The Sardinian Blue Zone Diet

Healthy Aging

What’s the secret to the longest-living men?

This Father’s Day, we thought it would be swell to cover the science behind how men in Sardinia, Italy live longer than anywhere else on earth.

A gorgeous place to live 100+ years.

Sardinia, Italy is called the “Island of Centenarians” because it has so many people who live at least 100 years, including an unusually high number of men. This Blue Longevity Zone island has an isolated and mountainous area that has managed to keep much of the rest of the world at bay. Most of their food comes from their land, which they foster as a community.

Why do Sardinians live longer?

Well, you have the typical must-have list for longevity: Sardinians are social. They are outdoors and laboring instead of indoors and writing blogs. They laugh a lot. As a sheep herding culture, many men walk 5 miles a day.

As shared by Caselli et al., Sardinians gain more years due to their lower rate of heart disease compared to other parts of the world.

What is the Sardinian diet?

As summarized by Wang et al., Sardinians eat very little meat, which is limited to Sundays and holidays and equates to only 5% of their diet.

Impressively, they have replaced meat with dairy. In fact, a whopping 26% of their diet consists of dairy products from their grass fed animals, especially goat’s milk and sheep cheese. A common part of their diet is their pecorino sheep cheese. Ends up, pecorino cheese from grass-fed sheep has even more C15:0 (1.4% of total fats) than butter from cows (0.8% of total fats).

According to the Blue Zone website, in addition to dairy products, 47% of the Sardinian diet consists of whole grains, as well as 12% vegetables.

A fatty acid study. Hello, C15:0.

Manca et al. compared fatty acid profiles of Sardinian people living in the High Longevity Zone (HLZ) versus a Low Longevity Zone (LLZ). Lo and behold, they showed that people in the HLZ had significantly higher C15:0 levels compared to the LLZ people.

In fact, the HLZ population had C15:0 blood levels at an amazingly high 0.64% of total fatty acids. Amazing because that is more than 3x higher than the rest of the world, which is sitting at a C15:0 level of about 0.20%.

Understanding the Sardinian diet and that our primary source of C15:0 is from dairy foods, perhaps it is not so surprising that Sardinians have such high C15:0 levels.