The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (46 page)

40.
Abraham Verghese,
My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story
(New York: Vintage, 1994).

41.
Sincere thanks go to
Globe and Mail
health reporter and Montreal bureau chief André Picard.

42.
Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,”
Sociological Theory
1 (1983).

43.
R. F. Baumeister,
Is There Anything Good About Men?
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Joyce Benenson and Anna Heath, “Boys Withdraw More in One-on-One Interactions, Whereas Girls Withdraw More in Groups,”
Developmental Psychology
42, no. 2 (2006); R. F. Baumeister and Kristin Sommer, “What Do Men Want? Gender Differences and Two Spheres of Belongingness,”
Psychological Bulletin
122, no. 1 (1997); Shira Gabriel and Wendi Gardner, “Are There ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ Types of Interdependence? The Implications of Gender Differences in Collective versus Relational Interdependence for Affect, Behavior, and Cognition,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
77, no. 3 (1999).

44.
Baumeister,
Is There Anything Good About Men?

45.
The live interactions took place via a video feed of the experimenter, who was in the same room, in real time, as two people can’t squeeze into one scanner. Elizabeth Redcay et al., “Live Face-to-Face Interaction during fMRI: A New Tool for Social Cognitive Neuroscience,”
NeuroImage
50 (2010).

46.
Joshua Fogel et al., “Internet Use and Social Support in Women with Breast Cancer,”
Health Psychology
21, no. 4 (2002).

47.
R. Kraut et al., “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology that Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-being?”
American Psychologist
53, no. 9 (1998); R. Kraut et al., “Internet Paradox Revisited,”
Journal of Social Issues
58, no. 1 (2002).

48.
Paula Klemm and Thomas Hardie, “Depression in Internet and Face-to-Face Cancer Support Groups,”
Oncology Nursing Forum
29, no. 4 (2002); Gunther Eysenbach, “The Impact of the Internet on Cancer Outcomes,”
Cancer Journal for Clinicians
53, no. 6 (2003).

49.
Norman Nie, D. Sunshine Hillygus, and Lutz Erbring, “Internet Use, Interpersonal Relations, and Sociability: A Time Diary Study,” in
The Internet in Everyday Life
, ed. B. Wellman and C. Haythornthwaite (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).

CHAPTER 2: IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAISE A CENTENARIAN

1.
  In
Made in America
, sociologist Claude Fischer delineates three types of places: the private, which is one’s home, shared only with intimates; the public, such as main streets, department stores, and plazas; and the parochial, by which he means semi-public places implicitly reserved for group members, such as a particular bar where everybody knows your
name, or a park bench reserved for certain elderly men. He writes: “in the smallest of communities, all the space that is not private may be parochial; locals stare at strangers even on Main Street.” That was my experience in Villagrande; I thought I was visiting a “public” village, but unbeknownst to me I was entering what residents considered to be a semi-private space, open primarily to locals and those with direct connections to them. Claude S. Fischer,
Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

2.
  A sex difference in lifespan is not unique to humans. A research team led by Anne Bronikowski at Iowa State University studied how primates age around the world and discovered that the females of nearly all primate species live longer than the males. This is true of humans too, of course. The only exception to this rule in non-human primates is the muriqui monkey of Brazil. “Unlike other primates, muriqui males do not compete with each other for access to females. Instead, they cooperate with each other,” explained one of the co-authors of the study, Karen Strier, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin. While men in central Sardinia certainly compete for the woman they most desire, as do men in all other cultures, this one non-human primate exception to the gender gap in longevity does pose a question about the life-preserving elements of cooperation within a tight social group—a feature of Sardinian society that may have developed and persisted over millennia of subsistence in an unforgiving social and geographic environment. For more details about primate lifespans, see Anne M. Bronikowski et al., “Aging in the Natural World: Comparative Data Reveal Similar Mortality Patterns across Primates,”
Science
331, no. 6022 (2011).

