Longevity Secrets (And Controversies) From The Blue Zones | Dan Buettner

28:28Dan Buettner:In other words, if we hang out with people who smoke or drink too much or sit around and watch TV and eat chips and drink Pepsi, we're more likely to adopt their behaviors. and the contagions that circulate through the Adventist community tend to be positive. You know, they get together and they walk and they have plant-based potlucks and they reinforce each other's spiritual growth, etc. So you have this self-propagating environment that helps keep them doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things. And manifestly, they're living somewhere between 7 and 11 years longer than their California counterparts.

29:14Dan Buettner:And they both live next to the San Bernardino Freeway. So it's astounding what this population is achieving. Another thing I hear in there, and you mentioned this when we were going through the Power Nine, and it's really come through in many of your utterances thus far, is social connection. And I mean, I've got this riff on this that some listeners to the show might be tired of hearing me go on, but I'm going to go on it again just because I want to get your reaction to it. But, you know, we live in an era of optimization. Everybody's striving for ketosis, tracking their sleep, counting their steps, counting their calories, subscribing to intense workouts, trying to achieve streaks on their meditation app, etc., etc.

30:05This is we are we're trying to pull every lever possible to be as healthy as possible. But the it appears from your work and from the work of Robert Waldinger over at Harvard, who's done this longitudinal study for many, many decades on many generations, that the most important thing to control for, to optimize for. Is the quality of your relationships. And yet very few people are talking about that on Instagram. And so that's my rant. What do you think of that?

30:36Dan Buettner:Well, I'm good friends with Robert. And I guess the three of us violently agree on that. The reason you don't see it on Instagram is because it's very hard for marketers to make money at it. And the things that tend to ripple through the internet and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok are supplements and superfoods, all of which have anti-aging stratagems and nostrums. All those have enormous profit margins. You can't make any money off of you going out and making a friend and walking with them every day. But my answer is actually more expansive. And this sort of gets to the central premise of Blue Zones.

31:22Dan Buettner:People who are manifestly living on... Now, we're talking of five disparate populations on five corners of the world, all of whom are living about eight years on average longer than Americans, a fifth the rate of cardiovascular disease, a sixth the rate of type 2 diabetes, half the rate or less of dementia, none of them are tracking their steps or taking superfoods or running down to Costa Rica for stem cells or any of this other poppycock that the internet sells us for living longer. In fact, further, they don't try to live longer. They don't proactively pursue health or longevity, which I think is the most important insight that is so under celebrated or under acknowledged.

32:15Dan Buettner:That trying to pursue health, whether it's through diets or exercise programs, gym memberships, you know, You start with 100 people who get a gym membership today. In one year, you lose 80%, actually more than 80 % of them. Diets. You start with 100 people today. Within nine months, you lose 90 % of them. They're great business models, but they're horrible at delivering any meaningful outcomes. In blue zones, people live a long time not because they pursue health. it's because it ensues they live a long time because they live in an environment where in their unconscious decisions are slightly better all day long as a result of their surroundings and if we want to see a healthier america and as your listeners if they want to live longer lose weight get more exercise eat better they'll get a far better return on their effort time and money by shaping their environment than they ever will by buying a gadget or thinking they're going to change their behavior for long enough to make any difference.

33:27Dan Buettner:They won't. Or maybe single digit percentages will. People with the inhuman discipline or presence of mind. But that's almost none of us over the long run. And I defy people. Everybody I talk, I defy them to show me one behavioral change strategy that lasts for more than two years. for more than 5 % of the people who get on it. I've never seen it. So what's the answer then? You need to be embedded in communities where these healthy practices are normalized? That's the easiest way. And it's not as hard as you think. There is, in Minneapolis where I was born, there's neighborhoods where there's a 13-year life expectancy difference.

34:17Dan Buettner:in neighborhoods that are less than three miles apart. And you look at the neighborhood where people are living a long time, there are parks, there are sidewalks, streets are walkable, there are bike lanes, there's easy access to fruits and vegetables, easy access to recreation, the air is cleaner, and quite honestly, there's lower crime rate. So you can move within your city, you can move within your country. Life expectancy in places like Boulder, Colorado is about 20 years higher than in places in Kentucky. So you live in Kentucky, you're way less likely to walk places. You're more likely to be confronted by fast food restaurants and junk food and live in an obesogenic environment as opposed to Boulder where you're never more than a few steps from a nature walk and healthy food abounds.

