Some call it “The island where people forget to die”. This may seem like an exaggeration, but there is some scientific evidence to back it up. It's the Greek island of Ikaria, and it's one of the so-called “blue zones” of the world where humans live much longer than the average life expectancy: and they can live healthier, too.
Among them, the man protagonist of this article, Stamatis Moraitis, who managed to "cheat" death for decades. Imagine, when I was just one year old (in 1976) he was diagnosed with cancer and the doctor was blunt with him: he only had between six and nine months to live.
And do you know how it ended?
The story of Stamatis Moraitis
The costs of the funeral in America (he was living there at the time) seemed very high to him: so he decided that it would be wiser to return to his country of origin. There he could “live life to the fullest and enjoy every moment” until the day he died.
However, as time went on Stamatis felt better and better. After nine months without a single visit to the hospital, he realized that the prognosis he received from the doctors could be very wrong, and maybe he could live healthier than he thought.
That's how it went. Stamatis is dead, of course, but he died at 98 and not at 61. What acted as medicine for him was simply the place where he lived. Clean air, unprocessed food, no stress and (he often joked about this, friends say) “even the wine helped”.
Live healthier and longer in the blue zone
Scientific studies across vast fields of knowledge in recent years have shown that only about 20% of a person's life expectancy is determined by their genetics. The rest depends on lifestyle.
The analysis of the various "blue zones" shows that the burden of controlling everything related to style is much more complicated than relying directly on a healthy place. This is why in some areas of the planet there is a greater concentration of healthy elderly people.
If you want to go somewhere in the world where you can live healthier and longer there is a great list of destinations.
A small map of the blue areas
Together with the island of Ikaria in Greece, other “blue zone” locations around the world include the Japanese island of Okinawa, the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, beautiful hill in California and the Peninsula of Nicoya in Costa Rica.
Statistically, people living in these parts of the world live longer, healthier lives, less likely to get serious illnesses in the later years of life.
How is it possible? Healthline among the various environmental factors, it attributes an important role to diet (after all, it is one of the most important touch points for our body, and stresses it every day, in almost all hours of the day). In the case of Okinawa, diet and cultural approach are a beneficial mix for living healthier: the residents of that place have the custom of never eating their fill. A small "ritual" of light caloric deprivation that seems to work wonders.
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