chronic disease in Canada and that there needs to be some more awareness and some more system change. And they're really about focusing on educating healthcare professionals that it can, a big answer is at the end of your fork.

[Kevin]
Always, it's always at the end of your fork. So today we are going to be talking about longevity because I certainly want to live longer. And I know that you have talked about things like blue zones earlier and other episodes.

And so today I think we're gonna talk a little bit about lessons that you can pass on from some of the longest living people on the planet. Is that right?

[Michelle]
Yes, this is such an amazing area of study that I latched onto this when I was actually first training as a student in my first training at the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition. We studied a book by John Robbins who was the heir apparent of the Baskin Robbins empire. And then he rejected that opportunity and when, and cause he was a huge into nutrition and health.

And he recognized that his family's legacy was contributing to the major chronic diseases in America.

[Kevin]
31 flavors of sugar.

[Michelle]
Yeah, yeah. He's yeah, in his book, he talks about the fact that he grew up with an ice cream cone shaped swimming pool.

[Kevin]
Well, that sounds like fun actually.

[Michelle]
So it created some rifts in the family when he made that choice, but he and his wife moved to remote little spot in British Columbia, Canada and raised their kids kind of off the grid. So in his book, Healthy at 100, which was published sometime in the early 2000s, he talks about the research of Alexander Leaf who was a physician researcher and who studied the longest living populations on the planet and the research that he published around the 1970s. And then there has been another National Geographic study that was led by Dan Buechner and a team of researchers more recently in another book which most people have heard of by now called the Blue Zones.

And the Blue Zones is considered a little bit more reliable research because there's more reliable birth records of the subjects. So I wanna talk about both of them though because what's interesting is the two of them together really create a very compelling story that should teach us a lot about what people do, who live the longest and also with the lowest incidence of disease in their communities. And on a population basis, the numbers are so significant.

There are so many of them, which tells us that there is something very different that they're doing. So I wanna go through both of those.

[Kevin]
Okay, I certainly wanna live longer.

[Michelle]
Let's start with Healthy at 100. And one of the things that the book sort of touches on in its intro is he sort of pokes at society's perspectives on aging. So when you think about aging in Canada or in North America, what are the things that come to mind?

What does our society tell us?

[Kevin]
How horrible old age homes are.

[Michelle]
Yes. So you get old, you deteriorate, you become less mobile, you become a bit more helpless, you become a bit decrepit.

[Kevin]
You become a burden.

[Michelle]
Think about the rituals too, that kind of follow turning 40, turning 50, turning 60.

[Kevin]
I hate that expression.

[Michelle]
You're over the hill. Black balloons, all of that stuff. So he sort of pokes at that because there are a lot of difference.

So like, for example, if you age in one of these blue zones, as you get older, you are considered more valuable, more respected, more revered in the society. So one of the hypotheses that is flushed out very early in the book is this idea that who you will become in your later years is shaped by the choices that you make.

[Kevin]
Makes sense.

[Michelle]
And in all the ways that you care for yourself, how you manage your life and your lifestyle, and even the way that you think and the way that you relate to others. And the keys are not just diet and exercise, which are very easy sources for us to go to in modern society, but also emphasizing this idea of incredibly strong social connections. And this is something that Leif's work and Buechner's work have very, very strongly in common.

So I'm gonna start with the spoiler and then work my way backwards.

[Kevin]
Spoiler alert.

[Michelle]
Here's kind of the healthy aging summary. And so we know from this research that diet and exercise are keys to help us live long and healthy lives, but that these social, combined with strong social connections, they play a very key role. One of the things that Robbins is famous for saying after he went through all of this research and wrote this book is that loneliness actually kills faster than cigarettes.

So it's the quality of our relationships that make a tremendous difference to the physical as well as our emotional health. And that authentic life-affirming intimate relationships have an enormous and a miraculous healing power. You know, I think in my own life that that really rings true for me because I remember when my mom was aging, my dear mom passed away at 93 and she had a lot of physical conditions that, you know, were burdening her by that age and mobility was very difficult for her, but her mind right up until the end remained as sharp as a tack.

My mom was always joyful. She had extremely strong social connections. Everybody for, I don't know, I don't know what mile radius, like she was known to the entire community and rings beyond our community as, you know, basically Mama Pierce, you know?

So, and she was always, you know, loved by so many people and visited, actively visited by so many people, cards, letters. And I truly, truly believe that those strong social connections, despite her physical condition and are what kept her mind strong and what helped her live to be such a long life. And there's, even though she had a lot of physical pain, she had a great deal of quality of life.

So I think that really, really rang true for me, which is why I paid such close attention to this book.

[Kevin]
Right, makes sense.

[Michelle]
Okay, so we're gonna start with Leif's research in the 1970s.

[Kevin]
Okay.

[Michelle]
And then in the 1970s, National Geographic Magazine asked Alexander Leif to visit, study, and write about the world's healthiest and most longest living people. And his qualifications were that he was at the time professor of clinical medicine at Harvard and the chief of medical services at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was also not just practicing in medicine, but he was also active in research.

