The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (8 page)

SARDINIA’S MYSTERIOUS MALE METHUSELAHS

Though belonging is key, extreme longevity also runs in families here, Gianni told us. As a family doctor he had examined at least
two hundred Sardinian centenarians. He went on to investigate their family and medical histories and whatever genetic information he could collect, along with details about their diet, physical activity levels, and cognitive states. While Gianni was responsible for first identifying the local clinical phenomenon of super-longevity, a Belgian demographer named Michel Poulain helped him validate the data. Municipal records in hand, the two men went from village to village in and outside the Blue Zone, interviewing and examining the centenarians, along with any living family members, to make sure the municipal records jibed with reality. “By the end of 2001 I had visited, alone or with Michel, about 261 municipalities out of a total 377 in Sardinia,” Gianni told me.

As I found out that evening in Alghero, Gianni had a personal stake in the longevity question. “I am the nephew of the very rare Sardinian man who reached the record age of 110. Up to now I can find only four people in Sardinia who have reached that age, and one of these four lucky persons is my great-uncle. So that stimulated my curiosity to know the secret of an exceptionally long life.” (By the time this book went to press, the number of Sardinians who had lived to 110 had doubled; there are now eight).

Gianni’s curiosity is matched only by his hospitality. Taking a day off from the lab, he and his wife, Sandra, her brother, Peppuccio, and Francesco, Gianni’s graduate student, drove in a convoy to lead me from Alghero to Sardinia’s Blue Zone. Eva and I brought up the rear in our battered rented Smart car. The extraordinary social support network that allows its seniors to live well beyond their “best by” date could well be tied to how hard it has always been to get to these villages. There’s an ocean to cross, then miles and miles of
macchia
, or pastured scrubland. Finally, barricaded behind a forbidding mountain range, the villages of the Blue Zone rise into view.

The ancestors of the roughly 3,500 people currently living in and around Villagrande have inhabited this spot since the Bronze Age. While driving to the Blue Zone we saw hundreds of
nuraghi
,
which are mysterious conical stone structures. No one knows whether they were used as houses, temples, or observation towers, but they still stand in farmers’ fields and on hills all over the Sardinian countryside, architectural testaments to the Nuragic people who lived here at least four thousand years ago. Inside the
nuraghi
, buried in rubble, archaeologists have found dozens of Smurf-like statuettes called
bronzetti
. These tiny statues clue us in to the community’s social cohesion even then. Looking like Bronze Age Happy Meal toys, three-inch-tall women cradle small children and lift their hands in cheerful greeting, while male warriors sport fearsome shields and quizzical grins on their faces. The social environment was clearly convivial, even if the physical surroundings were as inhospitable then as they are now. Outside the cozy hilltop villages, this is still a remote, windswept place, a landscape almost as empty of human settlement as the moon.

The small subsection of the Sardinian population that now lives here became genetically isolated somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand years ago. And while the small genetic pool that resulted from this isolation made diseases such as thalassemia and familial multiple sclerosis much more common, it also meant that powerful feelings of reciprocal altruism reverberate throughout these villages. People treat their neighbors and friends like
family because … well, most of them are. Called kin selection by evolutionary psychologists (and nepotism by everyone else), keeping close tabs on members of the community—even taking risks and making personal sacrifices on their behalf—became a normal feature of life in these small towns. Helping people was a way of helping your own genes survive, though no one is explicitly aware of that. Residents simply expect that when they need help they’ll get it, and at some point they’ll return the favor. Yogi Berra summed up the concept nicely: “Always go to other people’s funerals. Otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

Ancient bronzetti from Sardinia
. (Image and Figure Credits
2.1
)

That’s how reciprocal altruism can be fostered by kin selection in such small, isolated groups of people. Given how tight the Blue Zone Sardinians are, how committed to watching out for each other, this longevity-promoting social cohesion may have been selected for over many centuries of geographic and genetic isolation.
⁷
In the here and now, the act of helping other people releases feel-good neuropeptides and endorphins—that’s the positive side. On the negative side, those folks who don’t take constant, solicitous care of older family members, neighbors, and friends are shunned. Even as a visitor I felt the chilly breeze of censure when, after interviewing a 102-year-old charmer named Zio Giuseppe, his 72-year-old son Nino learned that my mother, who was around his own age, had come home ten days earlier from a hospital stay. She was in Canada and I was here? Disapproval cast a shadow over his handsome face. How could that be?

