The Mystery of rossetto

Rosetto Valfortore is located at the foot of Apennine Mountain. This is a small town in Foggia, Italy. It is located in the southeast of the capital Rome, about 100 miles away from Rome. The town is surrounded by a central square and has a typical medieval country style. Facing the square is Maces Palace, which was the residence of Sagis family, the big landlord of this land at that time. An arch next to it leads to Notre Dame de Camini. Climbing the narrow stone steps on the hillside, you can see rows of two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.

For hundreds of years, residents of rossetto have either worked in quarries on nearby mountains or cultivated in terraced fields at the foot of the mountain. They have to walk four or five miles down the hill to work every morning and spend the same time going home at night. Life in the village was really not easy at that time. Most people can't read, so it is difficult for them to think of any way to change their poor living conditions. Until the end of 19, the first batch of rossetto talents left their homes and found new opportunities on the other side of the ocean. The news brought a little new hope to the town.

1882 10 month, 1 person from rossetto-including 18 adult men and1children-sailed for new york, USA. When they first arrived in America, they slept on the floor of a small hotel on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. Then they went west and finally found jobs in a quarry near Bangor, Pennsylvania, which is 90 miles west of new york. The following year, 15 Americans left Italy and came to rossetto. Some of them joined their compatriots who came first and made a living in the quarry together. This group of new immigrants keep sending messages to their hometown, describing this new environment full of opportunities. So, groups of rossetto people packed their bags and went to Pennsylvania. Soon, the immigrant population gathered from a trickle into a turbulent immigration tide. In the year of 1894 alone, about 1 200 rossetto people went to the United States with passports, and their hometown of rossetto gradually became deserted.

Gradually, these immigrants from rossetto began to buy land. The road to Bangor City is rugged, and the ground is covered with traces of carriages. The land they bought is all over the rocky mountains on both sides of the road. They built two-story stone houses with slate roofs along the hillside, and these narrow streets gradually became lively. They built a church here, named the Church of Notre Dame, and named the main street where the church was located as garibaldi Avenue (garibaldi was a famous leader of the Italian unification movement). At first, people named this town "New Italy", but it was soon renamed "rossetto". Because they almost all come from the same village, the name makes immigrants feel cordial.

1896, a young and strong priest pascua de Nisco took over the church of Notre Dame. He set out to hold festivals and organize religious life in the local area. Nisco encourages residents to clean streets. He also distributed seeds and saplings for them to grow onions, soybeans, potatoes and melons in the backyard. Gradually, the town began to glow. Some villagers raise pigs, while others grow grapes to make wine. Schools, parks, monasteries and cemeteries have been built in the town. Small shops, bakeries and even restaurants and bars began to appear on both sides of garibaldi Avenue. Subsequently, more than 10 garment factories also opened one after another to engage in garment trade activities. The nearest town to rossetto is Bangor. There are a large number of Welsh and English people living around Bangor, while the towns on the other side are mainly German immigrants. At that time, the relationship between villages and towns where immigrants from these countries lived was tense, which meant that only immigrants from rossetto could live in rossetto. In the early decades of the 20th century, walking in rossetto, Pennsylvania, you will find that people here can only speak Italian, to be exact, it is the dialect of rossetto, a small town in Foggia province in southern Italy. In a word, this rossetto in Pennsylvania is a self-sufficient and little-known place. It was not until the appearance of Stuart Wolf that people gradually unveiled the mystery of the town.

Wolff is a physician who mainly studies the stomach and digestive system. He teaches at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine. He spent many summers on a farm near rossetto, Pennsylvania-of course, even so, he rarely heard of rossetto. Because rossetto is a small closed world, even neighboring towns know little about it. "About one summer in the late 1950s, we went to that place again. I was invited to speak at a local medical seminar, "Wolf said in an interview program many years later. "After the speech, a colleague invited me to dinner. During the dinner, he said to me,' You know, I have been practicing medicine here for 65,438+07 years, and I have treated patients all over the region, but I have hardly seen rossetto people under 65 come to see a heart attack.' "

Wolff was very surprised. In the 1950s, cholesterol-lowering drugs and invasive treatments to prevent heart disease did not appear. Heart disease was an epidemic in the United States at that time, and it has become the number one killer of male patients under 65. Generally speaking, doctors of that era must have come into contact with heart patients at work.

Therefore, Wolff intends to study this subject. He called some of his students and colleagues in Oklahoma to help. They collected a large number of death reports of patients in rossetto, including data of patients many years ago. They analyzed the patient's diagnosis and treatment records, and studied the medication records and the patient's family tree. "At that time, we were very busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study first, starting with the record of 196 1 year. The mayor told me:' My four sisters can come and help. You can also use the meeting room of the town Council. I said,' Then how do you have a meeting?' Then he said, "I'll try to postpone the meeting. So the ladies who came to help made lunch for us, and we divided the meeting room into small compartments, where we took blood and measured ECG. The preliminary research took four weeks, and then I chatted with some famous local people. We are going to borrow a local primary school for the summer vacation, because I want to expand the research scope to all rossetto people. "

The research results are amazing. In rossetto, no resident under the age of 55 died of heart disease, and even no patient showed symptoms of heart disease. The death rate of heart disease among men over 65 in this area is only about half that of the whole United States. In this respect, the probability of death due to various causes is also 30% to 35% lower than expected.

