Why Americans Live 10-15 Years Less Than Other Countries w/ Dan Buettner | EP #107

31:44So I was writing the story for National Geographic and my editor, Peter Miller, said, you need to find America's blue zone. And there's actually not a geographic blue zone like you see in the other four areas. But it turns out that Adventists, there's something called the Adventist Health Study that followed 103 ,000 Americans for 30 years. And if you're an ad here an Adventist, your life expectancy is about seven years longer than it is if you're not an adventist. Fasting. And the highest concentration of them are in Lomolinda. That's why we call Lomolinda Blue Zone. The reason they're living longer, again, it's a number of factors, but first of all, this idea of a Sabbath, I think is a lot more powerful than we think.

32:33They take it very seriously. From sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday, no matter how busy they are, no matter where the kids need to be driven or what the social schedule is demanding, they stop everything and they take a sanctuary in time Which includes slowing down stress reduction includes taking the focus off of Whatever stressing out in placing it on a higher being they have they always have a potluck lunch and then hardwired Right in the religion is a nature walk So this is something they're doing every single week for decades back to this old idea you have to think long term. They also take their diet directly from the Bible.

33:15And I'm not a big Bible reader, but if you look at Genesis chapter 1, verse 26 through 30, God lays out the diet to the Garden of Eden. Very clearly, three things. Every tree that bears fruit, so that's citrus, apples, tomatoes, and avocados, every plant that bears seed, so that's beans and grains and seeds and nuts, and then one stancellator green vegetables or greens. And that's up with the advent of seed. There's no mention of Tomahawk steak or lobster Thermador, you know, it's, you know, or skill or skittles. Yeah. So the Adventists actually filed so they're mostly Advent, Adventists all also tend to hang out with other Adventists.

34:10And this is another longevity strategy we overlook. We know that if our three best friends are obese or overweight, there's about 150 % better chance that you'll be overweight. And who we hang out with has huge and lasting impact on our health. And most Adventists, because they have this Saturday Sabbath and there's conservative Christians, they tend to hang out with each other. So they're not going to the party where they're sitting around roasting weeners and doing shots and tequila. I'm so true. I mean, I write about this, you know, 20 Robins speaks about, I mean, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

34:52If you're overweight, you want to get into good health, hang out with healthy people. If you're pessimistic, you want to be optimistic, hang out with optimistic people. I mean, it really does. It is about shaping your neural net, shaping your mindset and your behavior. I want to begin working our way through the fun. Let me just stop you there for a second. When you think about what really works, what you just said really works, and it works for the long run. Our friends tend to be long -term adventures. There's several dozen billion dollars spent on supplements a year. And if you look at the pool of people who take supplements, they actually have higher mortality than the pool of people who don't take supplements.

35:35But we don't spend much money at all helping people optimize their social network. You kind of say it in passing and then we move on to the next topic. But why we know it works. We can measure it works. Nicholas Christakis at Yale, measures, he can tell you exactly if your friends drink too much, here's your chance of drinking too much. If your friends say they're lonely, here's your chance of being lonely. If your friends are obese, here's your chance of being obese. Why aren't we creating programs to help people engineer those five people? Because we know that's going to have a lasting, measurable impact more so than anything else we're spending money on.

36:11I love that. I love that. That is. And it is so true. So, I mean, if you're lucky enough to be able to shape it, proactively shape it, you identified nine fundamentals of the blue zones. They're well covered in lots of your writings, but I'd like to talk through them in grain and take and ask to develop a minimum takeaway from here, like an action you can do, right? One of the things that end of the day is we can talk about this and people can listen to it, but if nothing changes as a result of our conversation here with folks today, it's a missed opportunity. So let's talk about the lowest hanging fruit, literally speaking.

36:58So the first one and their nine of them move naturally, incorporate physical activity into daily life. So more than 75 % of Americans don't even get 20 minutes of physical activity. This idea of going to the gym, this idea of going to the gym, and I'd even argue exercise has been a public health failure. People like you and me will go, but the average American doesn't. So how are you going to get the average, the biggest gain is to go from zero activity to 20 minutes a day. That's three years of life expectancy right there. How are you going to get the average American to do that? The easiest way to do it is to change their streets so they're walkable and bikeable and safe and aesthetically pleasing.

37:41That is going to get people off the couch to go get their cup of coffee or go walk to a neighbor's house or kids walking to school. That idea of just for the average amount of the biggest longevity impact you're going to get for the 340 million Americas is make our streets more walkable and bikeable. I love that. But I mean, hopefully people know if you're over 60, the number one impact on longevity is building muscle, it is movement, it is resistive training. And I think that zero to one, you know, at 20 minutes. So I think habits like taking a walk after you eat dinner, what are other, I mean for For me, I've moved to five workouts a week and I changed that from like three one hour workouts to five half hour workouts.

38:36I don't know how you think about that. It's like I'm not going to not get some exercise. The other thing I've done is walking meetings, right? If I have a meeting, I mean, I feel anxious sitting here recording this podcast with you instead of being on the walking outside. So walking meetings, I have a, I have a walking desk that I've used. I have, I'll take my, a lot of us are on zooms these days. And I've got a, a techno gym, stationary bike. And I take all of my board meeting zooms on my bike. Other, other hints?

39:18Well, I like to address the sort of workouts at the gym. And none of the five blue zones do you see people going to the gym? Yeah, you have the highest percentage of people making it to age 100 and if you look at gym Adherence you get tend to get a lot of people joining with zeal during the new year right after the new year But there's only about 20 % left at the end of the year So once again, it's this sort of popular knowledge that really doesn't vet out when it when it comes to producing on gym It will for people who actually do it but people don't actually do it Meanwhile, for example, if you take public transportation to work, which most of us can do, your chance of cardiovascular disease go down by about 20%.

