Living Longer ... And Better

0:00This message comes from Amazon Business. How can you grow your business from idea to industry leader? Bring your vision to life with smart business buying tools and technology from Amazon Business. Simplify how you stock up to get ahead. Go to AmazonBusiness.com for support. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find.

0:38Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and I'd like you to meet Lois. My name is Lois Poche Delahoussi. I'm 40. I was going to say 49. I'm 94. Lois lives in Broussard, Louisiana, and has a very active life. I think the most important thing is exercise. She goes to exercise class for an hour and a half, twice a week. She cleans her home. She gardens. I love working in the yard. She also plays cards with friends, goes to mass, and eats lunch with her family.

1:29Important things like going to the beauty pool. And I feel good, you know, I don't feel old. I don't know what old feels like. I just feel like myself. I do have a sister that lives to be 100. And I said, if she can do it, I can do it. So I have six more years to go. And Lois just might make it, Because all those activities are very likely contributing to her longevity. Even more, perhaps, than just having good genes. Only about 20 % of it is genes. The other 80 % is something else. This is writer and National Geographic fellow Dan Buettner. For the last 25 years, he's been traveling the world to places where groups of people have lived well into their 90s and beyond.

2:23We're talking about people who've achieved the health outcomes we want, which is to live a long time largely without disease. And these people do it better than anyone else in the world. These tiny towns, neighborhoods even, are referred to as blue zones, places where the environment seems to facilitate a longer life. If you do everything right and you have an average set of Gs, you can set your financial plan at age 95. But in the U.S., that seems less and less likely. Life expectancy has declined over the past few years. The average American makes it to about 76. Dan thinks they could live far longer.

3:07The reason that people I found are living a long time is not because they have some magical diet or longevity hack. It's simply because they're avoiding the diseases that foreshorten their lives. They are not dying of dementia, cancer of the GI tract, heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, obesity, at anywhere near the numbers we are today. They have the same machines, the same biological machines that we do. They've just managed to expose that machine to an environment that has allowed them to live out the capacity of what we're all given. So today on the show, we're spending the hour with Dan Buettner.

3:55He takes us around the world to these pockets of vitality, from mountaintop villages in Sardinia to islands off the coasts of Japan and Greece and to the Nicoya region of Costa Rica. We'll learn how these places nurtured longevity, why, as the modern world encroaches, they may be fading away, and how we can apply Blue Zone wisdom to our own homes and neighborhoods right now. The vast majority of it is, I argue, your environment, much less than your lifestyle, your environment. So Dan Buettner is now a best-selling author, and his recent Netflix series is called Live to 100, Secrets of the Blue Zones.

4:39But before he was into longevity, Dan was working for National Geographic and always on the hunt for a good story. It's actually my brother Nick who stumbled upon a World Health Organization report in the year 1999 that found that Okinawa, Japan, an archipelago of 161 islands in Southeast Asia, were producing a population with the highest disability-free life expectancy in the world. So I said, aha, now this is a good mystery. These people are living long and there's got to be a reason for it. So Okinawa, it's part of Japan today, but before about 1918, it was called the Rukus Kingdom. So it's actually a completely different population than people in Japan.

5:26Even though they live on islands close to the sea, they traditionally have not eaten much or any fish. Instead, they relied mostly on a type of purple potato called emo, full complex carbohydrates and antioxidants, the same ones that you find in blueberries. They also eat a lot of tofu. And they developed a few social constructs that, you know, at the time I kind of dismissed them, but evidence has now found are probably better explainers of their longevity than anything else. Number one, they have this vocabulary for purpose and the word ikigai, which roughly means the reason for which I wake up in the morning.

6:08And interestingly, the Okinawan dialect has no word for retirement. They continue to be engaged with their brains and their bodies, and they feel meaning in their life into their 90s or 100s. And that's been found to add up to eight years of life expectancy over being rudderous in life. Here's Dan Buettner on the TED stage. For this 102-year-old karate master, his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art. For this 100-year-old fisherman, it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week. For this 102-year-old woman, her ikigai was simply her great, great, great granddaughter.

