Commusings: The Quest for the Fountain of Youth by Dr. Mark Hyman

Hello Commune Community,

Longevity science is all the rage. Rapamycin, NAD+ drips, ozone therapy and hyperbaric chambers. I’m into it … to a point. I wear an Oura ring, an Apple watch and a continuous glucose monitor on my triceps. Michelle, my friendly neighborhood phlebotomist, visits every 6 months and draws what seems to be too much blood and, a mere three days later, 46 biomarkers appear on my phone. I share Dr. Mark Hyman’s dream “to die young at an old age.” 

However, after reading Mark’s essay chronicling his travels to the Blue Zones of Sardinia and Ikaria, I felt a certain nostalgia for a bygone era, a time when TikTok was the sound a clock made, when friends were people you saw in 4-dimensional space-time, when likes referred to crushes among teenagers and when shares required a straw. Are we not thirsting for a simpler time? And could simplicity be the ultimate longevity hack?

I am reminded of the 80th verse of the Tao Te Ching:
 

Here at [email protected] and, yeah, on a two-dimensional screen @jeffkrasno.
 
In love, include me,
Jeff

• • •

The Quest for the Fountain of Youth
by Dr. Mark Hyman

Excerpted from Young Forever

Are disease and death preprogrammed events that leave us powerless victims to their inexorable approach? Or is the secret of vitality and longevity buried in our DNA, our molecules, cells, tissues, and biological networks, the interconnected ecosystem that is our human form? 

Longevity was common in biblical times. Methuselah died at 969 years old; Noah was 950 years old; Adam was 930 years old. Today the longest-lived fully documented human in history was the smoking, port-drinking, chocaholic Madame Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who died at 122 years old. Emma Morano, an Italian woman who ate three eggs and 150 grams of raw meat a day, died at 117 years old. Circulating the internet is a video of an Arab man who claims to be 110 years old and is father to a seven-year-old son. In India I have heard personal reports of sages and rishis (Hindu saints) who live well past 150 years old. It could be that they have no birth records, or couldn’t count, but that raises the question: 

What is the limit of human life? Is there one? If we aren’t meant to have a limit, would you want to live to 150? Or beyond? 
 

THE BLUE ZONES—LONGEVITY IN PRACTICE

There are places in the world where people have already cracked the code, without knowing it, resulting in unusual longevity. Dan Buettner, a National Geographic explorer and author, researched the places on Earth with the longest-lived, healthiest communities, called Blue Zones (after the color of the marker an earlier researcher used to circle them on a world map). 

These communities have up to twenty times the number of people reaching 100 years old or more than in the United States. What makes the communities unique is not their genetics—when Blue Zone inhabitants move to a more modern world, their disease and death rates parallel everyone else’s. It is something else, something I have been on a quest to discover, which led me to visit the Blue Zones. 

What I witnessed has shaped how I view aging, longevity, and, frankly, living. 
 

JOURNEYING TO SARDINIA 

In the summer of 2021, with Dan’s help and advice, I ventured deep into the Ogliastra region of Sardinia, the heart of Sardinia’s Blue Zone, which has the longest-lived men in the world. I was guided by two native Sardinians, Eleonora Catta and Paola Demurtas, and their travel company, There, to the homes and hearths of local Sardinians, into the world of centenarians, an ancient world that has remained much the same for the last 3,000 years. The mountainous region, home to the Sardinian shepherds, is remote and landlocked and has remained inaccessible to conquerors and outside influences until recently. I heard the Sardinians’ stories, witnessed their way of life, ate their ancient foods, drank their antioxidant-rich Cannonau wine. 

The people of this region have preserved their ancient foodways. They still follow traditional methods of making cheese, wine, preserved meats, and olive oil and have a deep knowledge of the local plants. They understood that food was medicine even before Hippocrates! They are particular about what their goats, sheep, and pigs eat. They know that the flavors of the food come from the foods the animals eat, from the soil that feeds their plants, vegetables, and fruits. 

One farmer said to me, “We flavor the meat before we kill the animal.” The flavor comes from phytochemicals in the plants consumed by the animals. They don’t know these compounds are actually good for them. The food just tastes better. Sardinians eat some meat. They also drink goat milk, and their daily diet always includes sheep and goat cheeses. 

On one side of a steep valley sat an old, abandoned, crumbling thirteenth-century village and just above it a newer one. In the 1950s the threat of a mudslide forced the villagers to evacuate and move a little farther up the mountain. At the edge of the old, abandoned village, an eighty-four-year-old shepherd, Carmine, sat on an old stone wall, his small rust-colored Panda parked next to him, driver’s door open. He had pulled over when he saw us behind him and wanted to talk. Imagine that in America, someone just pulling over to the side of the road and flagging you down for a chat! 

