TV Review: Live to 100 - Secrets of the Blue Zones
Could mint tea be the secret of everything?
I’m a music lover and lyrics are often at the heart of my affection. Lyrics with overt messages are good, but my top favorite songs tend to have abstract lyrics with evocative visuals that invite me to overlay my own thinking onto the underlying music. All three of the songs in the previous sentence have the same egalitarian intent, but the third packs the best punch:
You live in the eye of the cyclone
We see stars above your head
Through golden bars
I could write an entire fantasy novel starting from this one visual premise.
For better or worse, the Netflix limited series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones falls squarely in the abstract lyrics category. Blue Zones, which focuses on the lifestyles of people who live in places with an exceptionally high number of centenarians, is frustratingly unscientific - with the central problem that the host, Dan Buettner, consistently fails to appreciate the problem that correlation of two variables doesn’t necessarily imply causation. The rooster’s crow doesn’t necessarily bring up the dawn, and the fact that a centenarian in Okinawa believes eschewing anger is the secret of her long life doesn’t necessarily mean suppressing anger is a strategy that will do me any good. Blue Zones is also disappointingly uninteresting as a travelog. The only thing I really appreciated about the show is that it invited me to overlay my own speculation onto the underlying documentary facts. And, as anybody who reads these Substack posts already knows, I loves me some speculation! So I guess Blue Zones gets a conflicted three out of five stars.
The most irritating thing about Blue Zones is that Buettner keeps getting bogged down in crappy 1980s diet advice that has been conclusively debunked. It’s been known for more than a decade that dietary cholesterol and saturated fats aren’t what cause heart disease, and a huge number of clinical trials have shown that antioxidant supplements don’t fight cancer or dementia. When a centenarian on the Greek island Ikaria is shown collecting sage, oregano, and rosemary, Buettner informs us that teas made from these herbs are beneficial because they provide antioxidants. I angrily shook my fist at the TV screen. Those are all mint-family herbs, you nitwit! Sigh. I channeled my inner Okinawan centenarian and told myself nitwit is too strong a term. The zombie dogma of low-fat antioxidants has been exasperatingly hard for the dietary-industrial complex to shake, and speculation that seems glaringly obvious to me might not be so glaringly obvious to other intelligent people of good will. So let’s walk through the hypothesis together.
The hypothesis rests on two starting assumptions. One starting assumption is that Covid infection correlates with significantly increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, immune dysfunction, and possibly some forms of cancer. In other words, all the major diseases of unhealthy aging. Don’t buy the assumption? Recent data are here. A corollary assumption is that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t the only virus causing this type of effect. Seasonal coronaviruses, which cause common colds, are very similar to SARS-CoV-2 - so it would be hard to argue they never cause the same types of hidden damage SARS-CoV-2 appears to be causing.
The virus-accelerated aging hypothesis isn’t restricted to coronaviruses. It has recently been proposed that there’s a such thing as “long flu” and “long colds,” which come with the same types of cardiac and memory problems seen in long Covid sufferers. The herpesvirus that causes chickenpox and shingles has recently been shown to cause about 19% of common age-related dementias. People who get an annual flu vaccine get about 40% less Alzheimer’s. Epstein-Barr herpesvirus causes multiple sclerosis. Enteroviruses - a group that includes poliovirus and common cold rhinoviruses - can directly infect the heart and brain. Polyomaviruses, parvoviruses, and possibly papillomaviruses infect the heart and brain. It’s horrifyingly plausible to imagine multiple families of common viruses quietly causing various forms of hidden damage and we’d basically have no way of knowing it.
A previous post covers the details of a second starting assumption - the idea that drinking tea made from mint-family herbs might help fight viral infections. From there, I draw a line to Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire. In Pollan’s framework, a human who happens to enjoy an herb that boosts her antiviral defenses would have a selective advantage over other members of her tribe who don’t enjoy the herb. Furthermore, a mint-family herb with compounds that happen to rev up antiviral defenses would benefit from having its seeds spread farther and wider if it could also develop a range of additional compounds humans find appealing. Catnip is a mint-family herb. Recruiting mammals to help spread seeds is kind of a known trick of the mint-family trade. If the Botany of Desire framework is applicable, it implies that humans would do well to enjoy plenty of delicious herbs. Hooray! I love pesto!
In brief summary, the two-fold hypothesis is: A) poor health in old age might primarily reflect damage caused by common infections, and B) mint-family herbs might help fight these infections. The hypothesis might strike you as wildly speculative, but wild speculation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. More importantly, my wild speculation is a whole lot more plausible than the disproven antioxidant hypothesis Buettner offers us in Blue Zones.
In addition to the prediction that enjoying delicious herbs might promote healthy living, the hypothesis also predicts that humankind would do well to get our butts in gear making repetitively arrayed vaccines against all the common infections we’ve fallen into the lazy habit of thinking of as “harmless.” We should always bet that viruses are causing more harm than we’re currently aware of.
Update 1
Shout-out to Gavrilova and Gavrilov, who published hypothesis A) back in 2012.
One potential problem of low calorie consumption may be increased susceptibility to pathogens reported in animal studies [19]. It is interesting that the Okinawa archipelago apparently had a low infectious load in the past. This conclusion follows from a relatively low infant mortality in 1900 and 1940 [1]. Taking into account that an overwhelming majority of infant deaths before the 1930s was caused by infections, low infant mortality may serve as a good indicator of environmental infectious load. Finch and Crimmins [20] suggest that childhood infection exposure may serve as a trigger of chronic inflammation later in life. Thus, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the unusually low mortality of older Okinawans could result from the fortunate combination of a low infectious load during childhood and low calorie consumption during the life course. Because of the low infectious load, [caloric restriction] in Okinawa did not result in excessive deaths from infectious diseases during childhood. It is interesting that infant mortality in the United States in 1915 was higher than that in Okinawa in 1900 [21].
Update 2
Some controversy has recently begun emerging over the question of whether people in Blue Zones are really as old as they say they are.