And it's interesting to look at these lives
because when you look at the blue zones
and there were several blue zones around the world,
and notice that one of them is in America,
which is the most unhealthy country in the world,
we'll get to that in a second.
But when you look at these places,
they don't have obesity,
they don't have diabetes,
they don't have heart disease,
if they do, it's very, very low.
All of them, there's no me there,
there's no physician that's treating obesity there,
it just doesn't exist.
And when you look at someone's,
let's look at Okinawa
where they have unbelievable longevity
or they did, it's getting worse over time.
What are they eating mainly?
Are they mainly eating protein?
No, they're mainly eating yams actually.
If you look at their diet,
it's very, very high in starches,
70% of it is yams,
they call them emo,
it's a purple yam.
That's the vast majority of what they eat.
They eat rice,
they eat fruits,
they eat vegetables.
How much dairy and meat do they eat?
I mean, look down there,
about 1% of their calories comes
from those different things.
The vast majority of their diet is a plant based diet.
They're not vegan or vegetarian,
they don't have these names and concepts,
that is just what they mainly eat.
And if you look at them over time,
a traditional Okinawan starts off low
and actually loses weight as they get older
compared to American who gains weight.
Now, you could see that the Okinawan diet
is unfortunately changing
and because of that, so are their waistlines,
and why is that?
We're moving to Okinawa
and it's a big problem
because as they start adopting I diet,
they start getting our disease processes.
Another blue zone is Sardinia.
And in Sardinia, what are they eating?
Well, they're eating lots of fruits
and vegetables and grains,
they eat bread, God forbid,
you know, bread's a killer, right?
Now, keep in mind their grains
are completely different than our grains.
They are whole grains,
they're not GMOs,
they're grown in great soil,
but still they're eating a grain-based diet
with lots of fruits and lots of vegetables,
they're not eating a lot of meat if at all.
And then in Loma Linda, California,
we have the Seventh Day Adventists.
Now they're a fascinating group, okay?
Very, very healthy group.
Probably the healthiest of all the blue zones is Loma Linda.
And if you've ever been to Loma Linda,
it doesn't look that healthy,
there's still McDonald's everywhere.
But the reason is the Seventh Day Adventists
by religion believes that the body is the temple of the soul
and should therefore be treated with respect.
So they don't drink
and they don't smoke
and they try to eat to be healthy.
And they follow somewhat the Daniel diet.
And that comes from the Bible.
If you guys know Daniel was in captivity, he was off,
this was the first prospective trial
where the king offered him wine and meat
and he said, no, he wants pulses and beans.
And he said, put your guards on it
and you'll see that they do better.
So Daniel was the first nutritional scientist.
But anyway, the Seventh Day Adventist,
when you look at what they do,
they eat lots of fruits,
they eat lots of vegetables,
they walk a lot
and they're pretty healthy.
Now, here's the fascinating thing,
when you look at all these blue zones together
and you do Venn diagrams,
you could see that they all have their similarities
and their differences.
But if you look at the central part
where we're looking at,
what do they do in common?
They have a strong sense of family,
they have a lot of social engagement,
they get exercise
but like I was talking about yesterday,
there's no Gold's Gym in Okinawa that I know of.
They're walking,
they're just active.
It's not like a physical,
a huge physical activity.
And then they all follow for the most part,
a plant based diet with lots of legumes.
That's the things that hold them all together.
Now the Seventh Day Adventist make for
the most unbelievable experiment that we could do
because the Seventh Day Adventist
had 60,900 people enroll in the Adventist Health Study-2.
And before they had an Adventist Health Study-1
that was 70,000 people.
And they've been followed over many years.
And here's the beauty of it,
it's hard to study a population, okay?
Because if you're studying a population in Japan,
they all have the same genetics,
so is it genes?
You always have to answer?
Is it genes?
This is not the same genes.
This is a heterogeneous group of people.
When you're studying a big population,
some people are smoking,
some people are drinking that could be affecting it,
these people drink or smoke.
Some people may be exercising,
some people may not,
these are all active people.
So it's a great population of study.
We could study these populations over many, many years.
And what did they find?
Well, one thing we found over and over again
is that the vegans are by far the lowest weight.
In fact, we consider a BMI of 25 to be a normal weight
and vegans were the only people
that were under 25 on average,
which is interesting.
Vegans also had a really, really low rate of diabetes.
Now 7.5% for the meat eaters
is pretty low compared to the country, but still,
in fact, when you look at it
and this is interesting,
there's some hard concepts
that I have to explain to you,
but they use the otters racers here.
So you see, the vegan has half the risk
of developing diabetes as a meat eater.
But here's the thing,
half the risk of one of those meat eaters,
and the other thing they did is controlled for weight.
When we're doing big studies like this,
if weight is an independent cause of diabetes,
we say, well, we gotta take out all the obese people.
So that data makes it look even less,
the data should be even stronger
because we put in obese people
that we saw in the weight study.
If we put obese people in here
that non-vegetarian group
would have even more people that were diabetic.
So very, very strong evidence.
And no matter what the Adventist Health Study looks at,
whether they look at heart disease,
you can see the vegans do a lot better,
whether they look at weight,
whether they look at cancer,
in this conclusion of the study they said,
the evidence that vegetarian diets
or similar diets with reduced meat consumption
may be associated with lower risk of death,
should be considered carefully by individuals
as they make dietary choices
and by those offering, doctors, those choices.
- Thank you so much for watching this video.
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