New News From The Centenarian Blue Zones
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From Blue To Green…
We sometimes write about supercentenarians, which word is usually used in academia to refer to people who are not merely over 100 years of age, but over 110 years. These people can be found in many countries, but places where they have been found to be most populous (as a percentage of the local population) have earned the moniker “Blue Zones”—of which Okinawa and Sardinia are probably the most famous, but there are others too.
This is in contrast to, for example “Red Zones”, a term often used for areas where a particular disease is endemic, or areas where a disease is “merely” epidemic, but particularly rife at present.
In any case, back to the Blue Zones, where people live the longest and healthiest—because the latter part is important too! See also:
- Lifespan: how long we live
- Healthspan: how long we stay healthy (portmanteau of “healthy lifespan”)
Most of our readers don’t live in a Blue Zone (in fact, many live in a COVID Red Zone, a diabetes Red Zone, and a heart disease Red Zone), but that doesn’t mean we can’t all take tips from the Blue Zones and apply them, for example:
- The basics: The Blue Zones’ Five Pillars Of Longevity
- Going beyond: The Five Key Traits Of Healthy Aging
You may be wondering… How much good will this do me? And, we do have an answer for that:
When All’s Said And Done, How Likely Are You To Live To 100?
Now that we’re all caught-up…
The news from the Blues
A team of researchers did a big review of observational studies of centenarians and near-centenarians (aged 95+). Why include the near-centenarians, you ask? Well, most of the studies are also longitudinal, and if we’re doing an observational study of the impact of lifestyle factors on a 100-year-old, it’s helpful to know what they’ve been doing recently. Hence nudging the younger-end cutoff a little lower, so as to not begin each study with fresh-faced 100-year-olds whom we know nothing about.
Looking at thousands of centenarians (and near-centenarians, but also including some supercentenarians, up the age of 118), the researchers got a lot of very valuable data, far more than we have room to go into here (do check out the paper at the bottom of this article, if you have time; it’s a treasure trove of data), but one of the key summary findings was a short list of four factors they found contributed the most to extreme longevity:
- A diverse diet with low salt intake: in particular, a wide variety of plant diversity, including protein-rich legumes, though fish featured prominently also. On average they got 57% and 65% of their energy intake from carbohydrates, 12% to 32% from protein, and 27% to 31% from fat. As for salt, they averaged 1.6g of sodium per day, which is well within the WHO’s recommendation of averaging under 2g of sodium per day. As a matter of interest, centenarians in Okinawa itself averaged 1.1g of sodium per day.
- Low medication use: obviously there may be a degree of non-causal association here, i.e. the same people who just happened to be healthier and therefore lived longer, correspondingly took fewer medications—they took fewer medications because they were healthier; they weren’t necessarily healthier because they took fewer medications. That said, overmedication can be a big problem, especially in places with a profit motive like the US, and can increase the risk of harmful drug interactions, and side effects that then need more medications to treat the side effects, as well as direct iatrogenic damage (i.e. this drug treats your condition, but as the cost of harming you in some other way). Naturally, sometimes we really do need meds, but it’s a good reminder to do a meds review with one’s doctor once in a while, and see if everything’s still of benefit.
- Getting good sleep: not shocking, and this one’s not exactly news. But what may be shocking is that 68% of centenarians reported consistently getting enough good-quality sleep. To put that into perspective, only 35% of 10almonds readers reported regularly getting sleep in the 7–9 hours range.
- Rural living environment: more than 75% of the centenarians and near-centenarians lived in rural areas. This is not usually something touted as a Blue Zones thing on lists of Blue zones things, but this review strongly highlighted it as very relevant. In the category of things that are more obvious once it’s pointed out, though, this isn’t necessarily such a difference between “country folk” and “city folk”, so much as the ability to regularly be in green spaces has well-established health benefits physically, mentally, and both combined (such as: neurologically).
And showing that yes, even parks in cities make a significant difference:
Want to know more?
You can read the study in full here:
A systematic review of diet and medication use among centenarians and near-centenarians worldwide
Take care!
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Anti-Aging Risotto With Mushrooms, White Beans, & Kale
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This risotto is made with millet, which as well as being gluten-free, is high in resistant starch that’s great for both our gut and our blood sugars. Add the longevity-inducing ergothioneine in the shiitake and portobello mushrooms, as well as the well-balanced mix of macro- and micronutrients, polyphenols such as lutein (important against neurodegeneration) not to mention more beneficial phytochemicals in the seasonings, and we have a very anti-aging dish!
