[virtualritz]

My bet as someone who has traveler to Sardinia often is that this is much less about meat consumption and rather more about stressors like lifestyle, quality of air, water etc.

Even if the people ate meat there at the same proportion as a modern city dweller did: no hormones, probably orders of magnitude less toxins, traces of pharmaceuticals etc.

A lifestyle that doesn't know many sources of anxiety or stress and includes daily physical activity (walking instead of driving for a start) and an air quality opposite that of any big city just remove a lot of sources of what mostly kills people that could live longer otherwise.

Heart disease, cancer, stroke and (possibly) Alzheimer's disease.

The Mediterranean diet also means you can strike diabetes off the list.

[dghughes]

I agree about your environmnet being a big factor. But I have to wonder what the skin cancer rate is in the sunny Meditteranian.

[woutersf]

Recently there was a study on here that said the sun is good for you. And its effects were underrated.it threw a shadow over big pharma because 1 in very many gets skin cancer.

[hammyhavoc]

I think how "good" prolonged exposure to direct sunlight is might vary wildly between demographics. I'm of Viking extraction (pale as a ghost). I quite literally get sunburn indoors if I'm not careful, no exaggeration. I can't see that being good in the long-term, especially when my aunt had melanoma.

Following WWII, my gruncle lived in Africa as his skin grafts wouldn't take in the British climate. He was like a patchwork quilt of grafts following his plane being shot down. Most white expats in Africa got nose cancer from the sun eventually. He moved back eventually, but had stayed out of the sun and never got nose cancer.

[foobiekr]

I am pasty white and used to burn very, very easily. Sunscreen every day, burned if I walked in the sun half an hour. When we changed our diets to vaguely keto, I stopped burning. It is super, super weird. YMMV, this is not advice, etc. I offer it only as a fellow "the sun looked at me wrong and I got burned" traveler.