Our role models for how to avoid dementia may live deep in the Bolivian Amazon among members of two tribes who remain physically active into later life, eat little processed food and have low levels of obesity, smoking and alcohol consumption.
In the UK about 7 per cent of people over 65 have dementia. In the US the figure is 11 per cent. Among members of the indigenous Tsimane and Moseten tribes in Bolivia it is 1 per cent, one of the lowest rates ever found.
Researchers have put this down to their “pre-industrial subsistence lifestyle”, noting that the 17,000 members of the Tsimane group “remain physically very active throughout their lifespans as they fish, hunt and farm with hand tools and gather food from