You will need
- 3 cups low-sodium vegetable stock
- 3 cups chopped fresh kale, stems removed (put the removed stems in the freezer with the vegetable offcuts you keep for making low-sodium vegetable stock)
- 2 cups thinly sliced baby portobello mushrooms
- 1 cup thinly sliced shiitake mushroom caps
- 1 cup millet, as yet uncooked
- 1 can white beans, drained and rinsed (or 1 cup white beans, cooked, drained, and rinsed)
- ½ cup finely chopped red onion
- ½ bulb garlic, finely chopped
- ¼ cup nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
- 2 tsp ground black pepper
- 1 tsp white miso paste
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Extra virgin olive oil
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Heat a little oil in a sauté or other pan suitable for both frying and volume-cooking. Fry the onion for about 5 minutes until soft, and then add the garlic, and cook for a further 1 minute, and then turn the heat down low.
2) Add about ¼ cup of the vegetable stock, and stir in the miso paste and MSG/salt.
3) Add the millet, followed by the rest of the vegetable stock. Cover and allow to simmer for 30 minutes, until all the liquid is absorbed and the millet is tender.
4) Meanwhile, heat a little oil to a medium heat in a skillet, and cook the mushrooms (both kinds), until lightly browned and softened, which should only take a few minutes. Add the vinegar and gently toss to coat the mushrooms, before setting side.
5) Remove the millet from the heat when it is done, and gently stir in the mushrooms, nutritional yeast, white beans, and kale. Cover, and let stand for 10 minutes (this will be sufficient to steam the kale in situ).
6) Uncover and fluff the risotto with a fork, sprinkling in the black pepper as you do so.
7) Serve. For a bonus for your tastebuds and blood sugars, drizzle with aged balsamic vinegar.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- The Magic Of Mushrooms: The “Longevity Vitamin” (That’s Not A Vitamin)
- Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
Take care!
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Our blood-brain barrier stops bugs and toxins getting to our brain. Here’s how it works
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Our brain is an extremely complex and delicate organ. Our body fiercely protects it by holding onto things that help it and keeping harmful things out, such as bugs that can cause infection and toxins.
It does that though a protective layer called the blood-brain barrier. Here’s how it works, and what it means for drug design.
The Conversation, Rattiya Thongdumhyu/Shutterstock, Petr Ganaj/Pexels First, let’s look at the circulatory system
Adults have roughly 30 trillion cells in their body. Every cell needs a variety of nutrients and oxygen, and they produce waste, which needs to be taken away.
Our circulatory system provides this service, delivering nutrients and removing waste.
Fenestrated capillaries let nutrients and waste pass through. Vectormine/Shutterstock Where the circulatory system meets your cells, it branches down to tiny tubes called capillaries. These tiny tubes, about one-tenth the width of a human hair, are also made of cells.
But in most capillaries, there are some special features (known as fenestrations) that allow relatively free exchange of nutrients and waste between the blood and the cells of your tissues.
It’s kind of like pizza delivery
One way to think about the way the circulation works is like a pizza delivery person in a big city. On the really big roads (vessels) there are walls and you can’t walk up to the door of the house and pass someone the pizza.
But once you get down to the little suburban streets (capillaries), the design of the streets means you can stop, get off your scooter and walk up to the door to deliver the pizza (nutrients).
We often think of the brain as a spongy mass without much blood in it. In reality, the average brain has about 600 kilometres of blood vessels.
The difference between the capillaries in most of the brain and those elsewhere is that these capillaries are made of specialised cells that are very tightly joined together and limit the free exchange of anything dissolved in your blood. These are sometimes called continuous capillaries.
Continuous capillaries limit the free exchange of anything dissolved in your blood. Vectormine/Shutterstock This is the blood brain barrier. It’s not so much a bag around your brain stopping things from getting in and out but more like walls on all the streets, even the very small ones.
The only way pizza can get in is through special slots and these are just the right shape for the pizza box.
The blood brain barrier is set up so there are specialised transporters (like pizza box slots) for all the required nutrients. So mostly, the only things that can get in are things that there are transporters for or things that look very similar (on a molecular scale).
The analogy does fall down a little bit because the pizza box slot applies to nutrients that dissolve in water. Things that are highly soluble in fat can often bypass the slots in the wall.
Why do we have a blood-brain barrier?
The blood brain barrier is thought to exist for a few reasons.
First, it protects the brain from toxins you might eat (think chemicals that plants make) and viruses that often can infect the rest of your body but usually don’t make it to your brain.
It also provides protection by tightly regulating the movement of nutrients and waste in and out, providing a more stable environment than in the rest of the body.
Lastly, it serves to regulate passage of immune cells, preventing unnecessary inflammation which could damage cells in the brain.
What it means for medicines
One consequence of this tight regulation across the blood brain barrier is that if you want a medicine that gets to the brain, you need to consider how it will get in.
