Dan Buettner: Daily Habits That Defy Aging, Boost Health, and Happiness | Health and Wellness | E366

26:04It's so important. And it really underscores another important point to Blue Zones, as opposed to, say, the Brian Johnson approach to longevity. For a lot of people, these injections and pills and supplements, 100 supplements a day and these extreme vegan diets, they may add years to your life. They may not, by the way, but they may. And even if they do, they often prolong a crappy life. In blue zones, these places, they're joyful places. They're among the happiest places in the world. And they're also living the longest. And the insight here is that most of what really works at adding good years to your life are things that are going to make the journey worthwhile.

26:48And knowing your sense of purpose is one of them. Something that I laugh about sometimes is gym culture that we've created in our modern times, right? I think 50, 60 years ago, there was no concept of exercise and working out. And now even myself, like I'm a gym rat. I love to go to the gym. I love to work out. I love to exercise. But you talk a lot about natural exercise and how the blue zones choose more natural activities. So what is your thoughts around working out and tell us how these different regions treat that exercise? Nobody in blue zones go to a gym. There's no gyms in any of the blue zones and they don't exercise.

27:28So the insight there is, well, maybe this quote unquote common knowledge of exercise is misguided. You look at the history of exercise, which is born more or less in the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. He created the Presidential Medal of Physical Activity. Exercise has been a failure at the population level. Three quarters of us don't even get 20 minutes of physical activity a day. Meanwhile, people in blue zones are getting the equivalent of 12 ,000 steps a day without even thinking about it. Why? Because every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat, it occasions a walk.

28:05They don't have cars or they don't use cars as much as we do. Their houses aren't full of the mechanical conveniences to do housework or yard work or kitchen work or knead their bread or grind their corn. They do it by hand. They have gardens out back. So they're spending some time, low intensity, physical activity, reaching and stretching and bending to harvest and to hoe and to water and to weed. And we vastly under-celebrate the value of these. First of all, almost all these activities are enjoyable. Secondly, they're mindless. They're just kind of baked into the daily. Thirdly, collectively, they burn way more calories than spending a half hour, an hour in a gym over the course of the day.

28:50It just adds up over the hours of constant movement. And the fourth and arguably the most important insight is that when you're keeping your body moving all day long, your metabolism is burning hotter. So you're burning more calories even when you're not, so to speak, working out or exercising. So the caloric burn is much higher. It's much easier on your body. You're less likely to get injured. But most importantly, if you look at the data of gym memberships, you start with 100 people on January 1st, you lose about 80 % of them by September, at least to regular. So gym memberships, great business model, they don't pay off.

29:29On the other hand, and I'm like you, I do go to the gym. Why? Because I have a group of friends there, and it's a social occasion for me. and it is a good idea to have weight-bearing exercise in your daily life. I just enjoy it. So I show up, not because I think it's necessarily central to my longevity regimen. So I used to live in New York and I used to walk all the time. I moved to Austin six months ago and it's not that walkable of a city. And immediately I noticed, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to figure out how to artificially get my walks in now. Talk to us about if somebody's a desk job, what are the ways that they can get this natural movement in?

30:13What are the ways that you get this natural activity in your life? Well, first of all, think about exploring public transportation ways to get to work. And I know you probably roll your eyes. I'm not going to ride a bus. But actually, there's good research that shows that people who take public transportation have about 20 % lower rates of cardiovascular diseases than people who drive to work. Why is that? Because you have to walk from your house to the bus stop and then the bus stop to your work, and then you do that reverse. That's four periods of mindless physical activity every day, every time you go to work.

30:50That adds up hugely over time. We under-celebrate it, but it's probably 90 % the value of training for a marathon. Number two, if you can bike or walk to work, I know that's even a bigger stretch for most people, do that. People say, well, I live too far away. Well, you can always move. And if health is a priority, moving to work might be an important contribution. You know, if you go from being sedentary to just 20 minutes of physical activity a day, that adds three years to your life expectancy. There is no rapamycin or metformin or other snake oil supplement that's gonna add three years to your life expectancy.

