5 daily habits of people who live longer | Dan Buettner

15:30Zoe Williams:I think it's really fascinating. And fascinating that you said that their diets had sort of figured out how to deliver all the protein you need through this combination of plants. Because just like eating one plant was going to be unhealthy, but this combination together was giving them what they need.

15:45Dan Buettner:As you know, almost all plants have protein. Spinach is very high in protein, for example. It's just not marketed to us, so we don't think about it. But in general, the easy way, especially if you don't have a lot of money and you want to get your protein and you also want to eat healthy, we're kind of bamboozled into thinking, I need this fancy superfood or fresh greens from the expensive market. No. You get one pot, some nice herbs and spices, and you make beans and rice. It's a staple in the southern part of the United States. Or if you're a Latino, every Latino is going to recognize a corn tortilla and beans.

16:23Dan Buettner:You put those two together, put some hot sauce, bam, you have all the protein you need. If you're Asian, mung beans or tofu is a great way to get that protein. And these are inexpensive foods. And the real genius Blue Zones is harnessed is they've known how to make these simple peasant foods high in protein, high in complex carbohydrates and fiber, taste delicious. That's the most important insight. Most important ingredient is deliciousness. Why? Because you could tell me that broccoli is the best, healthiest food in the world or fermented tofu or sauerkraut, whatever. But if you don't like it, you might force yourself to eat it for a couple weeks or months, but you're not going to eat it for long enough to make any difference.

17:10Dan Buettner:If you can figure out how to make these foods delicious, like people in the Blue Zones, peasant food delicious, bam, you've got a killer app.

17:17Zoe Williams:So tell me about deliciousness. Hi, Professor Tim Spector here. Have you heard about our documentary, The Gut Health Challenge? we challenged Sarah, Rob and Lucy to transform their health in just six weeks by improving their gut health. If you've ever wondered how Zoe works, this documentary reveals all. When our participants started, they struggled with everything from brain fog and sleep troubles and low energy. Can eating the Zoe way address these issues and improve their health markers? In just six weeks? You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at Zoe and discover some great, actionable advice from Federica and Sarah.

17:57Zoe Williams:Follow their journey by searching Gut Health Challenge on YouTube.

18:03Dan Buettner:So, you know, my daytime job, I get hired by insurance companies to lower the BMI of entire cities that thereby raises their life expectancy. And my job is to articulate in such a way that people want to move from a standard American diet to a Blue Zone Zoe-type diet. And by the way, the value proposition for a 20-year-old, for a woman, it's about 10 extra years. So moving from a standard American diet to a largely whole food plant-based. And for a man, it's about 12 years. So it's an enormous value proposition.

18:40Zoe Williams:In the US, going from like your standard American diet, as you're talking to these cities, you're saying like a woman can get an extra 10 years of life, a man an extra 12 years of life.

18:49Dan Buettner:That's right, a 20-year-old. It drops to about six years for a 60-year-old, but even an 80-year-old could get an extra three years. And those are valuable years where you're likely to be more free of a chronic disease and feel good and feel better. So it's one thing to know that. How do you get people to do it? So I'm particularly interested in harnessing the wisdom of deliciousness and putting it to work. And part of my first book is The Blue Zone Kitchen. my photographer from National Geographic and I went back to all the Blue Zones and we sat on a stool and we watched old ladies grandma's cook and make this fantastically delicious food these pies made out of beans and these wonderful stews and soups and what we were capturing there is sometimes 500 years of observed wisdom these people like to eat delicious food just like we do but they had very limited ingredients, greens and beans and tubers, et cetera.

19:48Dan Buettner:So I got to capture a half a millennium of culinary trial and error in these recipes. And I put in the book, Blue Zone Kitchen was a number one New York Times bestseller, number one Wall Street Journal bestseller because we focused on deliciousness, not on hammering people over the head. This is going to help you live longer or it avoids cruelty or it's good for the carbon footprint. I don't think people really give a crap about that for the most part when it actually comes to what they're going to eat for lunch.

20:19Zoe Williams:I always say that if a food's too healthy to be enjoyed, it's just not healthy at all.

20:23Dan Buettner:I love that. So much of longevity are these hacks, these quick fixes. And when you think about a plasma exchange or stem cells in my joints or Ozempic injection in my gut, that's not a very enjoyable way to live to 100. The way I like to think is an Italian grandfather, you know, who gets up and has breakfast with his friends and a cup of coffee and then maybe spend a little time in his garden. Lunch, he's back with his friends. A big, long lunch that takes three hours, comes home, takes a nap, has a glass of wine at five, another beautiful dinner over the sunset. And these guys, by the way, are living a dozen years longer than us living in the UK and the United States on average.