3.
  Increased male longevity in Europe, and especially France in recent years, has started to reduce the gender gap in lifespan. France Meslé, “Recent Improvements in Life Expectancy in France: Men Are Starting to Catch Up,”
Population Bulletin
61 (2006); Dr. Giovanni Pes, personal communication, January 2013.

4.
  
Bradley J. Willcox, D. Craig Willcox, and Luigi Ferrucci, “Secrets of Healthy Aging and Longevity from Exceptional Survivors Around the Globe: Lessons from Octogenarians to Supercentenarians,”
Journal of Gerontoloy
63A, no. 11 (2008). I am grateful to Dr. Giovanni Pes, of the University of Sassari, for clarifying the current sex ratios of longevity in the Villagrande region.

5.
  M. Poulain et al., “Identification of a Geographic Area Characterized by Extreme Longevity in the Sardinia Island: The AKEA Study,”
Experimental Gerontology
39 (2004).

6.
  Robert Andrews,
The Rough Guide to Sardinia
(New York: Rough Guides, 2007); Philip Carl Salzman,
The Anthropology of Real Life: Events in Human Experience
(Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1999).

7.
  In a lecture on the biology of human behavior recorded in November 2010, the brilliant Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky explained the relationship between kin selection and altruism as follows: “When something isolates a small subsection of the population, that smaller group will become more inbred. And because then there’s a high degree of relatedness, there will be more kin selection. They’re all related, so they’ll be more cooperative; you will fix that trait of cooperation in the group at a high rate. And then the cooperation, which is a founder-driven trait, will spread outwards. So that’s how kin selection turns into reciprocal altruism. A bunch of traits that are lousy in the individual are great for the group.” Robert M. Sapolsky, “Molecular Genetics II,”
Human Behavioral Biology
(iTunes University, 2010). To read more about kin selection and reciprocal altruism, see Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby,
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Pscyhology and the Generation of Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

8.
  Robert Koenig, “Sardinia’s Mysterious Male Methuselahs,”
Science
291, no. 5511 (2001); Giuseppe Passarino et al., “Y Chromosome Binary Markers to Study the High Prevalence of Males in Sardinian Centenarians and the Genetic Structure of the Sardinian Population,”
Human Heredity
52 (2001). The village of Villagrande has only two founding mothers, but the number of founding mothers in the Blue
Zone region is somewhat higher (Giovanni Pes, personal communication, January 28, 2013).

9.
  Anne Marie Herskind et al., “The Heritability of Human Longevity: A Population-Based Study of 2872 Danish Twin Pairs Born 1870–1900,”
Human Genetics
97, no. 3 (1996).

10.
Teresa Cabiddu died in January 2013, at the age of 101. Sadly, she did not live long enough to see her name and life story in print.

11.
Luisa Salaris, “Sardinian Centenarians: A Lesson from the Past?” paper presented at the International Symposium on Global Longevity, Sunchang, South Korea, 2008.

12.
According to Aubrey de Grey, among other prominent scientists working in the area of human aging, animal models clearly suggest that deprivation—specifically, reducing calorie intake—will reduce cell damage and, as a result, aging. “If you feed rodents (or, in fact, a wide variety of other animals) a bit less than they would like, they tend to live longer than if they have as much food as they want. This is not simply because such animals tend to overeat given the chance and become obese: animals that ‘eat sensibly’ and maintain a constant body weight throughout most of their lives still live less long than those given less food.” Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae,
Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), 24. See also J. F. Trepanowski et al., “Impact of Caloric and Dietary Restriction Regimens on Markers of Health and Longevity in Humans and Animals: A Summary of Available Findings,”
Nutrition Journal
10 (2011). When I consulted Gianni Pes about this issue, he wrote: “The basic idea is that the effect of restriction is effective only in people with excess caloric intake, while in people with normal diet, restriction can cause adverse effects.”

13.
Lisa Barnes et al., “Effects of Early-Life Adversity on Cognitive Decline in Older African Americans and Whites,”
Neurology
79 (2012).

