THE ARGUMENT AGAINST rich traditional foods goes like this: native peoples on their native diets, which were high in animal foods and animal fat, may have been attractive and healthy when they were young, but they did not live into old age. If you want to live a long life, we’re admonished, you need to eat a diet that is low in fat, low in salt, high in plant foods, and rich in dietary fiber. In short, the penalty for a long life is adherence to the sad and unsatisfying diet foisted on us by government bodies and medical “experts” from the Western world.
The book that promulgates this point of view the most extensively is The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest by Dan Buettner. The bestseller is based on his work for the National Geographic. In it, Buettner opens a lot of creaky gates, walks up driveways with crunchy gravel, and visits a number of dimly lit bars to explore several “Blue Zones,” areas known for having a large number of centenarians—long-lived people who invariably have wrinkly smiles and live fairly isolated, physically active, low-stress lives.
As for the diet, Buettner gives you the bottom line in chapter 1, which includes the suggestion to eat six to nine servings of vegetables a day and to make sure your meat is lean. He advocates a diet of “moderation.” Meat is okay if eaten in “European,” not “American” portions. “Are you eating meat a couple of times a week, or are you eating it every day for two meals a day?” he asks. “Are you eating processed meats that are filled with fat? Or are you eating good cuts of fairly lean meat?”1
BUETTNER’S FIRST EXAMPLE of a Blue Zone is the mountainous Barbagia region in the province of Ogliastra on the island of Sardinia. A paper given at a longevity conference in 1999 found, for example, seven centenarians in a village of 2,500 people, ratios that were confirmed in later studies. In the United States, only about one male in 20,000 reaches the age of one hundred.
Barbagia is characterized by “rough pastureland” with “patches of hardwood forest and occasional vineyards.” Like other Blue Zones, the region was relatively isolated until recent times. Buettner describes mountainous Barbagia as a place where life is difficult, and where kidnapping, stealing and vendettas are common. “A vendetta can last generations. A son of one family might get shot today for something his father did decades ago… If a boy catches you looking at his girl, expect to be confronted… everyone in Barbagia has a knife in his pocket.”
Knife-wielding peasants carrying grudges seem to contradict the notion that life in Barbagia is stress-free… but we digress.
Back to the diet. “The Sardinian diet was lean and largely plant-based,” Buettner insists, “with an emphasis on beans, whole wheat and garden vegetables, wine, goat milk and mastic oil.”*
Buettner first visits the alert and chipper Giuseppe Mura, age 102, whose house “smells vaguely of sausages and red wine.” Does the house smell of sausages because Mura eats sausages? We never find out. Here is a wonderful opportunity to ask a non-senile centenarian whether he has eaten foods like sausages over the years—after all, it would be good to know whether our centenarian peasant has enjoyed “processed meats filled with fat” during his long life. Instead, Buettner follows a protocol developed by the National Institute on Aging, designed to “tease out” from the elders narratives about their early lives in response to “nonleading,” “carefully crafted questions.… Instead of asking a man what he ate when he was a child, the question would inquire, ‘Can you think about things you do every day or have done most days of your life?’”
Buettner’s meal at the house of Giuseppe Mura included wine and cured ham, followed by cups of hot coffee. But according to Buettner’s carefully crafted questions, the centenarian’s diet consisted largely of fava beans, pecorino cheese, bread and meat as he could afford it, which he rarely could.
Next, we visit a fit and active seventy-five-year-old named Tonino Tola, who was definitely not eating fava beans. “When I caught up with Tonino… he was slaughtering a cow in the shed behind this house, his arms elbow-deep in the animal’s carcass… The cow would provide meat for two families for the season as well as gifts for several friends.” What a great opportunity to tease out the parts of the cow that Tonino actually ate—did he eat the liver and kidneys that evening, before they could spoil? Did the tripe get consumed or did the impoverished folks of the Sardinian mountains throw it out? Did Tola prefer lean or fatty cuts? Did he boil up the head? We never find out.
Buettner says that Tola slaughters his cow in the fall “to make meat easier to preserve.” How is that meat preserved? Another mystery left unsolved by carefully crafted questions. But it’s a good bet that Tola preserves his beef in salt, especially as we later learn that meat is boiled on Sunday (the usual preparation for salted beef) and roasted during festivals (the usual preparation for freshly killed meat). Of course, if Tola preserves his meat in salt, that means he is consuming quite a bit of salt, a habit that is not supposed to result in a long life. But there’s not a single mention of salt in the chapter—best to avoid the embarrassment of conflicting evidence.
The next fellow we meet drinks goat milk for breakfast and carries bread, cheese, wine, sheep milk and roasted lamb on journeys. No fava beans for him, either! Buettner admits that the shepherds of Sardinia consume a lot of sheep and goat milk products; in isolated Barbagia, these sheep-and goat-milk products are almost certainly raw. He notes that the centenarians seem to avoid bone loss and fractures and speculates that goat’s milk and the mysterious mastic oil, along with bread and wine, may be Sardinia’s “other two longevity elixirs.” (Those Sardinian peasants do drink a lot of wine, maybe to make their life of isolation and hard work tolerable.)
Better information about the Sardinian shepherd diet comes from a 2014 article, “Male Longevity in Sardinia,” published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.2 Here we learn that the main activity in the Sardinian Blue Zone was animal husbandry, whereas on the rest of the island it was agriculture: “The major discrepancy between the lowland areas, where peasants were the majority of the population, and the mountain areas, essentially pastoral, was the relatively superior consumption of animal-derived foods in the latter.” The shepherds also ate more animal fat and consumed very little vegetable oil. Carbohydrate consumption was also lower among the long-lived shepherds. Both shepherds and peasants did consume fairly high levels of “vegetable proteins,” in the form of fava beans, white beans, lupini beans, chickpeas and lentils, although none of Buettner’s informants seemed to eat much of any of these pulses. Seasonal vegetables came from their gardens; seasonal fruit (mainly grapes and figs), chestnuts and walnuts added variety to the diet.
