Monkey meat and walking – a recipe for healthy hearts
LA PAZ Scientists say there is a new diet for the perfectly healthy heart: the rainforest regime.
An Amazonian people reliant on subsistence hunting have the healthiest arteries in the world. Heart disease is almost unknown among the Tsimane people of northern Bolivia, who have the vascular systems of Americans 30 years younger and remain as fit as 20-year-olds well into old age, researchers have reported in British medical journal The Lancet.
The Tsimane eat a diet rich in vegetables, grains, lean meat and fish and – perhaps most importantly – they spend most of their day walking.
Scans of 707 Tsimane found that 85 per cent had no risk of heart disease at all, with none of the hardening of the arteries that indicates problems. Even over the age of 75, two-thirds had no hardening, also known as atherosclerosis, and only 8 per cent had even FRONTIERSTRAVEL.COM a moderate risk. That compares with half of Westerners the same age.
‘‘Most Tsimane live their entire life without developing any coronary atherosclerosis – something never seen in any prior research,’’ Gregory Thomas of the Long Beach Memorial Medical Centre in California, a senior author of the paper, said.
‘‘There must be something incredible that they’re doing. Exercise is probably the biggest part of it.’’
In many ways, the Tsimane diet is similar to that recommended in Western advice to keep the heart healthy. However, they consume even less saturated fat from meat, no dairy products and fewer oils than the Mediterranean diet, which is often found to protect against heart disease.
Almost three-quarters of what they eat is carbohydrate, mainly rice, plantain and manioc they grow themselves, and wild nuts and fruits. Protein comprises 14 per cent of their diet, mainly from wild animals such as peccary, tapir, capybara and monkeys, which are much less fatty than farmed meat.
The Tsimane also spend about six hours a day hunting, gathering, fishing and farming. Only 10 per cent of their time is spent sitting down, compared with 54 percent for people in modern cities.
For people wishing to copy the Tsimane regime, Thomas advised: ‘‘I would restrict as much as possible your saturated fat, then I would double your exercise. ‘Lifelong substantial physical activity and a very low-fat diet hold the promise of preventing or delaying the blockages that cause heart attacks.’’ The Times