31:30So if you can figure out how to walk to work and back every day and you're sedentary right now, I would argue there's no greater way to add yours to your life expectancy. Not sexy. I can't sell you anything, but it works. And there's plenty of academic research to show that it does. Well, I'm inspired to figure out how I can walk more often, even in Austin. So you've created this Blue Zones project where you basically go into cities and you make them healthier. You make them optimized for longevity. Give us an example of one of the cities that you've worked with and how you've turned it around and helped expand the lifespan of the people that live there.

32:08You start by the insight that you're never going to convince a million people in a city to eat what you want them to eat or get more exercise or socialize, but you can shape their environment so they do it mindlessly. How do you shape people's environment? Number one, policy. You can help a city adopt policies that favor healthy food over junk food and junk food marketing. You can help a city adopt policies that favor the pedestrian and the cyclist and public transportation over traffic and traffic jams. And you can also help a city pass policies that favor the non-smoker over the smoker. Those have enormous impacts on people's mindless decisions over the course of their day, and it sets people up for success.

32:57So when my teams come into a city, first of all, we audition them. They have to show us they're ready and they want us. We don't just show up and sell them. And number two, we help them identify the policies that will work for their city that will make their environment healthier. Number three, we have a Blue Zone certification process for workplaces, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, and churches. And we can usually get 30 or 40 % of all those places to optimize their designs and policies so people mindlessly move more, eat better, socialize more, and know and live their purpose. And then finally, we have in our Blue Zone Cities, a program for about 10 % of the people in that city to Blue Zone their own houses, their commutes, their social network, their workplaces.

33:50And then we recruit them to be part of a committee to help encourage their city government to pass healthier policies. So it's people, places, and policy for five years. We came into Fort Worth, Texas, a very conservative city. We were invited in, actually. by the hospital system and the mayor there, Betsy Price. And in five years, we lowered their obesity rate by 3 % while the rest of Texas got heavier. And by their own reckoning, we saved them a quarter of a billion dollars a year in healthcare costs. And they easily paid our fee from their savings. We've to date now worked with 70 different cities.

34:29We're in Jacksonville, Florida now, and Naples, Florida, Phoenix, Arizona, Tempe, Arizona, Riverside, California. It's really taking off, but it's only for cities that want to try something new and are tired of trying the same old memes and trying to get people healthier. It's so interesting to think about when I travel a lot. And one time I went to like Ohio and I was like, everyone is fat here. You know, like nobody's moving around. Everyone's driving their cars everywhere. And it's just interesting how like in New York, it seems like everybody is generally thinner because there's so much walk-in going on.

35:06So if we're in a city that is having some of these problems where it's not very walkable and things like that, how do we blue zone our house, blue zone our life? Well, there's two questions there. So walkability, there's something called a complete streets policy package. And essentially that is a city council agrees and the city planner agrees that every new street, about once every seven years, the street is completely redone in a city and they're on kind of a rotating schedule. But Complete Streets essentially helps the city make sure that when the street is up for redesign, that a bike lane, a sidewalk, trees, and safety.

35:51So in other words, it's not just a pathway for fast cars. It's a place for humans to move around to. Adopting that policy is the first and the biggest. And then once you adopt that policy, we can bring in experts that help the city planner plan for walkability. And by the way, that saves money over time. We all think we want to drive places fast. But when you close your eyes and you imagine a street with cars whizzing by at 50, 60 miles an hour and the smell of their exhaust and the stress that it generates and the danger for us and our children. We actually don't want to live in a place like that.

36:29If you close your eyes a second time and you think of a walkable city where cars ease by at 30 miles an hour, there are people gathering on sidewalk cafes, there are trees overhead, it's safe for our children to play, it's easier to stop into businesses because you're not whipping by at 50, 60 miles an hour. That's the place you really want to live. And once you help people understand that, it's pretty easy to get policy to follow. So I would say that's a really big one at the population level. And then Blue Zoning Your House, talk to us about that. I'm of the belief that most of us are on what I call a seafood diet, which is to say that we eat the food we see.