The authors of the article asked good questions and came up with some fascinating details: “Two vitally important foods were widely consumed throughout the island, that is, sourdough-leavened bread and vegetable soup (minestrone) that contained fresh vegetables… in the mountain area (Ogliastra), that soup also included some tubers (potatoes) and pork stock.” Also, “consumption of dairy products both from goats and sheep, was higher in the mountains [including] a sort of fresh sour cheese called casu ajedu, which was rich in lactobacilli.”*
In fact, the Sardinian Blue Zone diet sounds similar to other traditional diets we have seen from around the world, containing raw milk, lactobacillus-rich sour cheese, sourdough bread and soup made from pork stock. The diet almost certainly contained organ meats—shepherds eking out a living do not throw the organ meats away.
Speaking of pork, the island of Sardinia is famous for the Sarda pig, raised mainly in the mountainous provinces of Ogliastra and Nuoro. Sarda pigs range freely in the mountainous areas, “which often including public land, where they feed on acorns, chestnuts and roots. Additional feed is given only in the summer, when natural sources of food are scarce. Pigmen train the pigs to come at their call to the usual feeding-place; feed is often given directly on the ground, or at the side of the road.”3
This seems like a picturesque custom that Buettner would have heard about and that National Geographic would want to record, but one that would lead to uncomfortable questions, because pig meat is preserved by making it into sausage and ham, “processed meats that are filled with fat.” A quick search of Sardinian pork products reveals that Sardinian ham is fattier than prosciutto—with a one-inch-thick ribbon of fat around the edges. Did Buettner’s first Blue Zone meal of ham give him qualms about writing a whole book promoting a low-fat diet as the secret to longevity? He doesn’t say.
More research reveals photographs of whole lambs skewered and roasted over an open fire—these are for festivals, which apparently happen frequently in the Sardinian mountains. You will also find photographs of skewered, roasted intestines, another food that Buettner failed to tease out in his carefully crafted questions.
NEXT BUETTNER TURNS his attention to Okinawa, an island situated equidistant from Hong Kong and Tokyo. The average life span for women in Okinawa is eighty-four (compared to seventy-nine in America), and the island boasts a disproportionately high number of centenarians. Okinawans have low levels of chronic illness—osteoporosis, cancer, diabetes, atherosclerosis and stroke—compared to America, China and Japan, which allows them to continue to work, even in their advanced years. In spite of Okinawa’s horrific role as the site of the last major battle—and one of the bloodiest—of World War II, Okinawa is a breezy, pleasant place, neither crowded nor polluted, with a strong sense of family and community, where the local people still grow a large portion of their vegetables in family gardens.
Buettner subtitles his chapter on the Okinawan Blue Zone “Sunshine, Spirituality, and Sweet Potatoes,” but what he reveals in the very first paragraph is that the favorite Okinawan dish is Spam-and-vegetable stir-fry. Readers, please note: Spam is a processed meat that is full of fat.
From a USDA Foreign Agricultural Service report we learn that the “Annual average consumption of luncheon meat per person in the prefecture [of Okinawa] is about 14 cans (340 g per can)/year. It is even more impressive when you learn that Okinawa, with only 1.1 percent of the total Japanese population, is responsible for over 90 percent of the total luncheon meat consumption in Japan. The local menu using luncheon meat ranges widely from stir-fried vegetables to rice balls. ‘SPAM omusubi’… is particularly popular.” The Okinawans also eat more hamburger than people in Japan.4
In his visit to Sardinia, Buettner asked “nonleading questions, carefully crafted to tease out the lifestyle by eliciting a narrative.” Unfortunately, such questions were not very useful for finding out the important details of a traditional diet. But Buettner uses a different approach for the centenarians of Okinawa: “a survey developed by the National Institute on Aging to systematically interview… Okinawans in search of common lifestyle characteristics. And I’d connect with scientists to find out how those characteristics connected to longevity.”
The scientist he teams up with is Dr. Greg Plotnikoff. Dr. Plotnikoff has a decidedly vegetarian bent, having written a paper entitled “Nutritional Assessment in Vegetarians and Vegans: Questions Clinicians Should Ask,” published in Minnesota Medicine.5 On his website he recommends a ghastly sounding smoothie made of coconut milk, protein powder (from whey, rice, pea or hemp), sunflower lecithin, medium-chain triglyceride oil and liquid fish oil.
As Plotnikoff says to Buettner, “People don’t realize how bad sugar and meat are for them over time.” Okinawans, he says, eat mostly fresh vegetables, fewer salty pickles and less canned meat (hello—Spam is canned meat), and have good vitamin D status because they get plenty of sun.
Buettner does admit that in Okinawa, people eat almost every part of the pig—unlike the mainland Japanese, who get more protein from fish. But he insists that the Okinawans eat pork only for festivals. His conclusion about the Okinawan diet (presumably based on what he found from using the National Institute of Aging survey, although he doesn’t say): “Older Okinawans have eaten a plant-based diet most of their lives. Their meals of stir-fried vegetables, sweet potatoes, and tofu are high in nutrients and low in calories.… While centenarian Okinawans do eat some pork, it is traditionally reserved only for infrequent ceremonial occasions and taken only in small amounts.” He mentions bitter melon as a source of antioxidants and compounds that lower blood sugar.
Of course, life was hard during World War II. “We had famines, times when people starved to death,” says one of Buettner’s informants. “Even when times were good, all we ate was imo (sweet potato) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” But they also ate fish and pork from the family pig, and it’s obvious that this starvation diet was a temporary phenomenon and not a reason to eat a diet centered on sweet potatoes.
What have other surveys revealed about the diets of long-lived Okinawans? In 1992 scientists at the Department of Community Health, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Japan, published a paper6 that examined the relationship of nutritional status to further life expectancy and health status in the Japanese elderly. It was based on three epidemiological studies. In the first, nutrient intakes in ninety-four Japanese centenarians investigated between 1972 and 1973 showed a higher proportion of animal protein to total proteins than in contemporary average Japanese. The second demonstrated that high intakes of milk (!) and fats and oils had favorable effects on ten-year survivorship in 422 urban residents aged sixty-nine to seventy-one. The survivors revealed a longitudinal increase in intakes of animal foods such as eggs, milk, fish and meat over the ten years. In the third study, nutrient intakes were compared between a sample from Okinawa Prefecture where life expectancies at birth and sixty-five were the longest in Japan, and a sample from Akita Prefecture (on the mainland) where the life expectancies were much shorter. It found that the proportion of energy from proteins and fats was significantly higher in Okinawa than in the Japanese mainland.