21:13Dan Buettner:So what routine are you going to pick? The needle in the gut and the experimental plasma exchange or the wine with your buddies and the big, beautiful Mediterranean meal? I know what I'm picking.

21:26Zoe Williams:Dan, you're painting a beautiful picture. I know which one I would definitely be going for. I'd love to talk a bit now about some of the behaviors you've seen from these people who are living to be 100 and what we might be able to apply to ourselves. Could you tell me about how these people tend to start their day? And is it similar across these completely different regions?

21:49Dan Buettner:It turns out that none of them are consciously adopting a new healthy routine for the morning. They just live their lives. Longevity is much better if it ensues than trying to pursue it. In other words, when we try to change our behavior and our habits, It occasionally works in the short run, but fails for almost all people, almost all the time in the long run. It's about changing your environment. That's why, you know, I like to talk about evidence-based ways to shape your surroundings so your unconscious decisions are better. That's the idea behind Blue Zones. But we want to talk about morning routines because it's buzzy.

22:30Dan Buettner:Morning routines of 100-year-olds. Okay, here we go. The first big one, breakfast. It tends to be savory. they're not having cereal and milk or a smoothie or eggs and bacon like we have in the United States. It tends to be, you know, olives, a piece of sourdough bread, and a little tiny piece of feta cheese. In Sardinia, it's often a minestrone, which is this vegetable soup with beans that gives you about half of the fiber you need for the day and a piece of sourdough bread. A coffee accompanies almost every breakfast. Not a macchiato, but a cup of black coffee, which is, I would argue, is one of the better longevity beverages around.

23:15Dan Buettner:They tend to eat a large breakfast because they're off to work in the morning. So they wake up. This is traditional. It's changing quickly now. But they go to sleep and wake up with the sun. There'll often be a period at night where they'll wake up. It's often a two-sleep situation where they might wake up at four and do some work and then go back to bed till sunrise. But it's a big breakfast. In Costa Rica, it'll be beans and rice and avocado and some fruits from their gardens. And then it's off to work. And when I say work, it's not intensive, stress-laced work. It tends to be work that requires regular low-intensity physical activity.

24:03Zoe Williams:And there's a couple of points that I'd love to pick up on, Jonathan, because I think these are points that could just be applied to anyone wherever they live. And one is the point you made that they have a big breakfast. And this is something that we see a big difference in the U.S., the U.K., many of the countries that there is a big problem with obesity, type 2 diabetes. They tend to have the majority of their calories later in the day. and yet you see many of the European countries and the blue zone style countries tend to front load their calories and we know that you are metabolically healthier earlier in the day compared to later in the day and again we've seen from our own Zoe research that if you're having particularly carbohydrates or heavy meals later in the day that's associated with poorer metabolic health so I think that's really fascinating I wasn't aware that in the blue zones particularly they did that and then the other thing that was really interesting you talked about the quality of the breakfast.

24:56Zoe Williams:These savoury breakfasts tend to be higher in fibre, higher in protein, maybe healthy fats. By having these kind of breakfasts rather than a refined carbohydrate, it sets you up on a kind of really stable day. So if you have a refined carbohydrate, you have these big peaks in circulating glucose. If you have it for breakfast, then you have these big dips. And Sarah, circulating glucose means? Blood sugar in simple terms. And Dan, we've done some lovely research at Zoe where we found that if people have these high-carbohydrate breakfasts that are refined, so devoid of the kind of fiber. Like cereals.

25:29Zoe Williams:Yeah, like cereals, like white bread. Or even a smoothie.

25:31Dan Buettner:I'd love to hear what you think about smoothies.

25:33Zoe Williams:Oh, we've done studies on that. I'll come to smoothies. What's really fascinating is we see that people, yes, they have an increase in circulating blood sugar, but what they have is they have these dips. So about two hours after they've had this refined carbohydrate-style meal, they have a crash. And what that causes is them to consume more calories over the day. Our research shows that people that have that dip after breakfast consume 300 more calories over the day. They feel less energetic, it impacts their mood and they feel less alert. And so a really simple switch people can do, add some protein, add some healthy fats, add some fiber to your breakfast.