40:05This is the time of your words. It's not a bad time to put in a garden. It's a good time to do it in a Santa Monica. I'm sure, but for most of America, growing a garden is a perfect longevity strategy. Why? Because the moment you put the seeds in it, you kind of care about those plants. And there's a nudge to go out in water or weed. It's low intensity, range of motion physical activity. You know when we guard in our cortisol levels go. And at the end of the activity in a few months, you have fresh vegetables, you'll probably eat. So that for sure, those things work. Or buy a puppy and take it for a walk.

40:41Yes, there you go. Yeah, the dog needs to get walked every day and therefore the human gets walked. All right, so move naturally is the first one. And I, you know, big during COVID for me, the big thing was walking meetings. Walking. And now it's like, I sitting on a Zoom, you know, the phrase I use as sitting is the new smoking. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Okay, let's go to number two, purpose. This is one that I care about deeply as do you. And what I have here is having purpose can add up to seven years of extra life expectancy. So that sounds like a platitude, but it's not. Robert Butler, who was the original director of the National Institutes on Age, and he was the author of a paper that looked at people's writing and then followed them over time.

41:28The people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about seven years longer than people who were rudderless in life. And observation in Blues Island is they almost always have a vocabulary for purpose. So taking the time to know what you like to do, what you're good at, and an outlet for it. It's not just, I know my purpose. You have to, you have to live it. And by the way, most of the time in blue zones, there's an altruistic outlet. It's not just painting. It's sitting at home with painting. You know, it's teaching karate or it's basket making, but with the idea of passing it on to the younger generation.

42:09So, so many Americans, I think, I just got a letter from a woman from Houston yesterday who saw my documentary and she asked about my age. Her kids are grown up, she's retired, she's watching TV, and you can almost feel her kind of dying in real time. And you just want to say, you want to take that lady and help her identify what she has to give to the world and find an outlet for it. And I think it's so important. I think a purpose driven life is the most important aspect. It's my number one thing on this list. Because if you're driven, if you wake up with purpose in your life, you naturally are going to have a higher energy and want to hang out with people.

42:57People want to hang out with you that drive social, that drives movement. I talk a lot about having a massive transformative purpose. And more than just a purpose, Just like, what do you want to do that's going to make the world a better place? And it can start with your kids, it can start on your block, it can start in your area of focus. I actually, for those interested, I created a large language model called purposefinder .ai that will walk you through a series of questions for free and help you create a statement of purpose at the end. And so my MTP is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity.

43:41And so I get my greatest joy in life when I'm supporting entrepreneurs through ex -prize, through my venture of fun, through my writings, whatever. It's like, and my message to them is like, go dream big, go and, and you know, we're living in a world of such incredible capabilities and resources, you know, tap into it and do something. So I think that's the most powerful thing you're doing Peter actually. Yeah. Because it impacts people right now. Some of these perspective ideas, and I think they're very good ideas and right track, they may indeed work, but they don't necessarily make your life better.

44:21It may be prolonging a shitty life in some cases, whereas if you You can help people find their sense of purpose. Not only are you adding seven years of life expectancy now, you're making this week better. Yes, it's better right now. And people like hanging out with someone who's got purpose, whatever it is, right? It's like, you want to hang out. The other part of this in the mindset world, and one of the books I'm working on is called Mindset Mastery, is the notion that optimism live longer, right? And there's a pretty amazing study of 69 ,000 women, 1500 guys that said as much as 15 % longer.

44:58And I think all of that's tied into the work that you've done. Did you find optimism as a important factor in your work? Well, I wrote a cover story for National Geographic in a book called The Blue Zones of Happiness, which took all the statistical underpinnings of happiness. And it turns out, so, you know, optimism is usually measured in, you take a measure of people's life expectancy, right? I mean, they're subjective well -being now. On a scale of one to ten, they say there are seven five, and they think they're gonna be happier in five years. They call that thriving, and that's kind of the, I think the official way of measuring optimism.

45:38And yes, the people who are thriving have about six extra years of life. The top quintile have about six years of life expectancy and see over people on the bottom quintile. And there's lots of things you can do to stack the deck in your favor. But it's hard to, if you can't measure it, you can't really manage it or proclaim it. But yes, can I bring up another subject, a four -letter word called retirement? What? Oh, okay, I'm not that great. I'm not that great. But it's like when my dad God bless him It was OB -GYN and when he turned 65. I was like dad you really should retire You know this OB -GYN is stressful and and I now look back and I wish I'd never done that I may be slow down a little bit maybe give up the the OB the obstetrics and but folks stay in GYN And there appears to be a very high correlation between retirement and death.

46:45Like you give up your purpose in life. Have you studied that or looked at that? Yeah, well, I know there's a second most dangerous year in your life is your retire. The first most dangerous is your born infant mortality. But there's a big mortality spike that year. And we don't exactly know why, but I think we would probably both of us probably all of a sudden your purpose is gone. And you know two generations ago there was a good reason to retire because people mostly worked at jobs they didn't like and soon after they could no longer work they died. But now we're living 20 years longer and without having a sense of purpose, there's no impetus to get out of bed in the morning or get out of the easy chair or take your medicines or keep your mind So, and the lack of these things, they're all toxic to us.

47:39Yeah, you know, my mom got blessed her lives in Boka and she's doing great. And I'm like, Mom, I, you know, she's 88 now and it's like, Mom, I need you to find a new purpose in life so you can stick around for the next 20 years to see my kids grow up. And I think if people don't, if you're retired, I think there are so many different things you can do to renew a resurgent purpose, whether it's teaching, whether it's mentoring, whether it's, you know, like you said, just taking care of people in your community who are less well off than you. I mean, those things that create that level of connection and purpose, I think is the single most important thing.

48:27We see it in blue zones, for sure. In Okinawa, for example, there's not even a word in their vocabulary for purpose. Instead the word icky guy. I love icky guy. Please explain what icky guy is. It's essentially knowing why you wake up in the morning. It's like metabolizes purpose with altruism. And the Costa Ricans have Plandevida. So that's so important. There's a researcher from Columbia University named Linda Freed. I know Linda. And she found that older people who volunteer in a meaningful way in schools, and that usually means reading to kids. They have lower healthcare costs, they have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, and they have lower BMI, and all of that equates essentially to lower higher life expectancy.

