How to Live to 100 with Blue Zones explorer Dan Buettner

0:00If you've seen the Netflix documentary about the secrets of the Blue Zones, then you know Dan Buettner's work. Dan was an explorer with National Geographic, where, for years, he set out to uncover the mysteries of the world, which is how he first discovered what we now know as Blue Zones, these five places in the world where the people who live there regularly outlive Americans by 10 to 12 years. They suffer a fraction of the chronic diseases we do and, most importantly, live happier lives. Dan and I discussed how we can take the things he learned about Blue Zones and apply them in our own lives, right here, right now.

0:41That we can apply these principles to our corporate cultures and our home lives. It can even impact how we organize our kitchens, all to help us live longer and much happier lives. This is a bit of optimism. So I'll just jump right in. Jump. I live in Los Angeles where people are obsessed with their health. They exercise. They hire nutritionists. They eat right. They take every supplement. And yet these people who live in the blue zones live longer, live happier. It seems like the lives that they live are just common sense. If I had no pressures on me, that's how I'd want to live my life. I'd want to eat with my friends.

1:29I'd want to walk places. I'd want to have a glass of wine with my meals. why is it that the work is so profound when it seems like common sense? Well, first of all, it's not at all common sense. The blue zones, just for reference point, Okinawa, Japan, longest lived women. Highlands of Sardinia, longest lived men. The Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, lowest rate of middle-aged mortality in the world. Ikaria, Greece, eight years longer life expectancy in Americans with virtually no dementia. And then the United States among the Seventh-day Adventists. 76 % of Americans don't even get 20 minutes of physical activity a day.

2:11Until I wrote Blue Zones, nobody understood that there was a connection between your social network and your longevity. We now know that if you're lonely, it shaves eight years off life expectancy. Nobody was making a connection between having a sense of purpose and longevity. And we know that if you can articulate your sense of purpose, it's worth about seven years, populations that are actually achieving this extra 10 years of life expectancy. The big insight that we're largely missing is that longevity ensues. It's not successfully pursued. We spend well over$150 billion a year pursuing health, which is we find the right diet program, we saw the right exercise program, the right supplement, maybe throw in some longevity hacks, you know, run down to Costa Rica for some stem cells.

3:07And that's how we're going to live a long time. That's common sense in America. But what's uncommon sense is this notion of instead of trying to change our behavior, we change our environment and thereby engineer our unconscious decisions over the long run. Oh, I love that. And I guess the parts that get left out, you know, I know the work of some of the longevity experts. And the thing that I always find astonishing, and you touched on this, the two things that they rarely, if ever, talk about is friends and purpose. You know, food, sure. You know, exercise, sure. But friends and purpose, to your point, are not common sense in America, but are common sense in other places.

3:49because you know why Simon because you can't make money off of them they're not easily distilled into a pill or a tablet or something marketers can make money off of that's why it's not in our vernacular and you know the bold-faced names I'm sure we're both thinking about nobody's going to refute that yeah but it's not sexy but the reality is in a very evidence-based way they're far more powerful at delivering a higher life expectancy than any pill or supplement or genetic intervention or stem cell right now. Things may change. And probably in our lifetime, we'll probably see the change, but not now.

4:28I mean, I've talked about this before, which is there's a paradox to being human, which is every moment of every day, we are both individuals and members of groups. You are you, but you're also a son, a friend, a brother, a father, a member of a team, a member of a church, a member of a company. And these things very often operate in conflict, which is I'm forced to make sometimes small, sometimes big decisions. Do I put myself first at the expense of the group or do I put the group first at the expense of me? And there's entire schools of thought on one side of the aisle and the other, but the answer is you're both right and you're both wrong.

5:04It's a paradox. And the reason I think this is important is, and this is where I think your work is the antidote, which is if you consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, Maslow got it wrong because, you know, the most basic thing, he put food and shelter and he put relationships third on the tiers, third up from the bottom. And yet I've never heard of anyone dying by suicide from being hungry. I've heard of them dying by suicide from being lonely. The mistake he made, he's only considered us as individuals. He didn't think of us as members of groups. And the reason I think your work is profound is a lot of these diets and exercise things and all these longevity experts is they think of us as individuals.