According to the paper, “The food intake pattern in Okinawa has been different from that in other regions of Japan. The people there have never been influenced by Buddhism. Hence, there has been no taboo regarding eating habits. Eating meat was not stigmatized, and consumption of pork and goat was historically high… The intake of meat was higher in Okinawa… On the other hand, the intake of fish was lower… Intake of NaCl was lower… Deep colored vegetables were taken more in Okinawa… These characteristics of dietary status are thought to be among the crucial factors which convey longevity and good health to the elderly in Okinawa Prefecture… Unexpectedly, we did not find any vegetarians among the centenarians” [emphasis added].
From another source,7 we learn that:
Traditional foods of Okinawa are extremely varied, remarkably nutrient-dense as are all traditional foods and strictly moderated with the philosophy of hara hachi bu [eat until you are 80 percent full]. While the diet of Okinawa is, indeed, plant-based it is most certainly not “low fat” as has been posited by some writer-researchers about the native foods of Okinawa. Indeed, all those stir fries of bitter melon and fresh vegetables found in Okinawan bowls are fried in lard and seasoned with sesame oil. I remember fondly that a slab of salt pork graced every bowl of udon I slurped up while living on the island. Pig fat is not, as you can imagine, a low-fat food yet the Okinawans are fond of it. Much of the fat consumed is pastured as pigs are commonly raised at home in the gardens of Okinawan homes. Pork and lard, like avocado and olive oil, are a remarkably good source of monounsaturated fatty acid and, if that pig roots around on sunny days, it is also a remarkably good source of vitamin D.
The diet of Okinawa also includes considerably more animal products and meat—usually in the form of pork—than that of the mainland Japanese or even the Chinese. Goat and chicken play a lesser, but still important, role in Okinawan cuisine. Okinawans average about 100 grams or one modest portion of meat per person per day. Animal foods are important on Okinawa and, like all food, play a role in the population’s general health, well-being and longevity. Fish plays an important role in the cooking of Okinawa as well. Seafoods eaten are various and numerous—with Okinawans averaging about 200 grams of fish per day.
Buettner implies that the Okinawans do not eat much fish, but in fact, they eat quite a lot, just not as much as Japanese mainlanders.
The Okinawan diet became a subject of interest after the publication of a 1996 article in Health Magazine about the work of gerontologist Kazuhiko Taira,8 who described the Okinawan diet as “very healthy—and very, very greasy.” The whole pig is eaten, he noted, everything from “tails to nails.” Local menus offer boiled pig’s feet, entrail soup and shredded ears. Pork is marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, ginger, kelp and small amounts of sugar, then sliced or chopped for stir-fry dishes. Okinawans eat about 100 grams of meat per day—compared to 70 grams in Japan and just over 20 grams in China—and at least an equal amount of fish, for a total of about 200 grams per day, compared to 280 grams per person per day of meat and fish in America. Lard—not vegetable oil—is used in cooking.
According to Taira, Okinawans also eat plenty of fibrous root crops such as taro and sweet potatoes. They consume rice and noodles, but not as the main components of the diet. They eat a variety of vegetables such as carrots, white radish, cabbage and greens, both fresh and pickled. Bland tofu is part of the diet, consumed in traditional ways, but on the whole Okinawan cuisine is spicy. Pork dishes are flavored with a mixture of ginger and brown sugar, chile oil and “the wicked bite of bitter melon.”
Damage control soon followed in the form of the Okinawa Centenarian Study.9 The study confirmed the longevity and good health of Okinawans and focused on genetic and family factors. However, in the press, the study was described as follows: “Okinawa, a chain of islands in southern Japan, has the highest concentration of centenarians. Uniformly these old folks have a vegetable-based, low-calorie, low-fat diet and exercise daily. They eat on average seven servings of vegetables and seven servings of grain per day, several servings of soy products, fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids, and little dairy or red meat.”10
Bradley Willcox, D. Craig Willcox, and Makoto Suzuki repeat this description in their bestselling books The Okinawa Program and The Okinawa Diet Plan. The factors that confer longevity, they insist, include a politically correct low-calorie, plant-based, high-complex-carbohydrate diet, exercise and “attention to spirituality and friendships.” The high content of monounsaturated fatty acids from lard in the Okinawan diet gets translated into a recommendation for politically correct canola oil.
The recipes in the Okinawa diet books feature a great deal of tofu, leading vegan author John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, May All Be Fed and The Food Revolution, among others, to claim that the reason the Okinawans enjoy such longevity is because they eat two servings of soy foods per day, with soy constituting 12 percent of their calories. Numerous other vegan spokespeople soon repeated these figures like gospel in their articles, blogs, YouTube videos and Facebook posts.
As pointed out by Kaayla Daniel, author of The Whole Soy Story, “The amount of soy that Okinawans eat is not at all clear in these books. The authors say that the Okinawans eat ‘60 to 120 grams per day of soy protein,’ which means, according to the books’ context, soy foods eaten as a whole food protein source. But the authors also include a table that lists total legume consumption (including soy) in the amounts of about 75 grams per day for the years 1949 and 1993.” Contradictions abound, with claims that Okinawans eat an average of three ounces of soy products per day, mostly tofu and miso on one page and two one-ounce servings of soy on another. “As for soy making up 12 percent of the Okinawan diet, Robbins pulled that figure from a pie chart in which the 12 percent piece represents flavonoid-rich foods, not soy alone. Will the correct figures please stand up?”11
What’s clear is that the real Okinawan longevity diet is an embarrassment to modern diet gurus. The diet was and is greasy and good, with the largest proportion of calories coming from pork and pork fat, and many additional calories from fish; those who reach old age eat more animal protein and fat than those who don’t. Maybe that’s what gives the Okinawans the attitudes that Buettner so admires, “an affable smugness” that makes it easy to “enjoy today’s simple pleasures.”
THE NICOYA PENINSULA is a fertile rectangle on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Since the arrival of the Spaniards, the region has hosted herds of beef and dairy cattle. Many tropical fruits thrive there, including citrus, mango and papaya.