35:12Dan Buettner:I know people say, well, I can't afford to live in Boulder. That may be true. But the other point, and I wrote a whole book on this, it's called The Blue Zone Challenge, where I aggregated about 40 different evidence-based things you can do to your home, your kitchen, your bedroom, your social circle, your commute, and your workplace that will permanently set up nudges or defaults. So you'll unconsciously move more, eat better, sleep better, socialize more, and no one live your purpose. And those are the exact same characteristics in place in blue zones. Almost all of them are portable. But it requires you to shift away from the anti-aging hoax to paying attention to environments that or the strategies we know add years to your life expectancy.

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37:40Can you give me just a few examples, give us a few examples of these, I think you said, 40 little changes we can make around our homes and social circles to get us closer to the blue zone effect?

37:56Dan Buettner:So I'll remind you that this is a sum of lots of little things. In blue zones, there's no one big thing. So you may say, well, that didn't sound very big. But removing the toaster from your counter. Cornell Food Lab showed that if you have a toaster on your counter, after two years you weigh about six pounds more than the study group who removes their toaster. Establishing a junk food drawer where you put your junk food either down low or way up high or around the corner in the pantry. Most of us are on what I call a seafood diet. it we eat the food we see so if you have a bag of chips with a clip on your counter you're way more likely to eat that than you will if you have a fruit bowl we know that if your three best friends are obese or overweight there's 150 better chance that you'll be overweight so changing your social environment by proactively adding people whose idea of recreation is walking or playing pickleball who care about you on a bad day, who challenge your mind, who it's not a bad idea to have a vegan or vegetarian in your immediate social circle because they're going to show you where and how to eat more whole food plant-based as opposed to your friends who's beef obsessed.

39:21Dan Buettner:One time learning how to take the bus to work as opposed to driving all the time. So having a, what you have to do it once, but automatically buying a bus pass for the next six months. Having shoes, buying a comfortable pair of tennis shoes and parking them right next to your door so you're reminded to walk. Buying a high quality bicycle that's comfortable for you. We know, by the way, that just taking a public transportation to work lowers your chances of dying from cardiovascular disease by about 19%. So I say that's changing your commute environment. So these are a few examples. Because driving is just so stressful, being in traffic?

40:10Dan Buettner:Well, you know Daniel Kahneman's research that on a day-to-day basis, the activity we hate most is driving. the one that causes the done happiness. But also, so you get the stress from driving, but because you're driving, you're therefore not walking. Gallup also came up with a recent study that showed that the number of people you wave to every day is highly correlated with your overall happiness and health. Very hard to wave to people when you get in your car, in your attached garage, drive downtown to an underground garage and take the elevator to your office. So it's both the opportunity cost and the activity itself that are creating lower life expectancy.

41:00Dan Buettner:You know, in blue zones, nobody exercises. There's no CrossFit. There's no yoga class, no Pilates class. Nobody's running. There's no blue zone marathon. But they live in communities where every time they go to work, a friend's house, or out to eat, it occasions a walk they're taking about 8 000 steps a day without even thinking about it just getting around they have gardens out back usually three to four two to three seasons a year so they're out there bending and lifting and low intensity physical activity they have their houses aren't full mechanical conveniences to do their own work knead bread by hand and grind corn tortillas by hand and what we don't realize in sort of this exercise obsessed culture we live in that it's far better for our bodies to move every 20 minutes than it is to sit in our chairs all day long whether it's in our office in our homes and then expect to make it up 45 minutes of the gym that's not how we evolved if you're moving every 20 minutes or so like people do in the blue zones, you're keeping your metabolism higher and you're burning considerably more calories than you would trying to do it all in one 45 minute burst at the end of the day.