14.
Indeed, Eva moved seven thousand miles away within a year, when she enrolled in a graduate program at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium.

15.
T. E. Seeman and L. F. Berkman, “Structural Characteristics of Social Networks and Their Relationship with Social Support in the Elderly: Who Provides Support,”
Social Science and Medicine
26, no. 7 (1988).

16.
S. V. Subramanian, F. Elwert, and N. Christakis, “Widowhood and Mortality among the Elderly: The Modifying Role of Neighborhood Concentration of Widowed Individuals,”
Social Science and Medicine
66, no. 4 (2008). Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist who wrote about America’s declining social capital in his book
Bowling Alone
, has shown that, in the short term, trust and reciprocity take a dive in diverse neighborhoods, as “all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Though Putnam writes that diverse communities create a more solid national identity in the long term, in the here and now there is a tradeoff between diversity and the community cohesion—and homogeneity—that promotes longevity. Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum—Diversity and Community in the 21st Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,”
Scandinavian Political Studies
30, no. 2 (2007).

17.
N. Frasure-Smith et al., “Randomized Trial of Home-Based Psychosocial Nursing: Intervention for Patients Recovering from Myocardial Infarction,”
Lancet
350 (1997); Sheldon Cohen and Denise Janicki-Deverts, “Can We Improve Our Physical Health by Altering Our Social Networks?”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
4, no. 4 (2009).

18.
I am grateful to the authors of
The Longevity Project
, Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, who distinguish between the typical “disease and treatment” model and the more recent approach to health that focuses on health promotion, prevention, and “wellness.” Rebranding the more mundane word
health
as
wellness
was indeed a stroke of genius. Here I deploy the New Age byword a little ironically, to indicate that certain practices or habits typical of a place promote “wellness” even if those practices are firmly rooted in the evolution and biology of our species.

19.
Peter Crome, “Forever Young: A Cultural History of Longevity,”
British Medical Journal
328, no. 7454 (2004).

20.
B. Jeune and J. Vaupel, eds.,
Validation of Exceptional Longevity
, Odense Mongraphs on Population Aging, vol. 6 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1999); Poulain et al., “Identification of a geographic area”; Willcox, Willcox, and Ferrucci, “Secrets of healthy aging and longevity.”

21.
Mark Mackinnon, “Sad New Reality: Many Elderly Living and Dying Alone,”
Globe and Mail
, October 7, 2010.

22.
Resveratrol has extended the lifespan of yeasts, worms, fruit flies, and a fish with an average lifespan of two months, but it has not been shown to have a beneficial effect on mammals, including mice, rats, and humans. For evidence (based on aggregate data) on the minimal, if any, impact of diet on longevity in the Blue Zone, see Giovanni Mario Pes et al., “Lifestyle and Nutrition Related to Male Longevity in Sardinia: An Ecological Study,”
Nutrition, Metabolism, and Cardiovascular Diseases
23, no. 3 (2013).

23.
Dan Buettner,
The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest
(Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2008).

24.
David Snowdon,
Aging with Grace: What the Nun Study Teaches Us about Leading Longer, Healthier and More Meaningful Lives
(New York: Bantam 2001).

25.
K. Lochner, “Social Capital and Neighborhood Mortality Rates in Chicago,”
Social Science and Medicine
56, no. 8 (2003).

26.
Salzman,
Anthropology of Real Life
.

27.
For an account of the internecine conflicts in the Nuoro region of Sardinia, read “Events on a Mediterranean Island,” in Salzman,
Anthropology of Real Life
; Keith Gessen, “The Orange and the Blue: After the Revolution, the Politics of Disenchantment,”
New Yorker
, March 1, 2010.

28.
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Everything Is Illuminated
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

29.
J. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness:
Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
(New York: Norton, 2008); U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Reports,
U.S. Persons Living Alone, by Sex and Age
(Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2010); Pew Research
Center,
Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality
(Washington, DC: PRC, 2009).