49:26So it's actually been measured in the United States, but it usually has to be a meaningful, you have to feel like you're doing something that means something. All right, so to catch you up again, if you're listening to these nine, number one, don't sit during your zooms, take your walks, take your walking meetings, purpose, if you're retired, finding your purpose, it looks the greatest gift you can give yourself and people around you. Downshift, okay, this is my biggest problem. Downshifting, slowing down. What does downshifting mean? It means unraveling some of the stress of the human condition and that also usually means lowering inflammation.

50:07So in all of these blue zones they have the sacred daily rituals. The Okinawans have ancestor veneration, the Adventist prey. That works at Downshifting. The Costa Ricans and the Akkadians take a nap, which also works at Loring Court Saul levels. It's our deans do happy hour. But it's having something every day that puts some punctuation between the hurry and worry of your life and allows you to take your mind off of it. Is there a good time of day to do that? Is it, I mean, is it later in the day, end of the day, mid day? There's no pattern on that. I mean, the Okinawan is usually, it's first thing in the morning, is ancestor veneration.

50:55Adventures is usually first thing in the morning, they'll say a prayer. It's also a little prayer before a meal, which by the way, it sounds antiquated, but the idea of expressing some gratitude for your food, you'll slow down. You're more likely to honor what you're eating rather than just plunging it down. You know, let me double on that because Helen Messier, who's my chief medical officer at Fountain Life, talks about what she calls a vitamin O. So what's vitamin O? She goes, it's taking some deep breaths when you sit down to eat, to put yourself into a parrotset pathetic mode to rest and digest mode.

51:33And the flip side of that is eating while watching CNN. Right? Where the world's blowing up. Everybody's lying. There is dying and you're eating food and you're under stress. And I agree with you that just a moment of doing gratitude around the table or a prayer or just everybody together is deep breath in. It just automatically just has this massive impact on the body. I mean, I just, I've just one breath just made me feel like just really just relax and slow down. It's extraordinary. And the prayer is kind of like taking a breath. And also it's easy to remember because you get the prompt of, oh, we're sitting down to dinner.

52:19It's like, I'm going to brush my teeth. Oh, yeah, I should floss too. So it's a great opportunity to do that. Yeah, you're not going to forget dinner. and so connecting that to. I guess I've been getting up in the morning and my meditation time has been writing for an hour every morning but I've added red light and a meditation during red light to it. So that was about red light. Well, red light therapy right now photo modulation has an impact of reducing inflammatory factors. So it's in reducing inflammation and it's also really supporting skin collagen keeping your largest organ your body young.

53:10Did you send a boat there's no I bought a red light panel it's a four foot by one foot wide and I'm basically naked in front of it for 20 minutes a day and I'm meditating during that. The other thing I've added is a red light cap which the numbers look pretty good. It's stimulating follicle growth so just for maintaining hair. Oh wow. Yeah. I'm going to put that baby on. Yeah. Well, it's a, you know, it's a nice hair Peter. Thank you. It's true. Okay. It's 20 minutes. I'm going to add that to the next generation of my longevity playbook because I added the red light recently as part of my protocol.

53:47I always love doing two or three things at once and so being able to do the red light and meditation at the same time. I know your audiences heard that some of them, but they probably wouldn't mind a little reminder. What are your top three sort of new innovations that you put it to work in your life? It's not that complicated. I made it just decision last year to add 10 pounds of muscle, which was like my objective and it was increasing my protein intake to 1 gram per pound. And you need that adding creatin, 5 grams of creatin along that line to stimulate blood flow and muscle growth. And then increasing the frequency of workouts to, instead of three times a week, to five days a week.

54:41Now it's going to be maintaining it. Sleep has always been important. My only challenge, as I mentioned this earlier, yesterday was the flight four of Starship. So I woke up at 4am to watch that. It was delayed till about six. But it was funny waking up at 4am and then seeing my newsfeed in article that one of the newspapers are written about, you know, Peter D. Mannis thinks sleep is the most important element of a longevity. And here I am, like getting up at 4 a .m. I went to bed after lunch yesterday. But you know, it's my dad used to say, buy method and I just done everything in moderation.

55:21So I've added red light, therapeutics, and all I will run the numbers. I've been doing consistently now for two months and I'm measuring inflammatory markers. I'll keep this as part of my life. The problem is UNI travel and maintaining these habits while travel is so difficult, right? And I'll publish the next iteration of longevity practical playbook next year's 24 version in front of you. I'll publish it 25 and I Please, what does that mean? Well, it comes from, it was inspired by the Okinawan adage, Hata Hachi Boo, which essentially means stop eating when your stomach is 80 percent full. It actually goes back to Confucius.

56:15And it's very much in step with the notion of intermittent fasting. You know that when you feed monkeys as much food as they want compared to a group of monkeys that get 30 % fewer calories. The underfed monkeys live longer and I believe it's the same thing with humans. The challenge of course is that there's this delay between us being actually full and feeling full. Right. So the blue zone approach is not necessarily how to hachibu is They say that instead of a prayer. So it's a sort of natural place to kind of insert a habit. I'm not a huge fan of habits, but they work better if they're coupled with another activity.

57:06But the way Hata Hachi Blue shows up in the Blue Zone context is they tend to preplate their food and then put the rest away instead of eating family style, which occasions eating fewer calories. And how does that affect the speed of eating? Also, in other words, I have a limited amount on my plate. Yeah, it affects the amount of food you're going to eat. So instead of thinking about stop eating when your stomach is 80 % full, there's only enough food on your table to fill your stomach 80%. They tend to eat off of smaller plates. Cornell Food Lab found that if you're eating off a smaller plate, you're unconsciously fewer calories.

57:48You never see a TV in a blue zone kitchen. They tend to eat huge breakfast in a medium -sized lunch and little or no dinner. So the impact is if you look at their dietary surveys over time until about the year 2000, they were eating about 80 % of the calories that Americans are eating right now. And then modernization hit them? Yeah. As soon as the American standard American diet shows up in these blue zones, longevity. Coz it's a lot of the backdoor. Wow. A couple of tricks that I've learned from interviewing folks. One is the order in which your food, eat your food matters. And so I've made this a part of my every meal.

