HEALTHY AT 100 (17 page)

The Study of Adult Development at Harvard University is arguably the longest study of aging in the world. It is a prospective study, meaning that it has not depended on people’s memory of what took place in the past. Instead, nearly a thousand people have been followed by researchers for more than sixty years. It is also a rarity in
medicine, for it has studied the lives of the healthy rather than only those who are ill.

Looking back in 2002 over what had been learned in more than six decades, the study’s director, George E. Vaillant, M.D., concluded that in most cases genes are not the preeminent factor that many have believed:

To many it seems as if heart attacks and cancer are visitations from malicious gods and that much of the pain of old age is in the hands of cruel fate, or at least of cruel genes. The whole process of aging sometimes feels completely out of our control. But blessed with prospectively gathered data, I was astonished at how much of…healthy aging or lack of it is predicted by factors…that are more or less controllable.
³⁹

What about the Okinawans? Might the underlying reason for their fabulous health and longevity be some kind of special genetic status? Might they be blessed with favorable genes that enable them to remain healthy when others would fall ill?

These questions have been thoroughly studied. Migration studies have found that when Okinawans move elsewhere and adopt the diets of their new locations, they get the same diseases at the same rates, and die at the same ages, as the people whose customs they embrace. The life expectancy for Okinawans who move to Brazil, for example, drops seventeen years.
⁴⁰

The U.S. National Institutes of Health funded a study called “Genetics of Exceptional Longevity in Okinawan Centenarians.” The study found that most of the Okinawans’ advantage stems not from genetics, but from the way they live and the food they eat.

By far the most dramatic evidence that genetics is not the primary reason for the blessings of Okinawan health can be seen today in the lifestyles and health of the younger Okinawans, who of course share the same genes as their elders. It is a sad and sobering reality that the health practices and way of life that have produced such outstanding results for the elders for so long are today being abandoned by younger generations.
⁴¹

How has this happened? At the end of World War II, without
Okinawans’ having any voice in the matter, the American military seized massive amounts of Okinawan property in order to build numerous military bases and housing estates for American military families. The Americans did not requisition or pay for this land. They simply seized it, often at bayonet point, and then bulldozed the houses on it so they could use the land however they wanted.

In 1951, Okinawa legally became a possession of the United States, and the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa lasted until 1972, twenty years longer than the Allied occupation of mainland Japan. Even after Okinawa reverted to Japanese sovereignty in 1972, the United States has maintained an enormous military presence in Okinawa.

Today, there are still more than fifty thousand U.S. military personnel and thirty-nine U.S. military bases in Okinawa, occupying about one-sixth of the land mass of the prefecture. This massive presence has had a mammoth impact on the culture and lifestyle in Okinawa. With the soldiers have come American fast-food restaurants. McDonald’s, KFC, A&W, Burger King, and Baskin-Robbins have become commonplace. Okinawa now has more hamburger restaurants than anywhere else in Japan.

In addition, in the 1960s the Japanese government noticed that young people in Okinawa weighed less and ate fewer calories than young people in the rest of Japan. Mistakenly thinking this was a problem, the government proclaimed the young Okinawans underweight and began to institute a school lunch program designed to rectify the “problem.” Full-fat milk and refined white bread replaced a low-calorie plant-based diet centered on vegetables, whole grains, soy foods, and fish.

As a result of these influences, younger Okinawans today are eating a much more Western diet than their elders have ever eaten. They are consuming far more calories, far more fat, far more processed food, far more meat, sugar, and corn syrup. Relying ever more on convenience foods and eating many of their meals in American fast-food restaurants, they are becoming less physically active and less involved in their communities.

The contrast could hardly be more striking. The elders are still eating their traditional diets filled with sweet potatoes, fresh vegetables
, and tofu. But the younger residents of Okinawa, heavily influenced by the tens of thousands of U.S. troops based there, now spend three times more money per capita on processed meat and nearly five times more on canned foods than do the residents of any other Japanese prefecture.

