Long Life, Conclusion

It’s more than just healthy foods and exercise

This article is the last of a series of articles based on the book “Outliers” The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I continue to quote: “Wolf’s profession had a name for a place like Roseto – a place that lay outside of everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.”

If diet and exercise were never the reasons why the Rosetans enjoyed long life, what then was the reason? Was it living in the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania that made them live in a healthy environment? Dr. Wolf studied the records of towns near Roseto. He found out that death rates from heart disease of adults over sixty-five in neighboring towns were three times that of Roseto. Checkmate again! The secret was never diet or exercise or genes or location. Dr. Wolf and his colleagues walked around the town to figure out why.

Would you believe if I told you that the secrets of long life in Roseto are in many ways similar to the Rotary Four Way Test? Here are their secrets:

1. Relationships. Rosetans visited one another. They stop to talk to a friend in the street. They cook for one another in the backyard. They learned about extended family clans that made up Roseto’s social structure. There were houses where three generations of Rosetans still live together as a family. They give respect to the elders in the family and in the community.

2. Faith and Religion. They attend masses at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel. They saw the unifying and calming effects of the church.

3. Civic organizations. Dr. Wolf found out that there were twenty-two separate organizations in Roseto; a place, during the time that has two thousand people. The people of Roseto discouraged the flaunting of wealth and success and encouraged the unsuccessful to obscure their failures. They helped each other in their own small spheres of life.

4. Creation of a protective and powerful social structure. The Rosetans had created a world that insulated them from the pressures of the modern world. During the point in time when heart disease was linked to body function and processes, nobody thought about health in terms of community. Roseto was a closely-knit and united community.

Long life is not just exercise and good food. The author, Gladwell spoke of wisdom, “They had to look beyond the individual… They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”