58:38So first of all, when you go to a restaurant and they serve the bread and wine first, it's like the worst thing you could eat at the beginning of your meal, right? It just makes you hungry or... So I eat veggies first. So I'll literally eat all the vegetables on my plate first, which slows a digestive track. And then I'll eat my protein. And then I've actually gotten away from all carbs. But if you're going to eat carbs, eat the carbs last. Because your digestive, first of all, you'll be more full. And then it's slowed the veggies and the protein have slowed your digestive process a little bit.

59:14So I'm not sure if you've seen that in any form. Well, I'll say it's a dangerous message to tell people not to eat carbs. Okay, please. Well, both jelly beans and lentil beans are carbs. And I love, I had a great lentil soup last night. Yeah, and those are carbs, by the way. Yeah, okay, so let's talk about beans one second. Okay. So people, so in blue zones, you know, I wrote this book called, and I should have said high glycemic index carbs. I minimize. But your audience knows with that. But most Americans don't know what the hell high glycemic carbs means. And you tell people, by the way, even bread in blue zones, they're eating a ton of bread.

1:00:04I'm in the longest -lived men in the history of the world in Sargenia until about 1990, 60 % of their caloric intake came from bread, breads and pastas. So it's very hard to square that, but of course it's sourdough bread, and sourdough bread actually lowers the glycemic load of a meal. But people don't really, they say, bread, oh my god, a new dangerous carb. So it's too much of a blunt instrument to tell people not to eat carbs. You know, we need a better word. Correct, correct, correction, appreciate it. So thank you for that. I appreciate your wisdom. But it was more of a reason to sort of slip in there.

1:00:41Some, you know, what people really eat to live a long time. But anyway, back to you. Yeah, so honestly, I want to go back to you. What type of beans and are you seeing as important to be part of your diet? So all blue zones are eating a bottle cup of beans a day. And in Okinawa, they show up as the soy beans in tofu. in Costa Rica, their black beans, in Icadilla, Greece, that they're mostly lentils and garbanzos and Sergenia, it's fava beans. It doesn't seem to matter, but people who eat a couple of beans a day also live about four years longer. And I can't draw a causal relationship, but I can tell you it stacks the back in favor of longevity.

1:01:30You know, I hear this all the time, And we need to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into the inner city. No, that's the absolute wrong thing to do. Why they're expensive, they're not shelf stable, and people in their city don't know what to hell to do with fresh fruits and vegetables. You give them beans and rice. And by the way, you take a bean and a grain, you get all the amino acids, you get a whole protein. Beans and corn tortilla, beans and pasta. Those foods together, you're giving people 95 % of the fiber, the complex carbohydrates, the protein they need, a lot of micro -mineral is their cheap and the most important things you can make them taste delicious.

1:02:11Those are the longevity foods I think we should be promoting first. No. Which gets to number five here, which is a plant -based diet. Meat eating a small amount, five times per month. That is a small amount. That comes from a meta analysis of 155 dietary surveys done in all five blue zones over the last 90 years and I did it under the ages of Harvard University Walter Willett and That amounts to about 20 pounds of meat a year the average American eats about 240 pounds of meat a year And there's no question that quantity of meat is is doubling or even quadripling your chances of cardiovascular disease and cancers of the GI track, breast and prostate cancer.

1:03:01So a little bit of meat is probably not a problem, but the levels we eat in America for sure are driving chronic disease. Is that...is eggs falling the same category there? In blue zones on average, they're eating about three eggs a week. They're pastures raised, you know, they're typically chicken running around the yard their home home production and You know egg seems in low quantity. They're probably a neutral but in high quantities. They're for sure a negative Yeah, I'm trying to balance protein You know plant -based protein versus animal and it's so much easier to get the amount of protein I'm looking for from animals.

1:03:48Yeah, but when you remember you're also ingesting their hormones, you're ingesting the antibiotics. You probably say why you'd grass for meat. Sure. But that's only about 2 % or 4%. I don't eat beef. Oh yeah, you don't eat meat. I don't eat fish. I do eat chicken, I do eat fish. I mean, in particular, I want to come back to fish in a moment. But I recently, I do toxin testing all the time, and my arsenic levels were high. And I'm like, like, what's going on? And my physician at Felton Life said, it's chicken. It's coming from the amount of chicken you're eating. The number one driver of chronic disease in America is our sodium intake.

1:04:33And the number one source of sodium in America is chicken. Really? Yeah, it's the billion chickens we eat. So by the way, folks, do you know how many chickens are on the planet, this number just blows me away. It's like 37 billion chickens on planet Earth. We're a planet of chickens. It's crazy. Yeah, chicken is not a significant source of protein in any of the blue zones. Be careful of chicken. And we think, oh, it's the other white meat. But when you look at the subcellular level of saturated fat, it's on par with beef. and all 100 % of chicken has feces in it. And E. coli. So what meat products would you recommend based on your work?

1:05:17None. None. But I will tell you, and I'll be honest, people in blue zones, the most common meat is pork. And it's always eaten as a celebratory food. It's always home raised. It's not industrial raised. And you don't need meat. I have an eating meat in 12 years and my doctor tells me I'm as healthy as patient. Yeah, you look great. Tell me about fish. Blue zones are consuming about four servings of fish a week. It's typically mid -chain fish like anchovies or sardines, that's sort of the cheap fish that rarely makes it to our grocery stores here in America. And interestingly in blue zones, even though they're on islands, I would have thought a lot more fish.

1:06:06Yeah, but for example in Sardinia, there are 15 miles away from the ocean. You can see the ocean, but they never go down there. It used to be a day's journey to get there. Then you catch the fish, and then by the time they get the fish back up in the village, it stinks. Same with Eccarria, by the way, which is in Greece. the blue zone in it Korea is not on the coast, not the coastal city. It's up in like this crater because they had to always hide from the pirates. So it's sort of a hidden part of it Korea. So they're eating mostly beans and you know greens, the type of shit we'd weedwack from our back yard.

