How to live better, healthier and longer? Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon and CNN medical expert, travels the world to find answers to these questions. He shares his findings in a six-episode documentary series broadcast on Explora during spring break.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
Before setting foot in Norway, where he may discover the secret of happiness, Sanjay Gupta begins his quest in an unexpected place: Bolivia. He first travels to La Paz, the highest capital in the world, to explore the impact of altitude on heart health, but aims to get to the gates of the Amazon, where the population with “the healthiest hearts in the world”.
His stopover in the Bolivian capital in particular encourages him to talk about the impact on the body of an environment where oxygen is rarer, but also about the adaptation capacities of the human machine. He also sips coca tea, a drink popular in the Andes and supposed to counteract altitude sickness, while specifying that it would be illegal in the United States.
He then travels to a village in the Amazon basin where small communities live by hunting, fishing and gathering and are said to be free of heart problems. No, it is not the absence of stress that saves them. A Bolivian doctor has another surprising theory that we won’t reveal here, but which amounts to saying that societies that are too sanitized can also create health problems.
Curious, friendly, engaging
Sanjay Gupta advances in his quest like those explorers who, in other series, reveal the culinary traditions of a country or the most spectacular dwellings on the planet. He is curious, sympathetic and proves to be an engaging communicator who does not hesitate to promote the ancestral medicinal traditions that he is introduced to.
In particular, he specifies that South American healers helped fight malaria during the construction of the Panama Canal with cinchona, a shrub from which quinine was then extracted. He is just as open when, on a visit to Japan, he allows himself to be treated by a blind acupuncturist who is responsible for unblocking the energy flows stuck in his body.
The interest of the series also lies partly there: in this coexistence of traditional knowledge and scientific observations.
Sanjay Gupta takes care to make the link between these two worlds, explains how traditional cures have inspired modern medicine when this is the case or demonstrates – test in support – that it is true that a walk in the forest Lowers cortisol (hormone associated with stress).
Although he is in search of happiness and longevity, Sanjay Gupta is careful not to offer recipes for life or to emphasize miracle ingredients when talking about food. It raises questions, shows the variety of strategies or behaviors adopted in different cultures to maximize well-being, which gives leads that, sometimes, are applicable in our lives. In addition to Bolivia and Japan, the doctor and broadcaster explores India, Turkey, Italy and Norway.
Sanjay Gupta: in search of a better lifeSaturday to Thursday, 5 p.m., on Explora