Ancient Wisdom / Wise Advice

For almost all of history, human beings did not know cancer, diabetes or heart attacks the way we know them today. Our grandparents, and our grandparents' grandparents, ate differently, moved differently and lived differently. They did not have a doctor on every corner or pharmacies full of pills, and even so many of them reached old age strong, with almost all their teeth and a clear head. They knew something we forgot.

This chapter is not about new technology, but the opposite: about recovering what worked for thousands of years. The good news is that this wisdom is not lost. There are still places in the world where people live this way, and there are still people who took the trouble to study in depth how healthy peoples ate before modern food arrived. Here I tell you the most important of it.

The blue zones: where people reach a hundred in good health

There are five places in the world where people live much longer and, above all, much better: they reach ninety and a hundred still walking, lucid, and without the illnesses that knock the rest of us down at sixty. They are called the blue zones. They are the island of Okinawa in Japan, the region of Sardinia in Italy, the island of Ikaria in Greece, the Nicoya peninsula in Costa Rica, and the community of Loma Linda in California. A Netflix series showed them to the world recently. And Vilcabamba, Ecuador, where I lived for two decades; where my neighbor reached 106 years of age.

What is interesting is that they are very far from one another, they eat different things and they speak different languages, but they share the same customs. They eat real food, almost all of it from the land: vegetables, beans and little else, but nothing from a factory. They move all day long in a natural way: they walk, they work the land, they climb hills; they do not go to a gym, they live moving. They do not eat until they burst: in Okinawa they say "hara hachi bu," which is to eat until you are about eight parts full out of ten, and there they stop. They have a clear reason to get up every morning: the Okinawans call it "ikigai" and the people of Nicoya call it their "plan de vida," their life plan. And they live surrounded by others, with family and friends close by, taking life calmly, without the stress that eats the rest of us up inside.

The dentist who documented the healthiest peoples in the world

In the nineteen-thirties, a dentist from the United States named Weston Price asked himself a simple question: why did his patients have so many cavities and such crooked teeth, when wild animals did not? To answer it he left his practice and traveled the world looking for the peoples who still ate as their ancestors had, without having touched modern food.

He found them in the high valleys of Switzerland, in the islands of Scotland, among the Eskimos of Alaska, in tribes of Africa, among the Aborigines of Australia, in the islands of the Pacific and among peoples of South America. And in all of them he saw the same thing: teeth with almost not a single cavity, wide faces with room for all the teeth, strong bodies and healthy people, without tuberculosis or the diseases that were already beginning to fill the cities. All of that without a single dentist and without a single doctor.

The most revealing part came afterward. When those same peoples began to eat the "foods of modern commerce" — white flour, sugar, cans and factory products — in a single generation the cavities appeared, the faces narrowed, the teeth came in crooked and the diseases arrived. The food changed, and with it the body.

What did the healthy peoples eat? Each one its own thing, but with something in common: real animal food, rich in fat — butter, organ meats, eggs, fish and shellfish — fermented foods, and nothing refined; no sugar and no white flour. Price measured that those diets had far more of the vitamins that come in fat (A, D and K2), exactly the ones almost everyone is short of today. He wrote it down in his book "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration," which can still be read.

Eating the way our grandparents ate

Out of all this comes a very practical piece of advice: if your great-grandmother would not recognize it as food, it probably is not food. Go back to what was eaten before food factories existed.

Specifically: eat fermented foods, which were always the way to preserve food and to look after the gut — sauerkraut, kimchi, real pickles, plain yogurt, kefir. Make use of bone broth, which our grandmothers made with what was left over and which feeds the joints and the skin. Do not be afraid of organ meats, especially liver, which is the most nutritious food there is. Use real fats for cooking — butter, lard, tallow, olive oil or coconut oil — and not factory seed oils like soy, corn and the rest. And if you eat grains, let them be whole and well prepared, the way it was always done: nixtamalized corn, sourdough bread, soaked grains. None of that is a new fad; it is what was eaten for centuries. And let them be organic, none of that genetically modified.

Fasting: a rest as old as humankind

For almost all of history there was no food at all hours. People ate when there was food, and sometimes it fell to them to go hours or days without eating. That is why the body is made for it, and even welcomes it. All the ancient traditions knew this: almost every religion has its fasts — Lent, Ramadan, the fasts of the Eastern churches — and that was no coincidence.

When you stop eating for a while, the digestive system rests and the body takes the chance to clean itself inside and repair what is damaged. What we do today is the opposite: eat from the moment we open our eyes until we close them, and even in the small hours. That is new, and it makes people sick. Nothing extreme is needed: it is enough to stop eating early in the evening and not eat again until well into the morning, so the body has several hours of rest. The more hours without eating, the better. Every now and then, a longer fast of several days does almost everyone good.

Moving, sleeping with the sun, and not being alone

Ancient wisdom was not only about food. Our grandparents moved without setting out to, because life itself made them move: walking, carrying, planting, going up and down. They did not need a gym. Neither do you: move throughout the day, walk, use the car and the elevator less.

They slept with the sun. Before electric light, people went to bed when it got dark and got up at dawn, and that is why they really slept. As we saw in the previous chapter, artificial light at night throws the body out of order; return to the rhythm of the sun as much as you can.

And they were not alone. They lived surrounded by family and neighbors, with a place in their community and a faith that held them up. Today we know that loneliness makes people as sick as smoking does. Looking after your own, having someone to talk to, giving thanks and taking life calmly are not decorations: they are medicine, and of the most powerful kind.

In short

The health of our ancestors was not a mystery or a matter of luck: it was the natural consequence of how they lived. Eat real food, like that of the blue zones and like the food Price documented: animal food with real fat, fermented, with nothing refined and nothing from a factory. Do not eat until you burst, and let the body rest with some fasting. Move all day, sleep with the sun, and look after your ties with people and with God. None of this is sold in a pharmacy, which is why almost nobody reminds you of it; but it is what kept human beings healthy for thousands of years, and it is still within your reach today.

To learn more (sources in English)

Dan Buettner, his books on the blue zones ("The Blue Zones") and the Netflix series "Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones."

Weston A. Price, "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" (1939). The foundation that bears his name gathers a great deal of material on traditional diets: https://www.westonaprice.org.