42:22Dan Buettner:Yeah, this just all goes to support the notion that you're way better off living in an environment that nudges you unconsciously than to try to consciously pursue it, as is the case with exercise. Just curious, do you exercise or do you just try to move every 20 minutes or both? Well, I live in Miami Beach here, the very southern tip, and I'm looking at the ocean in which I can't wait to go jump in and swim at the end of the day. I have 20 restaurants very nearby, Whole Foods that I bike to. I do most of my calls walking around. So I live in an environment, a neighborhood that's very easy for me to get healthy food, to recreate, to get physical activity and to walk.

43:09Dan Buettner:But I happen to also love, you know, exercise in the more traditional modality. And I usually get out and do something every day. So it's a yes and. You're not sitting, you're not sedentary 23 hours and 15 minutes and then 45 minutes of working out. You do some working out, but your life is designed to move naturally. Correct. And I don't exercise in the way most people exercise. It is not, I'm not competitive. I'm not, it's not in my outlook. It's not a chore as part of my day. I really make it a rule for myself. Two rules. One, I'm going to do something every day. But the second part of it is that I enjoy.

44:00Dan Buettner:Today, it might be swimming. It might be a fat, tired bike. I go pedal in the sand. I have a bunch of friends who play pickleball or padel. Maybe it's to go out with them. I do go to a gym, but it's very social. And I go down there and I listen to my favorite podcast, 10 % Happier, and lift weights and stretch a little bit. And it's a joy. You know, it's not a chore. The minute it becomes a chore, people stop doing it. And again, when it comes to longevity, unless you're doing it close to daily for a lifetime, it's probably not making a difference in how long you're going to live over the long run.

44:42Let me go back to something small. This was at the beginning of your list of little nudges and hacks that you can do around your house to make it more conducive to longevity. You said something about ditching the toaster, and maybe I'm being obtuse, but I didn't quite understand why having a toaster could have deleterious effects.

45:00Dan Buettner:Because there's almost nothing that comes out of a toaster that's good for us. Most of the breads and the Pop-Tarts and the bagels, it's not good. It provides a prompt. We walk through our kitchen a dozen times a day. You don't remember you're hungry until you see the toaster and say, oh, toaster. You go into our pantry and we find that raisin cinnamon bread or white bread that we're going to put butter and jam on, whatever it is, Pop-Tarts, and we pop it in our toaster. Again, it's what we see. As opposed to having a high-quality fruit bowl. He's walking to get his fruit bowl. Now he's returning with said fruit bowl.

45:45That looks like a still life.

45:48Dan Buettner:Well, it's avocados and tangerines and limes and lemons. And, you know, that's what I see. So when I'm hungry, I'm way more likely to pick this up than, you know, put something in a toaster. Then we'll put butter on or or the worst thing is chips. Those chip clips. Those are the worst. The Cornell Food Lab has done a study in that. I can't quote you right now what the results were. But I remember seeing a study that those are the the the worst source of eating junky food in your home. the other little hack is you know i like to treat myself like everybody else does with ice cream and sweets and sort of i just don't bring them in my house so then when i'm here i'm not even tempted by it because i can't get at it but i go out and i like to treat myself i think it's i think it's wrong-minded to restrict yourself because if you're restricting yourself you're eventually going to fail so dan if you bring invite me over to your house and you've served me chocolate cake and ice cream, I'll eat it.

46:57Dan Buettner:But you won't find it in my house. If and when you come to my house, I will definitely serve you cake and ice cream. I'm a fan of both. Well, I'm expecting an invitation, Dan. You know, given your first name. Let's keep going through some of these blue zones just so we can get some more flavor of the locales. Another one, and I'm probably going to make a mincemeat of this name, but it's an island in Greece, Ikaria. Ikaria. What do we need to know about Ikaria? It is a, once again, isolated island of 10 ,000 people, largely overlooked by Western civilization, live about eight years longer than us, but about one-tenth the dementia we suffer in the United States.

47:41Dan Buettner:We don't know why, but along with living a long time, they're staying sharp to the very end. Now, a few things that are interesting. Number one, it's very hard to find more than 100 yards of flat terrain there, except for the airport. And just like Sardinia, where we found that the steeper the village, the higher the life expectancy. First of all, they eat the strictest version of the Mediterranean diet in the world. And they also include in their diet liberal use of herbs, specifically rosemary, sage, oregano, and kind of a mint, catnip they call it. And these herbs are used not only for medicinal purposes and to flavor food, but as teas, largely because they weren't importing coffee, but they liked warm beverages.