The elder Okinawans, whose health and longevity have been so thoroughly documented, eat a diet that—like those of the Abkhasians, Vilcabambans, and Hunzans—is plant-based and low-calorie and contains very little sugar or processed food. But when members of the younger generation buy food at markets, their shopping carts are filled with bacon, jelly rolls, sausage, and soda pop. The younger Okinawans today have actually become the world’s largest per capita consumers of Spam and other canned and processed meats.
⁴²

As you might expect, there have been health consequences to abandoning the ancestral Okinawan ways. They are serious, and I find them to be terribly sad. Younger Okinawans today have the highest level of obesity in Japan, the worst cardiovascular risk profile, the highest risk of coronary heart disease, and the highest risk for premature death. What a stark and painful contrast this presents to their elders, who are the healthiest and most long-lived people ever thoroughly studied by modern science.

Today, Okinawans in their forties and fifties are increasingly overweight, and are more likely to die of heart attacks and cancer than their elders who are in their nineties and beyond. Newspapers publish an increasing number of obituaries of people who have died in what might otherwise have been the middle of their lives. Most of those deaths are from diabetes, cancers, strokes, and heart disease—diet-related diseases rarely seen in the older generations. One of the saddest parts of life for Okinawan elders today is how often they must attend the funerals of their grandchildren.

The rapid and nearly total shift in dietary habits and in health between the generations in Okinawa is a source of deep sorrow to anyone who sees the calamity that is taking place. It is tragic to witness such a wholesome way of life being discarded in favor of one so harmful. And yet, at the same time as we mourn what is being lost, we can also realize that we are being offered an opportunity to learn something important. In Okinawa today we can see both an ultimate
example of healthful living and its opposite—both within the same gene pool, and both taking place at a time when they can be studied carefully by scientific investigators.

The researchers have done their job. They have made clear what the factors are that have produced the vastly different health outcomes among different generations in Okinawa. It’s up to each of us what we do with what we have learned.

You are not old until regret replaces your dreams.

—Anonymous

T
he distressing contrast between the eating habits and health of the elder and younger Okinawans is a sad reenactment of a pattern that has taken place in many indigenous cultures as they have become colonized by Western influences and processed foods. Beginning in the nineteenth century and becoming nearly unstoppable in the twentieth, it is a pattern that has devastated the cultural traditions of native peoples in nearly every corner of the globe. And it began to be thoroughly documented in the 1930s.

The 1930s were an interesting time in the evolution of modern civilization. Photographic equipment was just becoming relatively inexpensive and portable, and yet there were still many cultures and tribes of people worldwide who had not yet been exposed to the growing influence of Western culture. And it was in the 1930s that an American dentist named Weston A. Price traveled to nearly every corner of the world, camera in hand, seeking to understand the relationship between the food people were eating and the health they were experiencing.

As he trekked around the globe, Price specifically sought out people who were still eating their native foods. He asked about their dietary
habits, then examined and photographed their teeth. At the same time, he undertook similar studies and took similar photos of people from the same cultures who had become exposed to Western foods and who had begun to substitute foods like white flour, white sugar, marmalade, and canned goods for their native diets.

The differences, as shown by the many photographs in Price’s 1939 book
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
, were startling.
¹
Time and again, Price found that those people who were still eating their native diets had very little if any dental caries (decay or crumbling of teeth) and appeared to be in radiant health, while their counterparts who were now eating refined and processed foods from the West were exhibiting massive tooth decay and malformation of their dental arches as well as suffering from a growing cascade of illnesses and dysfunctions. Price came to believe that dental decay was caused primarily by nutritional deficiencies, and that the same conditions that promote tooth decay also promote disease elsewhere in the body.

