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Does Sardinia hold the secret of long life - mystery



guardian.co.uk

As the "Mystery of Dalarõ" documentary mentions, there is a village in Italy where an extraordinary proportion of the residents live to amazing ages. Can it really be possible that the population keeps its own mysterious secret of long life?

There are websites which predict life expectancy, simply enter your details and the probable length of your life will be revealed. In fact, there are some areas of the world where such tests, based as they are on general averages and statistical likelihood, would be unlikely to get it right even some of the time. Plug in the details of certain members of the population and the death clock would really embarrass itself. For, while most of us live more or less in line with the laws of probability, there are certain places in the world where people break all the rules.

The experts used to think that longevity was the blessing of people living in mountainous regions, such as the Russian Caucasus, or the Hunza region of the Himalayas. More recent studies have shown, however, that the places where the laws of nature really don't apply are Okinawa in Japan and in particular the island of Sardinia in Italy.

Of 1.6 million Sardinians, there are at least 220 who have reached 100, which is twice the typical ratio. The island boasts the highest documented percentage of people in the whole world who have passed that mythical 100 year mark. Most of these come from the tiny Ogliastra region, a place on the eastern side of the island, framed by mountains and the Mediterranean.

The isolated area, which Sardinians refer to as an island within an island, has a population of barely 300,000, but the number of centenarians and supercentenarians among them is simply uncanny. A super centenarian, by the way, is someone who is 110 years old or more. No less than five of the world's forty oldest people have come from the island, including Antonio Todde who, until his death in 2002, was the world's oldest man. He was a just shy of his 113th birthday.

The secret of long life has always fascinated us. Through history knights and scholars have searched for life-giving elixirs, these days we drink Actimel and buy bestsellers with titles like "How the World's Longest Lived People Achieve Everlasting Health and How You can Too" (available from Amazon if you're interested). But in small Sardinian villages like Talana in the Ogliastra, they seem to have found the answer. Nonetheless, the improbable proportion of the village's 1,200 residents living comfortably into their nineties and beyond don't make a fuss about it.

After all, they may have the statisticians weeping in confusion but for them it's simply ordinary. As Todde used to say when asked to explain the phenomenon, "Just love your brother and drink a good glass of red wine every day. You take one day after the other, you just go on.". But for the rest of us it doesn't look so straightforward. The curious coincidence of the long-lived Sardinians remains utterly intriguing and ultimately impenetrable.




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