BLUE ZONE - SARDINIA

Sardinia, Barbagia region, Italy

Area: 24,090 km2 Population: 1.65 million

Number of centenarians in Sardinia: 534, number of supercentenarians: 12

Life expectancy: men 76 years, women 82 years

Gianni Pes, in October 1999, at a conference on longevity research held at the University of Montpellier, reported on a small Sardinian village in the mountains of the Barbagia region, where people live to an exceptionally old age, and in shockingly high numbers.

Gianni Pes, a clinical biostatistician and physician, after examining the medical histories of thousands of Sardinians, discovered a small Italian village named Arzana, where seven, that is, seven people over 100 years old lived among 2,500 inhabitants. 

This figure was so extreme that all the demographers present at the conference were skeptical of the research results and recalled data from the Hunza Valley in Pakistan and the Vilcabamba Valley in Ecuador, where similar reports of very high life expectancies had emerged years earlier, but these results were later found to be incorrect. Just for comparison, if the ratio of seven centenarians to 2,500 inhabitants is true, it would mean 5 times!!! more centenarians than the Okinawan average, and even the Okinawan number, being a Blue Zone, is exceptionally high. Impossible, they said, but among the audience of the presentation was a Belgian demographer named Michel Poulain, who later confirmed Pes's findings.

Years earlier, Poulain had participated in the development of a method to accurately determine people's true age. Thus, Poulin was asked to travel to the Barbagia region and verify Pes's claims. On site, Poulin collected and examined mortality data from the municipal governments of 40 settlements in the region, and based on these, he established the so-called Extreme Longevity Index (ELI). After hearing Gianni Pes's presentation and now seeing his own results, Poulin was astonished. An incredible number of people in the area lived to be 100 years old, and the number of supercentenarians far exceeded all previous expectations.

Five years after Pes's presentation and the confirmation of Poulin's results, in 2004, National Geographic sent a research team to the Barbagia region and to other parts of the world where the number of centenarians far exceeded the average. This date marks the beginning of the research and discovery of the Blue Zones. Nicoya, Okinawa, Loma Linda, and the island of Ikaria were only discovered afterwards, regarding their high life expectancy. The story of the Blue Zones therefore started on the island of Sardinia, and we too will start from the villages of the Barbagia region to find out what makes people here live the longest in the world. 

As I delve deeper into understanding the secrets of the Blue Zones, it becomes increasingly clear what a crucial role family plays in communities where people live 25-30 years longer than anywhere else in the world. Not that family isn't important elsewhere, but the concept of family, or more precisely the family model, is quite different in Berlin, Madrid, or San Francisco than in the Blue Zone villages of Sardinia. I'm talking about cohesive, strong families where everyone knows their role and, by fulfilling it, contributes the most to the greater whole, resulting in a well-functioning, mutually supportive, and caring kinship community. A place to return home to rest, which provides protection, or where one simply recharges and knows that no matter what happens, there are people they can rely on unconditionally. The constant and reliable love, and the sense of belonging. This is family, not merely a collection of physically present people who are only connected by knowing each other's phone numbers for years. 

Just like in Okinawa, the role of family is extremely important in Sardinia; they couldn't imagine their lives without it. There is no lonely life in Sardinia, and the best example of this is Maria Angelica Sale, who, after her husband's early death at 54, moved in with her four daughters and from then on helped raise her grandchildren and their children. Maria died at 109; at 107, she was still knitting clothes for the children. Dr. Luca Deiana studied the life stories of residents over 90 in the Barbagia region for more than a decade, and concluded that although it cannot be scientifically proven that someone lives longer because their family takes care of them, something similar emerges from the statistics and family tree research he analyzed. 

Anyone who has been to Italy knows how integral community and the experience of belonging to a community are to the Italian national identity. It is no different on the island of Sardinia, only here, social interaction is a little more challenging, as all the Blue Zone villages are built into steep hillsides, making a visit to the local market or a simple friendly visit a significant physical exertion. Every day. This means doing it multiple times a day, which is further proof of how important daily physical activity integrated into one's rhythm of life is for long-term health. And I haven't even mentioned the 15 kilometers of daily walking involved in herding, because one can certainly wander for thousands of kilometers in the Sardinian pastures, but if this isn't consistently coupled with proper nutrition, then the Blue Zone men wouldn't even live to see 70. Here in Hungary, the public parking lot attendants walk easily 10 kilometers a day, yet I don't think that either they, or road construction workers, or other manual laborers, would live longer just because they do physically demanding work. In fact, quite the opposite, because not only here but everywhere in the world, those who perform physically demanding but socially low-prestige jobs are the least attentive to their nutrition. 

This also shows that there is no such thing as someone deciding to adopt the Blue Zone lifestyle but only focusing on nutrition, or only on an active life, or perhaps being content with "okay, my family works well," or "I have my social connections," and then sending out invitations for their hundredth birthday at the age of 32.

A well-functioning family (parents, grandparents, siblings) is a great advantage, but if it's not, you can't change that. You can change your social life, the supportive community around you, your physical activity, your ever-so-important mindset, and clearly, your nutrition. The Blue Zone lifestyle is a great system, not because some idiot invented it somewhere and spread it with good marketing, but because this lifestyle was shaped by life itself and proved that human life does not end at 75, but there are another 30 years in it, if only one would live that way. 

But how should one live? More precisely, how should one eat, if we want to do all this as they do in Sardinia?

The monotony of the diet is one of the most important factors for longevity, because too many ingredients cause molecular stress in the body, according to Gianni Pes, who on the one hand studied the Sardinian way of life for 30 years, and on the other hand is a professor at the University of Sassari, who examined the human body's immune response to different foods during the same period. 

Zucchini, onion, bell pepper, eggplant, parsley, basil, thyme, oregano, spinach, kidney beans, chickpeas, lentils, potato, beetroot, tomato, celery, garlic, pumpkin, carrot, Swiss chard, porcini mushrooms, Arborio rice, pecorino cheese, olive oil, oat flour, almonds, pecans, apple, lemon.

Sardinian cuisine includes local bread and, typically for Italians, pasta dishes. Recipes for these, and many other recipes in general, will be included in the downloadable version.

Wine consumption is a daily occurrence in Sardinia, not in the sense of a Hungarian standing bar, but one or two glasses with lunch and dinner. Specifically, Cannonau wine is consumed due to its extremely high antioxidant and flavonoid content. Those who can should get it, and those who can't or don't want to should feel free to drink quality red wine, but truly quality, so not those horrors from the bottom shelves of Auchan. 

Daily consumption of goat's milk. In Sardinia, goat's milk is attributed to maintaining mental freshness, primarily due to its preventative effect against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. 

It's not overcomplicated. Life in Sardinia is simple and unadorned. The food, like daily life, is simple. It's worth observing how, where life is meaningful, eating often takes a backseat and loses its significance. In Sardinia, although life might seem boring and indeed lacking in content, if we look at what truly matters in the villages of a few thousand people in Sardinia, we find things like family, community, traditions, and a meaningful life purpose.

One probably needs to be born into this, because for me, for example, it would be unimaginable to live in a village of 700 people on the side of a mountain. However, the goal of presenting Blue Zone lives is not for us to become shepherds like in Sardinia, or to adopt the Adventist religion like in Loma Linda, California, but to embrace these life values and integrate them into our daily lives. 

I don't believe that the average Hungarian life expectancy will ever even approach the average life expectancy of any Blue Zone, but those who start to follow what is written here will certainly come close. And I'm not just talking about years lived, but about mindset, about establishing well-functioning families you create, and about healthy, connected communities.

These are pretty cool things, after all.