26:08Zoe Williams:And we've seen again from trials that we've done, by doing that, you stabilize your sugar for the rest of the day, but you feel more energetic and you actually go on to eat less calories as for smoothies that's a really interesting area because that all relates to the food structure and so forth and so top line is is that if you can eat your food in the original matrix the original structure in which it came in i if it's an apple eat as an apple rather than as a smoothie because what happens is is by changing the texture of the apple making it into a smoothie you actually eat it five times more quickly the same amount of calories.

26:47By eating it more quickly, then you feel less full.

26:50Zoe Williams:You tend to eat your next meal sooner, and then you have these bigger spikes, but more importantly, these bigger dips in glucose. And there's been some fascinating research published on this.

26:59Dan Buettner:You also said something about whey protein, negative or positive, putting that scoop of protein in.

27:05Zoe Williams:I believe that you should be getting your protein and all of your nutrients from whole foods. So if you just follow a simple, basic, healthy, balanced diet, you get all the nutrients that you need you get all the protein that you need this obsession about protein is ridiculous in my opinion that there's very few people that don't get enough protein yes if you're older yes if you're really really active then maybe then we need to think about it we've done some research showing that if you have a bagel for breakfast and then the next day you add a kind of cup of greek yogurt to that breakfast that you totally change your metabolic response throughout the day you totally change how many calories you consume throughout the day for the better

27:45Dan Buettner:Just a caveat with yogurt. So you see yogurt in the Greek blue zone, Eccaria. You see fermented sheep's milk in the Sardinian blue zone. But it's never in these little plastic containers with fruit. By the way, have you ever looked on the back of fruit yogurt? Almost always it has more sugar per gram than a Coke. So I always like, whoa. You can't just tell people to eat yogurt, can you?

28:12Zoe Williams:Absolutely. When we talk about yogurt in the healthy sense, we're talking about yogurt that doesn't have, you know, the fruit compote with it, doesn't have all the added sugars or sweeteners. We're talking about Greek yogurt or plain natural yogurt or plain kefir, for example, as well. One thing I'm interested in listening to this is that what they're eating for breakfast feels quite different from what I was brought up thinking a breakfast should be. Because you talked about things like beans and rice or minestrone soup. And I was brought up, well, that might be dinner or lunch, but it's not breakfast.

28:43Zoe Williams:Breakfast is like this special food that you only eat for breakfast. And I was definitely brought up that Kellogg's probably made it. But is that like a common thing across the Blue Zones, that you're eating for breakfast meals that are not special breakfast meals?

28:57Dan Buettner:By the way, Kellogg's, which makes cereals, has famously funded the studies discovering that children need cereal for breakfast. So there's a little bit of self-interest there in what we've grown up to believe. But in all the Blue Zones, traditionally speaking, they're eating a whole food, largely plant-based savory breakfast. It's delicious. The advent and the timing of it, you know, in Costa Rica, for example, it's right at sunrise, which will be 6 or 7. But in Loma Linda, a common popular meal pattern is a giant breakfast at 10, which is more like a brunch, and then what they often call a linner, halfway between lunch and dinner at 4 p.m., and that'll be it.

29:44Dan Buettner:In the Western world here, I think that's about the healthiest pattern. And we could adjust that up or down an hour either way.

29:51Zoe Williams:And so, Dan, when you're talking about breakfast, and Sarah, you're talking about it as well, you're not saying I have to have breakfast at like 7 a.m., the first thing that I wake up, even if you are saying that this is like a big meal and setting me up well.

30:03Dan Buettner:The debate is ongoing whether or not we should be de facto intermittent fasting or restricting our calories. But I think most of the data would suggest that 12 hours is a minimum. So in other words, if you finish dinner at 8, you don't want to start eating until 8 o 'clock in the morning. Other evidence suggests you should wait 14 hours. So that would mean if you're finished eating dinner at 8, the next morning at 10, you're eating your first meal. Evolution often provides us a good source for insight. You can imagine our caveman ancestors didn't toddle over to their refrigerator and make a smoothie or have eggs and bacon.

30:44Dan Buettner:And they had to get up and find food or hunt food or at least kind of repurpose the dinner from the night before. So they're not getting up and eating right away. There's a great scientist from the National Institutes on Health named Mark Mattson, also a John Hopkins professor, who asserts that actually if you look at evolutionarily speaking, it's much better not to have your breakfast until about noon, which is probably the pattern of our ancient humans. And by not eating first thing in the morning, we're sharper in the brain. We have more endurance. And of course, you're going to burn up that visceral fat after about 12 hours for most of us.