And so he was known for that. So the four centenarian societies that he visited and studied based on the data that was available at the time. So keep in mind too, 1970, think about how long ago that was.

There were no computers, there was no social media.

[Kevin]
Different world.

[Michelle]
It was a very, very different time. So they would have had to have relied on paper records. Right.

Right, of things and legends and stories or whatever. It would have been very difficult to tease out this information. But the four famous centenarian societies, one was in the Caucasus Mountains in the South of Russia called the Abkhazians.

One was the Vilkabambans in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador, which is near Peru. Then there was the Hunzas in the mountainous area of Northern Pakistan, like really, really North, like near the border of Russia and China. And then of course the Okinawans from Japan.

And even at that time, I think the Okinawans, well, at least certainly by the time John Robbins was extrapolating and expanding on Leaf's work, there had already been the Okinawan centenarian study as well. So lots of, lots of evidence. So I'm not gonna go through everything obviously exhaustively in detail, but I wanna talk about some of the qualities of these societies and how they lived.

So, and this is actually, I'm taking this from a course that I used to teach.

[Kevin]
Oh, okay, perfect. So you know this.

[Michelle]
Yeah, it's really cool that it ended up being my favorite, sort of the favorite book that we read when I was in school. And then years later, when I ended up becoming faculty of the school, this was one of the courses I was asked to teach. So in Abkhazia, in the Caucasus, for example, in their culture, their society, there is no concept of retirement at all.

You never become sedentary. And in fact, if somebody approaches you and suggests that they do something for you or you sit down and, you know, because you're elderly, take my chair or whatever, it's insulting.

[Kevin]
Oh, okay, okay.

[Michelle]
Yeah, yeah. And all throughout their life, they are very, very hard workers, but they have very little emotional stress. So there's very little stress in their society.

They are a people as a society that they don't like being rushed. There is no concept of deadlines.

[Kevin]
Oh, I love this. I'm moving there.

[Michelle]
I know, right? I can't even relate to that. The only time there is ever any sense of urgency is if there is an actual emergency, like your house is on fire.

[Kevin]
Right, something very pressing and physical and- So they're very chill.

[Michelle]
They're very relaxed people. And there's tremendous, tremendous respect for the elderly in Abkhazian culture. In fact, your status in society increases with age such that we think that one of the reasons why some of the accounts of the ages of the actual centenarians that Leif was studying, like the research ended up being very discounted scientifically by a lot of people because the birth records and death records were kind of sketchy.

And think about it. If they were already in 1970, they're already over a hundred years old, like getting reliable records would have been tough.

[Kevin]
Yeah, you're looking at birth of 1870, yeah, yeah.

[Michelle]
But it turns out society reveres the aging so much that people lied about their age, not in the way that we do, where we lie about being younger, they would lie about being older.

[Kevin]
Interesting.

[Michelle]
Isn't that cool?

[Kevin]
That's amazing. I definitely want to move there now.

[Michelle]
Yeah, exactly. And the elderly are never required to compete with younger people. Like you're sitting at their feet, like listening to their stories and hanging on their words.

And in fact, in their language, there isn't even a word for old people. And the closest translation would be long living.

[Kevin]
Okay. It's a very positive spin to everything that you don't have to pander to the old people. You don't even call them elderly, you're old, or like you, it's just, you've lived a little bit longer.

Like it's very factual.

[Michelle]
Yeah.

[Kevin]
And there's not a value there. Whereas, the elderly, the age, like in our like Western language, there's often a bit of a derogatory, you know, oh, you're becoming a burden, you're less than somehow, you're less valuable because you're no longer young. You've retired, you've moved on, gone on to greener pastures, blah, blah, blah.

Like, it's interesting.

[Michelle]
And in fact, in Abkhazian traditional society, if I wanted to compliment you, Kevin, I would say, oh, hello, you're looking very old today.

[Kevin]
Okay, I'm really glad I don't live there.

[Michelle]
What that would mean is that would mean that you are very wise and you are very beautiful in your maturity. Looking young is considered to be an insult. That's how much they value it.

Yeah, it's so tremendous. And, you know, as a result of their healthy outlook and their healthy lifestyle, they continue on, according to John Robbins' book and recounting the research, have very active sex lives well into very, very old age.

[Kevin]
Okay, I'm totally moving there.

[Michelle]
They maintain a healthy appetite as well, which is something that we often see declining in seniors in our culture. It's very difficult to make sure that seniors are getting adequate, not just nutritional density, but just simple caloric intake. And sleep is also very much prioritized.

So they're, yeah, they're never thought of as burdens or anything like that as we think of. And, you know, there's something different with the way that, what struck me about the Caucasian culture in particular when we were studying this, Kevin, it's not just the way that they treat their elderly, though, I think that is important. It's also how they treat their youth.

So there's something fundamentally different about raising children. So the attitudes of aging seem to be greatly influenced by how they raise their kids. They feel that physical punishment induces disrespect and encourages disrespect.

So parents are taught to withhold praise and to express disapproval. And otherwise they praise often. And without the threat of punishment, it seems that their children get reared to never express or feel resentment.