6:52Two girls separated in age by 101 and a half years. And I asked her what it felt like to hold a great, great, great granddaughter. And she put her head back and she said, it feels like leaping into heaven. I watched your recent Netflix series with my 80-year-old parents. And we loved one particular woman. I think her name was Umito Yamashiro. She's 101 in the show. And she is just laughing and she can balance this like vase on her head while she's dancing. And she says that she never, she doesn't get angry, that the secret to living a long time is having fun. It really struck me. Yeah. Probably not coincidentally, these blue zones, in addition to being the longest live, they're in the top 10 or 20 percent of the happiest places in the world.

7:50So a really nice finding is that the same things that drive a long life also make the journey pleasant and wonderful. They kind of go hand in hand. You can't often separate happiness and laughter and a full, rich, purposeful life and longevity. They're part of the same mix.

8:15Okay, so you spent a lot of time in Okinawa. You learned about how they lived there. And then you decided to go visit Sardinia. Why was Sardinia next? We had data for Sardinia. A researcher named Gianni Pess was just beginning to report it in this very obscure journal. Nobody knew about it except for the 108 readers of the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. It was on the other side of the planet, and it was producing even more male centenarians than Okinawa was producing. So there are a few unique aspects of the Sardinian longevity phenomenon, but there are more commonalities. So first of all, the blue zone in Sardinia is only five villages in the Nuoro and Oleasta province.

9:05And it was a matriarchal society when the rest of the Mediterranean is patriarchal. And they lived in very steep, rugged terrain. They were largely shepherds, unlike the Okinawans who were largely agriculturalists. But what did they have in common? Well, if you look at dietary surveys over time, if you want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be 100, They were eating a very similar diet, a whole food, plant-based diet, not sweet potatoes and tofu, but instead they were eating lots of beans and local greens and some pastas, a lot of bread, by the way. You found an amazing correlation between longevity and how steep the people lived up in the mountains.

9:54Was it basically the steeper the better? Yes. So not the altitude. One of the top correlations was the steepness of the village predicted making it to 100 more than almost everything else. The other predictor actually was daughters you had. Turns out the guys who had five or more daughters had the best chance of making it to 100. And you add that when people do get older, they don't move to nursing homes, which you say can lead to someone dying two to six years earlier than if they live with their family. Yes. I believe from having visited the homes of over 300 centenarians, it's because when you're living with your family in a blue zone, you tend to have a responsibility.

10:42You're still in charge of the food tradition. You help raise the children. You always have a garden. So their wisdom is honored and put to work. And they have a reason to get up in the morning. They're still engaged with life. And I would encourage people to at least try to bring their aging parents nearby or incorporate them more into their family life. You know, something called the grandmother effect has showed that families with a grandparent in them, their children have lower rates of mortality and grow up healthier. You spent time with a woman named Juliana Pizanu, who was 101, never married.

11:24Right. But she had an extended family. And in Sardinia, extended family is almost as important as your immediate family. And her nieces took time, basically a day a week, to come stay with her. Do you enjoy the time you're here or is it work?

11:46You know, they weren't, oh God, I'm going to go take care of my aunt. It was, oh, it's my day. I get to spend a day with her. The other interesting aspect of the centenaries I met in Blue Zones, there wasn't a grump in the bunch. And it seemed that possessing a certain likability, being interested and interesting and a certain generosity actually drew people to them. I mean, there's something that strikes me about talking about Sardinia and Okinawa is that they're both relatively remote. Is there something to that with blue zones, that there is a rhythm to their day that doesn't include a lot of sitting and hearing about how awful climate change is or wars going on or all the things that consume us every day?

12:37Their remoteness does, to your point, afford them a certain insulation from the bombardment of bad news. But more importantly, it's afforded them a insulation from the standard American diet and globalization that has engineered so much physical activity out of our lives. Being remote allows this culture of longevity to incubate and develop apart from what the rest of the country is doing. When we come back, a blue zone that's not so remote. We visit Loma Linda, California. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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14:56Visit schwab.com to learn more. Hey, it's Manoush. Before we get back to the show, 2023 is coming to a close, and we've been doing some reflecting a bit here at TED Radio Hour. We have loved bringing you episodes about why wolves are thriving near Chernobyl, about how your brain sees your future self, and what needs to happen to fix the foster care system, among many other topics this year. And this is when we need to say a big thank you to our TED Radio Hour Plus supporters and anyone who already donates to public media. Your support makes independent and accurate journalism possible. We prioritize facts, context, and different perspectives, and we're beholden to no one except you, the public.