31:27Zoe Williams:Something we advocate for at Zoe is having a 12 or 14 hour fast period. We wouldn't advocate for the extremes. And I know there's lots of people that do these like six hour eating, 18 hour fast periods. We don't think that that's necessary. and we've done a big study called the Big Intermittent Fasting Study, where we looked in hundreds of thousands of people. We asked them to fast, but just for 14 hours. So we said, eat in a 10-hour window, exactly in the way that you've said, you know, you're having your last meal of the day, maybe at 8, and then you have your breakfast at 10. And we found in as little as two weeks, people reported a reduction in body weight.

32:02Zoe Williams:But more importantly, they felt better. They had better mood. They had less hunger. They were more energetic. And that was just after two weeks. And so you don't have to do it to extremes. So it's really interesting hearing that this is what naturally is happening in many of these blue zones as well.

32:16Dan Buettner:That's right. They tend to have an early dinner. It tends to be the smallest meal. You know, it's usually leftover lunch. And the other thing I noticed in blue zones, people don't snack. That's interesting. They're not going for the handful of chips or the, you know, superfood crunch or whatever the hell, you know, is marketed to us. But they eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and they're done.

32:39Zoe Williams:And Dan, when you look at those, because obviously these five very different periods, are they normally having about that sort of 12 to 14 hours, like overnight fast? Is that sort of the pattern?

32:49Dan Buettner:The sun is down by 7, and they've already done eating. And yeah, it's 12 to 14 hours. Okinawans might have a very small dinner at 4 in the afternoon, and then it's not until they wake up the next morning that their breakfast is likely to be, traditionally speaking, a miso soup full of root vegetables or some of the herbs growing.

33:12Zoe Williams:And I think this is really interesting because our research at Zoe has shown from our Predict studies that people who are eating after 9 o 'clock in the evening tend to have poorer metabolic health, tend to have higher propensity to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and so forth. And so this is something we often say to people, just try not to eat after 8 or 9. I love that.

33:32Dan Buettner:It's so simple and it's nice to hear the research underpins it. And I'm guessing 9 isn't the magic hour. No.

33:40Zoe Williams:That's for the sake of our analysis. I mean, you know, we looked at 8 o 'clock, 9 o 'clock. Those eating after 9, we found that there was a particularly heightened increased risk of poor metabolic health. But ideally, you eat in tune with your body clock. So ideally, not eating after 8, 9 or so forth would be better for you than snacking away through the night.

33:59Dan Buettner:I used to be on what I called a seafood diet. I'd see food and I'd eat it. It took a while to get off of it. I think we were all brought up.

34:07Zoe Williams:I feel like this is what the food industry is teaching us, right? and we're surrounded, I assume that part of the not snacking in these environments is you're not always within like 60 seconds and someone's selling you food.

34:20Dan Buettner:If you bring in the snacks and the ice cream and the chips and the cookies and the sodas, the temptation is going to overwhelm you. The key is to shape your environment, to rid them of the temptations. The decision point should be at the grocery store where you just don't buy it.

34:39Zoe Williams:If you want to help your friends and family live longer, healthier lives, and who doesn't, be sure to share this episode with them now. I'm confident they'll thank you for it. I understand from the research team that there might be a couple of real people that we might be able to talk about about sort of their routines. And I was told we might be able to start with Don Ramirez in Costa Rica.

35:05Dan Buettner:Amazing guy, 100 years old. He looks like he's about 70. He's got this perfect sort of smooth skin still. He wears blue jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid shirt, a cowboy hat, light cowboy hat. He's always got his knife on his belt. He's in Nicoya, Costa Rica. He wakes up every morning, and he's got cattle. He's got a horse, and he leads his cattle through town to where they pasture in the morning. You know, at first I didn't believe it because I've seen 500, 100-year-olds and I know what a 100-year-old looks like. This guy don't look like 100, but we checked his age. Now the guy's probably 102. But anyway, the funny part about his morning routine is he's single, he's a widower, but he still likes pretty girls.

35:53Dan Buettner:So every single morning he rides his horse and with all his cows in tow past a house where he knows there's a pretty girl sitting on the porch and he waves at her. You know, most people in the booze, and this is just an anecdotal, but it comes from interviewing 500 or so hundred year olds. Grumpy people don't make it. Is that true? I mean, there's a handful of them, but for the most part, the people are making it to a hundred. They're interesting. They're interested. They attract people to them. They enjoy telling their stories. They're generous. I remember I met this 108-year-old woman named Panchita, also in Costa Rica.

