Why Are People Living Longer In One Italian Village?

In 2013, a small village called Molochio on Italy’s southern hilly, Mediterranean coastline, comprised of about 2,000 people, made headlines. Amongst its inhabitants, it had an insanely large proportion of people over 100 years old–five centenarians to be exact.

As National Geographic went to investigate, one of them, the then-106-year-old Salvatore Caruso spoke of the secret to a long life. “No bacco, no tabacco, no venere—no drinking, no smoking, no women.” He told the reporter that he had lived on mostly figs and beans growing up and never any red meat. 103-year old Domenico Romeo said the same–“poco, ma tutto–a little bit, but of everything.”

Molochio is in a ‘blue zone’, a non-scientific term for an area of the world where people are regularly recorded living longer and with lower rates of chronic disease–Icaria, Greece is one and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica is another.

So what’s the reason? Why have the local population routinely lived longer than 100 years of age? Now EU funding and U.S. researchers are coming to investigate.

One hypothesis is that the deprivation they suffered as children, the fact that they had very little food and were forced to fast for long periods of time, has played a huge part in their longevity.

The planned clinical trial will take 500 people and split them into two groups, giving one group the food eaten by people with modern habits and the other, the food eaten by these centenarians and only at specific times of the day, as reported by Bloomberg.

The research will determine the impact of diet on longevity obviously, but also of fasting. One idea is that fasting is believed to kick off biological processes that can make people live longer, helping to regenerate cells and protect against age-related illnesses such as diabetes, heart-disease and cognitive decline.

The question that remains though, is even if people know what might make them live longer, would they want to change their behaviour?