NATURAL LONGEVITY

By Ryhaan Shah

As Guyana grows more affluent, are we reaching for prettily packaged foods and forgoing the fresh produce available easily and daily to us, thinking that this makes us more a part of the modern world? But could what we are putting into our food baskets shorten our life expectancy?
There is good evidence of this from studies done in places like Okinawa, Japan, and Sardinia, Italy, where no one is following any anti-ageing regimen, yet boasts the highest global concentration of centenarians – centenarians who are well and active.
For these small communities, there is no secret to their longevity. Their long life seems to grow out of dozens of small, unremarkable things: traditional food, constant low-level movement, tight family bonds, real roles for older people, and daily contact with the land.
The people who live the longest are not more disciplined than the rest of us. They do not have more willpower, a stronger sense of personal responsibility, or some private talent for saying no. They are not waking up each morning and deciding to eat well, take a walk, and call their friends. They live longer because they happen to live somewhere that makes the healthy choice the easy choice and often the only one available. Their natural environment does the work that we expect discipline to do.
For them, real, unprocessed food is what fills the kitchen, what the market sells, and what the holidays are built around, so eating well takes no decision at all. Nearly every errand comes with a walk because the house, the shop, the friend, and the church are all close enough that you go on foot. Most of them grow a good part of what they eat, which puts fresh vegetables on the table, and without anyone thinking of it as exercise, keep them bending, hauling, and moving for hours.
They know why they get up in the morning, and they keep a role worth having well into old age. Their entertainment, most nights, is with other people. Friends and family are the social bond that comes naturally.
So, longevity in such places is not a prize for effort. It comes from a place where the good choice is the cheap one, the easy one, and the one all your neighbours are making too. The elderly people of Sardinia and Okinawa are not showing heroic restraint but are being nudged gently and constantly by the shape of the world around them.
This is the ground natural longevity stands on. The phrase is not another name for anti-ageing medicine, and it is not a swipe at medical progress. It describes something slower: the benefits that pile up when your surroundings are working for you – movement you never have to plan; food that comes with the culture rather than a label; company, security, rest, and the steady feeling of being useful.
As life expectancy worldwide grows, more of us worry about holding on to our physical and mental sharpness, and time itself has quietly become the scarcest luxury of all. Adding years to life is one thing. Adding good, useful life to those years is now the goal.
Our genetic makeup accounts for only a modest share of how long we live; the rest is lifestyle and the environment we move through every day. The twin studies people cite most often in this field put the genetic contribution to longevity at roughly a fifth, which leaves a great deal to circumstance and habit.
That is not a formula. Living in the right place will not carry everyone to a hundred, but it tells you plainly that where you live, and the habits that place quietly permits, do a lot to shape how you age.
More than where we live, it is how we live in our environment that could give us a longer and healthier life. Life in Guyana has changed significantly with what is called “progress and development”. Few people bother to keep any kind of garden – flower garden or kitchen garden – as yards are concreted over, and there are fewer green spaces around us.
Just about everyone is hooked to a screen-a TV or cell phone-and spends hours being entertained as they snack on processed food and drink. Restaurants and fast-food joints flourish as we become more affluent.
We will not want to put away all the ease and conveniences that the world today offers, but perhaps we could become more aware of the choices we make and try to regain some of the good that comes with living simply.