So, you know, and I have to say, my mom was very much like that too. Like the worst thing I could ever hear was I'm very disappointed in you.

[Kevin]
Mm-hmm, yeah.

[Michelle]
Right? That was, I remember that, how that used to hit, right? And so that's what that reminds me of when I think about the Abcasians.

Yeah, so they work very joyfully and they have this incredible culture of respect and reverence from children all the way to the elderly. So I'm gonna go through kind of these characteristics of all of them, and then we're gonna talk about their diets because their diets have a lot of things in common, which is so incredible because they're completely in remote and distant parts of the world away from each other without being influenced.

[Kevin]
Right, yeah, they're in the four different corners basically, yeah.

[Michelle]
So the Vilcababans in Ecuador, it actually was famous around, you know, those earlier decades of the 1990s. Celebrities used to flock to this community because it was known as the land of eternal youth.

[Kevin]
Okay. Those crazy movie stars.

[Michelle]
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So again, and they have the same problem of lack of clear birth and death records. But again, this reverence for the elderly, they have a very tranquil existence.

There's not really a lot of competitive spirit. It's really just very, very community-based. And the quality of their human relationships are considered to be almost more notable than clean air and pure water and rich soil, which they also have as well.

They are not a people that ever fight. They don't quarrel. They don't dispute with one another.

They speak very elegantly, very respectfully. Lots of flourishes and tenderness when they speak with one another. And there is no separation by ages among their society.

So the older kids are always with the younger kids. The elderly are always with the elders. They're always doing things in community.

And that's why he says the quality of their social structures, their social relationships is almost more notable than all of the other stuff. They're a very, very tight-knit community. But the same idea of reverence for the elderly becoming more greater status as you age is very prevalent in this society too, because in Vilcabamba, the young people are known to absolutely flock around the elderly people and craving their company and appreciating learning from them.

And like, how different is that from today? Like imagine if we just opened up the doors of our senior centers and all of the kids after school just ran in to interact with them and listen to their stories and be with them. Imagine what that would do.

[Kevin]
Well, they wouldn't even be in senior centers because part of this idea is like outsourcing your aging parent who's a burden. Whereas I would assume that in these cultures, like the elderly, the long-lived are still in the family unit, still in the home, still in that community. They're not sort of pushed off to the side and made to live amongst themselves like they're lepers or something.

It's not a leper colony. They're interspersed among the community, which again, sends a bit of a message that whether you push them aside and like, oh, you're in your twilight years, even that terminology is horrible. And therefore you need to go in this particular building and have particular specialized nurses look after you because you're no longer productive in society.

Let the youngins take over. And you know, like there's so much baggage around that. And then the young, like you keep talking about youth.

And again, kids learn what they observe. So again, if they observe as they're growing up that the long-lived, the older people are respected and part of the community and blah, blah, blah, then they'll grow up that way. They'll teach their kids that way.

It'll just become second nature. Whereas if they learn that, oh, grandma's off in a home because she's useless or whatever, you know, they will similarly learn that schema for life. And that, you know, you live your productive up to X point.

And once you cross a magical age, usually it's like 65, you know, retirement age, you're no longer a productive member of society. Like it's interesting.

[Michelle]
Yeah, and I hope that those attitudes are shifting. And, you know, I think the Blue Zones has helped a lot with that one. Later we'll get to that book, but everything that you're touched on is bang on because one of the hallmarks that the Blue Zones emphasizes, which is present as well in Leaf's work and what John Robbins writes about.

And it's the fact that this incredible sense of purpose is one of the key things that they continue to have an incredible sense of purpose rather than feeling that, you know, loss of usefulness.

[Kevin]
Right, right. And I think also just generally, I think, you know, much as we blame the baby boomers for a lot, one thing that the baby boomers are doing is I think they are redefining retirement. And I think the old notion of you hit 65, you're given a gold watch, and then you play golf for the remaining years of your life until you kick off is no longer- Or pickleball.

Or pickleball, well, yeah, exactly. Well, the very fact that pickleball exists because pickleball is so much more active than golf. I don't want to offend golfers out there.

I'm sure it's a wonderful sport. I hate it, but whatever.

[Michelle]
Yeah, I like them both. I like golf and pickleball.

[Kevin]
But, you know, I think baby boomers are redefining retirement to the point that, you know, they're often entering a second or third or fourth career or they're volunteering. They're not just going out to pasture. And I think that's slowly, slowly changing our society to, you know, say that retirement isn't an end.

It's just a new chapter.

[Michelle]
Everyone, I think, wants to age healthy.

[Kevin]
Oh, of course.

[Michelle]
Nobody wants this prescription that society in Western culture has been teaching us. Nobody wants that. And we live in an age of medical technology where people are living longer, but those longer years are not with good health.

[Kevin]
With quality.

[Michelle]
They're living more years sick.

[Kevin]
Right.

[Michelle]
And I think what this book, what other book, what research, everything that we talk about in the Nutrition for News podcast is sort of a roadmap of how you can reject that paradigm that you have to, you know, that this is just your lot in life. And the great news is this is not new. We can look at these cultures that have already been doing it and some of them still are.