37:12Cornell's Food Lab has shown that if you have a bag of chips on your counter with a clip on it, you're going to eat a lot more of that junk food than if it's out of the way, a junk food drawer, a place you have to stoop down or reach up high or around the corner in the pantry. We're all going to bring junk food into our houses, but one of the easy strategies is to make sure they're hidden so we don't see those foods every time we walk through our kitchen. Conversely, having a fruit bowl at the most prominent spot in our kitchen and keeping that fruit bowl full. One of the greatest nudges to get more fruit into our diet.

37:49Secondly, you hear a lot more about sleep lately. I'll tell you what, having blackout curtains, invest in blackout curtains that are easy to put up and down. Great investment. You'll sleep better, especially in the morning. We've all heard about getting rid of electronics in our bedrooms, but very few people understand And at 68 degrees, right around there is the ideal temperature for sleeping. So once again, setting up our bedroom, setting up the environment, not trying to set a habit because we're going to forget or other crap's going to get in the way. We can set up our kitchens and our bedroom one time to favor better eating and better sleep.

38:28I wrote a book called The Blue Zones Challenge. You can get it on Amazon. it incorporates 30 different evidence-based ways for you to blue zone your home, your social network, your workplace, and your commute. So you set it up once and longevity ensues.

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41:35Happy New Year, Yap Gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign. There's no better time than right now. 2026 can be the year that you build something that is truly yours, the year where you take control over your career. And it starts with Shopify. I've built plenty of my own businesses on Shopify, including my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. So it's a two-day workshop. People buy their tickets on Shopify. And then my Mastermind subscription is also on Shopify.

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43:32It doesn't matter really how I feel. What I've done with National Geographic is found the five areas where people live the longest. And then in my current book, The Blue Zones One Pot Meal, you'll see in the introduction, I cite a meta-analysis we did. If you want to know how to eat to be 100, you have to know what a 100-year-old ate their entire life. You can't just ask them what they're eating lately. You have to know what she was eating as a little girl and a young adult and middle age and lately. So to get at that, we aggregated or found 155 dietary surveys done in all five blue zones over the past 100 years.

44:12So we know what people were eating in the 30s, in the 50s, in the 70s, et cetera. And when you average that out, which we did with Harvard, we found that about 90 % of all the calories they consume come from plant-based sources. So the five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains, corn, wheat, and rice, greens and garden vegetables, tubers like sweet potatoes. In Okinawa, the longest lived women in the world, about 70 % of their calories came from one food and one food alone. Purple sweet potatoes, nuts as a snack. And then the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans.

44:54and if you're eating a cup of beans a day, it's worth about four extra years of life expectancy. People in blue zones did eat meat, but only about five times per month, so a little more than once a week. Meat was a celebratory food, and over the course of the year, they ate about 20 pounds of meat. Most of it was pork from their own pigs, was an industrial raised meat. We in America, however, ever eat about 240 pounds of meat a year, about 11 times more meat than they do in the blue zones. Put 240 pounds in perspective, that's like a bathtub of dead animal, which I guarantee if you're eating that, you're doubling or tripling your chance of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and about 40 % of cancers.

45:44So not saying that you can't eat meat. I'm just saying that the more you move to a whole food plant-based diet, the longer you're going to live. And my books, like the Blue Zones Kitchen One Pot Meal, show you how to make these foods maniacally delicious. It's so confusing. I've interviewed Dave Asprey a bunch of times. I've interviewed Ben Greenfield. I had Dr. Gundry on. Everybody gives all these different perspectives, contradictory perspectives. For example, Dr. Gundry says beans are bad, lectins. He says, give fruit the boot, too much sugar. So let's stick on that. And then let's move on to meat after that and some of the controversy around meat.

46:23All right. Okay. So Dr. Gundry, I know him. He's a nice guy. We both lived in Santa Barbara for a long time, but Dr. Gundry conveniently doesn't tell people that yes, beans have lots of lectin, but as soon as you cook them for 10 minutes, 99 % of all the lectins are neutralized. And also conveniently, he has an anti-lectin supplement he sells you. So where do you think that message comes from? I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, I am quoting 155 dietary surveys done in places where people manifestly the longest. And I can tell you beans are the cornerstone of every diet. So you have to consider the sources of the experts.