5:41They're making the same mistake as Maslow. And your work is contextualized, which is it considers the individual, but it also considers that we're members of groups. And that's an essential part to being human. That's right. It's our environment that largely determines our health. our social network is our social environment. There's our built environment, our work environment, our food environment, our social environment. And the Blue Zones approach would be to have you engineering or at least curating. Some of those social networks you point out, you can't do anything about. You can't choose your parents, for example.

6:19Yeah, your parents, your family's your family. But you can choose to hang out with people people whose idea of recreation is pickleball or gardening or biking, or friends whose idea of recreation is going down to the bar and doing shots or going to the backyard and barbecuing wieners and hamburgers. And we know that the health behaviors are measurably contagious. So I would argue probably the most powerful thing you can do to add good years to your life is to recurate those social circles that you have control over. You have control over what job you take. You have control over who your leisure friends are.

7:00You have control over who your best friends, who you spend the most time with are. And making those adjustments will have profound and lasting impacts on how long you'll live and how healthy you'll be. And by the way, also how happy you are. You went across the entire world, all these very, very different cultures. And I'm curious what the connection was, what the pattern was, regardless of where you were, what mealtime was like. Like who prepared it? How many people at the table? You know, what kind of conversations were they having? What was an average mealtime like? What did they all have in common?

7:33So first, the meta pattern. They all tend to eat enormous breakfast, medium size or large lunches and little or no dinner. They tend to eat all their food in about a 10 hour window. but breakfast will usually be a little bit more hairy. You know, they're going out to the field or shepherds and that's not necessarily a family dinner. Midday is almost always a family dinner. They sit down. Interestingly, and I think this is more important than you think, is people will articulate some gratitude for their meal. There'll be some verbal punctuation between the busy day and, okay, now we're gonna eat.

8:12And by the way, thank you for this food. We appreciate this food. So you get a chance to slow down a little bit, lower that cortisol so you have better digestion. There's never a screen in the kitchen. Nobody's watching, eating to their favorite TV show or scrolling as they eat. They tend to eat as a family. That's actually a very big component, even if it's a smaller meal. At least some, if not all, family members will be together. So it provides a connection point. It's almost always women who are the keepers of the food tradition. So they're doing the cooking. Men are often doing the gardening.

8:52So men are bringing the food in. Women are cooking it. They have time-honored recipes. So until probably the year 2000 or 2005 in all these blue zones, they might have been eating almost the exact same meal that their great, great, great grandparents were eating. Those recipes that evolved over time to not only make the best use of the available food, which, by the way, is almost always peasant food, very low on the food chain. But also, I argue that they evolved in taste. You know, it's the tastiest recipes that get carried forward into the next generation. So you have all this beautiful natural selection.

9:34So the food at the dinner table is almost always, you know, I like to say maniacally delicious or evolutionarily delicious. And I think that's one of the reasons that the whole plant-based food in the blue zones is so hyper palatable. How did you get into this? How did you start studying this? Well, Simon, my previous business, I had a exploration business and I had a whole staff. I had 14 people on staff, scientists and technologists and videographers and photographers. And twice a year, we went out and solved some mystery. Usually they were ancient mysteries. Why the Maya civilization collapsed?

10:17Did Marco Polo go to China? Our last expedition before I sold it was one to Okinawa. And we stumbled upon a World Health Organization report that showed that Okinawa, Japan, was producing the longest lived human beings in the history of the world. And it also was, especially women, about 30 times more female centenarians among a cohort of women over age 60. And I said, aha, this is a good mystery. But that gave me the idea. National Institutes on Aging gave me the funding to hire the demographers. And National Geographic, you know, back in the golden days of National Geographic, They gave me the cover story assignment, which in the day, you know, they give you a quarter million dollar budget and nine months to do one story.

11:11But my real interest and when it comes to writing is finding the statistically most extraordinary populations and then distilling their wisdom. I've also done two books and a cover story for National Geographic on happiness, which took the similar approach, which is really a data backed approach. What do statistics tell us about living longer, being happier rather than sort of the semi anecdotal positive psychology? But, you know, I've iterated. I mean, I had a company, 200 employees, that we took the insights from Blue Zones. And the core insight was don't try to change your behavior, change your environment.