[Kevin]
Right, right.

[Michelle]
Which is why I think this is really powerful. I think I've said it before on this podcast, and that's one of the vantage points that I got, and I think it was largely influenced for the first time by this book and the work of T. Colin Campbell and others as well, is that I don't care what one anecdote or one celebrity on TikTok or what one, you know, celebrity doctor on television says about what they think.

I want to look at the longest living, healthiest people on the planet and see what they're doing. I want to learn from the survivors, not by a social media influencer.

[Kevin]
Yeah, yeah, because they've proved it by walking the walk and talking the talk.

[Michelle]
Yeah, so speaking of walking, this is another thing that these cultures do a lot of. They do not have social infrastructure where there are cars for a lot of them, if there are any. Like they are walking everywhere.

They're very, very active well into old age. And many of them, as you're gonna find, except for Okinawa, of these ones in the Healthy at 100 book, they're all in the high mountainous remote regions. So like it's very hilly terrain.

You know, it's just a matter of regular getting from point A to point B in their communities that they have to, you know, walk fairly great distances at times and through these terrains. In fact, one of the things that I love about the Vilcaboban culture is they have this saying that if you're ever feeling a little down, you're feeling a little bit blue, that the answer is to call upon your two doctors, your left leg and your right leg. They say, each of us has two doctors, our right leg and our left leg.

So they would say that if you're feeling a little bit blue, then you should go and walk over to that village next door and go visit your friends. I like that. Go talk to people.

Yeah, really cool, right? So the Hunzas are the next one of Northern Pakistan. Now, one thing that I found really, really interesting about the Hunzas is you maybe have heard of the Rodale Institute in the States.

So J.I. Rodale was the guy that invented organic farming. Okay. And J.I. Rodale was fascinated with Hunza in terms of how they had taken this fairly useless land, hilly land rock on the side of a mountain and turned them into some of the most incredible fertile terraces in the world.

[Kevin]
Oh, wow.

[Michelle]
So even from earlier decades or the earlier century, the Hunzas had already created fertile soil out of nothing over the way that they lived over centuries and using the slopes of the mountains to naturally create irrigation systems. So they were growing tons and tons of agricultural food in an otherwise very remote area where you wouldn't be able to grow it. So everything in their way that they lived was geared towards producing soil and producing this ability to grow.

There's even one funny thing that he talks about in the book that the children were taught to play a game that basically involved them picking up the animal dung.

[Kevin]
Yeah. Hey kids, let's play a fun game.

[Michelle]
Yeah, yeah. So if you could find the droppings and add them to the compost pile, whoever collected the most wins.

[Kevin]
Hmm, I wonder if that would work here. I've got some ideas for my son.

[Michelle]
Yeah, so when Brodale was researching them and coming up with this idea, like he was just apparently dumbfounded. You should Google sometime, like go on and Google the agricultural terraces of Hunza, Pakistan. They're these beautiful, lush, it looks incredible.

It almost looks like you're looking at a tea field.

[Kevin]
Oh, wow.

[Michelle]
Like tea terraces, but they're not. They're fruits and vegetables. Brodale commented that they were a people that learned to waste nothing.

And they in fact developed methods to compost their human waste so that it would be safely used to augment their soil long before there was ever the invention of any modern technology to do so. Wow. Yeah, so very resourceful people.

You know, in that environment, I don't think there was, there was not a lot of pasteurizing of animals because they didn't have any land, right? So everything really hinged on this growth of their food. So because they didn't have a lot of fuel up there either, most of what they ate was raw.

[Kevin]
Right, okay.

[Michelle]
And I think this would have been similar with all of these mountain areas that we talked about, no refrigeration.

[Michelle]
So if you're gonna eat, you're gonna eat things when they're the most nutrient-dense, right? And I think one of the reasons why these three mountainous areas also were so good with sleep hygiene and sleep habits is they wouldn't have had electricity.

[Kevin]
They wouldn't have electric writings. They would have raced with the sun.

[Michelle]
They would have gone to sleep. So they wouldn't have had disruptive melatonin cycles or out of balance with circadian rhythms. And they didn't have cell phones and things like that.

So yeah, they were conserving their body's energy. So that sort of summarizes those three communities in the mountains. Now, the Okinawans are an island, very low elevation.

So they are also around this time, they're recognized as a pocket of longevity where elders live very, very old into good health, a very significant number of centenarians, walking everywhere. So they have that in common. But the difference is that they're living their life at sea level instead of up in the mountains.

But what they also have in common is tremendous, tremendous respect for their elders. And this culture of sharing and caring for one another at all stages of life and not so much separation. Yeah, now hold on here before I continue.

I know that you've traveled so far, like tremendously. Have you traveled to any of these areas of the world?

[Kevin]
So I have gone to Peru, which is just next door to Ecuador. And I have gone into the mountains of Peru. So I have seen similar mountainous communities.

