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New book pushes the advantages of living in Okinawa

Get healthy. Live longer. Go Okinawan.

This is the message of a new book that examines the lifestyles of Japan's southern island prefecture Okinawa and attempts to explain how Okinawans have attained one of the world's highest life expectancy rates.

The Okinawa Program is written by a set of American twins and a Japanese professor who based their research on a 25-year study of the centenarians of Okinawa as well as examining the dietary, physical and psychological factors that have given Okinawa the world's highest concentration of people older than 100.

"Okinawans may not live forever, but they are able to stack the odds in favor of lifelong health," the health professionals said in the book.

The authors, Bradley Willcox, a geriatrics fellow at Harvard Medical School, his twin brother Craig Willcox, a PhD in medical anthropology, and Makoto Suzuki, professor emeritus at Okinawa's Ryukyu University medical school, said Okinawans' low-calorie, plant-based diet high in unrefined carbohydrates affords protection against most diseases associated with aging.

Regular exercise, psychological resiliency and the local form of spirituality help contribute to the high life expectancy rates in Okinawa, they said.

"Heart disease is minimal, breast cancer so rare that screening mammography is not needed, and most aging men have never heard of prostate cancer," they said, adding that Okinawans are able to spend more of their lives free of disabilities than people in other industrialized nations.

Okinawan women live about four years longer than women in France, five years longer than Italian women, 5-1/2 years longer than Germans, six years longer than Britons and Americans, and 13 years longer than Russians.
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