The region has always teamed with animal life. Early sixteenth-century Spanish settlers reported that the Amerindians of Costa Rica consumed significant amounts of poultry, fish, eggs, turtles and many types of forest game. The Spaniards introduced cattle to the area in the late 1500s, and cattle-raising has remained an important practice since that time. The Spaniards also introduced pig farming to ensure a source of ham and lard. It is clear from all reports that the Nicoyans have never been vegetarians.
Until very recently, the Nicoya Peninsula has remained relatively isolated from Western influence, with many people raising vegetables and fruit in their own gardens. Their water is noted for its high levels of magnesium and calcium.
Costa Rica is one of the Blue Zones that Buettner visited in writing his book. He interviewed several centenarians and noted that people seemed “sharper and more active than anywhere else.” He described a strong work ethic and sense of intergenerational family ties, even though the men are not noted for marital fidelity.
Corn and beans are definitely staples in the diet. The women still prepare the corn at home, soaking it in ash and lime water (lime referring here to calcium hydroxide, not the citrus fruit), the process of nixtimalization, which releases the niacin in the corn. “This creates the foundation of perhaps the best longevity diet the world has ever known,” says Buettner. “This food combination [corn plus beans] is rich in complex carbohydrates, protein, calcium and niacin. Recent research shows that in diets high in maize can reduce bad cholesterol and augment good cholesterol.”
“Like the people in most other Blue Zones,” Buettner insists, “Nicoyans ate the emblematic low-calorie, low-fat, plant-based diet rich in legumes.”
Just one little problem with this description: the corn and beans—and also eggs, meat, and fish—are cooked in lard. Buettner follows one Don Faustino as he shops for a Sunday meal. Don Faustino visits a butcher stall in the market, “handing two-liter plastic bottles to the butcher to fill with liquefied lard. Then the butcher sliced off two slabs of pork from a dangling pig carcass and wrapped them in newspapers.”
A 2013 study12 of the Nicoya region confirmed the longevity of Costa Rican males: “Reliable data show that the Nicoyan region of Costa Rica is a hot spot of high longevity… For a 60-year-old Nicoyan male, the probability of becoming centenarian is seven times that of a Japanese male, and his life expectancy is 2.2 years greater. This Nicoya advantage does not occur in females, is independent of socio-economic conditions… Nicoyans have lower levels of biomarkers of CV risk; they are also leaner, taller and suffer fewer disabilities.”
Looking at the diets of the nonagenarians, the researchers in this study were more honest and more systematic than those of Buettner:
The data on frequency of food consumption… showed some significant but small differences in the diet of elderly Nicoyans compared to other Costa Ricans. Nicoya diets include significantly more plain, quotidian foods like rice, beans, beef, fish, chicken, light cheese and sodas; and significantly less of “fancy” foods like aged cheese, olive oil or mayonnaise, less salad ingredients (lettuce, avocado, carrot, tomato) and less processed and fast foods such as white bread, cookies and hamburgers. They also drink significantly less milk (an average 0.5 glass per day compared to 0.7 glass by other Costa Ricans). There are no differences in consumption of fresh fruits, eggs, sugar, pastries and potato chips… [Compared to other Costa Ricans] Nicoyans eat or drink more calories, carbohydrates, proteins (mostly of animal origin) and fibre. Although they do not differ in the consumption of total fat, their significantly higher levels of saturated and trans fats [emphasis added] probably come from the use of cheaper brands of oils.
Those “cheaper brands of oils” were either unprocessed lard (it’s hard for modern researchers to use the L-word) or partially hydrogenated lard. Of course, the centenarians grew up on unprocessed lard—vegetable oils were not around in the early 1900s, at least not in isolated places like the Nicoyan Peninsula.
These are fascinating details—the long-lived people of Nicoya ate more animal protein, more fish, more meat and more saturated fat than inhabitants of other parts of Costa Rica. Still, there are other details we would like to know. Did they eat more organ meats? Are the centenarians still using lard today rather than vegetable oil? Seems like they drank less milk, but was the milk they drank straight from the cow, or processed milk from the grocery store? Did they make broth with bones?
Fortunately, Costa Rica resident Gina Baker made a point of interviewing Nicoyan centenarians in 2011 and again in 2016,13 and provides some answers to our questions. “On my way to visit a one-hundred-and-nine-year-old woman in the village of Mansión,” writes Baker, “I stopped at a house to ask for directions. The lady of the house, upon learning about my research, enthusiastically described a common local dish aptly named sustancia (the Spanish word for “substance”) consisting of pork shanks cooked with liver, kidney, ears, cheek, brain and heart, spiced with cilantro, garlic, onions and bell pepper. She also described a soup eaten daily by pregnant and nursing women, containing black or red beans cooked with a bone, lard and a type of green plantain that is very rich in potassium and magnesium, eaten along with boiled eggs.”
The granddaughter and son of one centenarian told Baker they “lived on meat and that everybody in the past loved meat and, in particular, fresh liver. Don Pedro hunted game, and when he or other hunters killed an animal, everybody fought over who got to eat the liver. Don Pedro also fished (he loved dried salted fish) and ate plenty of eggs and chicken. Don Pedro noted that children often went to look for shrimp and other seafood to eat. It was common to drink whey and sometimes make soup with it… Don Pedro and other older Nicoyans reported that pork, lard and chicken skin were the principal foods and fats traditionally consumed, while other menu items were perceived as ‘extras.’ Nicoyans used abundant lard and other animal fats for cooking.”
According to Baker, “One hundred years ago, Costa Rica produced so much lard that the country exported it. Even in recent years, indigenous people came to the town of Turrialba… by bus to purchase every single part of the pigs, including all available fat the butchers render to make chicharrón (fried pieces of pork belly or rind), a big treat to Costa Ricans. When families slaughtered one of their pigs, the animal yielded five gallons of lard, providing one month’s worth of cooking fat for seven to eight people.”