11:58And to date, we've been hired by 70 cities, funded by insurance companies to lower the BMI, higher, basically the obesity rates of entire cities, using this sort of golden insight that I picked up from Blue Zones. That's so interesting. So that's important that it is repeatable. But the way you talk about the work, which is, it's very similar to the work that I do in sort of corporate culture, which is the culture, the environment will drive the behavior, not the other way around. The leaders set the environment and you'll get the behavior of the environment. Get the environment right, get the context and the conditions right.

12:34And the behavior will follow almost, I guess, instinctively, right? Is that true? You're one of the few people I've ever met who gets it. That's exactly right. It's first of all, you change an environment. It is long term, you know, it's not like a behavior change, which has a half life of about a month. But secondly, the big idea is people's unconscious choices. Yeah, because it's very hard for people to remember to do something. It requires discipline, it requires presence of mind, You know, our brains are wired for novelty. We like new shit, you know, and doing the same old thing, even though it's healthy, it gets boring.

13:13But if we can engineer our environment so that the unconscious choices are good for productivity, are good for health, are good for well-being, all you have to do is close and play. You do that for employees. You can do it for citizens. You can do it for members of your household. That's the big idea. It's harder than all these sort of Fitbits and consultants and diets. It's harder to make money off of, but in every case, it will outperform in the long run. Everybody's got a magic bullet, right? And to your point, which is often there's a business sitting underneath that magic bullet, whether it's some supplement or some exercise regime or some diet or some whatever it is there's all these silver bullets and no one of the things that you talk about in blue zones will work it's the environment that allow those things to thrive in concert that they thrive naturally those people that you met they don't think about these things it just happens and i think the thing that's most interesting about your work is that it is repeatable and the experiments that you're doing in the United States.

14:20I know some of the numbers, you'll obviously can fill them in. But when you started in Albert Lee, this town in where is it, Minnesota? Yes. You know, as an experiment to see if you could make your own blue zone. And that was going on 14 years now. Is that right? Yes. The numbers are astonishing in terms of cessation and smoking, huge loss of weight, people being out active, walking their kids to school. I mean, you created these habits, these environmental things. Is there enough data yet to know if they will actually live longer? Well, you can predict that. You'd have to follow them against the control for 50 years to know that for sure.

15:04But to the extent that we know that eating healthy and moving more and socializing more contribute to higher life expectancy. That's not in dispute. The city reported 30 % drop in healthcare costs too, which is why. But today, when we do it now, we work in blue zone project cities now, and we have them in Fort Worth, Texas and Scottsdale, Arizona, Jacksonville, Florida, to name a few. We hire Gallup to come in and measure BMI at the population level, life satisfaction, vegetable intake, physical activity levels, and we get a baseline. And then you use the term magic bullet or silver bullet. We call it silver buckshot.

15:51So we can unleash about 70 or 80 nudges or defaults at the population level. None of them are going to blow your socks off. You know, they might have a quarter of a percent impact at the population level over time. But if we unleash 80 and we get 50 of them working, the collective result is always measurable. Every city we've ever been in, we've seen the BMI of that city go down against control. And it never fails. Whereas a silver bullet may or may not work. And usually a silver bullet works for a certain subset demographic. we unleash our silver buckshot at the population level. There's a very, well, famous in academic circle, epidemiologist named Jeffrey Rose, and his Rose's theorem shows that if you aim an intervention at the entire population, you get a much better result than an intervention aimed at the people at higher risk.

16:57I mean, that makes sense, right? I mean, even evolution happens at a population level. So it makes sense that these things would have a benefit. I mean, we're social animals, things happen in populations. Did you measure other some of asymmetrical benefits as well? Did you notice lower divorce rates? Did you notice lower addiction rates? You know, these things that are associated with higher levels of sociability, you know, that we get along with people better, you know, maybe quality of relationships between children and their parents, screen time addiction, you know, did you were you able to measure any of those things as well?