47:03Dave Asprey, another nice guy. He's a marketer. He's not a scientist. nice guy. I agree with some of the things he says, but with these Instagram influencers, you have to go a step deeper than what they post on their Instagram posts. I work for National Geographic and our fact checkers occupy the corner offices. So anyway, nice guys. I don't want to bad mouth them. No, I totally agree. And I think a lot of what they say is great, especially Dave Asprey love. One of the things that we talked about in our most recent episode is how more people are eating red meat and how beef has gotten a bad rap.

47:41And nowadays, people are obsessed with eating protein. I don't know if you've noticed this trend on Instagram. People are absolutely obsessed with getting a lot of protein in their diet. And beef, ground beef, beef is really making a comeback. It used to be, don't eat any red meat. Now it's eat as much red meat as possible. You just said we shouldn't really be eating that much red meat. Give us some more color around why. People who are free to do whatever they want. But I can tell you that the people who actually make it into their 80s or 90s or 100s at the population level and don't have chronic disease are not eating much red meat at all.

48:17We've been here before with the meat craze. There was something called the Atkins diet when I was young, which essentially gave everybody permission to eat bacon and pork and meat, lots of meat. Well, Atkins, the great evangelist, dropped dead at age 68 of a heart attack. So this is a guy we're supposed to listen to. You know, meat tastes good. And if you're on a starvation diet like most of human history, you know, we evolved in an environment of hardship and scarcity. And yes, if you killed an animal, you had a big meat feed, you needed those calories, you needed the protein. But we live in an environment where for every man, woman, and children in America, there are 4 ,200 calories floating around every single day.

49:02And marketers are dying to get us to buy and consume those calories. We only need 2 ,200 calories. So add on top of that, the calorically dense, saturated fat-laden meat. And no, it's not a good idea. If you look at the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, you'll see that the average American consumes between two and two and a half times more protein than they need. So we tend to think, yeah, we're going to eat a bunch of protein and our muscles are just going to get bigger and bigger. But that's not how it happens. Most of us are getting plenty of protein to begin with. And when we add more protein, it's hard on our kidneys.

49:39Most of the time we just piss it out and it's not doing us any good. And it's hard on the environment. Half a billion or so sentient creatures suffer so we can have our pork chop or our hamburger every year. It's not good for us. It's not good for the environment. It's not good for the creatures we share this planet with. So I would much rather spend the time, effort, and ingenuity to make beans taste delicious, which offer just as much protein, offer much more fiber, which 90 % of Americans are deficient in, and build the soil rather than tearing it down and photosynthesize carbon dioxide into oxygen and don't cause any cruelty at all.

50:21And by the way, everybody can afford beans. Inner city, welfare people, and lots of poor people recognize the deliciousness of beans and rice or beans and a corn tortilla and some delicious hot sauce. Why not make that cool again? Cool. There you go. See? Yeah. Hala says it's cool. I'm quoting that. I think it's cool. Beans are cool. We're going to eat more beans. I'm going to eat more beans. I'm putting that all over my Instagram. All right, let's play a game. It's called Blue Zone or Nah. Okay, I'm gonna rattle something off. You tell me, is this Blue Zone approved or no and why? Okay, first one, intermittent fasting.

51:03Blue Zones, yes. In every Blue Zone, people went through periods of hunger and typically they ate all their calories in an eight to 10 hour window, which has been rebranded to intermittent fasting. absolutely probably the best blue zone strategy cold plunges no and no places in blue zone are they cold plunging and although cold plunging might be good for reducing inflammation temporarily or it might be good for recuperation the half-life of somebody who starts cold plunging is about two weeks i actually looked it up so it's trendy but people never do it for long enough to make a difference, even if it did work.