Baker also interviewed an extremely alert ninety-nine-year-old, Don Cristobal Nuñez, who was born in 1917. “Don Cristobal was a fisherman, just like the other male members of his family. He stated that he was raised on seafood, eggs, organ meats (including one of his favorites, a dish called sofrito, made from the brain and cheeks of a pig) and plenty of chicken soup. In Don Cristobal’s day, people also viewed sopa de jarrete (beef shank soup) as an excellent means of strengthening children’s bones. He added that he drank a glass of sour milk (fresh cow’s milk left to sour overnight) every morning to ‘refresh the liver’… He also remembered the exact year… when industrialized cottonseed oil arrived in his part of the world.” That year was 1932. Thus it is clear that the centenarians of Costa Rica ate lard during their growing years and by all accounts continue to do so today.
Several oldsters reported that they had no white sugar as children, but occasionally used tapa dulce, a dark brown traditional sweetener made from evaporated sugarcane juice.
So for the centenarians of Costa Rica, yes to organ meats, continued use of lard, raw milk and bone broth. And all accounts of their diet indicate that they eat plenty of eggs—sometimes several eggs per day. None of the centenarians Baker talked to had ever suffered from joint pain or gastritis. But times are changing: these ailments affect virtually all modern-day Costa Ricans, including the centenarians’ children and grandchildren. Centenarians have noticed that their descendants are sickly and that food has changed. “Today’s food has the appearance of food but not the substance of it,” said one of Baker’s informants.
And the centenarians are disappearing. Writes Baker: “Sadly, in my recent travels I found far fewer centenarians than I did five years ago. Everywhere I went, I was told that some centenarians had recently died. Before leaving the retirement home in Nicoya, I asked employee Danny Espinosa about the shrinking population of local centenarians. He said, ‘When I arrived here six years ago, the home had forty-five centenarians. Today, we have just two.’”
TOURISM IN THE GREEK ISLAND of Ikaria got a boost when scientists determined that Ikaria was a Blue Zone. According to an Ikarian tour guide website, “After extensive research on the island, acclaimed New York Times Best Seller author of Blue Zones, Dan Buettner and his team, discovered the secrets of longevity on Ikaria and declared it as one of only five other Blue Zones worldwide. A Blue Zone is defined as a place where the environment is conducive to old age and in Ikaria it was found that residents are several times more likely to reach the age of ninety+ compared to normal. It’s also notable that on Ikaria instances of cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes are significantly lower, and dementia is rare.”14
The usual factors get credit for Ikaria’s longevity: “Little or no stress, maintaining a home vegetable garden, looking out over the bright blue Aegean Sea, walking in nature, picking and eating fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts, drinking wine with your friends and family, sleeping well and taking a siesta (short afternoon nap) and eating according to the Ikarian Diet.”
The Ikarian longevity diet is described as “rich in olive oil and vegetables, low in dairy (except goat’s milk) and meat products, and also included moderate amounts of alcohol. It emphasized homegrown potatoes, beans (garbanzo, black-eyed peas and lentils), wild greens and locally produced goat milk and honey.” Ikarians also drink a lot of coffee and wine, have low sugar consumption and consume an herbal mountain tea as a panacea for a variety of ailments. Overall, Buettner describes the Ikarian diet as plant-based with a “low intake of saturated fats from meat and dairy.”
This description is similar to descriptions applied to other Blue Zones: Sardinia, Okinawa and Costa Rica. But as we have seen, the common factor is all these diets is generous consumption of lard and pork, and higher consumption of animal foods among those who reach great old age. And as with our other three examples, Buettner’s descriptions of the meals he eats and the foods consumed are inconsistent with his low-fat conclusions.
For example, goat milk. Inconvenient fact: goat milk is a dairy food. The Ikarians consume a lot of goat milk and goat milk products, such as cheese and yogurt. This is not a diet that is low in dairy foods; it is a diet where dairy foods are consumed with almost every meal. And goat milk is higher in fat and higher in saturated fat than cow’s milk. And remember this is raw goat milk (Buettner never mentions the R-word), with all its nutritional components intact—nature’s perfect food, especially for the elderly.
Buettner notes that “everyone has access to a family garden and livestock.” What kind of livestock is lurking in those family gardens? Certainly goats; probably chickens and geese; and also pigs. Buettner visits a couple named Thanasis and Eirini. “At Christmas and Easter,” he says, “they would slaughter the family pig and enjoy small portions of larded pork for the next several months.” That sounds like at least six months of the year. But wait, the couple seems to have several pigs: “During a tour of their property, Thanasis and Eirini introduced their pigs to me by name.” So maybe they kill pigs on other occasions, not just for Christmas and Easter. And what is “larded pork”? Could that be homemade salami, speckled with hard white fat? This is one of those many details we wish he had supplied.
When articles about Ikaria appeared in the press—this Blue Zone was not included in Buettner’s book but described in 2012 in a New York Times Magazine15 article—I was puzzled that there was no mention of lamb—after all, Ikaria is in Greece. I emailed Buettner asking details about lamb consumption, but never got a reply. A quick survey of the Internet creates the impression that the Ikarians keep goats, rather than sheep.16
However, I did find a YouTube video of sheep in an Ikarian garden, which begins with the hushed statement, “This is where the Blue Zone team is staying…”17 Of the sheep shown in the enclosure, the narrator says, “Sheep milk is strong and fatty.” If the lamb shown in the video is male, he will soon end up on a platter as a Sunday roast. So the inn where Buettner was staying had sheep in the garden.
Since Ikaria has been declared a Blue Zone, there has, naturally, been a study about it, “Determinants of All-Cause Mortality and Incidence of Cardiovascular Disease (2009 to 2013) in Older Adults: The Ikaria Study of the Blue Zones,” carried out by the First Cardiology Clinic, School of Medicine, University of Athens.18 In the study, the researchers subjected 673 individuals older than sixty-five to a variety of tests and assessed dietary habits using a diet score called MedDietScore, “which assesses the level of adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern.” The MedDietScore determines through a single dietary survey adherence to the so-called Mediterranean diet, namely “the weekly consumption of 9 food groups: non-refined cereals (whole grain bread and pasta, brown rice, etc.), fruit, vegetables, legumes, potatoes, fish, meat and meat products, poultry, full fat dairy products (like cheese, yoghurt, milk) as well as olive oil and alcohol intake.”19
Here’s how it works: for the consumption of items presumed to be close to the pattern (nonrefined cereals, fruits, vegetables, legumes, olive oil, fish and potatoes), scores of zero are assigned when someone reports no consumption and scores of one to five are assigned for rare to daily consumption. For the “bad” items (meat and meat products, poultry and full-fat dairy products), scores are assigned on a reverse scale. Thus, if you eat full-fat dairy every day, you get a zero, and if you never eat it, you get a five.