And then of course I've gone to Japan. I have not gone to the Himalayas. So I can't say that either the Caucasus community or the Pakistani community, I've already forgotten their names.

Oh, Hunza's. The Hunza's. But I have seen the Peruvian Andes communities.

And of course, Japanese islands, just beautiful, stunning scenery. I love.

[Michelle]
But have you gone to Okinawa?

[Kevin]
I have not gone to Okinawa specifically, no.

[Michelle]
Okay, so we're gonna go together.

[Kevin]
Okay, let's go to Okinawa.

[Michelle]
We have to go. All right, so are you ready for a diet comparison?

[Kevin]
Yes, yes, let's move on to nutrition and food.

[Michelle]
Yeah, so there are some differences between them, but at a baseline level, what they share in common is that they all eat about 2,000 calories per day and that less than 10% of the overall diet is animal-based. So the Abkhazians, for example, really the major source of their animal-based foods, it's called matzoni. So it's like a fermented sort of dairy.

It's not a yogurt, it's a cultured milk. And that is a staple in their diet. But otherwise they eat fresh greens and pungent vegetables for breakfast.

In between meals, it's whatever fruit is in season. Every meal includes some sort of a cornmeal porridge, nuts and seeds. All of their vegetables they eat mainly raw.

They don't fry anything. And any fresh fruit from in season that they don't get the opportunity to eat, they actually dry them out so that they have, they store them for the winter. They do rarely have some servings of meat.

If they do, it's always healthy and fresh. And it's mainly for flavoring. And a small amount is used among this huge group of people.

And they're eating also, if you've ever seen, I'm sure somebody has images of this at some point in their life, they're eating very communally, right? It's not like two people are in their house eating and two people in their house eating, like you're enjoying meals very much communally. The Vilcabamans, the same caloric intake, again, very predominant in fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, and seeds.

They have milk and eggs only once in a while because it was quite scarce in their traditional diet. They almost never had meat, only usually if something died of a natural cause. And they never, ever, ever ate butter.

All of their carbohydrates were intact and unrefined from corn, quinoa, wheat, barley, tubers, fats. They would have gotten from their nuts and seeds and avocados. And all of the sweet in their diet would not have been refined sugars.

It's figs, nuts, and fruit. And then the Hunzas in Northern Pakistan, the same story, fruits, vegetables, berries, less than 1% of meat and dairy for them, which is actually really unusual for the rest of Pakistan, right? And again, mainly uncooked.

They're like, this is really because I think such a different meat culture because of this lack of pasture.

[Kevin]
Well, yeah, if you don't have the space, if everything you have, if you're basically living on terraces, then yeah, there's just no place for livestock.

[Michelle]
And you don't want the livestock eating all that food because you need it.

[Kevin]
Right, I mean, you're more efficient growing food for humans on what little space you have than growing food for animals to eat.

[Michelle]
Correct. And the Hunzas were doing a lot of what they saw from the research of sprouting their legumes, like sprouted beans, sprouted chickpeas, sprouted lentils. But because of these terraces, what they had that these other mountain areas didn't do is they were growing pumpkins and squashes, and they had carrots and turnip and potatoes and radishes, mustard greens, spinach, and lettuce.

It's just absolutely remarkable and it's crazy. Now, the big surprise for me when I was reading this book and learning about these for the first time was I had this idea that Okinawans ate a ton of fish. And what we found out was that they actually don't.

They do eat some fish for sure, and they would be termed what we would call today pesco-vegan, but they would have no fewer than seven servings of vegetables per day, seven servings of whole grains per day, two servings specifically of soy products per day, and they would have some fish two to three times per week, not even every day, almost no dairy or meat, very, very little sugar or added fats, absolutely no processed. There's this incredible, not just reverence for each other, like the way that we talk about these social relationships, but incredible reverence for the land. And I think we see that with the Huns too and the Vilkababins and the Abkhazians is they have this incredible respect for the nature that they are from and this ecosystem that they are invariably a part of.

So the Okinawans would have a lot of, like seek help and things like that from the ocean and some fish, but this sense of only taking what you need. So whereas today we have this incredible overfishing and things that are harming our oceans and instead of food scarcity, we have this problem of food abundance and not always doing it respectfully.

[Kevin]
Well, I find it interesting that of these four communities, you've got one island and three remote, high mountainous regions, the Caucasus, the Himalayas and the Andes, all of which like the common factor in all of these is land is at a premium and you can't just expand. You know, it's not like the prairies where you can just expand and expand and expand forever. Like in the mountains, you can't expand and you actually have to create land however you can with terraces or whatever to be able to grow and survive.

And similarly with an island, you know, you're bounded by how much you can expand. So I think that's very interesting that how the remoteness and the lack of ability to grow and expand physically probably created some of this attitude towards the respect for the land and what you've got, you need to use the most efficiently and that then creates choices for you and you know, you create a society around that.

[Michelle]
Yeah, like, and so minimalist, right? And no consumerism, no materialism. They can't just order it on Amazon and like have it dropped, they probably can now.