36:34Dan Buettner:They're descended from the Chorotega indigenous people. And she still cooks on something called a fogon, which is this giant adobe kind of oven stove type thing. And we had cameras and we asked her if she'd cook her dinner so we can give some context. And she patted tortillas and cooked up her beans. And she chased down a chicken and got an egg and put an egg. And it made this beautiful meal and then put it down. And this woman is stick thin. I say, well, can we watch you eat it? And she goes, no, that's for you. And we, no, no, no, we're not going to eat your food. And absolutely iron resolve.

37:15Dan Buettner:You eat that. And so it was this generosity. This woman doesn't have much. By the way, we made sure she got a big, huge gift she wasn't expecting, so it wasn't like we're taking the food out of her mom. But it was just that act of generosity that gives you insight to the bigger ecosystem of the blue zone. We tend to get down to the nutrient and the fiber and that, but the bigger magic in the blue zone happens in the ectoskeleton of it, to use a metaphor. The matrix of social and psychological characteristics that are in place that, I'd say, reduce stress and make for a stronger, safer, more supportive society.

37:59Dan Buettner:And there's a generosity where people look out for each other. They're not about a bunch of selfish people, you know, shooting up GLP-1s and eating superfoods.

38:09Zoe Williams:That's really fascinating. We've had some podcasts with researchers who've done these really big studies looking at how much social interaction affects your health in older age. And that basically having much more sociability apparently is one of the big things that means you live longer than otherwise. And it sounds like this is something you're seeing for real with people all the way up to 100 years old.

38:31Dan Buettner:Yes. Julia, who I met on set with this Lived in 100 Netflix documentary series, 100 years old, never got married. But she stayed in the village of her family and no kids of her own, but she has like a dozen nieces and nephews. And she's got a separate room in her place. And these nieces and nephews take turns staying at her house. They actually stay 24 hours. She doesn't need a nurse. By the way, this Julia is wonderful. She laughs. She tells dirty jokes. She goes outside. And you actually want to hang out with her. And the difference between being a lonely spinster and having this regular social interaction with the nieces that stay overnight and take her out and so forth, it's about eight years of life expectancy.

39:20Zoe Williams:It's interesting. It feels like there's almost two things you're talking about here. One is just having social interaction is really important. We're also talking, I think, about maybe these people having a sort of a more positive attitude and being quite sociable.

39:32Dan Buettner:Yeah. You know, people sort of turn the same research. Yeah, you should be social. Or yeah, you should have a sense of purpose. Or yeah, you should shed stress. That's why I come back to the core premise of Blue Zones. Don't try to change your behavior. Don't say, okay, I'm going to be more social now. Change your environment. The best example, imagine somebody living in a cul-de-sac in a suburb of London or a suburb of the United States here, where every time you want to see somebody new, you got to get in your car and drive to a shopping mall and everybody's on their phone looking down, as opposed to a small town where you have a walkable downtown.

40:12Dan Buettner:You move to a place like that and you walk to the place to get the coffee every morning. Every morning you bump into half a dozen people you say hi to. And eventually one of those people, we get into a conversation and pretty soon they become a friend. People who live in blue zones, well, first of all, they tend to live in extended family. It's a big, important idea. So right there, they have that sort of social network baked in. And number two, they tend to live in places where they're nudged into bumping into each other, to talking to each other, to needing each other. And so much of our health is a function of our environment, and that's social is right up at the top of that list.

41:00Zoe Williams:But I think you can have this in cities. When I think about where I live, I live in London. My sister lives 100 yards up the road. My in-laws live within five minute walk. My kids go to my old school. When I walk my kids to school, I see all my old school friends. And so I have what I feel is that kind of community. I live in London, but I still have that. At the weekend, people are constantly in and out of our house, old school friends, family. We eat in that social way. And so I think that we shouldn't disillusion people just because they're living in a city. And so I think you can still have all of that, even if you are from New York or London.

41:40Dan Buettner:Well, we have the suburbanization here in the United States where cities are sprawling. And that's an environmental direction that's going to breed loneliness. It's not just an opinion. It's a fact.

41:54Zoe Williams:That makes sense. We're in Florida right now, and it's hard to get anywhere, right, without getting in a car and driving a long way to be somewhere else. And so clearly, these cities have been built for cars first rather than humans first. I did want to pick up on one other story because we've spoken a lot about people living in environments I think are very different from the ones that we're used to in the West. But actually, one of your blue zones is in California, right? And so, can you tell us a bit about Marge?