Wolff invited his good friend in Oklahoma, sociologist John Bruen, to assist in the investigation. "I hired students from the Department of Medicine and the Department of Sociology to go door-to-door in rossetto and conducted a questionnaire survey on all adults over 2/kloc-0." Bruen recalled. Although more than 50 years have passed, when it comes to the findings of the investigation, Bruen still can't hide his inner excitement. "No one committed suicide here, no one drank, no one took drugs, and the crime rate was very low. None of them got welfare. We didn't even find anyone with gastric ulcer. Most people who live here die of natural causes, as simple as that. "

Wolff's technical terms can be used to describe a place like rossetto, which is beyond our daily experience and conventions are no longer applicable to it. rossetto is an "outlier".

Go beyond the individual to find the reason.

At first, Wolff thought that people in rossetto kept the healthy recipes of the old days, which made them healthier than residents in other parts of the United States. But he soon discovered that this assumption was incorrect. People in rossetto prefer to use lard when cooking, instead of eating healthier olive oil as people in rossetto used to. When Italians make pizza, they put oil and salt on the thin crust and add tomatoes, anchovies or onions. People in rossetto, Pennsylvania make pizza with sausages, pepperoni, sausages, ham and eggs. Italian shortbread and Taralli cookies are usually prepared for Christmas and Easter, but in rossetto, people eat them all year round. Wolf invited a nutritionist to analyze the eating habits of typical people in rossetto, and found that 465,438+0% of local people's body calories came from the fat in their diet. Here, people have no habit of getting up early to do yoga or jogging. On the contrary, people here like smoking, and many people are obese.

Because neither diet nor exercise can solve the mystery of rossetto, it is easy for researchers to think of genetic factors. Rossetto immigrants in the United States are closely related to Italian rossetto people, so Wolff wants to know whether they have special tolerance genes to protect them from diseases. To this end, Wolff began to investigate the situation of rossetto people living in other parts of the United States to see if they were as harmless as their relatives in Pennsylvania. But it didn't turn out that way.

Therefore, Wolff began to consider the geographical location of rossetto people. Does the foothills in eastern Pennsylvania bring people health? Bangor is the nearest town to rossetto, just at the foot of the mountain. Another nearby town is Nazareth, a few miles away. These two towns are about the size of rossetto and have similar population structure. Are European immigrants engaged in heavy manual labor. However, after comparing the medical reports in three towns, Wolff found that the mortality rate of men over 65 in Bangor and Nazareth was three times that in rossetto. This clue is also broken.

Slowly, Wolff began to realize that the secret of rossetto lies not in diet, sports, heredity and geographical location, but in rossetto society itself. When Wolff and Bruen walked in this small town, they finally understood the mystery. They see how people here visit relatives and friends, how to stop and chat in Italian, and how to cook for their families in the yard. They learned how different surnames expand the family size. Many big families in it are the inheritors of the family, and the elders enjoy absolute authority in the family. Residents all attend the mass of the Holy Dress Church of Our Lady, which plays an important role in uniting society and soothing pain. In this small town with a population of less than 2000, there are actually 22 independent social groups. People here advocate the idea of equality, but the rich don't. The whole society is willing to help the losers out of trouble.

In the process of transplanting the local culture of southern Italy to the mountainous area of Pennsylvania, rossetto people established a strong social structure, which freed them from the pressure of modern society. Rossetto people are healthy because they live in a self-sufficient mountain city.

"I remember the first time I went to rossetto, I saw three generations of * * * eating, and there were many sweet little bakeries in the street. People there often walk in the street and sit on the porch and chat when they are free. Women work in garment factories and men work in quarries. " Bruen said, "This is really a harmonious picture."

You can imagine how many people questioned Bruen and Wolff when they first entered the medical seminar with this view. At that time, colleagues were using lengthy data to analyze genetic factors, or using complex charts to analyze physiological reasons. It never occurred to them to stop and chat in the street, or it was part of the family life style, which was the key to solving the mystery of rossetto. The mainstream view at that time was that longevity depends on who we are-that is, our genes, but also on the choices we make-what to eat, how long we exercise, and how much the medical system takes care of us. Before this, no one has studied human health from the perspective of "community".

The research results of Wolff and Bruen made the medical community finally realize that considering individual choices and behaviors in isolation cannot explain how people in rossetto keep healthy. This provides a brand-new way for the medical community to study heart diseases and health problems: that is, to find the reasons outside the scope of individuals-to understand people's cultural background, consider their families and friends, and trace their family origins. People must realize that the natural environment and social environment in which human beings live play an indelible role in human development.