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Dan Buettner is a National Geographic explorer/fellow, a best-selling author, adventurist and the world’s most rigorous researcher of longevity and quality of life. The top of the two agendas of leading medical establishments in the world is today to lengthen life, and improve quality of life. So there’s enough reason to find out, in one easy Netflix limited series, what Buettner has been doing and what he has discovered over research of 20-plus years. He himself is 60 now, and much like the subjects of his research — age doesn’t show on him.
Over four episodes, Live To 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones covers six regions in the world with the highest concentration of centenarians — Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Loma Linda, California; Ikaria, Greece; and Nicoya, Costa Rica, and Singapore — Buettner identifies a few deciding factors. Not much of the findings are absolutely new, but each case study and character are riveting to watch. According to Buettner, a few factors contribute to longevity and quality of life: Protein- and other nutrient-dense vegetarian proteins, “hard hachi bu”, a Japanese saying popular in Okinawa which means eating up to 80 per cent satiety, natural movements with activities like climbing steep roads, gardenia, working at kitchens and doing household and community work which result in strong lower bodies and and precise balancing of limbs, being part of communities that ensure communication, support and sharing joy and volunteer work, ‘Ikigai’ or ‘Plan de Vida’ which translates to “a sense of purpose” (what are you waking up in the morning for?), sourdough breads and fermented carbohydrates; local, seasonal vegetables, active coping of stress by which experts mean the ability to let go of an anxiety or a problem by finding and focussing on what can be done, fulfilled and enjoyed in the present; and economic incentive for the ageing to continue working, to connect with people and belong to communities.
The most astonishing character in the series is a Greek man named Stamatis Moriaitis. At 66, he had a perfect American suburban life with a family when he was given a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. His American oncologist gave him six months to live. He decided to move back to his hometown in Ikaria, Greece. Soon after return, he planted grapes on a land he inherited and hoped his wife would remember him by harvesting these grapes every year. Bruettner met him when he was 102, still harvesting those grapes, and full of plans to enjoy the rest of his life. So what kept him alive? According to him, his family and friends, it was the environment and the air, the connection he felt with old friends, returning to the food he grew up eating, which included many varieties of herbal tea with herbs grown locally with locally-extracted raw honey, and drinking the local wine made not in barrels but stone structures under sunlight. He also says, he found a new purpose in life.
In India, these stories sound a bit like fairy tales. Although life expectancy has been increasing in India steadily (according to 2022’s government population data, in 1950 India’s longevity rate was 35.21; it is expected to be 81.96 in the year 2100. In 2022 it was 70.19). We are also adding between 5 to 6 million senior citizens to our population every year; every fifth Indian will be above the age of 60 by 2050. The measures that have possibly led to improved longevity, on the other hand, are those that developed, wealthy nations in the world adopted at least 50 years ago without a substantial number of its citizens living up to 100. America is now trying to repurpose diabetes drugs like Ozempic to suppress appetite and facilitate weight loss, funding start-ups that use the blood plasma of teenagers to pump to ageing billionaires.
India’s solutions so far have been increased medical care, more access to clean water, more antibiotics, more vaccines — air-borne and water-borne diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid and diseases like small pox and polio have lowered mortality rates. We are still working at the baseline. As Atul Gawande writes in his award-winning book Being Mortal (2014),
“Medicine has been slow to confront the very changes that it has been responsible for — or to apply the knowledge we have about how to make old age better”, obliterating disease and improving basic sanitation isn’t responsible for happy older people. Most Indians are ageist. Indian society is yet to make laws and implement policies that makes our public spaces, our infrastructure and our living conditions easier for senior citizens. The solution that’s marketed often is expensive and luxurious old age homes which facilitates community living. These facilities are beyond the means of an overwhelming majority of senior citizens.
A viable solution comes in the documentary series in an episode in which we see Bruettner travel to our neighbour city-state Singapore and in Nicoya, Costa Rica. Small medical clinics with teams of doctors that travel from door to door populate Costa Rica’s towns and villages, to take stock of its citizen’s heath, reinforcing the idea of prevention over treatment. The Singapore government has created affordable senior citizens’ townships in which they have access to all amenities and a common area called the plaza where everyone congregate to shop, walk, and for all kinds of recreation.
If we have to go by what Bruettner’s research and this most heartening of wellness series on Streaming TV shows, societies that consider keeping their elderly rested, immobile — if the idea of taking care of an elderly is to make life basic and convenient — real longevity, or even a reasonable number of healthy, active centenarians is going to remain a pipe dream.
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