42:20Dan Buettner:Marge D 'Aton. Marge, 105 years old, wakes up every morning at 6 a.m., reads her Bible. Long-lived people are almost always religious or they belong to a faith-based community. Half hour, then she has her breakfast and she's very prescriptive about her breakfast. She has slow-cooked oatmeal, not the quick oats, with dates, walnuts, topped with soy milk, followed by what she calls a prune juice shooter. Now, in America, prune juice is kind of a laxative, so you can kind of get the shooter end of that. But then she goes and she's busy. At 105, she still volunteered for seven organizations. She was in charge of a recycling program, a tape-copying effort at her church.

43:09Dan Buettner:She adopted a 78-year-old woman, and she'd get in her 1994 Cadillac, barrel down the San Bernardino Freeway in Los Angeles, where she would volunteer for these organizations, including the Loma Linda Senior Center, where she'd go help out the old folks, who of course are like 40 years younger than she is. But for me, she was the personification of purpose. And what's purpose? This is something we often don't think deeply enough about. true purpose almost always has an altruistic element to it. It's not just, you know, I love to knit or I love collecting cars. It's knowing what their values are, what their passions are, what they're good at, what they like to do.

43:56Dan Buettner:And then the most important is an outlet. If you don't have an outlet, it ain't purpose. And she had seven outlets and she got out of bed in the morning, jumped out of bed and she didn't wake up with the existential stress of 105. I'm no good to anybody anymore. No, these seven organizations need me. She took her medicines. It kept her active. It kept her brain engaged. It's not a coincidence she's 105 and healthy. So Dan, what's your morning routine? My morning routine? Well, I travel a lot these days because I'm still working for National Geographic. But typically, it's a cup of coffee in the morning, which I believe is a longevity beverage.

44:39Dan Buettner:And I live in Miami. And the first thing I do is I walk down to the beach and I get a huge eyeful of sun, rises over the Atlantic where I am. And then I walk up to my favorite coffee shop and have a cup of coffee and read the papers. And I know a bunch of people I always bump into. and then at noon I come home to my place and I go swimming in the ocean. I would say three days out of five, a couple of days it's too turbulent. But I live in a very walkable, bikeable neighborhood and I hardly ever get in a car.

45:17Zoe Williams:And what do you typically have for breakfast?

45:20Dan Buettner:So I fast more like 16 hours. And I don't know if that's necessarily the right thing for people, but I tend to fast. So I have my breakfast at about 11 and I go have, I have the same thing every day. I make a huge pot of sardinian minestrone. The recipe, by the way, is on my website, danbutner.com or in my Blue Zone Kitchen books. But I make it in a big Instapot and then I store seven servings of it for the whole week. I store them, and this is a tip, in glass Pyrex Tupperware. I don't like the plastic. And then I can just take the top off and that's my lunch. And I'll often put avocado on top of it.

46:00Dan Buettner:So my minestrone's got three beans, eight or so other vegetables, extra virgin olive oil, put herbs and red pepper in there.

46:09Zoe Williams:Sounds brilliant. And you've pre-prepared it, so during the week.

46:11Dan Buettner:Takes three minutes in the microwave and it's piping hot.

46:15Zoe Williams:Can I ask you one last question to do with the way that people in the blue zones eat? because it's something that I'm really interested in and we're really interested in as early is how fast they eat their foods. So they eat in a social setting, which we know slows down the rate. But we know in the US and the UK, people are eating their food so fast, which we know is a big problem. Yes, yes. I'm really curious because I think it's something that's a really easy, actionable thing for people to take away.

46:41Dan Buettner:So breakfast might be a little fast, but lunch is a to-do. Lunch is their main meal usually. And it happens a little later in the afternoon. The whole family sits down. In all places, there is some prayer or some phrase people say. Harahachibu, for example, and Okinawa, which means stop when my stomach is 80 % full or the Lord's Prayer. It's some punctuation between whatever the heck they were doing before and now, oh, thank you for this food. This food's special. I'm going to honor it. Let's slow down and now we'll eat. And these bigger dinners are always with family. I was just in Sardinia a couple weeks ago, met the mayor, and he had to cut off my interview at two because he had to go home.

