➡ The article discusses the lifestyle of people in certain communities who live significantly longer than average, often past 100 years. These individuals maintain a healthy diet of locally sourced, unprocessed foods, stay physically active, and have strong community ties. They also consume homemade alcoholic beverages and continue to work and contribute to their communities well into old age. The article suggests that these factors, along with avoiding processed foods and maintaining regular physical activity, could be key to a longer, healthier life.

➡ It’s crucial to spend time outdoors in nature for our overall well-being. This can help us stay healthy, both physically and mentally, and potentially live longer. Adopting a healthier lifestyle, which includes enjoying the outdoors, can be more enjoyable than the typical 40-hour workweek. More discussions on this topic will follow in the next True Health Report.

Maybe we’re all supposed to live to 120, but something in the way that we are living our life is interfering with this. Welcome to The True Health Report. I’m Dr. Andy Kaufman, recovering physician, pandemic whistleblower, natural healing pedagogue, and legal code talker. You can call me The Truth Doctor. My mission is to shift your paradigm as we dive into radical forensic dissections, discerning fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, medicine from poison, law from legal fiction, and individualism from collectivism. This podcast is your channel for unraveling the truth about health and science.

Together, we’ll challenge the narratives, expose the fallacies, and empower you to become your own health authority. This is The True Health Report, where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Hello and welcome to The True Health Report. I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufman. Today, I’m going to talk about a subject that I think will be quite important to many, if not all of you, and that is longevity and aging. Now, this is a subject that I feel contains a lot of subterfuge and misinformation because we have come to, one, believe that we have a certain life expectancy.

I think many of us associate that with the human life expectancy. In addition to that, we have certain beliefs about aging that we are going to essentially deteriorate, we’re going to develop problems, loss of function, et cetera. This, of course, is a concern for many because we always want the fountain of youth. We want to live as long as possible, stay as young as possible. Of course, this leads to the consumption of pharmaceuticals, for one, and also to a new process and materials that have some kind of research that suggests they may increase your lifespan.

But most of that is not very conclusive and probably mostly driven by profit and not really looking at, well, what are the factors and how long are we really supposed to live and what’s our quality of life supposed to be like? Are we supposed to become debilitated with arthritis and walk with canes? Are we supposed to lose our mental sharpness and stop being able to remember things or drive? Many of the circumstances that we’ve come to accept and regard as normal aging. But what if we could look at other cultures, perhaps even ones before the influence of modern agriculture, modern medicine, technology, the chemical industry, et cetera, and see what kind of experiences they had.

Did they live as long or longer than we did? What was their quality of life like throughout the lifespan? Well, it turns out that I had been reading an author who wrote a book called Dead Doctors Don’t Lie and his name is Dr. Wallach. And in one of his lectures that I was looking at while I was reading the book or maybe when I was waiting for the book to arrive, he mentioned an article in National Geographic magazine from the 1970s that was about this topic. Now, I, of course, was one that’s always skeptical and I wanted to check the sources.

So as soon as I heard that, I paused the lecture and then I went to see if I could find that particular article. Maybe it was published online somewhere. I thought of looking at archive.org and other places. And it turns out that National Geographic itself actually has a website where you can order past issues. So I found the issue on there and it does exist, but however, it was out of stock. And I kind of felt like I wonder if this is permanently out of stock because I could not find the article anywhere else.

In fact, many of the searches I look for didn’t even have that article. They just had something related to National Geographic. So I talked about this before. I can’t remember exactly where I mentioned it, but very fortunate for me that one of the listeners went into some old boxes somewhere in her house where the old National Geographic magazines were and found this particular issue from January, 1973. And you can see that it’s actually the cover story or at least the photograph on the cover is from the article that we’re going to look at.

And it’s called Every Day is a Gift When You’re Over 100 by Alexander Leif, M.D. and photographs by John Lanoir. And we’re going to look at some of those photographs. And like I said, this is January, 1973, and it’s volume 143, number one. Now, I was very tickled pink to receive this issue. And of course, I sat down to read it, but first I decided I was going to scan the article in before I might have a chance to wrinkle the pages or perhaps tear something by accident. And so I scanned it and archived it, and I’ll bring it up on the screen in a moment.

But what happened in this article is that a journalist from National Geographic went on a long journey to three different places, which are said to have people living a long time, specifically over 100 years. And that’s what he focused on, meeting and interviewing a variety of people who are more than 100 years old. And it turns out that many of them were considerably more than 100 years old, and they were from three particular places. So a place in Ecuador where the village is called Vilcabamba, and a place in Pakistan formerly of Kashmir in the mountains called the Hunza, H-U-N-Z-A people, and then also the Abkhazia people in Georgia, in Southern Russia.