There are a few approaches. Highly fat-soluble molecules can often pass into the brain, so you might design your drug so it is a bit greasy.
The blood-brain barrier stops many medicines getting into the brain. Ron Lach/Pexels Another option is to link your medicine to another molecule that is normally taken up into the brain so it can hitch a ride, or a “pro-drug”, which looks like a molecule that is normally transported.
Using it to our advantage
You can also take advantage of the blood brain barrier.
Opioids used for pain relief often cause constipation. They do this because their target (opioid receptors) are also present in the nervous system of the intestines, where they act to slow movement of the intestinal contents.
Imodium (Loperamide), which is used to treat diarrhoea, is actually an opioid, but it has been specifically designed so it can’t cross the blood brain barrier.
This design means it can act on opioid receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, slowing down the movement of contents, but does not act on brain opioid receptors.
In contrast to Imodium, Ozempic and Victoza (originally designed for type 2 diabetes, but now popular for weight-loss) both have a long fat attached, to improve the length of time they stay in the body.
A consequence of having this long fat attached is that they can cross the blood-brain barrier, where they act to suppress appetite. This is part of the reason they are so effective as weight-loss drugs.
So while the blood brain barrier is important for protecting the brain it presents both a challenge and an opportunity for development of new medicines.
Sebastian Furness, ARC Future Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Purpose – by Gina Bianchini
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To address the elephant in the room, this is not a rehash of Rick Warren’s best-selling “The Purpose-Driven Life”. Instead, this book is (in this reviewer’s opinion) a lot better. It’s a lot more comprehensive, and it doesn’t assume that what’s most important to the author will be what’s most important to you.
What’s it about, then? It’s about giving your passion (whatever it may be) the tools to have an enduring impact on the world. It recommends doing this by leveraging a technology that would once have been considered magic: social media.
Far from “grow your brand” business books, this one looks at what really matters the most to you. Nobody will look back on your life and say “what a profitable second quarter that was in such-a-year”. But if you do your thing well, people will look back and say:
- “he was a pillar of the community”
- “she raised that community around her”
- “they did so much for us”
- “finding my place in that community changed my life”
- …and so forth. Isn’t that something worth doing?
Bianchini takes the position of both “idealistic dreamer” and “realistic worker”.
Further, she blends the two beautifully, to give practical step-by-step instructions on how to give life to the community that you build.
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Undo The Sun’s Damage To Your Skin
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It’s often said that our skin is our largest organ. Our brain or liver are the largest solid organs by mass (which one comes out on top will vary from person to person), our gut is the longest, and our lungs are the largest by surface area. But our skin is large, noticeable, and has a big impact on the rest of our health.
The sun is one of the main damaging factors for our skin; assorted toxins are also a major threat for many people, and once the skin barrier gets broken, it’s a field-day for bacteria.
So, what can we do about it?
Tretinoin: the skin’s rejuvenator
Tretinoin is also called retinoic acid, not to be mistaken for retinol, although they are both retinoids. Tretinoin is much stronger.
As for what it’s stronger at:
It’s usually prescribed for the treatment of sun-damage, acne, and wrinkles. Paradoxically, it works by inflaming the skin (and then making it better, and having done so, keeping it better).
In few words: it encourages your skin to speed up its life cycle, which means that cells die and are replaced sooner, which means the average age of skin cells will be considerably younger at any given time.
This is the same principle as we see at work when it comes to cellular apoptosis and autophagy in general, and specifically the same idea as we discussed when talking about senolytics, compounds that kill aging cells:
Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin
About that paradoxical inflammation…
❝The topical use of tretinoin as an antiacne agent began almost a half century ago. Since that time it has been successfully used to treat comedonal and inflammatory acne.
Over the intervening years, the beneficial effects of tretinoin have grown from an understanding of its potent cornedolytie-related properties to an evolving appreciation of its antiinflammatory actions.
…
The topical use of clindamycin and tretinoin as a combination treatment modality that includes antibacterial, comedolytic, and antiinflammatoiy properties has proven to be a very effective therapy for treating the various stages of acne
…
It is now becoming increasingly clear that there may be good reasons for these observations.❞
~ Drs. Schmidt & Gans, lightly edited here for brevity
Read in full: Tretinoin: A Review of Its Anti-inflammatory Properties in the Treatment of Acne
Against damage by the sun
The older we get, the more likely sun damage is a problem than acne. And in the case of tretinoin,
❝In several well-controlled clinical trials, the proportion of patients showing improvement was significantly higher with 0.01 or 0.05% tretinoin cream than with placebo for criteria such as global assessment, fine and coarse wrinkling, pigmentation and roughness.
Improvements in the overall severity of photodamage were also significantly greater with tretinoin than with placebo.