17:28some of the social benefits? I think the big Uber metric we use is Gallup uses a term they refer to as thriving. And that's measured by thinking of your life as a whole on a scale of one to 10. How satisfied are you with your life today? And then they ask the same question and ask how satisfied do you think you'll be with your life in five years? And if the second number is higher, they say that's the thriving score. So we always have higher thriving scores. In other words, people believe their lives are on the upswing at a greater numbers or greater percentages when we go in. But here's the thing.

18:10These things, these projects are expensive. We usually have to hire 20 or 30 people and they work, you know, they're full-time employees for five years. So you can imagine how much it costs. The numbers that people are always most interested are economic numbers. They want to know our healthcare costs are going down. And the other number we've been able to capture is in our blue zone cities, property values go up and also the tax base goes up. And that's usually where the rubber hits the road in America. You know, people kind of care about health, but what they really care about is economics. Fort Worth, Texas, for example, we saw about a 2 % drop in BMI over the five year against Texas controls or against the rest of Texas.

18:56But the number that really kept them on the program is Gallup reported out we're saving them about a quarter of a billion dollars a year in health care costs, our project. And that's where people decide or cities decide, yes, we're going to do this or we're not going to do this. Let's take it down a few thousand feet, right? Let's not talk about cities implementing. Let's talk about families implementing. How many days a week should we be sitting down with the family for dinner and having family dinner, old school, no TVs in the room? There's good research that shows that families who eat together, their nutrition is better.

19:33They consume less sodas, they consume higher quality, fewer calories when they're eating with the family as opposed to eating by themselves or with one hand on the steering wheel. But the Blue Zone approach would say, in your kitchen, there's good research that shows if this Cornell Food Lab, but if you take your toaster off of your kitchen counter, you'll weigh three to four pounds less after two years compared with your counterpart that keeps a toaster on your counter. You know, I like to joke we're all on a seafood diet. We eat the food we see. So if we're prompted by a toaster every time we walked into our kitchen, you know, typically what goes into toasters and comes out of toasters isn't all that healthy.

20:20Putting a fruit bowl, a really nice fruit bowl in the middle of your kitchen, having a junk food drawer instead of, you know, putting your chips, a clip on your chips, all that makes a measurable difference in how much you eat over the course of the day. So, you know, I actually wrote a book called The Blue Zone Challenge, where I aggregated all the available research on how to set up your kitchen, your bedroom, your home, your social circle, your workplace takes a few weeks, but then you can turn your brain off because basically behavioral economics or these nudges will force you to consume 150 fewer calories a day, to move an extra 100 calories a day or 100 calories or so.

21:05And over time, that makes a vast difference on how much you weigh and how much physical activity do you get? I love this. How simple it is, right? No discipline required. Because as you said, if the toaster's on the counter, you walk into the kitchen, you're like, oh, I'll have a piece of toast. Or I'll have a Pop-Tart, whatever, whatever you put in a toaster. And if you simply hide the toaster, the impulse to have a piece of toast because you're just not reminded of it, or you can have the snacks, but if they're hidden, you're less likely to have the impulse because it's just not there. I did what you're suggesting by accident, which is I put all of my snacks, my chips used to be in a standard cupboard that I'd open on a regular basis.

21:47And so I'd always just put my hand in, have a few bites and then close it up as I was getting something else. And I just decided to reorganize my kitchen. It wasn't a blue zone thing. And all of my snacks went into the bottom drawer that you have to bend down to get to. And I snack so much less i never open it that's exactly right and there by cornell food lab is actually i can't cite the numbers but they have a statistically significant difference in the amount of junk food consumed when you put it either down or up where you have to reach or around the corner in a pantry the worst thing you can do is have it out in the open and it makes a big difference so rather than hound people or guilt people or shame them, whatever, or give them a free t-shirt for not eating junk food.

22:39I just as soon show them how to set up their homes and their workplaces and their lives. So they're mindlessly doing better, setting them up for success. We're making a very, very simple case here that behavior follows environment. That's right. You don't have to learn some habit forming thing to stop eating junk food. You simply change your environment and the behavior follows automatically. And if it works for something as compelling as junk food and sugar and salt and fat, you know, those things which are so appealing to us, then it follows that all the other things fall into place. I love that no discipline is required or little discipline is required.