For nearly a decade, Weston Price and his wife, Monica, traveled each summer to different parts of the world. Their investigations took them to isolated Swiss villages and to an island off the coast of Scotland. They studied Aborigines in Australia, Maoris in New Zealand, traditional Eskimos in Alaska, indigenous tribes in Canada and the Florida Everglades, Peruvian and Amazonian natives, South Sea islanders, and tribespeople in Africa.

All told, Price found fourteen different tribes whose diets, though radically different from one another, seemed to provide not only nearly complete immunity from tooth decay, but also extraordinary resistance to illness. And in every case, he also found that when members of these tribes began to eat what Price called “the displacing foods of modern commerce,” the results were uniformly disastrous. While eating their native foods, they enjoyed robust, vibrant, and nearly disease-free health, but when they began eating imported white flour, sugar, jams, jellies, cookies, condensed milk, canned vegetables, margarine, vegetable oils, confections, and other refined foods, their health rapidly deteriorated.

Price was a dentist, and his principal concern was the teeth and dental arches of the people he encountered. He found that as long as
these people consumed their native diet, their mouths and jaws developed so that they never experienced crowded teeth, overbites, under-bites, or tooth decay. When their wisdom teeth came in, they always had plenty of room. But as his photographs poignantly show, once they abandoned the wisdom of eating their native foods for eating “civilized” foods, the results were ruinous. Now all kinds of dental problems that had been previously unknown became rampant.

And it wasn’t just dental problems. Price found that as people shifted to refined foods, birth defects increased, and people became more susceptible both to infection and to chronic disease. As people ate ever more refined and devitalized foods, he said, they and their offspring became increasingly weaker and more prone to all kinds of diseases.

Before eating such foods, Price said, native peoples enjoyed magnificent health and exhibited superb physical traits. He wrote of their eyesight with awe, pointing out that they could see many stars that are visible to those of us in the modern world only with the aid of telescopes. The Maori of New Zealand, he said, could see the moons of Jupiter with their naked eyes. The proof was that they could describe the moons to someone looking through a telescope, and their descriptions were accurate.

He wrote of the Aborigines of Australia, who could see animals moving a mile in the distance, and whose skill in tracking was so uncanny that it was as though they possessed a sixth sense.
²
Over and over again he found indigenous people who had for countless generations built superbly functioning bodies which they maintained in excellent health as long as they ate only their traditional native foods.

But, Price warned ominously, once modern Western foods became part of native peoples’ diets, the destruction developed rapidly. He wrote:

[Indigenous peoples like] the Aborigines of Australia have reproduced for generation after generation through many centuries—no one knows for how many thousands of years—without the
development of a conspicuous number of irregularities of the dental arches. Yet in the next generation after these people adopt the foods of the white man, a large percentage of the children developed irregularities of the dental arches with conspicuous facial deformities.
³

Again and again, Price warned of the menace of processed foods. To his eyes, their incorporation into the human diet represented a dire threat to human health and quality of life. “If a scale were extended a mile long,” he said,

and the decades measured by inches, there would apparently be more degeneration in the last few inches than in the preceding mile. This gives some idea of the virulence of the blight contributed by our modern civilization.…
⁴
It should be a matter not only of concern but deep alarm that human beings can degenerate physically so rapidly by the use of a certain type of nutrition, particularly the dietary products used so generally by modern civilization.
⁵

Price saw this tragedy occurring among all the indigenous peoples he visited. The peoples he studied were diverse. They were of widely different cultures and ethnicities, and they lived at different altitudes, latitudes, and climates. Yet in writing about culture after culture, Price speaks of the radiant health that was theirs before the advent of processed and refined foods, and the inevitable deterioration that ensued after such foods became part of their diets. It is not just his words that account for the power of Price’s message. Some of the photographs he took are inspiring depictions of the health enjoyed by native peoples in all corners of the globe while they continued to eat the foods that were natural to their environment. Others of his photos are graphic and haunting illustrations of what happened when these ancestral ways were discarded in favor of “civilized foods.”