He hasn’t left this mountainside since 1989, when he went to visit one of his children on the Italian mainland. Carmine tends his six sheep and one goat, his chickens, and one pig amid his olive orchards, which comprise a 300-year-old olive tree among younger olive trees, growing together with pomegranates, almonds, persimmons, figs, chestnuts, and blackberries. And he grows a large garden of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, chard, strawberries, and artichokes. He spoke of his simple life, his diet of minestrone soup, which is a staple here. Carmine’s wife had died two years earlier, and he lives with his sister and her two daughters, like most Sardinians who stay in tightly knit family and friend units. His now smaller family can’t eat all the food he grows, so he feeds what remains back to the animals or gives it away. 

His routine, the simplicity of his life, tending his animals and gardens, chatting with his friends, being useful and part of his community, and his curious mind keep him going. I asked how he spends his time when not tending his land and animals and he said he reads a lot. He opened the hatch of his Panda and pulled out a thick tome on world religions that led to a deep conversation about God, whom he is not so sure about, and climate change and the irreversible destruction of the planet. 

We spent three hours chatting about his life, touring his farm, and enjoying each other’s company as he hiked effortlessly up and down the mountainside, calling to his sheep to come get a little ancient grain. I struggled to keep up with him as he bounded up the mountainside after his sheep. 
 

IKARIA: A PLACE OF WILD FOOD 

I visited another Blue Zone, Ikaria, Greece, and encountered much the same spirit of self-reliance, deep community, preserved ancient foodways, and an environment that naturally supports a healing diet, love and connection, and daily movement up and down the steep mountains. Every day the Ikarians, some of the longest-lived humans on the planet, drink tea made from wild herbs, including sage. Turns out it is full of the same phytonutrients that green tea has, epigallocatechins, which are powerful detoxifying and anti-inflammatory antioxidants that act on our longevity switches. 

Is that part of the secret to their longevity? 

The Ikarians’ diet consists mainly of wild food. Bitter and sweet wild greens. Foraged mushrooms. Wild herbal teas. All super sources of medicinal phytonutrients. The wild sage tea they drink daily has the same powerful protective longevity phytochemicals as green tea without the caffeine. They eat very little sugar—just a little preserved fruit, such as lemons and oranges, from time to time. 

Wild foods have the most powerful types and highest concentrations of phytonutrients, which surely contribute to their longevity. In fact, all the food is technically organic, though you’ll never see a certification (or a food label at all, for that matter!). That is just how they have farmed and foraged for centuries. 

I visited ninety-seven-year-old Panagiotis and his eighty-seven-year-old wife, Alkea. They were joyful, cuddly, and happy. She cooked a meal for us of wild-greens pies, fresh garden salad, and local eggs with greens and wild mushrooms served with local Ikarian wine that had not been bottled. At eighty-seven, Alkea was spry and bright eyed, looking 20 years younger. She tended her large, terraced gardens and fruit trees and grew and preserved all their food for the year by herself, climbing the steps and steep hillside terraces with ease. 

Movement is built into their life. They don’t retire. They wake up with more things to do than they can get done in a day, and they are surrounded by a rich community of lifelong friends and loved ones. These are the simple principles of happiness and longevity. 

It was a privilege to peek into the Sardinians’ and Ikarians’ ancient ways, to see the care with which they grow food and tend to their animals, the deep understanding they have that flavor originates not in the animal or plant itself but in where and how it is grown, in what the animals eat, in the wild plants rich in medicinal phytochemicals, and in the depth of the love and connection they feel toward their family, friends, and community. 

Science now clearly links nutrient density and the flavor of a food to its phytochemical richness—whether it is a strawberry or goat cheese or prosciutto. This is what makes food medicine; this is the type of food we want washing over our DNA, regulating our epigenome, the system that controls all our gene expression, and all our biological networks. 

These communities don’t have to go to a gym, buy organic food, or mindlessly scroll through social media. Embedded in the very fabric of their lives are medicinal foods, movement up and down the mountains, deep, lifelong friendships and community, and the slow savoring of life together. 

We have to make adaptations in our modern lives and find good food at farmers’ markets or Whole Foods, and go to the gym to work out, but there is much to learn from the Blue Zones. We have drifted away from our nuclear families and close-knit communities. We are removed from nature, natural cycles, and knowing the source of our food. 

We cannot go back to live in the world of a thousand years ago, but we can learn the lessons of the Blue Zones and build our own zones within our homes, our family, our friends, and our community. 

The lessons are clear. Live close to nature. Love deeply. Eat simple food raised sustainably (ideally by your own hands). Move naturally. Laugh and rest. Actually live. (And live longer, as it turns out.)

Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and internationally recognized leader, speaker, and educator in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and a fourteen-time New York Times best-selling author.

His most recent book is Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life and his most recent course on Commune is The Emerging Science of Longevity.

Adapted from YOUNG FOREVER by Mark Hyman, MD. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Hyman, MD. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.