23:22You know, these five blue zones and none of them are people at 50 say, well, call darn it. I'm going to get on that longevity diet and live another 50 years. They don't have CrossFit. They don't have FitBits. They don't have yoga classes or Pilates. They're not calling an 800 number and buying supplements or superfoods or running down to Costa Rica for stem cells. They're just living there. And by the way, they love to party. Some of the legendary parties in the world are on this Greek island of Vicaria. But their day-to-day, moment-to-moment decisions, they don't even have to think about, are marginally healthier.

24:00And that deployed over years and decades results manifestly at population level, by the way. My work is not anecdotal. Population level data you see very clear. Fraction the rate of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease. Fraction the rate of cancers of the GI tract, prostate, breast cancer. Fraction the rate of dementia. And the same thing over and over. They're not better humans. They don't have a better sense of individual responsibility. It's your responsibility. You know, like these politicians keep telling, your responsibility, you need healthy. Meanwhile, we live in an ocean of toxic food.

24:39You've got to find the healthy food here. In blue zones, the healthy food is the default. You know one thing I would love to do with you one day, if we ever have the opportunity? I know you're making blue zone cities and you're recreating your work. I would love to make a blue zone company where we go into a company because your work and my work are exactly the same, which is fix the culture, fix the environment, and all the behavior that you want will show up. The trust, the innovation, all of it, it shows up as a result. It's not an input, it's an output. And I would love to demonstrate it and change the culture and build a blue zone company.

25:18And we'll demonstrate it. We'll show profits and revenues and innovation and trust and churn And all of those valuable corporate numbers will demonstrate the benefit of a Blue Zone company. I would love to partner with you on that. We already have a Blue Zone certification, but we only offer it in cities where we're actually doing a whole citywide project. I think the two of us putting our heads together would probably double the impact that we have. But we go through and we give them 30 evidence-based things they can do to change the designs and the policies so people are unconsciously nudged into moving more, eating less and better, socializing more, and knowing and living their purpose.

26:03Yeah. So we give them points for taking all sugar sweetened beverages out of vending machines, for changing their break room policies so there's not chips, sodas, packaged sweets there because that, you know, a lot of junk food is consumed. And I would add to that, those are the nutritional ones, but I would also say no cell phones in conference rooms. I love that. Ideally, no computers in conference rooms either, just pens and paper for taking notes. But at the very minimum, not a cell phone in a single meeting. I would say when you have the company off-site, it doesn't have to be some big formal thing, but have a company family dinner.

26:41You can do it once a month. It doesn't matter. It's literally a dinner. Bring your spouses, bring your family, and we have company dinner. And if the company is too big, do it by team. There you go. And these are simple things. And by the way, the point is, is just like be friends with the people you work with. You don't have to like everybody, but you can you want to find out what their values are. And we build trust that way. There was a social construct in Okinawa that really inspired us. It's called a moai. It's spelled M-O-A-I, moai. And it's a committed social circle, four or five friends.

27:18And they travel through life together. And when things go bad, they support each other. You know, like if you get a divorce or a parent dies or a child gets sick, the other four jump in, sometimes financially, but at least with social support. And if things go well, you know, you get a raise or there was a good harvest. You share it with your moai. But one of the things we do in companies is you got to get the company to buy in, but they allow us to get all the employees or the teams together. And we have this process by which we help them pick out their own Moai. We actually circle them up and we ask them, we throw out 20 questions.

28:03And we say before we ask the questions, pay attention to how other people are answering these questions, because afterwards we want you to go pick three or four of the people you're going to spend the next 10 weeks with. And then we ask questions like, raise your hand if you've seen a Disney movie in the last three months. The next question is about your vacation. Do you like a staycation, a European vacation, or a hiking trip? The idea is the 20 questions get at people's values and their interests. And then it's very easy then for people to cluster up in groups of five. And sometimes they're managers, sometimes they're workers, sometimes they're executives.