51:45Alcohol. I'm going to address red wine. I can tell you in all the Mediterranean blue zones, they're drinking red wine. 80 to 90 % of people making it to 100 are drinking organic red wine every single day and more on fiestas. Now, I'm not saying rum and coke or I'm not saying shots of tequila. I'm saying red wine. Red wine, moderate drinking, is associated with about a 10 % drop in all-cause mortality. In other words, very light drinkers live longer than non-drinkers. Blue zones, yes. Protein powder. No. In no blue zones are people taking protein powder. You can get all the protein you need from a whole food, plant-based diet, and that's the best way to get your protein.

52:31Matcha lattes. The latte part, no. The matcha part, yes. So green tea is definitely a longevity food. And it was a regular beverage for the longest lived women in the world in Okinawa, Japan. Okay. So the last one is dairy. Dairy is a tough one. So in Blue Zones, nobody's drinking cow's dairy at all. Cow's dairy is absolutely not. But you do see sheep's milk cheese in Sardinia, pecorino. And you do see goat's milk cheese in Ikaria, Greece as feta. but it's really strong cheese, really flavorful. So they're only eating a piece about the size of a marshmallow, very sparingly. Cheese is on the fence.

53:18What is your personal diet right now? I'm vegan plus some fish. Yeah, it's a Blue Zone diet, actually. That's what people in Blue Zones largely eat. If you invite me over to your house and you have meat, you're serving meat, I'll politely eat a little bit of it. But at home, I never cook meat. Okay, let's move on to modern hot topics and things like that in our last minutes together. So Ozempic is really taking over these days. And you mentioned Brian Johnson earlier, and he had a video that went viral that said olive oil is actually more effective than Ozempic is. Any thoughts about that? Brian gets it right.

53:58I actually like Brian Johnson. And I saw his documentary. As a human, I like him. And I agree with olive oil. You know, we need fat. And I think it's the best source of fat, even better than avocado or coconut oil. But no, it's not as effective as Ozempic. I'm not a fan of Ozempic either. While it may deliver some short-term relief to obesity, there's no proof that it's a long-term solution. And, you know, it's just no fun jabbing a needle in your belly a couple times a week in pursuit of health. I would much rather have everybody over to my house and I'll cook you a beautiful Blue zone banquet, mostly whole plant-based foods, and we'll sit around and we'll connect as human beings.

54:40And you'll want to come over time and time again. I'll guarantee you that's a better approach to dealing with weight issues and longevity than a thousand dollar a month pharmaceutical habit. Have you thought about AI and how it might impact longevity positively or negatively? The pace of discovery is increasing. And I have to admit, AI is likely to help produce some major breakthrough, probably at the genetic level or the nano level, or creating some sort of a drug that helps prevent the fundamentals of aging. We don't see it yet. We can see the pathway. I don't think AI is going to make the human experience better.

55:22We evolved for 25 ,000 generations doing what you and I are doing right now, Hala. We're making contact. We're communicating. We're sharing ideas. We're doing that human to human. Ideally, we'd be in the same room. We'd be doing this over a nice meal. I think that's never going to be fundamental to the human experience. And I just don't think AI is going to replace that. And also, part of what is making America sick, and we have a sick culture here, at least 80 % of Americans are suffering from some metabolic disease. 75 % of us are overweight. We live in a sick culture. That comes from the ease and overabundance of our lives.

56:05Most of what drives longevity requires a little bit of effort. It doesn't satiate our appetites for meat and sugar and processed foods and calories and rest. In blue zones, they're sort of nudged into these foods lower on the food chain, nudged into movement, nudged into human interaction. And that's what makes life rich and wonderful. And that's what actually produces longevity. And AI is not going to produce an alternative to that. Dan, this was an awesome conversation. I really enjoyed it. I think our listeners are going to love it. I end my show with two questions that I ask all my guests.

56:42The person listening in right now is typically 30 years old or so. So what is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? The first thing is do what you love. Forget chasing the money. The money will come. Why? Because if you're obsessed about something you love, you're going to get good at it. You're going to build your social network around that. You're going to think about it all the time rather than just money, money, money, which at the end of the day doesn't deliver much happiness. The second thing for greater profitability is really think about your immediate social circle.