…
Several placebo-controlled clinical studies have demonstrated that topical tretinoin has significant efficacy in the treatment of photodamaged skin. Improvements in subjective global assessment scores were recorded in:
49–100% of patients using once-daily 0.01% tretinoin,
68–100% of patients using 0.05% tretinoin, and
0–44% of patients using placebo.❞
~ Drs. Wagstaff & Noble
…which is quite compelling.
Read in full: Tretinoin: A Review of its Pharmacological Properties and Clinical Efficacy in the Topical Treatment of Photodamaged Skin
This is very well-established by now; here’s an old paper from when the mechanism of action was unknown (here in the current day, 17 mechanisms of action have been identified; beyond the scope of this article as we only have so much room, but it’s nice to see science building on science):
❝Tretinoin cream has been used extensively to reverse the changes of photoaging. It is the first topical therapy to undergo controlled clinical testing and proved to be efficacious. These results have been substantiated with photography, histopathologie examination, and skin surface replicas.
…
Tretinoin cream has an excellent safety record; a local cutaneous hypervitaminosis A reaction is the only common problem.❞
~ Dr. Goldfarb et al.
Read in full: Topical tretinoin therapy: Its use in photoaged skin
Is it safe?
For most people, when used as directed*, yes. However, it’s likely to irritate your skin at first, and that’s normal. If this persists more than a few weeks, or seems unduly severe, then you might want to stop and talk to your doctor again.
*See also: Scarring following inappropriate use of 0.05% tretinoin gel
(in the case of a young woman who used it 4x daily instead of 1x daily)
Want to try some?
Tretinoin is prescription-only, so speak with your doctor/pharmacist about that. Alternatively, retinol is the strongest natural alternative that works on the same principles; here’s an example product on Amazon 😎
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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What I Wish People Knew About Dementia – by Dr. Wendy Mitchell
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We hear a lot from doctors who work with dementia patients; sometimes we hear from carers too. In this case, the author spent 20 years working for the NHS, before being diagnosed with young-onset dementia, at the age of 58. Like many health industry workers who got a life-changing diagnosis, she quickly found it wasn’t fun being on the other side of things, and vowed to spend her time researching, and raising awareness about, dementia.
Many people assume that once a person has dementia, they’re basically “gone before they’re gone”, which can rapidly become a self-fulfilling prophecy as that person finds themself isolated and—though this word isn’t usually used—objectified. Talked over, viewed (and treated) more as a problem than a person. Cared for hopefully, but again, often more as a patient than a person. If doctors struggle to find the time for the human side of things with most patients most of the time, this is only accentuated when someone needs more time and patience than average.
Instead, Dr. Mitchell—an honorary doctorate, by the way, awarded for her research—writes about what it’s actually like to be a human with dementia. Everything from her senses, how she eats, the experience of eating in care homes, the process of boiling an egg… To relationships, how care changes them, to the challenges of living alone. And communication, confusion, criticism, the language used by professionals, or how things are misrepresented in popular media. She also talks about the shifting sense of self, and brings it all together with gritty optimism.
The style is deeply personal, yet lucid and clear. While dementia is most strongly associated with memory loss and communication problems, this hasn’t affected her ability to write well (7 years into her diagnosis, in case you were wondering).
Bottom line: if you’d like to read a first-person view of dementia, then this is an excellent opportunity to understand it from the view of, as the subtitle goes, someone who knows.
Click here to check out What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, and then know those things!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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Pine Nuts vs Peanuts – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing pine nuts to peanuts, we picked the pine nuts.
Why?
An argument could be made for either, honestly, as it depends on what we prioritize the most. These are both very high-calorie foods, and/but are far from empty calories, as they both contain main nutrients. Obviously, if you are allergic to nuts, this one is just not a comparison for you, sorry.
Looking at the macros first, peanuts are higher in protein, carbs, and fiber, while pine nuts are higher in fats—though the fats are healthy, being mostly polyunsaturated, with about a third of the total fats monounsaturated, and a low amount of saturated fat (peanuts have nearly 2x the saturated fat). On balance, we’ll call the macros category a moderate win for peanuts, though.
In terms of vitamins, peanuts have more of vitamins B1, B3, B5, B6, and B9, while pine nuts have more of vitamins A, B2, C, E, K, and choline. All in all, a marginal win for pine nuts.
In the category of minerals, peanuts have more calcium and selenium, while pine nuts have more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc. An easy win for pine nuts, even before we take into account that peanuts have nearly 10x as much sodium. And yes, we are talking about the raw nuts, not nuts that have been roasted and salted.
Adding up the categories gives a win for pine nuts—but if you have certain particular priorities, you might still prefer peanuts for the areas in which peanuts are stronger.
Of course, the best solution is to enjoy both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