Gianni had told me that a team of Italian geneticists had recently discovered certain polymorphisms—distinct clusters of DNA sequences—that are ten times more common among the male centenarians in this part of Sardinia than in a comparison group of younger Italian men from elsewhere on the island. This finding confirms oral histories told in Villagrande. The older residents describe having descended from just a few founding families, and they regard their town’s genealogy as a sacred trust. To be precise,
they’re likely the descendents of two founding
mothers
, as the mitochondrial DNA hosting these genetic variations can be inherited only from mothers, not fathers.
⁸

It’s tantalizing to consider that there may be clusters of longevity-promoting genes that are primarily transmitted through the maternal line but influence men’s lifespans exclusively—an interesting gloss on the female effect. If that’s true, then women are skewing extreme longevity in Sardinia in more ways than one. They’re passing on their genes—in this case a particular haplogroup of mitochondrial DNA that promotes health across the male lifespan—and they’re also offering the TLC and companionship that allow their elders, husbands, and children to benefit from the protective village effect.

When it comes to the lineage for longevity, it may be a one-sided contribution. As the Y chromosome markers (paternally inherited polymorphisms) in male Sardinian centenarians don’t differ that much from those of younger Sardinian men, or from western European men in general, it’s hard to argue that genes on their own tell the whole story of male longevity in the Blue Zone. A study of nearly three thousand Danish twins born at the turn of the twentieth century found that genes answer 25 percent of the longevity question, at most.
⁹
So it’s interesting to consider how the social habits particular to this place—very likely transmitted through its mothers and grandmothers—have transformed the already propitious genetic hand the community has been dealt.

BECAUSE THEY LOVE ME

A life as long as Teresa Cabiddu’s might be a blessing or a curse. The elegant white-haired centenarian was born in 1912 and has lived in the same house for seventy-five years.
¹⁰
The morning we visited her, a light rain was falling in Villagrande and the surrounding mountains were obscured by fog. Squeezed between two larger, recently built houses, Zia Teresa’s place seemed doll-like in its
dimensions. It was constructed in the typical Sardinian village style: dark, wood-framed windows with shutters, sandstone-colored walls, and a red tiled roof. The paving stones were slick that day, and as we shook out our umbrellas and bent our heads under the low door frame to enter the kitchen, I was struck by the Hans Christian Andersen–like setting. As if drawn by a child with a checklist of life’s necessities, the room was small but complete: round wooden table with four ladder-back chairs, a fireplace, narrow gas stove and fridge flanking the sink, a small couch next to the fireplace, a glass china cabinet, and a plate of cookies on the counter, freshly baked in anticipation of our visit.

Zia Teresa was sitting on the pink loveseat by the hearth with her neighbor Marietta Monni, at eighty-two nearly twenty years her junior. The two women were dressed identically, in black sweaters and knitted black shawls. Black skirts and pastel-colored floral aprons covered their expansive laps, Teresa’s pale blue, Marietta’s sage green. Both were knockouts: high cheekbones, white hair tightly wrapped into a knot at the nape of the neck, and lively black eyes. Though Teresa’s forehead showed a few freckles—souvenirs of a life of work in the fields—both women’s faces were remarkably devoid of the crepey folds and creases common in the elderly. The room smelled pleasantly of wood smoke and cookies. The contrast to the antiseptic pall of institutional living, the fate of the oldest old in most industrialized nations, couldn’t have been greater.

