The “Amazon Secret” to a YOUNGER Brain
We tend look to new technologies, drugs, or treatments to find the answer to today’s health problems.
But what if the answer isn’t in the present — or even the future — but the past?
Researchers recently identified a native tribe living in the Amazon that could hold the key to one of modern day’s greatest health threats:
Dementia.
There’s a tribe that lives a remote part of the Bolivian Amazon called the Tsimane.
To see how these people live is like stepping back in time.
They have no modern conveniences. They work hard for their basic necessities in life, hunting, gathering, fishing, and farming for their food.
They have no modern technology, no Internet, no processed foods, and no access to modern healthcare.
Yet they live longer than people in the modern, industrialized world, and they have lower rates of clogged arteries and heart disease!
They also have healthier brains.
Now that researchers know about this special group of people, they’ve begun studying them to see what we can learn from them.
For this study, researchers took 746 Tsimane people from 40-94 years old to a city to undergo a CT scan of their brain.
Then they compared to scans to those of US and European adults.
They determined that overall, the Tsimane people had far less brain shrinkage than Westerners in the same age group.
In fact, the results indicated that their brains shrunk at a 70 percent slower rate.
While everyone experiences some degree of brain shrinkage with age, a faster decline is linked with an increased risk of dementia and other physical ailments.
This benefit likely has to do with better blood flow to the brain, which no doubt comes from living a life with optimized circadian rhythm, living a naturally active lifestyle (without ever stepping foot in a gym!), and eating natural foods rich in good fat and fiber, and low in sugar and preservatives.
The good news is that you don’t have to move to South America to achieve some of the same health benefits this lifestyle provides for the Tsimane.
Plenty of other studies have shown that people who adopt the same kinds of healthy lifestyle habits that I write to you about every week tend to have healthier hearts… and bigger brains.