47:29Dan Buettner:And he told me he has a two-hour lunch on a school day and his whole family. And it's not just his family. It's his brother and his brother's family. So there's 10 people sit down to lunch every day. And they talk and they unpack the day. and they're not just eating to their favorite TV show or wolfing it down so they can run back to the office. It's a ritual. It's a celebration. And to your point, I think, they're consuming those calories more slowly over the course of time. And you're probably going to tell me why that's good for us.

48:06Zoe Williams:I think it's really good for you. And I think we have a problem in many countries, US, UK particularly, that we're consuming our lunch in about 20 minutes. we're consuming our dinners similarly in about 30 minutes and so by eating so fast you're not allowing the fullness and signals to get to your brain you're having bigger metabolic responses and we know again from our own research that this is associated with poor metabolic health increased levels of obesity type 2 diabetes and so forth and there's been research showing if you just slow down the rate that you're eating by 20 percent you subconsciously reduce your calorie intake by 15%.

48:42Zoe Williams:And in addition, you get these metabolic effects. And I think that's what's so lovely when you hear about the blue zones and this social way of eating that naturally ensures that you slow down anyway because you're talking. I mean, Jonathan doesn't have that problem because he talks so much. He eats slowly.

48:58Dan Buettner:I have to admit, when I have my minestrone, I eat alone. I'm probably done in 10 minutes. How do you slow down practically?

49:06Zoe Williams:So there isn't an optimum time. Practically, there's different ways you can do it. You can have smaller spoons, smaller bowl. The biggest, simplest way to do it is to be in a social setting. That's why I think as well in these blue zones where all of the eating is done or most of it's done in that social setting, you're naturally slowing down. Studies show that if you eat in front of the TV, you eat about 50 % more quickly.

49:27Dan Buettner:Okay. So recapping, I mean, I would say three things. I'd say express gratitude for your food. And this is something we saw in Kyoto, that there's this whole manner of eating where before the first bite, people take stock in all the people who brought the food to their table. The farmer, the person who delivered the food, the person who prepared the food, the person who cooked the food, the person who served the food. And that takes a minute. Sit down with people and make it a social event. So you're talking, I would say, if you can bring food out in stages, the first plate, the second plate, and third plate.

50:09Dan Buettner:And then I like this idea that we don't have a TV on or we're not looking at a screen. When we sit down to eat, we just eat and try to taste the food and ponder it a second before you go into your second bite.

50:24Zoe Williams:Are the old Blue Zones still as healthy as they've always been?

50:29Dan Buettner:No, they're under siege. As soon as the American way of eating, convenience, ultra-processed food, and you see immediately their rates of heart disease and type 2 diabetes and obesity begin to skyrocket and you get a commensurate drop in life expectancy. The life expectancy is still going up, but it's decelerating. And what the scientists are finding is the blue zones are kind of the canary in the coal mine. Being able to study them gives us an advanced glimpse of what's going to happen to us. Things are happening quicker there. I'd say the corruption of the food environment, because they were isolated until 2000 or 2010, and now it's hitting hard.

51:13Dan Buettner:Cars are arriving. Mechanized convenience is hitting there, and it's hitting there faster for the young people. Young people want the same thing that kids in America or kids in the UK do, but the older people are hanging on. So Okinawa is now the least healthy prefecture in Japan, produced the highest healthy life expectancy in the history of the world. And now it's the least healthy. But for people over 60, they're still the healthiest cohort. They're still the highest concentration of female centenarians in the world is still in Okinawa. Why? Because they still eat the same way. They're still eating tofu and goya champuru, their stir fry.

51:55Dan Buettner:They're still eating sweet potatoes. So what's happened to the younger people? They're drinking Coke and they're going to McDonald's and Burger King and KFC. Their habits, their way of eating isn't solidified. You know, they're online and they're getting pushed the marketing messages where the older people, they don't have an iPhone. They're getting together with their moai and having sake and gossiping together.

52:21Zoe Williams:And so Dan, for you, really the introduction of sort of Western processed food is like a huge part of that, moving from like the healthiest people to the least healthy people in Japan?

52:31Dan Buettner:You know, I'd say it's 50%. But here's the cluster. People are constantly looking for the silver bullet, and there's no silver bullet. You have to think a silver buckshot. And there's essentially five mutually supporting interconnected features to Blue's Own Life. They're eating mostly a whole food plant-based diet. They're moving naturally. They're not exercising, but they live in environments where every trip occasions a walk. They have gardens out back. They don't have mechanical conveniences. They're getting the equivalent of 10 ,000 to 12 ,000 steps a day without thinking about it. Number three, their life is underpinned with purpose.