48:31Dan Buettner:So they just go into the fields or their backyard and they take these herbs, which grow like weeds, and they make infusions from them. But all of these herbs are anti-inflammatory. They're oxidant. They're diuretics, which lower blood pressure. So one theory is one of the possible contributors to longevity. They have lower blood pressure for a long time. So fewer heart attacks and less vascular dementia. Let's keep going through the two others, and then I have a million other questions for you. Nicoya Costa Rica to what stuck out to me is and you may have other things you want to say about Nicoya but is this notion of purpose they have this concept in Nicoya of plan de vida which is like a life plan I guess in all blue zones there's vocabulary for purpose and Okinawa it's Ikigai.

49:35Dan Buettner:And believe it or not, people who can articulate their sense of purpose live about eight years longer than people who are rudderless. A lot of it in Nikoya comes from their religion. About 95 % of them are Catholic. They're very family oriented. So if you ask most of them what their plan de vida almost always involves the Lord and family. And for as cliched or trite as that may sound, it actually does work. What's the mechanism? When you're clearing your sense of purpose, day-to-day decisions are easier. It forms sort of ballast and hard times. You're not dealing with the existential stress of, you know, what am I doing on this planet?

50:22Dan Buettner:Where's my self-worth? Where's my value? It's a very useful way to make life less stressful. You know, I know you've made a lot that your study of the Blue Zones has had an impact on how you live your life. Do you have an articulation of your purpose that has been useful to you? Yes. My purpose is going out into the world, researching traditional peoples, learning their wisdom and translating their wisdom to my audiences, I guess, in my writing. I've done that 40 years ago. My first quote-unquote job after college was biking from Alaska to Argentina. And I biked around the world. Then I biked across Africa.

51:16Dan Buettner:And in a more superficial way, I wrote books and I wrote for Outside Magazine and Chicago Tribune. And then I did a series of these expeditions that solved mysteries. And it never really occurred to me. They started out as kind of facile. why did the Maya civilization collapse? But ultimately, the best answers came from talking to the contemporary people who are still living there today. And I was more and more intrigued with how their quality of life was greater than ours, even though they're not necessarily as rich. They lived richer lives. And Blue Zones is the summation of that. And my book's Blue Zones of Happiness also sought to even delve delve into that notion even deeper.

52:04It reminds me of, I think it was Benjamin Franklin who observed that there were so many white people running away and joining indigenous tribes, but never the opposite or rarely the opposite.

52:21Dan Buettner:I believe it. A lot of these people go to these blue zones and never come back, especially in Costa Rica because once you start living there yeah maybe you're not living as in as big of a house or shopping at Costco or driving a fancy car but the quality of life it's an important aspect I mean you're familiar with the like Gallup's life satisfaction data when you look at these blue zones they're all in the top quintile that of the happiest places in the world. In fact, Costa Rica, which is near the top in positive affect, is also a blue zone. You know, we spend about$83 billion a year on anti-aging.

53:07Dan Buettner:None of it's been proven to stop slower reverse aging in humans. And even if it does work, it would probably just prolong a crappy life. Meanwhile, in blue zones, they're living a long time because they're growing their own food and they live close to nature and they walk to their friend's house and they eat with their families and they go to church or temple on Sundays or they slow down. They know their purpose and their path for an extra eight to 10 years is joyous. And that's the real value proposition. Staying on the subject of purpose, and this will get us to the fifth blue zone. You mentioned in the context of Okinawa, the Japanese island, this notion of ikigai.

54:00What is that?

54:02Dan Buettner:It's basically purpose, but it always has a altruistic dimension to it. In other words, it's not just pursuing your hobby. it's pursuing something because it benefits somebody else, either the community or a younger generation or a family. So it's sort of a purpose on steroids. Maybe you would call this a kind of enlightened self-interest. Well, I suppose. I don't know if they think of it as self-interest, though. I think they think of it as they're doing their duty to their family or their community. But I guess to the extent that doing your duty makes us feel good, it would be self-induced. Yes, it's a slippery concept, but it reminds me of the Dalai Lama's idea of wise selfishness.