And these three areas have similar geographic characteristics. They’re all in mountainous areas. They’re all very difficult to get to, and they’re isolated. And this is probably why they were able to exist without much influence of the modern world until at least in the 1970s when this article came out. So this is quite interesting, and actually some of the information about these cultures has been slightly misreported because of the obstacle to getting to these remote areas to study. For example, the researchers from the west, like anthropologists and archaeologists and such, as well as physicians who came to study these people, always come in the summer months or the warm months because it’s much easier to get there even though it’s challenging enough in those seasons.

And so they see what the people eat there at a certain time of year, and there’s been some misinformation about what the diet consists of throughout the year. And I will get into that a little bit during this discussion, but that’s not where the similarities end. It’s not just that they are all in the mountains in kind of harsh and remote conditions, but I will talk about some of the other similarities after we see a little bit of what these folks look like. National Geographic is definitely known for its photography, and they really capture the human existence.

And so here we see a woman who is at least 130 years of age or older. She only had retired from picking tea leaves three years before this photograph was taken, and she actually had been given the title of the fastest tea leaf picker in her community. And even though she retired, she still remains active in community activities and her social life, and she has a daily routine and ritual which involves smoking a pack of cigarettes, and they estimated that she had smoked for over 60 years. And also the reporter noted that when he met her, she poured him a shot of vodka, and they had a toast.

And she said that she drinks vodka every morning as well as a glass of wine before lunch. So not exactly the kind of lifestyle you might expect for someone of that age or someone who lived that long. Now, you’ll also notice from the photograph that she is overweight. Now, she is from the Abkhazian community in Russia and Georgia, and that location, interestingly, the people there, there is some obesity. Whereas in the other two areas in Vilcabamba and Ecuador and the Hunza people in Pakistan, there generally is no obesity among those peoples.

But they all have very long lifespans. So we’re kind of going against convention here. Now, another interesting finding because there have been some doctors, including a cardiologist, who has gone and studied these people. And when they do some of the tests like EKGs, for example, they find evidence often that the people had heart attacks, but when they interviewed them, they never had any symptoms of a heart attack. So I wonder, are we, one, diagnosing heart attacks correctly, but two, if they never experienced any symptoms, then was it really a condition? But nevertheless, we see smoking, drinking, obesity, perhaps some kind of heart disease, yet living very, very long lifespans.

And let’s look at some other pictures. This gentleman is 104 years old on horseback, and they’re going to also show him bathing in the river. And if you look at his body, you can tell that he does not look like someone who is 104 years old. His skin is not completely atrophied and wrinkled and hanging down. He looks quite vibrant, more like a man in his 60s. And you’ll see that there is a theme of a very active lifestyle among these people. That’s the same gentleman who is 104. This gentleman, I believe, is 125 years old.

No, I’m sorry. His father lived to be 125. He is 98 years old. But as you can see, he’s still out in the fields and gathering tea leaves. And he has a fondness for wine as well. And there seem to be a theme of that the folks living in these communities have celebration and community. And generally, I think that’s when they drink wine and vodka or brandy or some other liquor. But the thing about these alcoholic beverages is that they make them themselves from local products. So it’s not something made in a factory.

It’s not made with crops sprayed with herbicides and pesticides. But nevertheless, it still is alcohol. And if we go on the next page, I think we’re going to see one of the feasts that was attended by this journalist. And you can see it’s quite a nice spread. And notice that there is no processed foods on the table. There are no condiment jars. There’s no sodas or anything like that. I think everyone is drinking wine and there’s a pitcher of water. And then you can see that there’s actual just real food ingredients. And this is still in Georgia.

This gentleman is 117 years old and he’s carrying potatoes home for lunch. And he still works a half a day and he still maintains interest in romantic life. Another theme that we’ll talk about. So I just want to show a few more pictures of these folks because you could see while some of them look older and some of them look younger, they’re all with people and they don’t have any nursing homes or care homes in these communities. She’s only 95 but works at a bakery. So they did eat some bread in these communities. All right.

So I think we’ve seen some good imagery to have a little further discussion here. And my reason for bringing up this topic is really because I want to point out where I think we should be looking to find the answers about what our lives should be like throughout our lifespan and what is an appropriate human age to live to. And I think we would learn this information by looking at actual people who have lived to that age. And in, for example, the southern area of Russia where Georgia is, it’s not just those Abkhazian people featured in the article, but there are other people that were in the Soviet Union at the time that were not allowed to be interviewed or studied by Westerners who had very high rates of living to be over 100.

In fact, they had someone who had lived to be 154 years who was well known to the research community in this area at the time. So since we have so many of these examples of living that long, it’s far different. We think in the West that if you get to 100, that you’re one in a million and you’re going to be dead pretty soon after that. But seeing people into their 120s, 130s, 140s, and 150s, well, that’s a really a different ballgame. I mean, that’s living almost 50% longer potentially than we previously thought.

