Written by Dan Buettner, the piece focuses on the Greek island of Ikaria, and, in many ways, it's a lot like a lot of the other stories I've read on this subject. From a scientific perspective, we don't really understand why some people live longer than others. And we definitely don't understand why some populations have more people who live longer. There are lots of theories. Conveniently, they tend to coincide with our own biases about what we currently think is most wrong with our own society. So articles about extremely long-lived populations tend to offer a lot of inspiring stories, some funny quotes from really old people, and not a lot in the way of answers.

Buettner's story has all those elements, but it also proposes some ideas that were, for me, really thought provoking. After spending much of the article discussing the Ikarian's diet (it's low in meat and sugar, high in antioxidants, and includes lots of locally produced food and wine) and their laid-back, low-stress way of life, Buettner doesn't suggest that we'll all live to be 100 if we just, individually, try to live exactly like the Ikarians do. In fact, he points out that other communities of long-lived individuals actually live differently — Californian Seventh-Day Adventists, for instance, eat no meat at all and don't drink, and they live with the normal stresses of everyday American life.

What these groups do have in common, though, is a strong social infrastructure that ties people to each other emotionally and connects individual choices to a bigger community lifestyle.

It's hard to follow any diet when you're trying to do it on your own, in a culture that doesn't necessarily encourage you. It's hard to sleep in until 11:00 am every day (as the Ikarians do) when the social infrastructure of your community would actively punish such behavior. What's more, a common thread running through all these communities is an emphasis on the life-long pursuit of things that give your life meaning. There's not a cutoff point when you're expected to sit back, relax, and do nothing until you die.

The importance of systems, and how they shape individual behavior, is something I spent a lot of time thinking about while writing my book on energy. For example, it's somewhat futile to tell people to make an individual choice to drive less if the infrastructure of their city is set up in such a way that living without a car means being trapped in your house. But it's not something I'd thought about in terms of longevity.

Buettner's piece seems to suggest that it's not really your specific diet that matters. By which, I mean that eating healthy is definitely important, but there might not be a single, strict, specific diet that makes some things taboo and other things mandatory and must be followed at all times.

Instead, the important thing might really be your community as a system. If your community eats well (and makes eating well easy), so will you. If your community makes physical fitness part of daily life, you're more likely to be physically fit. If your community helps you create meaning in your life, it will be easier to find it. It's not really a solid answer for "HOW TO LIVE LONGER NOW", but it is intriguing. More importantly, from my perspective, it makes living a healthy life sound, you know, pleasant ... rather than like an obnoxious, individual dogma that creates smug insiders and resentful outsiders.

Of course, all of this fits nicely with my own personal biases, so who the hell knows. ;)

We do know from reliable data that people on Ikaria are outliving those on surrounding islands (a control group, of sorts). Samos, for instance, is just eight miles away. People there with the same genetic background eat yogurt, drink wine, breathe the same air, fish from the same sea as their neighbors on Ikaria. But people on Samos tend to live no longer than average Greeks. This is what makes the Ikarian formula so tantalizing.

If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing. You’re less likely to be a victim of crime because everyone at once is a busybody and feels as if he’s being watched. At day’s end, you’ll share a cup of the seasonal herbal tea with your neighbor because that’s what he’s serving. Several glasses of wine may follow the tea, but you’ll drink them in the company of good friends. On Sunday, you’ll attend church, and you’ll fast before Orthodox feast days. Even if you’re antisocial, you’ll never be entirely alone. Your neighbors will cajole you out of your house for the village festival to eat your portion of goat meat.

Via Tom Rafferty

Read the full story at The New York Times Magazine

Robert Sapolsky is a Professor of Biological Sciences and Neurology at Stanford University. He is the author of A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons.

Avi Solomon:

What event or person influenced your decision to study Primatology?