[Kevin]
Well, yeah, I mean, part of that is also the age. I mean, you know, if you looked at, given we're talking about centenarians, you know, if you looked at 1870 in Toronto, you know, like people born in 1870 in Toronto, there wouldn't have been Amazon and there wouldn't have been, there wasn't refrigeration and you know, there wasn't electricity. And so, you know, and given it ended in 1970, you know, some of that is much more modern, modern inventions, but definitely the remoteness would have, you know, the 1950s craze on processed food and everything being canned and processed and all that would have been missed by, you know, a lot of these places.

Right. You know.

[Michelle]
And I think too, like their meal time, meal time in their culture wasn't just a time that you consumed calories. Like they, their focus in their society was being together and conversation and sharing each other's company and eating in these very communal type of settings.

[Kevin]
Yeah, and I think, you know, we had that in a lot of Western society until about 1940, like post-war, post-World War II.

[Michelle]
Yeah, I think you're right.

[Kevin]
Suddenly you had, certainly in North America, you had the suburbs being created and everyone, this idea of the nuclear family was created in the post-war. And suddenly you had everyone gets their own house and you don't need to live one apartment with three or four generations living in one little apartment in Brooklyn. You can move out to the suburbs and everyone can have their own house.

And that has created a bit of this social isolation. And the entire idea of the nuclear family is kind of ridiculous, but it's pervaded. And now we're at the stage where everyone is isolated and you don't have those communal meals.

And, you know, all of that, all the things that you've discussed about these four areas, the social fabric that keeps people united has been missing since the 1940s or 1950s here to a large degree.

[Michelle]
Yeah, and I think that's something that was a highlight for me when I was learning this and we're not very good at doing it every day, but certainly I put greater emphasis on my family of us sitting and at least having dinner together as much as possible. And that's certainly how I grew up on the farm was I had breakfast, lunch, and dinner with somebody. But when we were all together, my brothers, my sisters, my parents, we sat and had dinner together, right?

And so I try to emphasize that here in those years when my kids were still living at home and, you know, anyone that is in the vicinity, they still know to this day about Sunday dinner. You try to reserve as much of that. I think you're very good at that in your house as well, at having those rituals, mealtime rituals, and sticking to that schedule, not just from a time perspective, but actually having a conversation to know what's going on in people's lives.

[Kevin]
From a bonding perspective, yeah. And we've actually gone one step further fairly recently where, of course, you know, I have an only child and, you know, our neighbors who we got very close to during COVID also have an only child and our kids are literally three weeks apart in age. That's awesome.

And so recently, we've actually, you know, I mean, recently in the last year or two, we've started having communal dinners with them every once in a while, where, you know, every, maybe every other week or so, we just, you know, it's very disorganized and it's just like, hey, do you want to do this tonight? Hey, sure, sounds good. And whatever we were planning on making for dinner, we just pool it together.

Everyone brings their own food and we have an impromptu communal dinner.

[Michelle]
Oh, so fun. I want to come.

[Kevin]
And my son is always so super happy when this happens. It's like, oh, you know, are they coming over here? Are we going over there?

Oh, amazing. Like, he's really, really keen on this and he loves it.

[Michelle]
He's going to remember that for his whole life and carry on those traditions, right?

[Kevin]
And I look forward to it too. Like, it's kind of nice just to have that.

[Michelle]
And you'll be the wise, revered- Oh, I hope so. Older person, right?

[Kevin]
But when my son comes up to me and says, you're looking old, dad, I'm never going to be good with that.

[Michelle]
You say, thank you.

[Kevin]
Thank you. Yeah, that'll throw him for a loop. Let me tell you, yeah.

[Michelle]
So let's just recap what we did here. And then I think we'll have to do a part two of this for the Blue Zones. Yeah.

And it's really cool. I'm really excited to tie them together with the four cultures from Alexander Lee's research from the first National Geographic stab on this as written in the book, Healthy at 100 by John Robbins. I cannot plug that book enough because it's such an incredible book.

There's so many great things in there. 2,000 calories by today's standards, you know, is the average that they're consuming. That's a fairly low caloric intake compared to today, right?

Because today we know that the average North American is more like 4,000 calories. And what we shoot for is 2,000 to 2,500 calories when we're trying to teach people healthier diets. So fairly low in calories, but very, very high in nutrient density.

To hearken our last episode, Kevin, or one of the most recent ones, very high in carbohydrates.

[Kevin]
Right.

[Michelle]
Plenty of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. It's very a whole food centric dietary approach with very little, if any, processed or refined foods of any kind. Maybe they do a little bit of manual refining of their corn and like grains and things like that, but they don't have sugar.

They don't have corn syrup. They don't have preservatives. There's no artificial flavors.

There's no chemicals. There's nothing in a package. They depend on fresh foods that are primarily, you know, in season, locally grown where they are, and they're storing things for the winter and the months when they can't grow as much.

It's low, but not super low in fats. And their fats are all from natural sources. They're getting nuts.

They're getting seeds. And in some cases, in the case of the Okinawans, they're getting a little bit of fish. And there will be fats in that matzoni or those fermented dairies that we see some of the other mountains.

