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Scientists have finally found clear and convincing proof of how the modern world, with its lousy food, sedentary lifestyle, and daily frustrations is affecting us as we age.
And it isn’t great.
The proof? They’ve spent 20 years studying a remote group that lives preindustrial lives deep in the Amazon rainforest.
Meet the Tsimane.
They live in an area of Bolivia so remote it takes days to get there by boat, road and foot. And they live the way humans did for millennia.
They don’t spend all day on their butts. They don’t drive everywhere. They don’t work in offices.
They don’t have “coffee” with 500 calories or eat breakfast cereals with 20 grams of refined sugar. They don’t eat cheeseburgers or pizzas with extra, processed cheese in the crust. They don’t eat at drive-through facilities so they can consume these things without even having to get out and walk to the counter.
They don’t even get to spend all day staring at “social media” on hand-held devices or watching TV.
In other words, they still live the way our bodies were designed to.
The result? They have much, much healthier brains and hearts as they age than the rest of us.
“They have the lowest incidence of heart disease of all the people’s known to science, and they seem to have much slower rates of brain atrophy with age,” says Andrei Irimia, professor of gerontology, biomedical engineering and neuroscience of the University of Southern California,
“If you plot brain volume as people age you see a much slower rate of decline among the Tsimane people,” he tells MarketWatch. “We see a much slower rate of decline of brain volume with age than we see in North America and Europe,” says Irimia.
Brain shrinkage between middle age and old age is about 70% less among the Tsimane than among Westerners. This has implications for the likelihood of brain atrophy, cognitive decline, dementia and other diseases such as Parkinson’s, the researchers note.
The findings on brain volume are new, and have just been published in the Journal of Gerontology. They were based on CT scans of nearly 750 Tsimane aged 40 to 94. The findings on heart disease came out in 2017.
Hillard Kaplan, a professor at Chapman University who has studied the Tsimane for nearly 20 years, tells USC: “Our sedentary lifestyle and diet rich in sugars and fats may be accelerating the loss of brain tissue with age and making us more vulnerable to diseases such as Alzheimer’s. the Tsimane can serve as a baseline for healthy brain aging.”
To be sure, there are doubtless multiple factors at play in the case of the Tsimane: Genetics could play a role as well as everything else. And it’s not a one-way street. The Tsimane still die younger than the rest of us: The average life expectancy is in their 50s (although some live into their 90s). But of course they have no doctors and no healthcare. And scientists found that their bodies are constantly suffering from the inflammations associated with fighting diseases — because, after all, they are living in a rainforest. So it’s not a case of them being better off than we are.
But for all that, they show terrific results on two things that are devastating us Westerners as we age: Heart and brain health.
The Tsimane may hold terrific insights for the rest of us as we try to avoid heart disease, cognitive decline and dementia.
“They have a much healthier diet than the average person in the U.S. or European countries,” says Irimia. (Note: It could hardly be less healthy, as we are poisoning ourselves — which is why obesity is a far bigger and deadlier pandemic than Covid-19.) “Their diet includes a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, fish and lean meat. They have essentially no processed foods in their diet, no refined sugar, no preservatives in any of the foods that they eat,” Irimia says. Their foods contain almost no trans fats, he says.
Meanwhile, scientists find the Tsimane lead a much healthier lifestyle. “Whereas, in the U.S., the average American takes about 5,000 to 6,000 steps per day, the average Tsimane takes about 15,000 to 18,000 steps per day,” Irimia tells MarketWatch. Tsimane, in other words, do “over three times the amount of walking that the average person does in the U.S.…it’s a lot more physical exercise.” And, he adds, among the Tsimane this continues throughout their lives.
The good news? In the West we have the choice—to embrace the things about modern life that can help us live longer and healthier lives, and avoid all the things that are making us sicker.