The main things they learned in the study: 1) the older you were, the more likely you were to die; and 2) the participants didn’t adhere very well to the “Mediterranean diet.” Out of a total of fifty-five points, adherence was about thirty-eight. According to the report, “None of the food groups or macronutrients intake was associated with the outcome.” Surprisingly, “energy intake was inversely associated with mortality,” meaning that those who ate the most calories lived the longest. Could it be that full-fat dairy and red meat—which add a lot of calories to the diet—are associated with a longer life?
Indeed, with all the hype about the amazing Ikarian plant-based diet, it has been difficult to determine just exactly how our garden-tending Greek nonagenarians actually eat. Fortunately, a letter from Greek native George Voryas to the Weston A. Price Foundation provides us with important details:20
Regarding… an NPR-aired report by Dan Buettner on longevity on the Greek island of Ikaria, it seems Buettner failed to take into account the demographics of the island, or was fed inaccurate information by locals, perhaps only intended for tourist consumption.
According to various sources, in the early twentieth century, Ikaria had a population of about twenty to twenty-five thousand, which declined steadily to the current level of six to eight thousand, due to emigration to mainland Greece, the United States and other destinations in the world. So, the one-third of today’s residents on the island said to have reached ninety years of age, is about twenty-two hundred to twenty-seven hundred people. That’s not one-third of the population of which they were part at the time they were born. Today’s superannuated Ikarians on the island are at best only 2–2.7 percent of their generation. Is that an amazing longevity feat? I don’t think it is much different from longevity figures for other parts of Greece and, probably, many other parts of the world.
Some of that generation have emigrated to the Greek mainland or abroad, some may still be alive elsewhere, and some may have died elsewhere, but there is no reliable, verifiable, comprehensive information about their longevity or about some identical lifestyle or a uniform nutrition regimen they maintained, regardless of where in the world they had moved. Was the nutrition of their generation better or worse than that of subsequent generations? It’s hard to say, but there are historical and cultural indications that show it was not what the cholesterol-mythology “science” in the West has inventively defined in modern times as “The Mediterranean Diet.”
First of all, it’s important to note that there never was one Mediterranean diet anywhere in the Mediterranean. Nutrition was always dependent on local production and local consumption for numerous reasons, and it varied according to proximity to food sources. Some seaside villages ate more seafood, if isolated from pastures by topography. Mountain villages consumed more meat, because they had more grazing land and raised more livestock, so they also supplied some seaside areas, wherever accessible.
However, both mountain and seaside villages consumed healthy amounts of game in the fall and spring. There was much less shipping of perishable, fresh foodstuffs, because there was no refrigeration and because transportation was costly, time consuming and limited to only a few road-accessible locations.
Different areas had different sources for their essential nutritional cholesterol intake. Mountainous areas sustained flocks of a variety of free-grazing, fat sheep and goats. In fact, the Maltese goats were famous everywhere in the basin for producing the most and the fattest milk, while Anatolia sheep were prized for their plentiful storage of fat on their tails.
Without refrigeration, meat was preserved by cooking it well in kebab-size pieces and storing it in lightly salted, melted fat, which acted as a healthy, edible preservative. The meat was kept in big, wax-sealed, earthen jars in basements for at least several months at a time. The practice continued in many areas in the country even after the end of World War II. Mountain villagers also provided the nearby plains and seaside populations with dairy products and mountain game, such as wild boar in the mainland, lots of rabbits traditionally cooked with onions in wine flavored with bay leaves, and an occasional dorkada, a small antelope in northern Greece, or a wild goat or kri-kri on Crete.
Seaside villages had more poultry roaming freely in their backyards and plenty of wild fowl. They trapped whole flocks of quail with big fishing nets spread on the ground or anchored on tree trunks; they caught smaller birds with homemade adhesive pads or xoverges, tied to tree branches, and used individual snares, called thilies, and shotguns for the large number of wild geese moving south from the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor toward the big islands like Cyprus and Crete and to North Africa.
In many islands and some mainland residential areas, people also raised flocks of pigeons and still do, not only for communications and competitions, but also for food. Much of the folk architecture of many Aegean islands traditionally includes highly decorative multiple pigeon pens on top of residences. Old Greek cookbooks have various recipes for cooking these delicacies in wine and olive oil, thyme or oregano, or even salting them for year-round consumption, just like fish. Most of the salt was washed off with lemon juice or vinegar before eating. The salt used, of course, was not processed, and it contained the normal amount of magnesium and other minerals of seawater, so it did not affect blood-pressure as precipitously as modern, “free-running” industrial salt.
What caused the population of Ikaria to dwindle? Domestic and foreign emigration has been a constant drain. The unpredictable availability and expense of transportation, as well as the allure of economic opportunity and modern amenities in the mainland and abroad played an important role. Local recreation and social interaction on the island was mostly limited to the numerous communal, open-air feasts linked to various religious holidays, when the consumption of sheep and goat meat cooked in public areas and accompanied by the strong local wine was the usual fare, supplemented by game, mostly from flocks of migratory birds. As to fish, however, it was the traditional fare in funeral wakes. It still is in many parts of Greece. Meat was for festive occasions.
One wonders whether Ikaria residents and the mainland physicians they rarely visited ever imagined there would come a day when an atrocious, so-called “correct Mediterranean Diet” would be invented abroad and falsely attributed to islanders.
As to the documented, predominantly leftist political leanings of the island’s residents, they are, to some extent, connected with internal social issues. They include the common resentment of seafood catchers and eaters against meat eaters, perceived as social injustice because of the highly envied socio-economic status of livestock owners and consumers versus the “proletariat” status of fishermen. Meat, particularly red meat, was a status symbol, an indication of financial success and prominence.