54:56Everybody's selfish, he says, but if you want to do selfishness correctly, you should live an altruistic and compassionate life because that is what will make you feel the best.

55:07Dan Buettner:That's beautiful. Okay. So Okinawa, I have not watched this video myself, but my staff told me about it, that there was a recent video, I believe, posted by you saying that maybe Okinawa had been disqualified as a blue zone. What's happening there? Well, since I started studying the place 25 years ago, 1999, they were producing the longest of human beings in the history of the world. But now, thanks largely to the American military base, it attracted a forest of fast food restaurants, McDonald's, KFC's, Pizza Hut's, A &W, and also a snarl of highways. and now okinawa has among the highest obesity rates the highest type 2 diabetes rates the highest smoking rates and it's the least healthy of japan's prefectures so it is in one generation they've lost their blue zone standing you can still see vestiges of it if you go to the villages and the smaller islands.

56:18Dan Buettner:Okinawa is 151 islands. It's not just one island. So some of the smaller islands are still blue zone-ish. And in the north, the Motobu Peninsula and places like Ogimi, you still see, it's still blue zones. But most of the 1.6 million people on Okinawa are among Japan's least healthy people. And that's a tragedy. Are you seeing similar threats to the other blue zones or because many of them are isolated, are they safe? They're only isolated to an extent and they're all disappearing. They'll all be gone in a generation, I think. I mean, I was just in Nikoya about three weeks ago and there's a city of Nikoya as well as a peninsula.

57:09Dan Buettner:And as you enter the city of Nicoya, you see a McDonald's, a Burger King, and a KFC. And that is the beginning of the end. Obesity is on the rise. You have two diabetes on the rise in all of these blue zones. A little bit more protected at Icaria. The young people there really do honor older people and older traditions. and the younger generations are bringing back these and preserving these traditions of gardening and the panagliari, their social gatherings and so forth. But I'm afraid Blue Zone will be a thing of the past in the very near future. So the bad news is, as you just said, Blue Zones may be a thing of the past.

57:56I guess the good news is we can still take the lessons from the traditional lifestyles and apply them to our own life.

58:05Dan Buettner:That's right. We captured the blueprint. My daytime job, I've worked with 72 cities in America, and we get paid by insurance companies or hospital systems to lower the obesity rate and the chronic disease loads of entire cities, thereby raising their life expectancy. And it actually works. And it works not by trying to convince a million people to change their behavior, but it works because we change people's environments. So the healthy choice is the easy choice or the unavoidable choice. And therein, Blue Zones will survive. And I also had a Netflix series called Live to 100, Secrets of the Blue Zones.

58:48Dan Buettner:And in the fourth episode of that, I announced the Blue Zone 2.0, Singapore, where in one lifetime, life expectancy has jumped by over 20 years. and now they currently have the longest health adjustment life expectancy in the world. In other words, they live more years in full health than any place else in the world. And that is a wholly manufactured blue zone. It's the result of a leadership that has proactively aggregated policies that favor human health and well-being and they have manifestly produced healthier people. I further prove for the central premise that if you create an environment where humans can thrive, you see it in their life expectancy and their happiness.

59:36Dan Buettner:And, you know, if you rely on diets and exercise programs and a bloated health care system like we do in the United States, we get very expensive ill health. I want to go back to the Powered Nine. These are the lifestyle habits of the world's healthiest and longest lived people. You ran through, you kind of did a drive-by of them, and then when we were talking about the specific Blue Zones, you said a lot about many of these, but I'm just going to read them quickly to the audience and then pick a few where I feel more could be said. So first, move naturally. We've talked about that, that the world's longest-lived people aren't necessarily going to the gym.

1:00:19They just live in environments that encourage them to move without thinking about it. Two, purpose. We've talked about that. Three, downshift. Might be worth stopping on this for a second. I know we've touched on it a little bit, but it seems like life in a blue zone has built into it breaks that many of us in our headlong effort to check things off our to-do list do not have in our lives. So what more would you say about that?