So what if we all really are supposed to live to about 100 and maybe some of us to 150? Maybe we’re all supposed to live to 120 and some of us a little bit longer. But something in the way that we are living our life is interfering with this. And also, if you look at these folks, even if their body habitus was overweight, they were active and functional. They were not strung up in wheelchairs and using walkers and bedridden. They were maintaining their social interactions. They still had normal cognitive function even at those ages.

And every example really was like that because those cultures didn’t have a way to care for people who were infirm and debilitated like that. So it’s like they wouldn’t have been able to survive there, but also I think they never needed that because that’s simply not what they were experiencing. So let’s look at what are the main common factors that we can learn from these people, which could lead us in further directions to find out what really are the most critical factors to live this type of lifespan. And I think it may not be that hard to adopt many things because we kind of have an idea what they are already.

So obviously, nutrition in the diet has to be important for this purpose. And one thing that is definitely true about all these people is that they did not have any kind of ultra processed or highly processed food other than what they processed themselves. So they did make bread of different times, some from corn in some of the cultures and from wheat, but they harvested and ground it themselves and processed it and baked it. And it was not grown with GMO crops. It didn’t come from the factory. I didn’t get into the process. I don’t know if it was fermented, but I do know that they almost all had a lot of dairy content in their diet.

And for many of them, it was sour dairy or fermented dairy. So that would be similar to like a kefir type drink. And in some of these cultures, they seem to have dairy at just about every meal. Also, all their food was local from the area. They weren’t bringing in fruit from Central America in the middle of the winter, for example. So they had a seasonal diet because of that. They were able to preserve things in various ways, but only really access to a lot of dairy and some meat throughout a lot of the year with very limited other things, and then a more bountiful experience during the harvest season, except for bread, which was, I guess, a staple to some degree, but always with a variety of things at the meal of whole foods.

So this is very different, obviously, from the standard American or Western diet, which has many sugary things and processed foods and such. Another commonality among these cultures is that they did not have any access whatsoever to the Western allopathic healthcare system. So they did have traditional and herbal medicines that were varied between the different cultures. And they actually, all of them, I think, reported eating a lot of different and using a lot of different herbs or leaves from different trees and plants for nutritional purposes, seasoning, and medicinal purposes. They all continued to work and have a role in their community throughout their lifespan.

In fact, the elders in these cultures had a higher social status. So not like in Western culture, where they’re like a burden and kind of left out to dry and the younger generation takes over, but they were actually more like in the Asian cultures, seen as respectful leader, most wise. Also in the Native American cultures, that’s more true as well. So they had to stay active. They had to stay sharp. And physical activity or work was present also throughout their life, even into the old age, they really didn’t slow down very much at all.

They mostly live with extended family. So there was a built-in support systems. And this also was part of what gave them their status as the wise elder of that family, but also of the community. Like I said, all these cultures were somewhat geographically isolated. And I think that kind of protected them against modern civilization and culture. And everyone lived independently. So like I said before, there were no nursing homes or care homes or anything like that, that these folks could depend on. And to the surprise of many, alcohol and tobacco use were more common than one might think, alcohol being more ubiquitous.

Although it did mention in some of the communities that most elder people may have turned down the vodka sometimes, but they drank it previously throughout the first hundred years of their life, not stop drinking it after that, perhaps. So in other words, what I’m saying is that they didn’t adhere to some extremely ascetic type of monks lifestyle. They engaged in the community. Many of them had multiple marriages. In fact, it was very important that they had good marriages. The people themselves expressed that they felt that that helped them live longer, but very different from our cultural experiences.

So I think we can take away some things here that if we want to certainly improve our lifespan, that we do have to address our diet and stay away from processed foods no matter what. So we can certainly get into a lot more detail than that, but that is the most important thing. We can moderately drink some alcohol, but make our own potentially, or get something that is of a good quality, not the cheap stuff. It’s important that we maintain physical activity and it doesn’t have to be sport or it doesn’t have to be going to the gym to work out.

It could be gardening, it could be cleaning, but it’s got to be enough of it and on a regular basis. So it can’t just be once in a while. It needs to be ongoing. We need to nurture our relationships. We need to be part of communities. And I think all these folks spent a great deal of time in nature, something that many of us miss these days because of our circumstances working and perhaps the climates we live and that we don’t have the necessity to go outside all the time. But it’s important to do that and to do it in a natural setting as much as possible.

So this information, I think, should peak your imagination, spark your curiosity and inspire you that you could actually maintain a high level of functioning, a healthy body, a healthy mind, a healthy spirit, and live many more years than you ever believed possible if you’re simply willing to adopt a lifestyle that’s a little bit healthier and also seems more enjoyable than many people’s average 40-hour workweek lifestyle. All right. Well, this has been a very interesting topic and I’m definitely going to be speaking more about this. But until then, I’ll see you on the next True Health Report.

See more of Andrew Kaufman, M.D. on their Public Channel and the MPN Andrew Kaufman, M.D. channel.