1:06:43They're making it in hortas and beautiful pies. I'm familiar with my grandma just to make that for me. I had a blue zone diet when I was growing up living at home and it shifted when I went to medical school. This next one, wine at five. So I am seriously curious about this because a lot of the science data today says, this an alcohol is no added benefits and it's detrimental. I mean, this is not what science is saying, but this is what the blue zones do. Two glasses per day. Interesting. Yeah, I'm investigating a place where it's more like more like four Glasses so I'm familiar with the epidemiology which everybody sites that there's no safe level of alcohol But they also factor in things like falls and drunk driving and fatal accidents It's not always just what you know, and there's some I Would say them weak studies on alcohol and you know gray matter in your brain and so forth, but But I know that 90 % of people are making it into their 90s and 100s and all the blue zones except low -malinda are drinking every day of their life.

1:07:57They're drinking homemade wine, a couple glasses. It's almost always with a meal or always with food. It's almost always in the presence of other people. And their life expectancy at middle ages 10 years longer than us. So I know for certain that drinking a little bit is not mutually exclusive with living a long healthy life. Could they live two or three more years without drinking it? Maybe. But maybe not. We don't know for sure. All I know is, you know, a little bit doesn't seem to get in the way of living a long time in blue zones. Number seven is a challenge in our low -need septic epidemic care, which is belong participation in faith -based services four times per month adds four to 14 years of life expectancy.

1:08:49Yes again that's a meta -analysis Gary Frazier. So I interviewed personally about 430 centenarians and all but about five that they belong to a faith -based community. And you can't really measure spirituality, because it's too vague, but you can measure religiosity, which is showing up. And some people who show up, church, temple, mosque, it doesn't seem to matter. Those are the ones living for extra years of life expectancy. Arguably, the most cost -effective public health intervention would be getting inner -city youth involved with the church. I'm not religious person. I'm not advocating anything here, but all I could say, those are the ones getting the extra 14 years of life expectancy.

1:09:37And it might be because they're lowering their chance of getting involved in risky behaviors. It might be belong because they have cars. Yeah, it works. Number eight, loved ones first, keeping parents, grandparents nearby or in the home. I love that. And, you know, I'm sad my mom lives in Florida and I'm in L .A. I'm excited having my kids at 13 for the next five years. So, it's just the bonds, it's just the experience of love and connection. Yeah, so I think we're quick to dismiss the benefits of having our aging parents around. The definition of wisdom is knowledge plus experience. So the longer you've been around, the better chance you've wisdom.

1:10:29In these blue zones, you older people, it would shame the family to put your older person in a retirement home, which by the way, you put your aging parent in a retirement home. Instantly, it's a two to six year drop in life expectancy. Yeah. And you talk about purpose, there's no purpose in retirement home. So the longer you can keep your parent engaged, ideally with your family, because in blues zones you see them, they're the ones cooking. They're the ones stewards of this food tradition, which seems to be driving longevity. They're helping mom with child care. They're growing the garden. The agriculture was in the resilience.

1:11:09It turns out that a child who lives in a home with a grandparents, they actually have lower rates of disease and lower rates of mortality. We don't know exactly know why, but it's this virtuous circle that we're quick did again quick to dismiss, but very clearly a longevity strategy. And last one on your list here right to tribe. So social circles that support healthy behaviors. And this folds back into you know who are the five people you spend the most time with and falls back into default behaviors because of the tribe you're with. Yes, and yeah, I call it tribe, but it's the five people who we spend the most time with.

1:11:58They're typically people with whom we can have a meaningful conversation, who we can call in a bad day and they'll care. But I would argue that is the most powerful thing you can do to add years to your life. Because friends are long -term adventures, and they have a measurable impact on what we eat, how much physical activity we get, often our sense of purpose, how much quality social interaction we get. You know, the longevity project at Harvard, that followed a cohort of Harvard graduates since 1925. Millions of dollars of study, core finding was the number one determinative longevity, quality of your social relationships.

1:12:39You have the power to curate your social relationships, and that's what your best longevity investment is. I want to get back again to the what should people do now, right? And I think I love that. It's like, who do you spend time with? I know I have my dearest and closest friends and who I love, you know, and are my, I have one, their family is staying with us this week and then we're spending next two weeks and grease, some funny grease next week. I'm so excited about this. I'm going to take my 13 year old. Jell -Bus. Jell -Bus. Jell -Bus. Jell -Bus. Jell -Bus. Jell -Bus.

1:13:28Jell -Bus. It's great. So actively choosing that social life and putting yourself in those situations, I think also when you're looking to decide where you wanna live, right? Making sure that you've got, like you said, walkable streets and friends nearby. I mean, all those, do you add that to the equation when you're deciding where you're gonna live? I mean, those are important things to do. Yeah, I know when it comes to happiness, the number one thing you can do to increase happiness and therefore longevity is decide where to live. It's, you can remember to do gratitude or try to remember or savoring.

1:14:14But for example, when you take unhappy people from Moldavia, the Soviet block country and move them to Copenhagen or unhappy people from Southeast Asia or Africa and move them to Canada, which is a happy country. Nothing else changes about them. Their gender doesn't change. Their sexual preference doesn't change. Their BMI doesn't change. But within one year, they report the happiness level of their adoptive home, which is often a doubling of happiness. There's no other thing you can do. Same thing with zip codes in the United States. If you live in Kentucky, counties in certain counties in Kentucky, your life expectancy is 22 years less than if you live in Boulder, Colorado.

1:14:59Why? You move to Boulder, Colorado, every street's walkable. It's quicker to bike across the city than it is to take a car across the city. The healthy food options abound. You're a 10 minute walk into nature. And these things are there for the long run. And we miss them. We miss them in the seat. I love your work buddy. I love this. Is there a place someone can go to check what the life expectancy of the zip code is? Yes, it's the Gallup well -being index known as the WBI. That's, they have BMI and they have a life satisfaction. That's probably the best source I think. Amazing, amazing. Or CDC also.

