watchnerd
Level 8 Valued Member
Blue zone hot spots represent epidemiological associations of people who seem to life longer. In other words, the blue zone is not just diet it is an association. The whole human responds 24 hours a day to all the inputs, processes and outputs that occur. There can be some variation within limits but if variation falls outside those limits then health and lifespan are affected. So, the blue zone regions diet may vary a bit from the paleo diet idea and the paleo idea will still remain true.
For example, if you take the mediterranean diet and remove grains and dairy then you have a diet that approximates the paleo diet. Note that dairy and grain consumption varies wildly throughout the mediterranean area. Some places eat a lot of grain some eat little or none. Same with dairy. The mediterranean diet actually eaten by the older ones in different countries was in fact highly variable and I'm not even sure it should be called that. ie it might be better to talk about sardinian diet and so on. Buzz terms like "blue zone" sound great but can be a bit misleading. Even more so when layered upon things like the mediterranean diet.
The Victorians in industrial England a couple of hunder years ago were thought to life short and brutal lives as the average life span was reduced compared to modern people. Then someone did some in depth work, published (from memory) in the proceedings of the royal society and discovered that the average life span was reduced by a large number of infant deaths. In modern times, medicine has stopped many of those deaths and so the average lifespan is lengthened. The Victorians lived about as long as modern people in England if you take out infant mortality.
On the Okinawans, the studies showing longevity are due to a diet that is rather similar to a hunter gatherer diet when these dietary analyses were done using data going back over the life span of the old Okinawans ie back to around 1900. From memory they ate a lot of pig meat and vegetables.
Vegetarianism is an idealogical choice. Simple macro and micronutrient analysis of a vegetarian diet makes clear that they always end up with nutritional deficiencies. Zinc, Iron, glycine, methionine are some examples of nutrients they don't get enough of. So, they are a poor model.
The Kung currently in Africa are living a second class life and on a second class diet as they have been displaced and put into limited areas as happened to the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines and other similar groups. So, whilst we can learn some things from them about how things used to be done within living memory most of the reliable data comes from work done back in the 1940s-1960s on the Kung when they were relatively uncontaminated by modern civilisation. At that point anthropologists were visiting and spending time living with small groups who were hunting and gathering. From memory we don't have a large bank of mortality statistics for the Kung during that time.
Again:
What empirical longitudinal data do you have that eating like a hunter gather has been observed to increase longevity in populations?
Otherwise, it's just hypothesis and conjecture, as opposed to evidence-based.
Note:
This is assuming you actually *could* eat like one, which is not a sure thing given lack of game meats in modern grocery stores, fruits and vegetables that are domesticated and not the same as wild plants, etc.