Robert Sapolsky:

Reading The Year of the Gorilla, by George Schaller, when I was in middle school. Schaller was the first person to do field work with gorillas (long before Dian Fossey). I had a vague sense of wanting to do primatology before that (sufficiently so to be reading the book), but that book cemented it.

Avi

What led you to research Stress?

Robert

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution. If you are in that world, evolution really feels like it is about adaptation - when there are changes in the environment, new challenges, the critical issue becomes whether there is the genetic variability in a population that will allow for survival - will there be individuals with the means to adapt to the changing environment?

As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.

Another reason is intellectual temperament. There is a classic study (by Tversky and Kahneman) in which people are given two scenarios. You have a population in which there are two diseases; each disease accounts for 50% of the deaths. Scenario A: you come up with something which completely cures one of the diseases, without having any effect on the other. Scenario B: you come up with something which cuts the mortality rate in half for each disease. The two are equivalent: 1 x 50% = 2 x 25%. The vast majority of people prefer Scenario A, for the sense of closure that it gives. My temperament has always been more for Scenario B. Stress, all on its own, doesn't directly kill people in the way that, say, cancer does. What it does is make lots and lots of different diseases 2% worse, 5% worse, whatever. Distributed impact. Going after that is much more to my taste as an intellectual problem (rather than, say, coming up with a vaccine or identifying a mutation that underlies a disease - those are Scenario A's).

Avi

How do you define Stress? Is Stress necessarily a bad thing?

Robert

If you are a normal mammal, a stressor is a challenge to homeostatic balance - a real physical challenge in the world - and the stress-response is the adaptation your body mobilizes to re-establish homeostasis.

For a cognitively complex species (like humans and other primates), stressor is also the ANTICIPATION that a a real physical challenge is about to happen. If there really is not the threat of a physical stressor coming, then you are setting yourself up for increased risk of stress-related disease.

Is stress always bad? No - if a stressor isn't too extreme, is only transient, and occurs in what overall feels like a benevolent environment, it's great, we love it - that's what play and stimulation are.

Avi

Why are Baboons good human analogs for the study of Stress?

Robert

Baboons are perfect models for the ecosystem I study. They live in the Serengeti in East Africa, which is a wonderful place for a baboon to live. They're in big troops, so predators don't hassle them much. Infant mortality is low. Most importantly, it takes baboons only about 3 hours of foraging to get their day's calories. Critical implication of this - if you are spending only 3 hours in a day getting food, that means you have 9 hours of free time each day to devote to being miserable to some other baboon. Like us, they are ecologically privileged enough so that they can devote their time to generating psychological stress for each other. If a baboon in the Serengeti is miserable, it is because another baboon has worked very hard to bring that state about.

Avi

What are the most important science-based strategies for coping with Stress?

Robert

Successful stress management heavily revolves around combating the building blocks of psychological stress - a feeling as if you have no control over the adversities in your life, a feeling that you have no predictive information about the stressors, if you lack outlets for the frustrations caused by the stressors, if you have no social support.

Avi

How do you use them in your own life?

Robert

As for me - I'm terrible at applying any of this. Why else would I study the subject?

Avi

How has doing regular fieldwork in Africa affected you?

Robert

It has been one of the most important things in my life. I am very very happy when I am there.

Avi

You grew up an orthodox Jew in New York. What is your opinion of God now?

Robert

What's God? For me, God died when I was around 14, and I haven't been capable of anything resembling "spirituality" since then either. I wish I could—life would be easier—but I can't.

Previously at Boing Boing

Toxoplasma (cat-poo parasite) hypnotizes rats by making them horny for cat pee
Sapolsky's outstanding Stanford lecture on "The Uniqueness of Humans"
Stanford's Sapolsky on primate sexuality: funny, fascinating, educational
Sapolsky on primate sexuality part two: required viewing for the horny
Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality
Stanford's Sapolsky and National Geo produce a documentary on stress
Mind-opening lectures on the physiology of stress ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/23/robert-sapolsky-on-stress-an.html/feed 12