The protein sources are not primarily coming from meat. Their protein sources are primarily coming from beans, peas, whole grains, nuts, and seeds. So this is what's so cool is this is all the stuff that we've been talking about.

Let me give you some percentages that were actually calculated in Alexander Leaf's research. He determined that the Abkhazians, that 75% of their diet was in the form of carbohydrates. Vilcabamba, 74%.

Hunza, 73%. And we're not talking about croissants and bagels. We're talking about fruits and vegetables, porridge, whole grains, tubers, yucca, sweet potato, apricots, millet, buckwheat, all these things.

And then so fat, because we talked about the fat recommendations. The North American standard is 30 to 35% of your calories from fat. In Abkhazia, they have 20.

In Vilcabamba, they have 15. In Hunza, it's only 17%. So even though we have this sort of scientifically dietary recommendation threshold of 30 to 35, that's still far more that we see some of these longer living cultures.

[Kevin]
And all these other cultures, you said for most of them, they don't fry and such. So it's all natural sources of fat from the whole food, not adding fat in to fry stuff or butter or whatever.

[Michelle]
Exactly.

[Kevin]
Which makes a difference. I remember that from the episode.

[Michelle]
I know, exactly. And now their calories from protein, Abkhazia, 15%. Vilcabamba, 11% total calories from protein.

Hunza, about 10%. And their protein sources are a little bit coming from the meats that they're consuming or the animal foods that they're consuming, but primarily from vegetables, from grains, from beans, chickpeas. This is the one theme that is often, when people are looking at both this early research and then the later Blue Zones research, that longest living cultures are really getting a lot of their calories and their protein sources from legumes.

And we have very little legume culture in North America. Beans and chickpeas and lentils and things like that, sprouted and unsprouted and et cetera. People have difficulty in this part of the world often digesting them.

[Kevin]
Beans, beans, the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot.

[Michelle]
And as we've talked about, that's because you don't have the gut bacteria to support effective digestion of them. And you can build that up and you can build that microbiome strength the same as you can build any muscle.

[Kevin]
Right, just hold your breath for a little while as your microbiome is adjusting and it'll be no problem. You'll be there in no time.

[Michelle]
So, really super exciting. And I can't wait to go through the next part with you to go through the Blue Zones part with you. But where I would like to sort of cap off this discussion about Alexander Leaf, because I think there was a lot of people really trying to discount this because of the problem of the birth and death records.

But he made a subsequent comment that I thought was so freaking brilliant that whether or not somebody lied about being 108 years old and they were actually only 98 or 102, perhaps in reality, they're still old.

[Kevin]
That's telling in and of itself. Well, that's telling in and of itself that they're lying to be older, but even not, yeah, it's indicative. It's the general trend that there's a bunch of people who could viably be over 100, even if they're 99 and a half.

[Michelle]
I know. It's like you're splitting hairs.

[Kevin]
Yeah, exactly.

[Michelle]
They still freaking live to be their late 90s and early 100s. So who cares about that little bit of math?

[Kevin]
Are you so desperate to discount this research that you're nitpicking? Well, he was 99 and 17 months before you... Well, 99 and 17 months would be over 100.

Anyways, I can't do math or read a calendar, apparently. But you know what I mean? Like you're really grasping at straws if you're gonna nitpick whether you're 98 versus 102.

Like, whatever, close enough, you know?

[Michelle]
And so do you wanna hear what ended up happening, how Alexander Leaf's life played out?

[Kevin]
Yes.

[Michelle]
Because he was really sort of the first pioneer, the first research scientist to even embroach on this topic.

[Kevin]
How long did he live?

[Michelle]
He lived to be 92.

[Kevin]
That's pretty good.

[Michelle]
Yep, he lived to be 92. So he went down in history hailed as a very versatile physician and research scientist. The New York Times published a really very nice homage article about him upon his passing.

And he died in Boston, December 24th, 2012, at the age of 92. And it appeared to be due to complications from Parkinson's. But yeah, so he was at different times in his life, the chairman of medicine and chief medical service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, which I mentioned earlier.

And he led the department of preventative medicine at Harvard Medical School, which is a very high status position in the medical community. And he was one of the very first practicing physicians ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. So he, I mean, this work was important work that he did, but he was best known for the work that he did on heart disease and advocating for prevention of heart disease through exercise and diet and foods primarily low in animal fat and sodium.

Yeah, so he went on to do many, many other years of research after this one. And he goes down in history as being a great physician, a great research scientist that really tried to bring this information to the forefront of the world.

[Kevin]
And what strikes me as interesting particularly is in 1970, he would have been 50 years old. So if he kind of adopted a lot of this blue zone mentality only at age 50 or even late forties, cause he was doing the research for a few years, whatever. It's not like he was born into it like the people in these blue zones, like he sort of adjusted his lifestyle at 50 plus or minus and was still able to sort of make it to 92.

And hopefully he was healthy up until then. And I don't wanna hear if he wasn't, I don't wanna hear any bad news. I wanna just imagine that he was super healthy and happy and then he just like kicked off the minute that he wasn't.