Though the house hardly seemed large enough, it had once accommodated a family with six children, one of whom, Angela, around fifty, was seated on a kitchen chair facing me. She had recently moved back in with her mother to look after her. Including her friend Marietta, my daughter, the interpreter, and me, we were six in that tiny kitchen, all talking about Zia Teresa’s exceptionally long life. There was no escaping the fact that getting older in central Sardinia is an intensely communal affair. Every centenarian we met was surrounded by a tight web of kith and kin.

It’s not as if I didn’t want to meet the centenarians’ families and neighbors. But I viewed the centenarians as individuals, with unique stories to tell, and wanted them to tell them uninterrupted. The people around them, though, considered them to be communal property and were fiercely protective of their “treasures”—the word one woman used to describe her 102-year-old uncle. Feeling isolated was simply not possible for these centenarians. As the Sardinian demographer Luisa Salaris put it at an international conference on longevity, “All centenarians live at their children’s house and have frequent contact with other relatives, including grandchildren and great-grandchildren, with whom they love to natter.” Nattering with whoever happens to be hanging around is how one ages in central Sardinia.
¹¹

One of the first things Zia Teresa told me about herself was that she left school after the third grade and her graduation gift was a hoe. She was born in Arzana, a village about eighteen kilometers south of Villagrande, and she “tilled the wheat, set the potatoes in the garden, made the bread” from the time she left school until she married at the age of twenty-five, after which the farm work, cooking, and family responsibilities only intensified. As a young wife, a typical day meant waking in the dark at two a.m., then walking to the family fields near Nuoro (“a thirty-kilometer trip each way!” daughter Angela interjected). As soon as she was able, Teresa’s eldest, Giulia, stayed home from school to look after the younger children.

When I asked if her field work and domestic life in Villagrande were lonely jobs for a young woman from a different village, Zia Teresa shook her head no. “I helped the neighbors and my neighbors helped me. Still now, on Saturdays and Sundays, we all make bread together
—su pani pistoccu
,” she said, referring in Sardinian to the parchment-like flatbread typical of the region. Angela added, “We still do it—me, my sister, my mother, and my sister-in-law—every Saturday and every Sunday.” The conversation progressed to the making of
culurgiones
, the local specialty: pasta purses, about
the size of a child’s fist, filled with ricotta, potato, and mint, each one filled and crimped by hand. On the loveseat, the two older ladies demonstrated by rhythmically squeezing their thumbs and forefingers together; clearly a light touch was needed to create the right seal. “We make them for the entire family—three or four hundred at a time—and then we give them to everyone,” said Angela. The
culurgiones
are boiled for a few minutes and then eaten smothered in homemade tomato sauce.

For a moment I felt jealous. Not just because Zia Teresa’s now adult children had learned the secrets of Italian country cooking well before Marcella Hazan and Mario Batali taught the rest of us. But because this type of take-it-for-granted social bonding, which seems to be a key feature of the scientific recipe for a long, healthy life, seemed so effortless here.

Still, Teresa had spent seven decades, sixteen hours a day, doing back-breaking work, which held no appeal for me at all, even if that was one piece of the Sardinian longevity puzzle. Long treks by foot over steep inclines and hours of vigorous farm work are still features of daily life for most of the residents there. Even food deprivation—common in the region during and after both world wars—can add years to one’s life, some experts say. Though the impact of caloric restriction on longevity is controversial, famine (for a limited period, anyway) has been known to slow down or suspend age-related cell death.
¹²
Recent research by cognitive neuroscientist Lisa Barnes has shown that going hungry as a child predicts a slower rate of cognitive decline in old age. By following more than six thousand
older Americans as they aged, she and her team discovered that her subjects were a third less likely to suffer from serious memory loss or dementia if they reported not having had enough to eat as children.
¹³
Zia Teresa, who lived through the deprivation caused by two world wars, may have benefited from brief periods of caloric restriction during the first half of her life.