1:00:53Dan Buettner:I would say our grandparents knew it. You know, I'm not a religious person, but prayer is a pretty good strategy to slow down and take the focus off of whatever you're busy with onto something else. Taking a nap. You see it throughout the Mediterranean area in Europe. People taking a siesta. You see it in Latin America as well. But we know people who take a nap, their lower cortisol levels. I saw one study that showed the chance of cardiovascular disease is about 30 % lower in people who nap than people who don't nap. Ancestor veneration or taking a moment to remember that you're not just a point in time, but part of a continuum, as we see in Okinawa.

1:01:40Dan Buettner:In Sardinia, it's almost all, you know, we call it happy hour, but at the end of a day's work, there's always the reward where you're going to walk down to the town square, the town tavern and see your friends, have an hour of conviviality, maybe a glass or two of wine. these are the things that that not only bring joy to life but they actually lower cortisol levels they lower stress levels and they we know that inflammation is that root of every major age related disease and if you're muscling through your day you're working nine hours a day you drive home, hour-long commute, it's a stressful commute.

1:02:25Dan Buettner:You get home, your kids are screaming or kids are hungry. You got to bring dinner together quickly. You go to bed late and tired. You wake up tired. Sure, that might be a recipe for making more money, but in Blue Zone, that whole process is slowed down without the hormones and could very well explain much of their seven-day, eight-year life expectancy gain. Thanks for that. Number four on the list is the 80 % rule, which I also think bears some explication from you. It has to do with not overeating. Can you explain it? So it's riffing off of a Confucian adage, harahachibu, which means roughly stop eating when your stomach is 80 % full.

1:03:13Dan Buettner:And in Okinawa, you'll still see people before a meal, instead of saying grace, they'll say how to Hachibu. So I expanded it a little bit to evidence-based strategies to keep from overeating. And a few things we know work, taking screens, TV screens out of the kitchen, eating with family, saying some prayer or some gratitude before a meal to put some punctuation between your busy life and your meal time, front-loading your calories at the beginning of the day and eating a light dinner and then not eating for 14 hours. These are all strategies to keep from overeating. This runs right in opposition to where we've been marketed for most of our lives, this idea that we need more nutrients.

1:04:09Dan Buettner:Every power bar and every vitamin-fortified cereal and vitamin D-fortified milk, we've been told for decades that the path to health is through these additive minerals and vitamins and nutrients. But actually, in Blue Zones, it's about taking calories out of the meal, not adding new things to it. I love that. Number five on the list is plant slant. We've covered that, that many of these people are not eating too much meat. Number six is wine at five, which you also talked about that folks are drinking alcohol moderately and regularly. How do you square that with, and I know you referenced this earlier, the more recent data that suggests that alcohol is basically poison at any dose?

1:05:07Dan Buettner:First of all, I know it's not mutually exclusive with living a long, healthy life because these people are manifestly living eight or 10 years longer and they're drinking every day. And obviously you can't draw a causal relation, but you can. And maybe if they didn't drink at all, they live two or three more years or maybe not. But I think these studies miss the healthy byproducts of drinking. Coming together around a glass of wine is part of a daily ritual that socializes people and sheds stress. It's the fuel for these parties, these panelleres, which ultimately are fundraisers for the village and cement social bonds.

1:05:59Also, the type of alcohol they drink in Blue Zones.

1:06:04Dan Buettner:You know, these studies are done with alcohol. Well, when you drink a blue zone, a Connell, for example, in Sardinia, that has the highest levels of polyphenols of any other wine in the world. One of those polyphenols is known to reduce inflammation of the endothelia, the lining of the arteries. So when you're drinking that every day, as opposed to a margarita or a beer, biochemically, the results could be hugely different. so all i know is people in the blue zones live a long time and they drink a little bit every day and they enjoy it the final three three entries in the power nine all are about social connection number seven is belong and that's about uh the data that seems to suggest that belonging to a faith-based community and no matter what the denomination has longevity implications eight Eight is loved ones first.

1:07:00People putting their families first, which we've talked about. And nine is having the right tribe, being in a tight-knit social circle that lasts for quite a while. Anything more worth saying about this portion of the list, or do you think we've covered it?

