Despite all the media attention and even research on the "Blue Zone diet" or "Blue Zone exercise regime" or other lifestyle aspects, I think the real missed poi

Despite all the media attention and even research on the "Blue Zone diet" or "Blue Zone exercise regime" or other lifestyle aspects, I think the real missed point is often missed. The thing that all of these Blue Zones have in common isn't diet or exercise but community. The 7th Day Adventists of Loma Linda California are extremely communal. Icaria is a Greek Island where a bunch of Catholic communists got expelled to during the Greek Civil War. In Nicoya, Costa Rica intergenerational households are by far the norm and extremely important. I could go on about the rest The effect is called the Roseto Effect by sociologists (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell). It's likely the same effect as another sociological term called the "Health Immigrant Effect" which shows how immigrants to the US often have much better health outcomes for a few generations before matching up with the rest of the population. It also is significantly confirmed by the results of possibly the single longest running study in Sociology: The Harvard Happiness study. Which finds that the strongest predictor of good health is good social relationships It turns out community makes you live longer, have much fewer chronic health conditions, etc. It shouldn't really be surprising given humans are probably one of the only 2 known eusocial mammals