The importance of these perceptions is reflected in centuries-old folk songs and poems, where, for example, a father urges his son not to become a revolutionary and risk losing his chances at the enviable local status of a sheep and goat owner. There is no popular folk song extolling the social status of a skillful fisherman or a productive producer of tomatoes and beans. It is clear that nutrition based on foods of animal origin was the most desirable one, and those who could afford it were usually the best looking and most envied individuals.
It is also worth reminding researchers that Greece had rampant tuberculosis infection rates in the first half of the 20th century. The victims included some prominent members of the Communist Party, who were internally exiled by dictators and royalists to “desert island” detention camps, including Ikaria in the 1930s to late 1950s. Some of them are known to have denounced their ideology and their comrades in exchange for hospitalization in state-operated sanatoria for tubercular patients, which were built and operated only on mountain areas—not by the seaside where a more affordable diet of grains, vegetables and fish was available.
In the days before antibiotics the only cure for the dreaded disease was restful confinement, large quantities of locally produced fresh, full-fat milk, and lots of fresh meat and eggs… not low-fat, low-cholesterol “Mediterranean” foods.
So there is plenty of fat lamb on the island of Ikaria, festivals featuring lamb are frequent, and life on the island was so limited (might we say boring?) that the young people left in droves, leaving a concentration of older folks eating mostly natural foods, some of whom lived long. These facts make it difficult to conclude that a low-fat diet is a longevity diet, or even that Ikarians enjoy remarkable longevity at all.
SO FAR WE HAVE LOOKED at four “Blue Zones”—regions that have lots of long-lived people—Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica, and Ikaria. What have we learned so far about the characteristics of these centenarians?*
What we have learned is that these healthy folks eat plenty of animal foods and animal fats, especially lard. They eat organ meats and their dairy foods are raw. And by and large, they avoid modern processed junk food.
Now we turn our attention to a very different Blue Zone, Loma Linda, home of the largest concentration of Seventh-Day Adventists in the world. The religion is strongly against smoking, alcohol and eating “unclean” foods like pork. We can conclude that the Seventh-Day Adventists are definitely not eating lard.*
Their religion also discourages—but does not prohibit—consumption of meat, rich foods, caffeinated drinks and even stimulating condiments and spices.
In Buettner’s chapter on Loma Linda in The Blue Zones, his exacting research comprises interviews with an energetic centenarian named Marge; Dr. Ellsworth Wareham, age ninety, who pioneered open-heart procedures and is still helping out with surgeries; and a family that is bringing their children up as vegetarians on lots of nuts and soy foods.
Dr. Wareham became a vegan in middle age because he says he found nice smooth arteries in vegetarians (yet they still needed heart surgery). He must not be familiar with the International Atherosclerosis Project, which found that vegetarians had just as much atherosclerosis as meat eaters.21 He uses soy milk and egg substitutes and eats lots of nuts. He’s a lucky man: he has a colleague who is “just as careful” with his diet but has had cancers of the prostate and the neck and two heart attacks.
The California Adventists have been the subject of two long studies, according to which “as a group the Adventists currently lead the nation in longest life expectancy.” According to the study, Adventists contracted lung cancer at a rate of only 21 percent compared to a control group (which contained some smokers), and had a lower incidence of other cancers, as well as less heart disease and diabetes.22
Buettner concludes that vegetarians live longer because they eat lots of nuts (he visits a health food store that has bins of nuts from floor to ceiling), avoid meat (which causes heart diseases because it contains lots of saturated fat), and drink lots of water. We “know with certainty [that] consuming fruits and vegetables and whole grains seems to be protective for a wide variety of cancers.”23 Being a vegetarian or eating a lot of nuts will get you about two extra years of life, he claims.
However, as in the other chapters in The Blue Zones, we don’t learn many details about the Adventist diets. Buettner does mention that only about 4 percent of Adventists are strictly vegan and these individuals are thirty to thirty-two pounds lighter than nonvegetarian Adventists of the same height—does that mean they are frail?
Many of the Adventist oldsters grew up on farms, and at least in the past, they consumed raw milk—in fact, it was the advocacy of Adventists that ensured the right to purchase raw milk in stores in California. Are they still consuming raw milk, eating cheese and butter, and eating eggs? We never find out.
And the Adventists are certainly not disease-free. According to one doctor Buettner interviewed, “Some Adventists get personally offended if they get colon cancer or some other disease. They have a reputation for avoiding these things now, of course, but it begs the question, what do you expect to die of? And when we looked, we found that, by and large, the proportions of deaths from different causes in Adventists are about the same as everybody else. It is just that they die later.”24 Does this have anything to do with the fact that they don’t drink or smoke or consume caffeine? Or with the fact that some of them avoid meat?
The bottom line of the Adventist studies: on average, Adventist men live 7.3 years longer and Adventist women live 4.4 years longer than other Californians. Remember that only 4 percent of those Adventists are vegans, and that they are being compared with the entire California population, which includes many who smoke, drink alcohol, take drugs, drink coffee and eat junk food. Adventists in California as a whole are highly educated and prosperous white people, a group with better longevity than uneducated, poor, nonwhite people.
And contradictions abound. For example, while the first Adventist Health Study showed reduced all-cause mortality and increased longevity for Adventists, the 2016 European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition–Oxford (EPIC-Oxford) cohort study did not show an all-cause mortality advantage for British vegetarians.25
Statistician Russell Smith analyzed the existing studies on vegetarianism and discovered that while there have been ample investigations that show, quite unsurprisingly, that vegetarian diets significantly decrease blood cholesterol levels, few studies have evaluated the effects of vegetarian diets on mortality. In a review of some three thousand articles in the scientific literature, Smith found only two that compared mortality data for vegetarians and nonvegetarians.26
One was a 1978 study of Seventh-Day Adventists. By ignoring a large portion of the data and through statistical manipulation, researchers computed “odds ratios” showing that mortality increased as meat or poultry consumption increased (but not for cheese, eggs, milk or fat attached to meat). But when Smith analyzed total mortality rates from the study as a function of the frequencies of consuming cheese, meat, milk, eggs and fat attached to meat, he found that the total death rate decreased as the frequencies of consuming cheese, eggs, meat and milk increased.27
The second study, published by Burr and Sweetnam in 1982, showed that the annual death rate from heart disease among vegetarians was only 0.01 percent lower than that of nonvegetarians, yet the authors described that difference as “substantial.” The difference in all-cause death rate was in the opposite direction, namely higher for vegetarians, especially female vegetarians.28
The claim that vegetarians have lower rates of cancer compared to nonvegetarians has been squarely contradicted by a 1994 study comparing Adventist vegetarians with the general population.29 Researchers found that although vegetarian Adventists have the same or slightly lower cancer rates for some sites—for example, slightly lower rates of breast cancer—the rates for numerous other cancers are much higher than the general U.S. population standard, especially cancers of the reproductive tract. Seventh-Day Adventist females had more Hodgkin’s disease (131 percent), more brain cancer (118 percent), more malignant melanoma (171 percent), more uterine cancer (191 percent), more cervical cancer (180 percent), and more ovarian cancer (129 percent) on average.