57:19I call that a moai. This is from an Okinawa term. We really do become who our three best friends are. So we can let into our immediate social circle people who sit around and bitch or people who eat junk food or sit around and watch TV. And guess what we're going to do when we are with them? There's good research that shows that if our three best friends' idea of recreation is physical activity, pickleball, biking, golf, whatever it is, that's what we're going to do when we're with them. We mimic our friends and what they eat. So it's a good idea to have a vegan or vegetarian in that immediate social circle.

57:53So they'll teach you how to eat whole plant-based foods. And also success is measurably contagious. If we hang around people with low expectations and no goals, that tends to be contagious. Conversely, if we're adding friends who are on fire to change the world, on fire to make a difference, not just make money, that's going to be contagious too. And I would argue that's the most important thing you can do for stacking the deck in favor of not only success, but being around to your hundredth year to enjoy that success. I love it. Dan, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

58:30Well, I would love it if you check out my new book. It's called The Blue Zone Kitchen One Pot Meals on Amazon at Dan Buettner on Instagram. I answer all my own DMs and I have a website, danbuettner.com. where, by the way, there's a recipe, free recipe for the minestrone soup that fueled the longest lived family for over 100 years. They ate it every day of their life. I got the recipe. It's yours for free at danbutner.com. Ooh, I'm gonna try to make that. We'll stick all those links in the show notes. Dan, thank you so much for coming on Young and Profiting Podcast. Holla, thank you. And thank you for my swag box and my new microphone.

59:09So if I sounded good, I have to thank you. I really applaud what you're doing. I think it is fabulous. I think the way you're creating community is very blue zones. I love your energy. And I'm going to consider you part of my success circle from here on out. Oh, thank you so much, Dan. You're always welcome back on the show. I'm here for you.

59:32Well, guys, Dan offered up such a wealth of information on longevity today. And he reminded us that longevity is something that we can actually design. In fact, only 20 % of how long we live is determined by our genetics. The rest is up to us. It's influenced by our surroundings, the environments that we live in, the people around us, and the structures that quietly shape our everyday choices. This is the essence of the blue zones. And Dan gave us a tool so that we could mimic how people live in the blue zones and so we could live to be 100 years old. Firstly, downshift. Dan reminded us that chronic stress leads to inflammation.

1:00:10and inflammation is the root of most age-related diseases. In blue zones, people manage stress through simple rituals like naps, prayer, and quiet moments. Entrepreneurs, I want you to hear this loud and clear. Rest is not a luxury. It's a performance strategy. Next, move naturally. In the longest living regions, people don't exercise in the traditional sense. They walk, they garden, they cook, they move often without tracking steps or scheduling workouts. So look at your space. Rearrange your life so gentle movement becomes more automatic. Then there's dieting. Dan's food philosophy is refreshingly simple.

1:00:47Eat mostly plants, especially beans. Blue zone diets center on beans, vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. And also snacking on nuts. Meat becomes an occasional celebration, not a daily staple. This isn't about restriction. It's about abundance from Earth's most powerful longevity tools. And maybe most importantly, know your purpose. People in the blue zones live with intention. They have a why that pulls them forward every single day, whether it's family, creativity, service, or faith. Purpose can add up to eight extra years to your life. What Dan showed us is that thriving into your 90s or past 100 isn't out of reach.

1:01:25It's within your design. You can design a life that enables you to live longer. If you want to stay energized and mission-driven for the long haul, start with your environment. Build a life that makes well-being your default. So take what you learned today and start creating your own version of a blue zone, one that supports your energy, protects your health, and fuels your future. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting. If you listened, learned, and profited from this conversation, please be sure to share it with a friend or family member. And if you did enjoy this show and you learned something, then drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to this show.

1:02:01Nothing helps us reach more people than a good review from you. And by the way, all of our podcasts are uploaded to YouTube. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel if you'd like to watch your podcasts. And our Yap Live series is now on Spotify Video. You guys can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching for my name. It's Hala Taha. Of course, I gotta say thank you to my Yap Media production team. We produce all of our podcasts in-house here at Yap Media. I have a rockstar team, so thank you for all that you do. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.

1:02:40Thank you.