1:15:40Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA. Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called full body intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spitting stool, and can tell you so much about your health.

1:16:18They've tested over 700 ,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance like, what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. As reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine and after just six months of following Viom's recommendations, members reported the following, a 36 % reduction in depression, a 40 % reduction in anxiety, a 30 % reduction in diabetes, and a 48 % reduction in IBS.

1:16:57Listen, I've been using Viom for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viom is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to vioam .com slash Peter. I've asked Naveen Jane, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Vioam to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at vioam .com slash Peter. You and I joked about this, but I am curious, is there a correlation between sex life and longevity? Yes. So if you're over 40 and you're having sex at least twice per week, you have about half the rate of mortality than your friend who's not getting it at all.

1:17:43But once again, we don't know if that's because it's a reflection of if you can still have sex over 40, you're fit to begin with, or if there's some longevity -giving aspect to sex, I suspect it's the latter. Causality versus correlation is a lot of things you have to figure out. Peter, I look at correlate, for in most cases, correlation is a pretty good suggestion of the direction of it. I look at it as it stacks the deck. If it can do no harm to put it in doctor's term, all it can do is stack the deck in favor of a better outcome. So I'm all for looking at what correlates to longevity and putting it to work in your life.

1:18:27So we've talked about a bunch of things and one of the things, and I think about this a lot is food. food. And food has lots of factors. It's what's convenient. What do I actually know? I should be eating what tastes good. And you just, you've just come up with a line of food called Blue Zone Kitchen. Tell me about that. Well, I'm a big believer that you have to create an environment where the healthy choice is the appealing choice and the easy choice. And over 80 % of foods and grocery stores are highly processed or sugar added. Most of the things other than the vegetables by themselves are not all that healthy.

1:19:10So I spent an entire year with a team of people and we took basically blue zones food. And I said to them, I want them maniacally delicious. And they came up with four foods, basically their bowls, and they're in the frozen section of every whole foods in America, 1200 other grocery stores. They're under $8, and they're all maniacally delicious. And I know that because people in the magazine just gave us the number one award. And according to Nielsen of the four meals we have, they ranked number one, two, three, and six as the top sellers. And it's the company's only six months old. Congratulations.

1:19:47So tell me more about it. So these are, it's a frozen bowl that I bring home and how is it prepared? You can put in your microwave or you can cook it at a stove top if you want. Most people put it in their microwave. And it's all plant -based. It's a hundred percent plant -based. And the difference between ours and most frozen food, usually the main component is the sauce.

1:20:16They've and then the food underneath that is batched, and it's cooked at one temperature. But we've sourced the best ingredients, the best beans, the best vegetables, the best greens. And then we cooked them at the right way, the right level so that they maintain their texture and their flavor of forwardness. And so therefore the sauces that we have have less sodium, no added sugar, but you still have all the flavor because it's not just a pile of mush, It's a symphony of deliciousness. I just made it. I like that. That sounds good. I mean, but it's interesting. Right, eight bucks. I mean, you're not going to get out of McDonald's for less than that.

1:20:56No. No. So you're giving someone economically and just buying these. Can you set up a subscription as well to have it delivered? No, not right now. Yeah. They're only in grocery stores. Eventually, we hope to do that. but the team I have their expertise is frozen food and we got really good at that first. Congrats. I look forward to diving into that. What else? What were you going next? What are you excited about? I mean, you're young. You got your age. I said you're young. You've got some good decades ahead. What do you want to do next? What purpose driven life do you want to lead next now? You know, I tried to retire four years ago and I failed miserably at it.

1:21:46And at a certain point, I realized that work is more fun than fun. So I'm working out another National Geographic article and book about the health, the places where people enjoy the longest life and full health. I hope to collect a few of these Emmys with my Netflix living to 100 series. When do you find that about that? I find on Saturday. All right. Probably be after this podcast. All right. I'll tell you that. I text me, please let me know. Yeah, I will. But I get to walk the red carpet. I'll feel like a big shot for a day. And for Minnesota. You know, put, you know, humble, demure people.

1:22:25And so I hope there's a second season of Netflix. looks, I believe there will be. And I really enjoy doing that. And I like to continue to evolve this city work. Gallup calculates that we've worked with 72 cities and they calculate that we've saved over 10 million life years. Those are real people. I haven't gotten anybody to 110. But I've gotten a lot of people, an extra two or three years of life expectancy, help them avoid type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancers and dementia and cardiovascular disease. And when I think about altruism, what I think about what my biggest impact on this earth, there's not a check I could write or a foundation I could start that would have a bigger impact and humanity than what I'm doing with these blue zone cities.

1:23:16Yeah. I mean, you've done an amazing job building a meme that is powerful, that is penetrated and which is hard to do. Do you mind if I ask you, I'm just curious, the whole process of creating your Netflix series. So, because I am fascinated by that world living in LA, was this something that they came to you with? Yes, they came to me. I've been approached two dozen times to do documentaries. And typically, they wanna hurl you into the gladiator ring of ratings. And there's all these sort of cheap ways. They want its celebrities there, and they want it kind of a biggest loser construct. And I said, no.

1:24:06I want to create longevity porn. I mean, my stuff, eating beans and socialize is not nearly as sexy as this type of stuff you do, Peter. And I know I didn't have that. So we made up for it by getting the best directors, the best cinematographers and we sat down and we spent over a year and a half shooting this. Because you're beautiful locations. Beautiful location but we also, Clay Jeter was the director. He's up for an Emmy. I believe he's one of the best directors in this genre. I trained at Chef's Table actually and I needed to make living to 100 aspirational and usually Really programmers can't see that as being good TV.

1:24:53We cracked the code on it, but it took a long time, and it also, I think, when you stick to your guns, when you have a mission and principles, and I don't relent. It means saying no 14 times before you say yes to the right person. And Netflix said, they can't be during COVID. They had flush with money. They had the right budget. It's the number one. There's no better place to release a documentary series or a movie or a Netflix, right? They have the biggest penetration in the world. But it was hard work. I've written five New York Times best -seller books, writing's hard, TV was twice as hard.

