Time, Newsweek, Health Magazine—and many other international media outlets from the United Kingdom to Australia—are all talking about the recent findings by a group of doctors and Anthropologists who have found why a South American population has the lowest rate of heart disease—a disease that is the leading cause of death for both men and women in the U.S.
“We found that among the Tsimane, people live into old age with little to no risk of coronary atherosclerosis, the principal cause of heart attacks,” said Hillard Kaplan, lead author and professor of Anthropology at UNM. “The national and international attention that the article has received shows that the message has struck a chord.”
In the report, published in the medical journal The Lancet, researchers explain why The Tsimane people—a hunter-gatherer population of the Bolivian Amazon—have the lowest reported levels of vascular aging for any population on record with coronary atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, being five times less common than in the U.S.
Around 9000 Tsimane live in about 80 small villages, typically consisting of extended family. The villages do not have running water or electricity. Less than half the villages have schools where children learn to read and write in both Tsimane and Spanish.
The research team was looking to better understand the correlation between the pre-industrial lifestyle and low prevalence of coronary artery disease risk factors.
“The Tsimane lifestyle suggests that a diet low in saturated fats and high in non-processed fibre-rich carbohydrates, along with wild game and fish, not smoking and being active throughout the day could help prevent hardening in the arteries of the heart.” said Kaplan. “The loss of subsistence diets and lifestyles could be classed as a new risk factor for vascular ageing and we believe that components of this way of life could benefit contemporary sedentary populations.”
The study estimates that an 80-year-old from the Tsimane group had the same vascular age as an American in their mid-fifties.
The report further explained, “While industrial populations are sedentary for more than half of their waking hours, 54 percent, the Tsimane spend only 10 percent of their daytime being inactive. They live a subsistence lifestyle that involves hunting, gathering, fishing and farming, where men spend an average of 6-7 hours of their day being physically active and women spend 4-6 hours.”
Because the study is observational, utilizing CT scans of the heart as well as measuring weight, age, heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose and inflammation, it cannot confirm how the Tsimane population is protected from vascular ageing, or which part of their lifestyle—diet, physical activity or smoking—is most protective.
The researchers suggest it is more likely to be a result of their lifestyle than genetics, because of a gradual increase in cholesterol levels coinciding with a rapidly changing lifestyle.
“There is a positive message for us—we can do things to make a difference in our health,” said Kaplan. “The Tsimane case serves to reinforce what we already know: increase our physical activity, improve our diet to maintain a healthy weight and not smoke.”
The research findings are an outgrowth of a collaboration between The Tsimane Health and Life History Project (THLHP) and the Division of Cardiology in Health Sciences. The findings are the first of many expected reports on the Tsimane people.
xteeth i couldnt agree more!
And their average lifespan is? And the control groups for other things were? And the control for their genetic make up was? I know that the work is difficult but we have to stop making these generalizations from incomplete studies like these. Look at the work of Ioanides at Stanford also in JAMA and Lancet. Turns out that about half of all the drug studies have ludicrous results.