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16:24It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, a conversation with TED speaker and National Geographic fellow Dan Buettner about Blue Zones, places around the world where people have lived well into their 90s and beyond. We started our show in Okinawa and Sardinia, Blue Zone havens that benefit from being cut off from the world. But the next Blue Zone we'll visit isn't very remote at all. They're right off the San Bernardino Freeway in Loma Lina, California. Recently, one of our producers visited the local recreation center there and met one couple taking their regular exercise class.

17:10I'm Jody Nichols and 78 years old. Jody Nichols was joined by her husband, Glenn. Glenn Nichols, 94 years old. I think he's probably the eldest of our group. Alongside dozens of other regulars, Glenn and Jody stretched, balanced medicine balls, and stomped along with their instructor. But here's what's different about this exercise for seniors. Most of the attendees are part of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a Christian denomination whose members view their health as sacred. They're living about seven years longer than their North American counterparts. It's not so much Loma Linda that's a blue zone.

17:56It's really the Adventist culture that's a blue zone, the best concentration of which is in Loma Linda. And they look to the Bible to inform their diet. Mostly, it's from Genesis. There's a passage where God articulates the diet of the Garden of Eden. every plant that bears seed and every tree that bears fruit. Little or no meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, things like that. That's the original diet, according to the Bible. And from that, they've derived the message that they should be eating a plant-based diet. And their friends are all eating a plant-based diet. So that's probably the biggest driver of the fact that they're living longer, again with a fraction of the rate of disease of their neighbors living just a county over who are not Adventists.

18:52I've been a vegetarian since I was 19. I never smoked, never drank. I don't use coffee. And the reason they can avoid those things better than maybe the rest of us is because they were hanging out with other clean-living people who were eating plant-based foods and supporting each other spiritually and it becomes easy to fall into the slipstream of that way of life. We have socials at the church. We go to that on Saturday night, play games, and socialize. She's more socially active than I am. We don't sit in front of the TV. The TV is rarely, rarely on. We play games. That keeps our brain, we hope, moving.

19:42I think God gave us that community. He wants us to be in community and prayer, not just once or twice a day, but throughout our day. I'm really curious about the role of religion for the folks in Loma Linda, because how much is organized religion and an affiliation with a group? What impacts longevity, do you think? Is it belonging and identity that makes people live longer or the spirituality connection to a higher power that makes people live longer? Can we tell the difference? Well, we don't know how to measure spirituality with any accuracy, but we can measure something called religiosity, which is simply measured by how often you show up to a faith-based community, whether it be a church, a temple, or a mosque.

20:36And we know from meta-analyses that people who show up four times a month are living four to 14 years longer than people who don't show up. But we don't know if that's because belonging to a faith-based community, you're less likely to engage in risky behaviors or if it's because you have a day every week where you're de-stressing and thinking about a higher power or if it's because you have a nice social network that you close and play. But we do know that belonging to a faith-based community stacks the deck in favor of health and longevity. And by the way, those people who are making it 14 years are inner city minorities.

21:21And I argue that one of the best public health interventions we have available to us in most cities is getting young people involved with religious organizations. And I say that not as a religious person myself. I say it. Look at the data. You know, I don't know of anything else that can convey 14 extra years of life expectancy, you know, other than, you know, joining up for your temple or mosque or church. I mean, that's a commitment and a big decision. But then you also, you say that having a handful of nuts every day could give you three extra years. That's from the Adventist health study. That's when you follow 103 ,000 people for 30 years and you find that people who report eating a handful of nuts every day are living two to three years longer than the people who aren't eating nuts.

22:12You also visited a blue zone, Nicoya, a rural region in northern Costa Rica. And, you know, we've heard this for years, that in most of the world, as income rises, so does life expectancy. But that is not the case in Nicoya. It is one of the poorest regions in a pretty poor country. Which is why we should pay attention to it. This population has the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality. So they have about a two-fold better chance of reaching a healthy age 90 than Americans do. So, you know, once again, I go there trying to solve a multivariable equation. I just know that this place is producing super long-lived people.

22:54And we found that the Nicoya Peninsula has very different groundwater than the rest of Costa Rica. It's limestone in Nicoya. And what burbles up through the ground is a type of water very high in calcium and magnesium. So maybe that has something to do with it. And the race there is a blend of Spaniards, African-Americans, but mostly Native Americans, the Chorotega people. So maybe it has to do with this particular mix. For most of a centenarian's life, about 80 % of their dietary intake came from three foods. They call it the three sisters, corn tortillas, squash, and beans. And those three foods come together in absolutely magical ways.