1:25:37Fascinating. Next book. Oh, and next book is... Is it, are you working on something? Yeah, I'm working on the book of this Life health adjusted life expectancy the place around the world where people live the longest lives without in full health so help health spandas you help and and Do you imagine you might find that in your blue zones or will you find I already found the places I can't tell you where the places are but their places do I live in one? No. No. America does a horrible job. So healthy life expectancy in the United States is about 64. You know, we're the juvenile delinquents of health.

1:26:23The A team, they're elsewhere. They enjoy 12 more years of life in full health. So think about that at age 75. You're just maybe you're done with your first career. You have financial security. You have a spouse. You have you want to travel. Just imagine the value proposition of 12 good years. And these people have achieved and they've achieved it by very definable factors that we under -selebrate. And my job is going to be bringing them, allowing people to see clearly what drives healthy life expectancy, and then showing how to put it to work in their lives or showing cities, how to put it to work in their policies.

1:27:05That's my next step. I love that. I mean, and again, you're the first bridge that everybody who cares about this needs to be focusing on, because it's in your control right now. And by the way, it's not expensive. No. I think one of the most important things people to realize, because listen, a lot of the stuff I talk about advanced diagnostics to catch disease early in therapeutics and so forth. There's a budget behind that. But sleep, diet, exercise, community, all of these things are fundamentals implemented by some of the poorest people. So the Nikoi Appendence of Costa Rica currently has the lowest rate of middle -aged mortality in the world.

1:27:51So best chance of reaching a healthy age 93 or so. They're all below the property line. They spend one -fifteenth the amount we do on health care in the United States and after we just identified it as a blue zone, Stanford came in and they measured the telomeres and they found the people with the longest telomeres which means the people with the the youngest biologically speaking were the poorest people, not the rich people. So it flies right in this face of the notion that you have to be rich to be healthy in this country. And their set of lifestyle factors are very replicable by the poorest Americans.

1:28:33So important. Can you engineer? I know you're doing this with Blue Zones LLC where you're working for cities to help bring these principles in and you're hired by who in that situation. Usually insurance companies, the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan or hospital systems. And so that's great and I get that. Is it, do you think it's possible to actually engineer from the ground up a blue zone? I have lots of friends of mine, not lots of friends, a number of friends of mine who are excited about building cities in the future or in the UAE they're building new island communities and so forth. Do you think you can engineer from the bottom up?

1:29:22Yes. And there's a book called the Blue Zones Challenge which talks about evidence base ways that you can set up your kitchen, your home, your workplace, your commute, your bedroom. room. We're always looking for the silver bullet. To certain extent, the ex -price is the silver bullet. Yes, exactly. I'm interested in the silver buck shot. I'm looking at the 80 things that the healthy swarm of nudges and defaults we can unleash on our bigger life. And they're all insidious, but they all have that half a percent or quarter percent impact on our behaviors, but when you add those all up over time, especially since they're long -lasting, they have a big bang for the buck.

1:30:09Yeah. I'm a very driven person, meaning I love what I do and I operate typically 24 -7. I've shifted my life to really other than during a starship launch. go out to sleep at 9 .30 and then waking up at 5 .30, spending an hour writing, going to the gym, getting my morning routines, which are important to me, those routines. I feel good about them. But I don't do weekends well and vacations are a rarity. But I'm purpose -driven in that. How do you think about that balance? Well, you probably get as much joy in stress relief and sitting around with friends coming up with new ideas or meetings which would be agony for everybody else, so I probably give you energy.

1:31:05So you're probably three standard deviations from the norm when it comes to being purpose -driven and having ideas and having the energy to execute on them. And as long as you're not feeling stressed doing these things and getting enough sleep, you're probably in a better position in a blue zone sort of way of making it to a hundred than people who can't wait for five o 'clock to come around in the weekend. I'm interested before... Yeah, please. Where does this drive for you come? Because we were talking before we started. You tell me about these great events you're doing. working with CEOs and investment fund and the X prize and spaceships and you're doing the work of you know eight people and I want did you at a certain point of your life say God I'm gonna do all this stuff or is it a kind of an unconscious drive and if it's where is it what's the genus of it because I bet you a lot of people would like to find that yeah secret sauce I I consider myself a kid in a candy store having a blast.

1:32:15So I'm driven by the stuff I find exciting and curiosity and desire to do. It's interesting. I went through something called the landmark forum. It's the derivative of a vest. And one of the things you do is you look back at moments of time in your life. Events that you made mean something. And I'll tell you what Strife never told before here, which was my mom was a Cub Scout leader, and I was member of the Cub Scouts. And during that Cub Scout year, there was a play that had to be done. And my mom felt like it was the right thing to do not to give me the lead in the play. So she gave the lead in the play to some other kid.

1:32:58And I was so distraught that I demanded that I get five other parts in the play to make up for not having to leave the play. And I think I made the sense of doing more things, means getting my mom's love. And that's of course she's amazing and I love her dearly and she loves me immensely. But that was the first moment in time that I could point at something. So I get today, I get a rejuvenated energy coming to something new. And so this morning I was on a series of fun calls for a fountain live this afternoon. I've got some meetings for my venture fund. And so I come back, but you can't do all these things well unless you have an amazing team.

1:33:51Yeah. And so I have learned having an incredible CEO so when running all of these I like the energy of starting something and then helping it helping it grow but The more is better disease is what I call it But the pearl that you said in that story which I caught was you wanted to make your mother proud Yeah, and perhaps that is the maybe it's the intrinsic motivation Yeah, and and maybe there's a message to mothers out there and having high expectations of your children and when they do something Show your pride in them and maybe they'll maybe your child will be a Peter D. Montice

1:34:39But that's no I mean where does it come from? Where does this like? You're not only purpose driven you're in a frickin purpose Maserati What's the pet on the map? Thank you. At the end of this amazing discovery journey, you're a scientist and a sociologist and a explorer where the Earth is your petri dish, so to speak, and you're extracting all of this incredible data. And it's beautiful how you've interwoven it together. where does this go next? Are you just going to continue to cycle through this process of discovery? At National Geographic, my beat is populations. I'm most interested in extraordinary populations and learning their lessons.

