Next Up: Longevity Travel

Travel trends just keep coming. We’ve seen adventure travel and sex toursim; now comes longevity travel. The Boston Globe reports that Ecuador’s Valle de Longevidad — Valley of Longevity, which has historically had an extraordinarily high percentage of people living to 100, is attracting tourists and retirees from places not known for their longevity, like Indianapolis. In 1971, one town in the valley, Vilcabamba, had a population of 819 and nine people older than 100. In
comparison, the Globe reports, the United States had three centenarians per 100,000 people. When the long-term health of Vilcabambians came onto the radar of Alexander Leaf, then a professor at Harvard and chief of medical services at Massachusetts General Hospital, he flew down to have a look. And while Leaf and most experts give some credit to a genetic component, the researcher suggested that the diet and physical activity required to live at an altitude of 5,000 feet likely played major roles in the townspeople’s longevity. Leaf estimated that most people in the town took in about 1,200 calories a day, and ate little fat and cholesterol. Americans, on the other hand, are believed to average about 3,330 calories a day.

Read more about Vilcabamba in the Boston Globe.