In an interview with Buettner, at the offices for the Adventist Health Study in Loma Linda, study researchers claimed, “We found that the Adventists who ate meat had a 65 percent increased risk of [colon cancer] compared to vegetarian Adventists.” But a study of cancer incidence from EPIC-Oxford found that the incidence of colon cancer was higher in vegetarians.30
As for overall health in vegans and vegetarians, a 2014 study found that these groups have more cancer, more allergies, more mental illness and more tooth decay. They need more health care and have a poorer quality of life.31
THE BIG QUESTION: is it low meat consumption that most contributes to good health or is it avoidance of alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and junk food? To answer this question, let me introduce yet another Blue Zone, this one in the north island of New Zealand. I call it the Maria (pronounced MAR-y-a) Blue Zone, after the auburn-haired Maria family, which came to New Zealand from the Azores. Nicholas Maria, who settled in New Zealand in the 1860s, died at age 93 after a life of many adventures; his wife lived on for several years after his death.
His son, Albert, died young at age 75—a tragic death from a blocked prostate, as they could not get him to the doctor in time (250 miles away from his farm in the far north of New Zealand). Albert’s wife, Eva, lived to age 95.
Albert and Eva had six children. Son Roger died in his nineties; son Owen died at age 102 and was still farming in his late nineties; daughter Phyllis (mother of my husband) came very close to 102; daughter Enid died “young,” in her eighties; daughter Jessie died in her nineties; daughter Winnie is still alive at age 98.
Eva Maria’s brother died at age 104. Two aunts died in their late eighties.
My husband also married into longevity: both his mother-in-law and father-in-law (family name of Grimes) lived into their nineties, and their daughter Joyce lived to age 91. Their other daughter, Margaret, died at age 81. My husband’s father (family name Morell) lived alone until age 98 and died at age 100. In fact, every one of these long-lived people lived on their own until close to the time of their death. My husband is 92 and still does tractor work on our farm.
This was a family of clean-living people: none of them smoked, most of them never drank and—surprisingly—none of them had the English habit of drinking a lot of tea, let alone coffee. But they sure did eat meat. They consumed a typical New Zealand diet of meat (lamb, beef, pork), organ meats, eggs, fish, shellfish and of course oodles of deep yellow grass-fed New Zealand butter on everything. Sugar consumption was moderate and no one drank soft drinks. The milk they consumed on the farm was raw.
This family prided itself on vegetable consumption—no meal was complete without four or five vegetables on the plate. But we should not confuse a diet containing a lot of vegetables with what’s called a “plant-based” diet as Buettner does. Theirs was a meat-based diet garnished with vegetables, and the vegetables were dressed with butter and salt.
And oh yes, they all got cod liver oil as kids.
Many of these long-lived folks were farmers. Typically, they killed a lamb on Thursday or Friday. The organ meats were consumed that evening, and the roast or leg was served for Sunday dinner. Leftovers became curry and hash in the new week. The butcher sold blood sausage, and fast-food stores sold fish ’n’ chips fried in tallow. They collected fresh mussels and oysters in New Zealand’s pristine ocean waters, and fished for trout in New Zealand’s clear streams. The prized parts of the trout were the roe (a powerful superfood) and the vitamin A–rich flesh behind the eyes—my husband tells me they always ate this part of the fish immediately on catching it. The skin-on filets were dipped in batter and fried in tallow. Once a physician told Aunt Sybil, Albert’s sister, then in her eighties, not to do such a terrible thing, not to eat fats nor her home-fried fish. “But I like my fats,” she said.
The Maria Blue Zone provides us with the right formula for longevity: real food including plenty of superfoods like organ meats, animal fats, raw dairy foods, grass-fed butter, and seafood, along with moderate habits. Renunciation of delicious, satisfying food is not necessary for good health while young, nor for good health well into old age.
THE QUESTION IS WHY? Why does Buettner insist that the secret to longevity is a plant-based diet low in fat and high in plant foods when both the published scientific evidence and his own experiences visiting the Blue Zones show the opposite?
The answer emerges in his acknowledgments, where he thanks his mentors—all of them ensconced in mainstream medicine—for “keeping me on the path of science and off the short cuts of conjecture and hyperbole.” The Blue Zone project was largely funded by the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, which has firmly embraced the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans. According to these guidelines, a healthy diet 1) emphasizes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products; 2) includes lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs and nuts; 3) is low in saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, salt and added sugars; and 4) balances the calories from foods and beverages with calories burned through physical activities to maintain a healthy weight.*
This prescription leaves out all the healthy, nutrient-dense foods that have sustained human beings throughout the world, including the elderly living in the Blue Zones: organ meats; shellfish, fish liver oils; animal fats like butter and lard; soaked and soured grains; fermented foods; gelatinous bone broth; raw whole dairy products; and generous amounts of salt.
The Blue Zone project also received funds from Davisco Foods International, producer of industrial dairy products including low-fat cheese, whey protein, whey protein isolates and whey protein fractions—hardly the type of benefactor that would sanction raw whole dairy products sold directly from the farm to the consumer.
The notion that fat-free foods constitute the key to longevity falls squarely in the category of “conjecture and hyperbole.” The Blue Zone project constitutes damage control against the burgeoning interest in traditional foods, and the dawning realization that government-sanctioned dietary guidelines are nothing but a pack of lies designed to keep the hospital beds full.