[Michelle]
Well, I think one of the themes of John Robbins' book, which is not the blue zones, by the way, we're gonna cover that one next. But I think it's fair to use the term because that's become very colloquially the way we refer to these longest living peoples. John Robbins' book really emphasizes not just through this research of Leafs, but other bits that he injects into Healthy at 100 from other areas of research and other prolific members of history, including Jack LaLanne is one of them that he talks about, T.

Colin Campbell, who you know is my greatest hero ever, that you can get healthier at any age. When you adopt a healthier diet and a healthier lifestyle at any age, like it's never too late. And so to your point, even if Leaf himself discovered this because he was, as a research scientist, was interested in this phenomena, learned it and brought it into his own diet and lifestyle, he lived to be, I don't know what the longevity was in his family, but 92, even in 19, 2012 or whatever it was- It's pretty darn good.

[Kevin]
When he passed away. I'll take it.

[Michelle]
That's still much greater than the average age.

[Kevin]
No, exactly, exactly. Okay, well, this has been amazing. So next time we're going to delve into the actual Blue Zones, not what I'm calling the Blue Zones, because in my mind, all of this is the Blue Zones.

My apologies, Mr. Leaf.

[Michelle]
They can all be thought of as the Blue Zones.

[Kevin]
And yeah, we will delve into that. And then I think not to do a spoiler, but I think you have some other information about emerging Blue Zones, but we'll talk about that next time. You'll have to wait for a couple of weeks until you hear that.

[Michelle]
Tune in next time.

[Kevin]
Exactly. Don't miss it. Yeah, you'll want to hear about that.

So thank you, Michelle. And it's time for some blue jokes.

[Michelle]
The dad jokes.

[Kevin]
Some blue jokes. No, no, no, they're not that blue. They're not blue that way.

Get your mind out of the gutter, Michelle. I'm offended.

[Michelle]
You're wearing a blue shirt by the way, even though the listeners can't tell.

[Kevin]
Yeah, that's totally by accident, 100%. But it's fitting. We should have had a video call of this and put it online so people would see it.

Okay. If you lose something in a senior care home, don't stop looking until you've searched every nook and granny.

[Michelle]
Oh, you got to watch out for that granny.

[Kevin]
Oh, exactly. Exactly. And I got another one.

Do you know what the young chicken said to the old chicken?

[Michelle]
No, Kevin, what did the young chicken say to the old chicken?

[Kevin]
You're no spring chicken. And then of course the old chicken probably said, well, thank you.

[Michelle]
Well, thank you, because we don't accept ageism here.

[Kevin]
Yes, exactly. Like my wrinkles?

[Michelle]
Yep, 80 is the new 20.

[Kevin]
Exactly. I will live by those words. Works for me.

[Michelle]
Kevin, I look forward to becoming weirder and older with you.

[Kevin]
Weirder? Older, I'm good with. Can you get weirder?

I don't know. I'll look forward to that.

[Michelle]
Of course, there's always room to get weirder.

[Kevin]
Yes, exactly, there is. There's always room for weirder. I need to do a little public announcement now before we sign off.

[Michelle]
Oh, PSA?

[Kevin]
Yes, little PSA time. So if you've listened this far, you obviously like what you hear. So please, please, please, please, please do us a solid and subscribe if you haven't already.

And you can also consider leaving us a review on your podcast app of choice. These two small things really do help us get the word out. And if you do, then the magical podcast algorithms will serve us up to more potential listeners.

So please, share the love.

[Michelle]
Share the love, share the greens.

[Kevin]
End of PSA, yes.

[Michelle]
That's awesome, and you know what? I've had a lot of people ask me how to do the review, and I know at least in Apple Podcasts, if you scroll all the way down past episode one, past the intro, there is a little dynamic link that you can click called Write a Review. So if you scroll down, you do find it.

[Kevin]
Exactly, and if you are listening on a smart speaker, you can also subscribe through the smart speaker. You can just say, hey, insert smart speaker name of choice, subscribe me to Nutrition for Noobs.

[Michelle]
I did not know that.

[Kevin]
Just so you don't miss a single episode.

[Michelle]
That's so cool.

[Kevin]
And it really does help with the algorithm because algorithms run our world now. So Michelle, thank you so much.

[Michelle]
Thank you, Kevin. I just love talking about this and spreading the news, even about all of the good work of John Robbins, past and present, and these luminaries like Alexander Leaf so that they don't get forgotten.

[Kevin]
Exactly, exactly. So until next time, eat your greens and hug a not young person in your life.

[Michelle]
Yes, and be real, everyone.

[Kevin]
This has been Nutrition for Noobs. We hope you're a bit more enlightened about how your fantastic and complicated body works with the food you put into it. If you have a question or a topic you'd like Michelle to discuss, drop us a line at n4noobs@gmail.com.

That's the letter N, the number four, N-O-O-B-S at gmail.com. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to the podcast on whatever your favorite platform might be. Also, please consider leaving a review or telling your friends.

That's the best way to spread the word. We'll see you next time with another interesting topic.