1:35:31In addition to longevity, I've done happiness and now I'm doing healthy life expectancy? In the intro I mentioned that you're an explored national geographic fellow and I forget about that part of your life right? Because I see you in such a different way. But with 8 billion people on the planet and so many thousands of cultures, there are so many massive experiments going on for us to learn from. We have the ability to learn now. Yeah, and there are some that excel, and they excel in measurable ways, and ultimately there are very clear drivers of what gets them to where they are, and that's what interests me, because I started my career.

1:36:21I said three world records for biking across five continents. I saw that. And my goal for all of those is, I wanted to write for national geographic. with that was the writing for national that geo is your driver that was that was that was my ex -price in my mind i want to write for national what what caused that in your life for me was the Apollo program star track they got me started what what got you was it like seeing a magazine on someone's coffee table yeah we used to get national media so we can get uh... and what my early mentor was a polar explorer name Will Steeger, who was first to reach the Norse bull.

1:36:57He's a Minnesota hero, you know, a ticker -tape parades type thing. You know, when I was in my early 20s, you know, he was kind of my hero. An explorer is in, you know, when you think of the hero's journey, the Joseph Campbell hero is the one who goes out. And it's not the hero that just leaves his or her community. They find something, they overcome their own demons and challenges, and they bring something back that betters their community at the end of it or saves the community. But it betters the community. So, you know, mine is sort of a modern day. The bike rides turned out, you know, I did the part of the journey where I left, but I wasn't really bringing back something interesting.

1:37:44And my editor at National Geographic, he said, you know, everybody loves what you do around here. But, you know, if you really, we're really looking for the type of stories that is going to improve the human condition or add to the body of knowledge and it was that little insight. And that led me to a series of expeditions to solve ancient mysteries. I did about 16 of those and I stumbled upon it. That's got to be fun. That is fun. I had a team of 14 people in twice a year, we went on. Give us an example of like one mystery to go solve. So, in the greatest civilization in the Western hemisphere until the 9th century where they ancient Maya, they figured out the length of the solar year to within 17 seconds of the figure we come up with today.

1:38:28They built the biggest pyramids in the world. They had a language, incredibly complex system of governance, and they mysteriously collapsed. And in 909 AD, there was no more trace of them. And what happened to them? And there was all this sort of misguided theories. And in the late 90s, I brought a multidisciplinary team with a huge online audience and did sort of a meta. They're 14 different archaeologists. They all have their own pet theories, climatic warfare, disease. And I basically did a wisdom of the crowd. We interacted with all of them and let an audience of a million and a half people decide what really happened.

1:39:17And we published that. Answer is. Well, the answer is they incredibly disciplined, innovative civilization that eventually got the upper hand on agriculture. And they were able to grow a lot more food, which gave them more free time. And then the population got so big that they were exceeding the carrying capacity of their land, and it was a very fragile system. And then a little thing happened. A drought moved from Panama up to this about Arizona, 17 miles per generation. When it hit the Central American about the a century. These little droughts caused little food shortages, but that threw the whole system off because all of a sudden they were making enough food that created social agitation and all these people who would do what the king asked them to do when there was enough food.

1:40:16All of a sudden weren't listening anymore. The king under pressure starts attacking neighboring cities for food and then farmers instead of being in the cornfield or in the battlefield and this whole system just exacerbates and it collapses. And it was a climatic event that triggered the whole thing, which of course makes us think about sugar warming today. And the fragility of our 8 billion people in the food system that underpins it. So at the time, you know, we, I think our theory made all kinds of national news. We did another one. I think we proved Marco Polo didn't go to China. Oh, really?

1:40:55Yeah, there's actually pretty good evidence of it. But in 1999, the Japanese government asked us to do a mystery there, and we needed funding, and they offered to fund it. And we looked at some Bronze Age culture disappearances, and they weren't very interesting. But then we stumbled upon this study from the World Health Organization, that their southernmost islands were producing the longest disability -free life expectancy in the world. And that was Okinawa. And that's the Earth. That's a good mystery. That's what blue zones actually. Wow, that's a beautiful story, my friend. You know, obviously thoughts of Indiana Jones come to mind as you're telling your stories there.

1:41:39I love that idea of pursuing a mystery. I am curious if there are teams at National Geographic including yourself thinking about the whole UFO aspects have aliens come to Earth before? Not the subject of a conversation here today, but I am curious. National Geographic is mostly, they're missions mostly focused on geographic, they're Earth. They're not so. There were some theories that the sarcophagus in a place called Palenque shows what looks like might be a figure sitting at a spaceship a manipulating a kind of a joystick, but that's been debunked. Oh well, you know, I guess I'll have to just stick with Starship as the way I'm getting off of it.

1:42:34But such a pleasure. Excited for the work that you do. I have a couple of pages at the end of my longevity playbook just because I think it's so important. Page 109. 109, yes. Which I have in front of me that you talk about the blues on. It's very flat. I was reading it like, well, this is a great plot. And then actually, I love your work because it is so important for people to realize what they can do now. Nothing happens unless you take action now. These are actions you can take that don't cost a lot of money. Well my job Peter is to get the most people possible across the first bridge. You can talk them across, take them across bridges two and three.

1:43:20Amen. I'm in. Those who are interested, Dan butiner .com. You can hire Don and Dan as a keynote speaker. He does that and there's a beautiful job of inspiring people and giving them a vision of what's possible on Instagram. It's at Dan butiner. And thank you. It was a joy, Peter. Glad to find us sit down with you. I know. I'm absolutely beautiful. Thanks, pal. We'll see you when you're on Rick. It's not stopped there. Oh yeah, that's an insult for you.