When I was very young, my stepfather started a trucking company. We didn’t get along terribly well so my mom thought that driving together would solve our problems. We would hotshot recreational vehicles two to a flatbed and haul them from an Amish community east of Chicago to their dealer destination.
So, we got to know some people in the community and learned some things that would be relevant to this. One big one is the Amish view on technology. With 1965 data, especially looking at farmers, you’ll see variations in pest control tech. Amish people are not against all technology but they evaluate it differently.
For the Amish, they look at a technology and ask whether it will pull them together or push them apart. Farm chemicals would increase yields, but dramatically reduce the number of people they could have working on fields. So many colonies avoided highly toxic chemicals like DDT that were released during or after WW2. And because there was some resistance to Amish people, they tend to congregate together and so you’ll have colonies bunched up in areas - some colonies avoided water table contamination through a freak of geology and cousins who shared a belief on technology.
So nutrition does play a role - food in Amish communities is very whole and very close to natural. As an example, my stepfather was quite affable and so we’d take doughnuts to the factory where we picked up RVs. Certain companies have so much sugar in their doughnuts that it felt like giving people drugs. Physical activity is a constant. And their community plays a massive role in life and life expectancy but this data is from 1965 and looks at farmers so chemical use is definitely part of these findings as well.