53:10Dan Buettner:They know why they wake up in the morning and that makes it easier for them to stick to staying active and staying socially and mentally engaged. They surround themselves with the right people. They're around people who care about them on a bad day and they tend to share values. So they reinforce the right diet. They reinforce the downshifting. They reinforce being part of a spiritual community. And finally, they live in places where the healthy choice is the easy choice. that is the big insight that we miss over and over and over again it's a harder way to go about you know where we're it's like you know on this mouse wheel of you know we we're going to adopt this new diet or this new exercise program or supplement or longevity hack and even if they worked and they might we don't do them for long enough to make a difference in blue zones again it's about the environment it's about these five interconnected mutually supporting facets of their life that keep people doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things for long enough so they don't develop type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease or 40 % of cancers or most of dementia.

54:19Dan Buettner:That's the secret.

54:21Zoe Williams:I would like to try and do a little summary, and we covered a lot of ground, so hopefully I'll pick out the key things. The thing that's most on my mind actually is grumpy people don't make it to 100. I absolutely love that. You said they're like interesting and interested that if you implement change from like the standard American diet, which is a standard Western diet to the sort of blue zone style diet that you're talking about, you know, if you're 20 years old, you can add 10 to 12 years, but even if you're 80 years old, you can add another three years. So like, it's amazing, right? This is never too late about that.

54:54Zoe Williams:When you look at these five blue zones that you've been studying now for, for so long, these people on average, I think had like 10 extra years that they were living and this amazing number of people living to 100 and living to 100 with a quality of life. When you really dig into what they're doing, there's a lot of things that are very different from the way in which we're living in the Western world. But this being Zaria, I guess I'm focusing particularly on nutrition. You give this amazing statistic, the average American is eating 110 kilograms of meat and they were on average eating 10. So it's Not that they were vegetarian, but it's like much, much less.

55:28Zoe Williams:And despite all this sort of obsession of like getting as much protein and added protein, they weren't getting this a lot from meat. They are, however, getting it from plants. And they all have this diet where they've got this combination of plants, which is really effective for getting you all the mix of these amino acids, this sort of healthy protein. And that it's a sort of grain in a bean, very, very high in whole grains. Actually, a lot of the food is coming from these carbohydrates, but very high in fiber and all the polyphenols and everything. Basically, no processed foods because they live before this sort of like big food industry had arrived in these places.

56:06Zoe Williams:They have a lifestyle where they're tending to sort of go to sleep with the sun and waking up in the sun. And that is having an impact also on their eating duration. So in general, it's not like they're only eating for six hours in a day, but they are generally having 12 to 14 hours when they're not eating. they're not snacking, but basically they're having these sort of regular meals and patterns that are quite different between the blue zones. It's not like there's just like one magic pattern that everyone has, but they're living this pattern with other people. And interestingly, in almost all of these cases, when they do eat, it's actually quite a large breakfast.

56:38Zoe Williams:It's a breakfast that is not like the one that Kellogg's taught me I should be having for breakfast. It's quite the opposite. It sounds often like lunch and dinner. And this is your own meal now, right? This minestrone soup, you know, for your breakfast at 11am. Sarah was explaining that actually, you know, doing that is really efficient because your body can cope with like this meal better if you're having this big meal early rather than later, even if you start at midday, right? It's not the timing. It's a fact it's your first meal. And they're very much like whole foods, so not processed, plant-based, whether it's beans and rice or minestrone soup.

57:10Zoe Williams:And, you know, the contrast I understood from Sarah is like the sort of Western diet we eat, like you fill yourself up with this thing that's very processed, your blood sugar spikes through the roof, you know, then collapses. And then of course, you're hungry a few hours later. So you have your snack beforehand and you wrap all of that up. This is the food in an environment where these things are really social. So instead of like, I'm all off eating on my own and I'm living on my own, you know, you gave us these beautiful stories of these centenarians. And what was really striking is how sociable they are.

57:40Zoe Williams:I'm going to remember the cowboy taking his cows out every morning in order to like doff his hat to the pretty girl, like you're still involved in life.

57:47Dan Buettner:There's a lot of encoded wisdom in the traditional ways of doing things. There's a reason for it. And there's a reason people have done the same things for centuries or millennia that we ought to pay attention to. I know AI is the great white hope for the infinitely better future, but there's a lot of value in looking back as well.

58:08Zoe Williams:As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, It all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high quality hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber. Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives.

58:51Zoe Williams:Simply add one scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life, becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.