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1:09:26That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash happier, code happier at checkout. out. There was a recent study that suggested that the number of centenarians in blue zones is factually inaccurate, in part because of errors in record keeping or because some people are claiming to be older than they are in order to get their pensions earlier. So it so this data has been warped in some way. What's your pushback on that?

1:09:57Dan Buettner:You're probably referring to a plant scientist by the name of Saul Newman, who wrote one paper, which actually wasn't accepted by an academic journal. He brought up errors in recording areas in non-blue zone area, other parts of Japan, not in blue zones. I work for National Geographic. The record, the fact checkers occupy the corner offices. We hired the, or we collaborate with the top demographers in the world to carefully check ages in each one of the blue zones. And in every case, we were able to find birth records and death records and do the math between the two. So summation, this guy, Saul Newman, is criticizing the Blue Zones methodology, but you're saying the methodology is sound.

1:10:56Dan Buettner:Yeah, he's finding places that aren't Blue Zones, and he's leveling criticisms that may be true elsewhere, but they're not true in Blue Zones, at least in record-keeping accuracy. he also correctly you know as an effort to undermine blue zones works he cites okinawa's high rates of obesity but what he doesn't do is go back 25 years when i started my work to discover that actually then it was the highest they're producing the longest lived people in the world and it has deteriorated in the last 25 years nothing i can do about that something i readily acknowledged in my writings and in Netflix, but it no way undermines the fact that they did live a long time and that there were a set of attending characteristics that went along with that longevity.

1:11:51Let's talk about the diet. There have been some folks who've said that the Blue Zone diet is based less on solid science and more on speculation. How solid, in your view, is the science of the Blue Zone diet.

1:12:06Dan Buettner:So the criticisms are usually from the carnivore crowd who go to Sardinia or Okinawa today and they look at what people are eating today and they correctly see that people are eating a lot of meat. My work, however, and I wrote about it in the New York Times, Sunday magazine article, The Island Where People Get to Die, and also the book called The Blue Zone Solution, which was a two-time New York Times bestseller. For that, we did a meta-analysis of 155 dietary studies, dietary surveys that were, if you want to know what, as I said before, what a centenarian ate, you have to look not what they're eating today, but they were eating throughout their lives.

1:12:49Dan Buettner:And the closest we could approximate that was pulling dietary surveys and doing a meta-analysis, which essentially is an averaging. And is it 100 % accurate? No, but it's the best available. And it's very clear that in all of these places, these were poor areas. There weren't any McDonald's. People didn't have enough money to be able to eat meat more than about once a week. There were no processed foods. So to assert that somehow I've made this up is just foolishness. What, did they somehow import burgers from the mail or something like that? They just weren't around to eat. What was around was peasant foods, beans and grains and sweet potatoes and tubers and vegetables they could get in their gardens and greens that were available.

1:13:45Dan Buettner:Yes, they did have a family pig, which they butchered once a year. They might have had a few goats. There weren't cows in blue zones except for the Nicoya Peninsula, So I stand by my work. And have there been any longitudinal studies on people on the blue zone diet as you prescribe it? I don't prescribe anything. I simply say, here's what the longest lived people have eaten over their lifetime. You can do what you want. And what about the fact that the diets are often hyper localized? You know, there's raw honey and grease, the sourdough bread that you mentioned in Sardinia, squash in Costa Rica.

1:14:24Can the recommendations be translated to Des Moines and Dubuque?

1:14:30Dan Buettner:I don't see why not. I mean, all of the products eaten in Blue Zones are available in Des Moines. You may not have the exact same honey, but anybody with an Amazon account can get Icarina honey delivered to their house. If you want to mimic the way people in any one of the five Blue Zones eat, you can very easily do it in the United States for much cheaper, by the way, than it, than you would spend eating steaks and, and, uh, having customized meals delivered via Amazon. One last critique I want to run by you has to do with the blue zone checklist that you talked about before the, the 40 or so tweaks that we can put into our environment to, to get our lives closer to the way life is lived in the blue zones.

1:15:23And this is a quote from one paper that looked at the checklists. It said that the checklists assume that an individual lives in an environment that allows pets, has space for a garden, has a garage and a separate space for an exercise area. The implication being that the checklist is, you know, not universally accessible to people who don't have a bunch of dough. Is that a fair? Is that a fair critique?

