In part 1 of this series I interviewed “CC,” a local 69-year-old woman who is quite healthy. There’s nothing really extraordinary about her health, except that despite having a hormone disorder, she’s healthier than many 40-year olds. Well that IS extraordinary, then, isn’t it?

I hope to convey that the really extraordinary thing is that our concept of “normal aging” has steadily grown to assume that disease and disability are “normal.” CC is aging like most Americans used to age before our food supply came to include mostly industrialized-commodity food.

My husband’s and my parents are now in their mid-60s. They are now in the stage when you hope against hopes that they can “be lucky” and stay out of the medical system. Four out of five of them are on multiple medications. Three of them have required major medical intervention in the last few years.

I don’t believe in the inevitability of physical decline. Because of my travels, I tend to look to other cultures and other eras to understand the context we are living in and what I see is that there is another human experience we can choose to have. It is entirely humanly possible to age without dementia or deteriorating faculties and it’s not just predetermined according to our genes.

I just read a book called Healthy at 100 by John Robbins. In it, Robbins profiles four cultures whose elders regularly live beyond 100 years old. It’s fascinating to read about these people and also to learn what all four cultures have in common. Genetic determinism can’t explain this one, as one of the groups is from South America, one is from the Caucasus mountains in Eastern Europe, one is from far Northeastern Pakistan and the last is from the Islands of Okinawa in Japan.

Three of the four locations are mountainous and while elder Okinawans live at sea level, they still tend to get a lot of exercise like their mountain-bound counterparts. Another lifestyle trait that was shared among the four longest-living cultures was having an ethic of tremendous respect for elders. (The single greatest source of sibling fighting in Okinawa is who will get to host the elders.) They also all had a culture of mutual respect and inclusion where women are not exploited or overworked, children are never truly orphaned and no one is excluded from group life. They were happy! And visitors to each of these places were amazed to see what was humanly possible.

The other greatest factor, as you can imagine, was their food. There was some variation among them, like the proportion of raw food to cooked food was quite different sometimes. And while they all ate some animal products (between 1% and 10% of their calories,) their sources varied from fish to fermented sheep’s milk to meat and eggs. The ratios of fats to carbs to protein in their diets were all quite similar and so was the fact that they averaged only about 1900 calories a day. Compared to the American average of 2,650 calories per day, that’s quite low. More on that in a minute, but meanwhile these populations ate whole, fresh food. This included whole grains (not in a bread form, just a bowl of grains), fresh fruits and vegetables picked right before eating, beans, legumes, seeds and nuts and small amounts of non-industrial animal products. Zero refined sugar or refined oil, zero processed food and minimal salt. This is how our ancestors ate and is the diet our human bodies evolved on.

All of these populations fastidiously tended to the health of the soil they grew their plants in. In Pakistan, the children made a game out of collecting the sheep and goat droppings so that every last one was added to the compost pile. This creates plants that are packed with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytochemicals and micronutrients.

The result is a diet that is dense with nutrients. Every mouthful of food in this case is replenishing and health-supporting. When this is true, a human body doesn’t need 2,650 calories to get all the nutrients it needs. (As it happens, our usual 2,650 American calories not only often don’t contain nutrients, they contain “anti-nutrients” that deplete our reserves of essential nutrients, causing widespread deficiencies.) The “nutrient to calorie” ratio is quite different in the American diet versus the Okinawan diet, for example.

When a human body routinely gets nutrient-dense whole foods (plus love, exercise, dignity and community) it can naturally live nine or ten decades without disease or disability. So not only do people in those 4 cultures live to be REALLY old, the rates of disease (cancer, heart disease, dementia, osteoporosis, even needing eye glasses) are negligible. It turns out that low-calorie intake also has a major correlation with longevity. As you can imagine, that’s not true if there are nutrient deficiencies present, but low calorie intake of nutrient-dense foods seems to be a proven key to long life.

Robbins squares this with what he calls “the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted,”—The China Study. Started in 1983, this was an utterly massive study of the correlation between food and disease in 24 of China’s 27 provinces, conducted at a time when 90% of the population still lived right where they were born. (This study could no longer take place today with the population shifts and the availability of modern industrial-commodity food.)

What this study made apparent was that there is a complex of diseases that arise when a population becomes affluent. This affluence causes a shift in the diet from one of whole grains, plant-based sources of protein and unrefined oils to a diet of “prestige” foods, including white flour products, refined sugar, refined oils and lots more meat. In a massive study conducted on a homogeneous population that was 87% Han Chinese, the food-to-disease correlation jumped off the page to the researchers.

Diabetes, coronary heart disease, obesity and many forms of cancer stood in direct and clear correlation to “nutritional extravagance,” the study found, with affluent people. In the decades since the China Study was conducted, researchers have had an opportunity to watch as change has hit China like a tidal wave.

Affluence is much more common now in China than in 1983 and so are western fast food restaurants. There are now more than 1200 KFCs. Meat consumption in China increased 12,700% (yes, 12,700%) between 1974 and 2004. Despite what was learned in the study, researchers have watched the upwardly mobile in China steadily gravitate towards a diet that that will, in the end, reward them with “diseases of affluence.” This is true all over the world. It’s even starting to creep into the four longest-living cultures that Robbins profiled in his book. Obesity is becoming a world-wide problem now as the whole world opts for elements of a western-style diet, including deep-fried food, refined flours, refined vegetable oils and prodigious amounts of sugar. Now more than 25% of children in Egypt, Chile, Peru, Germany and Mexico are obese. (page 97) This is the direct result of food commodities becoming industrial products that need to have a long shelf life in order to travel well. The calories make it to the end consumer and the nutrients don’t.

Over the last 100 years, with such a seemingly slow-moving shift away from traditional whole food and toward food that is produced in large amounts and designed for travel, it’s almost hard to imagine that we didn’t always eat this way. But before the industrial revolution, it was only the very wealthy who could afford to eat refined food. It was only about 35 years ago that refined food became available to absolutely everyone in this country and the food industry began to ramp up to mega-volume global trade. The changes in our food supply have been quiet but very dramatically away from our ancestral diets.

“CC” in my previous article alighted on an eating style that was much more in alignment with her ancestral diet, with a high “nutrient to calorie ratio.” Mark Hyman M.D. says that “food is information” and the information that CC’s body receives makes sense to her cells. THIS is the key to aging well. Everyone’s body works well with variations on the whole food theme– meaning there is no one diet that is right for everyone– but research clearly shows that everyone can benefit from eating more vegetables (often WAY more vegetables,) less refined, processed food, less sugar and probably less meat and milk. It’s not as complex as the food industry would have you think.

The correlations are scientifically clear even if they aren’t always clear to us in a moment when we are feeling crappy and just want comfort food. Luckily our “comfort food” preferences are not hard-wired programming. Our tastes can and do change. It sometimes takes years of agonizing cycles to evolve away from tastes that have been designed in a chemical plant in New Jersey, but it’s empowering as hell when it happens. And it can add healthy, high-quality-of-life years to your life, starting at any age.

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