Good Friday Morning! Continued from yesterday.

1. Question – What is the secret to the Rosetan’s longevity?

2. Thought – It had to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted 22 separate civic organizations in a town of just over 2000 people. They picked up on the egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.

When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were – that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made – on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was part of, and who their friends and family were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhibit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. (Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell)

“We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.” (Charles Evans Hughes)

Have a great weekend! Spring around the corner. No texting and driving. Exercise and drink water. Be good – Do good!

Good Thursday Morning!

1. Question – Why is the death rate so low in Roseto? Virtually no one under 55 had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 % lower than expected.

2. Thought – Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. “I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged 21 and over,” Bruhn remembers. This happened more than 50 years ago, but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he described what they found. “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.”

Wolf’s first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the Old World that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn’t true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard instead of the much healthier olive oil they had used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies, or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham, and sometimes eggs. Sweets such as biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; in Roseto they were eaten year around. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan’s eating habits, they found that a whopping 41% of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk 6 miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily and many were struggling with obesity.

If diet and exercise didn’t explain the findings, then what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close-knit group from the same region of Italy, and Wolf’s next thought was to wonder whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn’t.

He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania that was good for their health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the size of Roseto, and both were populated with the same kind of hardworking European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns’ medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were three time that of Roseto. Another dead end.

What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be……….. (Outliers by Malcom Gladwell)

​”These old people were dying of old age. That’s it.” ​(John Bruhn)