http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,465868,00.html

This is an interesting story. For any of you who have never visited an old order Amish community, one exists just north of Lawerenceburg TN. about 25 miles north of the Alabama border on highway 43. It's like time travel. You can tell immediately when you're in the Amish community because of the lack of power lines. The Amish don't use modern things like electricity, telephones, televisions or computers. They also don't drive cars. You can see them in their horse drawn buggies, sometimes several miles away from the community.
They all dress alike. All the men wear blue coveralls for work with big straw hats. All men have beards but no mustaches. The women dress in full length dresses with bonnets. The Amish are not uninviting and cetainly not hostile but they are not "friendly" by most standards. Their personalities are usually flat and they are very straight forward, not much sense of humor.
They are very peaceful and are pacifists as required by their religion. They farm, do a lot of woodworking and sell their crafts and produce. I thought the story was interesting because the Amish don't worry if anything is "low fat". They raise cows and pigs and eat the meat. They make their own butter and drink unpasturized milk from their cows. Drinking alcohol is forbidden but some of them do smoke. Not ready rolled cigarettes though. I've seen them smoking some very rough looking sticks that they rolled themselves.

I've seen that before but it's always great to see it again LOL.

When they were talking of this story on the news this morning (can't remember the station), they were explaining how great it was to study the Amish for genetic coding. They are a relatively small group that tend to marry within their community.

So one of the anchors asked..."Are you saying to stay slim we need to marry our cousins?".... 

I thought that was funny 

Come to think of it, yeah I've never seen an obese Amish person. Sad to say that cousin breeding is pretty evident though.

I'd wager that's because they work.
They manually grow all that food in fields they've plowed the old-school way.
They manually raise those animals without modern conveniences (read: hormones, etc).
And they don't sit around on their asses 

I read something a long time ago about Amish medical studies.  If I remember right, there is a lot of diabetes, maybe just in one particular group, which has been studied extensively.

It's very interesting.

I still laugh at these two articles my aunt sent me from the paper in Fort Wayne, Indiana... they had a problem with the Amish youth renting storage buildings in the city wherein they stored automobiles. They'd ride to town in their buggies, swap out at the storage unit, and have a night out on the town. Then, there was the article she sent about two Amish teenagers arrested for drag racing in their buggies...

If you're ever up that way, though - there are a few pretty neat Amish communities. One even has a shop where they sell all sorts of tools, clothing, housewares, and garden goodies.