The World’s Healthiest Communities Eat This Way—Here’s Why
Deep in the Bolivian Amazon lives a community of roughly 16,000 people whose hearts have become one of the most studied subjects in modern cardiology. Researchers who scanned hundreds of their arteries found something no other population on record has ever matched.
The community in question has no gym memberships, no nutrition labels and no wellness industry telling them what to eat. What they do have is a diet and daily routine that looks almost nothing like modern health advice, yet appears to be working remarkably well.
None of it means abandoning modern life is realistic or even necessary. Here is what researchers found when they studied the world’s healthiest hearts, and the honest complications behind that finding.
Researchers Found The Least Clogged Arteries Ever Recorded
Cardiologists scanning 705 members of Bolivia’s Tsimane people found the lowest levels of coronary artery calcification ever recorded in a published study, put forward in The Lancet. “The average middle aged Tsimane has arteries that are about 28 years younger” than those of Westerners, cardiologist Randall Thompson said of the finding.
Coronary atherosclerosis, the hardening and narrowing of arteries that drives most heart attacks, showed up five times less often among the Tsimane than in the average American. Researchers had been tracking the same villages for well over a decade before running this specific analysis.
The Diet Looks Almost Nothing Like Modern Health Advice
Roughly two thirds of the Tsimane diet comes from starchy, whole carbohydrates like corn, rice, manioc root and plantains grown locally. The remaining third comes from hunted and gathered food, including wild game, freshwater fish, fruit and nuts, with barely 2 percent of calories coming from any purchased, packaged food.
Anthropologist Michael Gurven, who has co directed long term research on the Tsimane, has pointed to their overall dietary pattern as genuinely distinctive, built around high carbohydrate and protein intake alongside very low fat consumption. Nearly all of their waking hours are spent standing, walking or physically working, rather than sitting.
The Full Picture Is More Complicated Than One Statistic
Researchers involved in the work have been careful not to romanticize the lifestyle wholesale. Study co author Hillard Kaplan has said components of this way of life could genuinely benefit sedentary modern populations, while the study itself only shows correlation, not definitive proof of cause and effect.
The comparison is not entirely one sided either, since the most common age of death among the Tsimane sits around 70, compared to roughly 80 in most developed countries, and childhood mortality remains considerably higher. Exceptionally healthy hearts, in other words, do not automatically mean an exceptionally long life overall.
None of this means anyone needs to move to the Amazon or give up modern conveniences entirely to benefit. It does mean the two habits researchers keep circling back to, staying physically active most of the day and eating mostly unprocessed, whole carbohydrates, appear to matter more for heart health than almost anything else examined so far.
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