1:15:46Dan Buettner:I didn't know that study existed. and I'm kind of flattered that somebody would take the time to critique it. There's about 40 things, and it's a multiple choice. The more that you can check off, the bigger impact it would have. But, I mean, if you have a kitchen, most of what I suggest you do to your kitchen is easily implementable. The most powerful part of that checklist, I would argue, is optimizing or curating your immediate social circle. which anybody can do no matter how rich or poor to a certain extent, I guess. So, yeah, not everybody can do everything on that list. But if you get half of a man, I would bet that your weight drops and your life expectancy goes up.

1:16:36It's very super interesting to to talk about this with you. Are there things you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to?

1:16:45Dan Buettner:No, I think we covered it pretty well. Yeah, we covered it well. I've been at this for 20 years, and the central premise of Blue Zones, if you want to live longer, don't try to change your environment. Don't try to change your behavior, change your environment. I think that's the most important takeaway. I guess a couple interesting things. There's an association between eating beans and higher life expectancy. People eat a cup of beans a day, live about four years longer than people who get their protein from less healthy sources. A handful of nuts a day is associated with about two extra years of life expectancy.

1:17:24Dan Buettner:People are interested in easy longevity hacks, and those are two of them. And I've written six books on Blue Zones. Four of them are New York Times bestsellers, and I'm proud of them. And if people have any other questions, I'm at Dan Butner on Instagram and I answer all my questions, all my direct messages personally. That's very cool. You're making me sheepish about the fact that I don't answer. I answer a fraction of mine. And I suspect I get a fraction of yours. Let me just go back to beans for a second, because I was a vegan for five years. Now I'm mostly plant based, but I do eat some animal products.

1:18:04And one of the reasons was I just could never build up a tolerance for beans, even with taking Beano and whatever. I just it made me very unpleasant to be around for reasons that I'm assuming you can put together. Any thoughts on that?

1:18:20Dan Buettner:OK, there are outliers and you might be one of the outliers that would just never be able to metabolize beans very well. But your gut has about 100 trillion bacteria in it. Most of them, bacteria are almost 100 % responsible for extracting energy out of our plant food. Out of those 100 million bacteria, most of them depend on their survival fiber or plant-based material. There's no fiber in meat. If you feed your gut meat and cheese and eggs, the bad bacteria start to proliferate. Whereas if you feed it high fiber food like beans, the good bacteria proliferate. So the good bacteria are the ones that take fiber and they convert it into short chain fatty acids, which make their way into our bloodstream, and they provide energy for our cells.

1:19:24Dan Buettner:They lower inflammation. They fine-tune our immune system. They're the precursor to a lot of the feel-good hormones. If you're not eating fiber, you're not getting that. To your question about beans, often if people start with just a tablespoon or two of beans and work up to a cup gradually over two or three weeks, they sort of prune their bacterial gardens such that they can handle the beans as opposed to starting today with a cup of beans it might be too much for people who aren't used to eating these high fiber diets. I like the sound of that start small. Dan just you mentioned your six books can you just remind us of the names of some of them any that come to mind and also remind us again of the name of your Netflix show, which was, was, and is super popular.

1:20:16Dan Buettner:Thank you. Blue Zones, nine lessons from the world's longest lived people, the Blue Zone solution, Blue Zone Kitchen, which was a cookbook. It was the number one New York Times bestseller, Blue Zones of happiness. And, um, the Netflix show is lived in 100 secrets of the Blue Zones. and then in all Whole Foods, I have Blue Zone Kitchen frozen meals, which are formulated for longevity with a maniacal focus on deliciousness. So I'm starting to create a retail environment of healthy eating as well. Dan Buettner, thank you very much for your time. Dan, it was a delight and you'll be pleased to know that I am now 19 % happier.

1:21:01Dan Buettner:So we're trending the road. Your show works. I love it. It may also be the fact that you're now free to go swimming in the ocean, but I'll take it. A real delight, Dan. Nice to spend time with you. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10 % Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme.

1:21:36Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10 % with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers, ad-free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.

1:22:55Thank you. insurance company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law.