23:49They produce all complex carbohydrates, lots of trace minerals, but perhaps most importantly, all the amino acids necessary for human sustenance, which is to say it's a whole protein without the saturated fats and the hormones and the other more dangerous aspects of animal-based proteins. They have a very strong sense of community. Most of them are very strongly religious. Again, this was a very remote part of the world, so they had to stick together. I'm thinking of one of the people that you feature in your Netflix series, a cowboy named Ramiro, who really demonstrates how people in Nakoya are biologically younger than people of the same age in other places.

24:40The scene starts with him on a horse, lassoing some cattle, and it's pretty extraordinary. He's amazing. He wakes up every morning about 5 a.m., makes his own breakfast, saddles up his horse and trots across town through a river where he has a number of cattle that just a small herd that he takes care of and he comes home and takes a nap and gets his lunch together and does it again in the afternoon and he had the vitality and the physical abilities of a of a 50 year old but yet we know because we could check his birth certificate and his id that he was over 100 years old.

25:33And, you know, that's where we want to be. It's at that level of vitality, but also, you know, making it to our hundred and possessing all the wisdom that he did. You have said that in the U.S., we hope for health, but we incent for sickness. that kind of bowled me over. How is the approach to healthcare in the U.S. different from NACOIA? The Costa Rican government in the 1990s instituted these basic health teams where every single man, woman, and child has the right to a visit every year from an ambassador from this team composed of a doctor, a nurse practitioner, a record keeper, and two of these sort of wandering health ambassadors and they actually go to your front door.

26:23They have your health records. They go in your backyard and look for standing water, which could harbor disease-bearing mosquitoes. They look in your refrigerator to see what you've been eating, to look for signs of chronic disease. And they can catch diabetes or heart disease decades before it shows up in an emergency room. And that's because the government invests in health rather than looks for profit in health. There's free health care for everybody, no matter how poor you are. And it's proactive health care, not reactive health care like we have in the United States. So interestingly, they have about half the rate of middle-aged cardiovascular mortality.

27:07So much better health comes fraction of the rate of what we spend.

27:16We healthcare, about 85 % of it is on avoidable diseases. And, you know, that's because our healthcare system only makes money when you get sick. All right. Let's go to our last blue zone, Ikaria. This is a Greek island close to Turkey. I feel like this one makes sense, right? Greek cuisine is what the Mediterranean diet is modeled after. We hear about that here. But tell us about life in Ikaria, how it's different from the rest of Greece. Ikaria is, again, very hilly, arrives abruptly out of the Aegean Sea. There were no natural ports. So it was largely overlooked by Western civilization. You can see from Ikaria, you can see Samos, where Epicurus and Pythagoras lived and created the foundations of Western civilization.

28:12But yet in Korea, nobody really stopped there much. So you don't see the whitewashed villages like you see in the rest of Greece. The villages are away from the sea, almost hidden, sometimes in these sort of craters, and they're scattered. You often don't even see a town square. That's because they were in perpetual threat of pirates. As a result, they had to stick together socially, but every family had its own garden and its own little vineyard. So instead of relying on the farmer to create all the food for the village, everybody created their own food. So they're all actively growing food, actively growing grapes for their wine, there and staying more physically active.

29:03they didn't have money for coffee for the most part so they drank these herbal teas at higher rates than the rest of greece and the herbal teas were made of oregano rosemary a catnip and a sage i had these herbal teas sent to the university of athens and analyzed and it turns out they were all antioxidants or anti-inflammatory and in most cases also mild diuretics which lower your blood pressure. So, you know, one of the reasons these people are living longer might be because they're drinking these herbal teas all the time and have a lower inflammation load or fewer vascular strokes because they have lower blood pressure.

29:47Going back to enjoying the pleasantries of life and another liquid that we have to talk about, which is alcohol. The sad headlines in the United States have recently been a rather definitive conclusion that the best amount of alcohol to drink is no alcohol. But that is not the case in Icaria. Right. Except for the Adventists who shun alcohol. In every blue zone they're drinking, and I'm very well aware of the epidemiology studies, but it's not definitive in my mind. Alcohol or a little bit of wine in blue zones bring people together socially. In Ikari, I just read a survey of 90-year-olds, and 90 % of them reported drinking every day.