Hidden in plain sight – the best protection against dementia

It seems to be a secret hidden in plain sight – the most effective protection against dementia summed up in a word - community. Living alongside people who know you, where you know you belong. It has been demonstrated again and again, in regions designated the earth’s ‘blue zones’ like Loma Linda in America; historically by the town of Roseto founded by Italian immigrants in the 1890s, and now in the indigenous villagers of Tsimane and Moseten in the Bolivian Amazon where Chapman University Professor Hillard Kaplan, found the percentage of dementia among them was a mere 1 percent, against 11 percent in America.

In the published Bolivian study it’s put down to their ‘hunter-farmer-forager lifestyle’. “If the industrialized world emulated the Tsimane and Moseten in diet and daily activity, it would save millions of lives and billions of dollars in health care costs,” Professor Kaplan said. Yet the evidence is that it is not the diet of a community that matters as much as the community itself and the sense of belonging.

Roseto was one of the most intensely investigated of all the blue zones. No one under the age of 65 developed cardiovascular disease, a major cause of dementia. And the death rates from all causes was 35% lower than anywhere else. It was discovered Dr Stewart Wolf, then head of Medicine of the University of Oklahoma who, with students and colleagues from the University spent the whole of the next summer examining the people of Roseta. Even the soil was investigated. They also tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States but found they did not enjoy the same remarkable health as their relatives in the little Pennsylvania town.

The Rosetans’ diet would appall health experts today. They ate meat, loved butter and pasta; they cooked with lard, and in short, ate a lot of fat and carbohydrates. Yet Sociologist John Bruhn commented, ‘There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.’ (The Outliers, The story of Success, p 7, Malcolm Gladwell, 2009, Read More Penguin.)

Although medical research has shown that food is a contributing factor to heart disease, this research suggests that food has a much smaller role to play in heart disease than that currently emphasised, says analyst Marshall Chang.

He adds, ‘If this is a scientifically proven fact, then why have we done nothing to promote it in the way we live in our communities? Our lifestyles and relationships are becoming increasingly shallow, fractured, and distracted, despite the fact that medical science has proven this to be detrimental to our health. So the question is, how far will we let our health suffer as a result of our increasingly ill-relationships and communities?’ Click here for more info on The Roseto Effect.

Now a new report shows that older people prefer to live in community.

The research shows that over half of the nation (55%) worry that people’s sense of community is disappearing. To remedy this, Marshall Chang recommends ‘relearning how to make moment by moment choices to connect with the people around us at work, with family, even with the random people you pass on the street … this has the potential to be the drops of water that will collectively create an ocean of change in the way we relate to each other, and ultimately to our collective health and wellbeing.’

Our church fellowships are a natural community for people of all ages, and those that bring generations together are especially beneficial. In all aspects of our lives, especially with the family of God, we can intentionally be those drops of water.