Live more healthy years

27:06That's incredibly sad. Longest people on the planet to the least healthy people in Japan, largely because of the American food culture. I'm very sorry. And of course, as soon as you start getting cheap meat on the plate, it's not so much the effect of that meat, but the fact it displaces all those healthy beans and other vegetables. that they were eating before. So I think people have got this idea about a dichotomous view of meat as it's either healthy or unhealthy, rather than the fact that, okay, if we take away ultra-processed meats, which nearly everyone agrees are unhealthy, natural well-cooked meat is fine, but it displaces, there's just no room on your plate.

27:45If you're having meat every day, you can't have the same level of other vegetables, legumes, et cetera, that kept these population so healthy so this is i think one reason and also we talked about this a lot in nutrition sarah wouldn't talk about it's it's instead of what you know we take it it's not just one thing in it it has to be in context so as you said okinawa you know they've displaced a lot of the good stuff with the bad stuff and it's so some of it is the bad stuff coming in but a lot of it is they're no longer having the good stuff because there's you know their minds and plates are full of other stuff.

28:21One of your other guests, Walter Willett, famously said about meat, it's a lot like radiation. We know a lot will kill you, but we don't quite know the safe level. And if you look at blue zones, the suggestion of five times per month seems to be associated, or it doesn't seem to be getting in the way of them living long, largely chronic disease-free lives. And it's interesting about the fish also, because I think most people listening to this will be, there will be some exceptions. A lot of people are like, yeah, okay, I sort of know that red meat's not good for me. But a lot of people, and I think Sarah might be here also talking about the positive benefits of fish.

29:02So it's quite interesting that that is not something that you - I'm not saying it's not good for you. I know you're not saying it, but you're not saying it's interesting that that hasn't been an essential component to be a blue zone. Because I might've expected that to have been like, oh, they will definitely be eating quite a lot of fish in their diet as a complement. So maybe not a huge total amount of calories, but that was a really important nutrient. But it sounds like you're saying that actually fish eating is not essential to being one of these blue zones. That's right. For sure it's not.

29:34But you have to realize, as I said before, the diet's a verb. It's changed dramatically, especially in the last 20 years. And they're almost caught up with the rest of Italy in this case of Sardinia or exceeded Japan in the case of Okinawa at embracing this ultra-processed meat-heavy diet. So you're basically telling a story that the blue zones are disappearing. You're going to hell. Is that really the sort of – which is quite sad because we're all reading everything about how our climate is being destroyed and the world is falling apart. and you have been seen almost in your own lifetime, the way in which these patterns that were so healthy are falling away.

30:15That's right. But yes. It's hard to be isolated though, isn't it? I mean, that's the other thing is you get contaminated by cultures and pressures and marketing that's global. And so it's very hard for these say mountain villages around the world to stay isolated in their bubble. and I think that's the other thing we're seeing. It's like, you know, it used to only be, if you had to live on the coast to eat fish, now it's frozen and, you know, everyone can get it in their freezer. I guess the other thing that's really interesting is it tells you that this is a bit by chance is what you're saying.

30:50It's not like these people in these zones were like, this is my absolute favorite food and I'm choosing to eat it because it's my favorite food and it's making me healthy. Actually, it was sort of, they were quite poor. this was like what was available and that they could support where they are. And then when we've suddenly been offered all of this meat and candy and all the rest of it, you're saying they weren't like, I don't want any of that. Actually, they're like, oh, okay, that sounds tasty. And unexpectedly, this is then affecting their health. Is that the story of what's going on? There's a generational shift.

31:24The diets, the Blue Zones, I wrote about them in the Blue Zone kitchen, there's a lot of ingenuity and intentionality in creating these recipes. It's usually the older women who maintain the food tradition. And they are genius at taking these very simple, inexpensive peasant foods and making them taste delicious. And they have a taste for them. So the cohort of people over 60 in Okinawa, for example, still have the highest concentration of centenarians in the world. It's the 20-year-olds who started eating the burgers and the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and their taste buds have been napalmed, and they're now used for the richer, fattier, enhanced-flavored food.

32:12You immediately play straight into my guilt as a parent about the fact that I'm not bringing my children up well enough to appreciate the sort of food that I know is good for their health. They were exposed to all of this like very easy to eat food, which tastes really sugary fast and lots of meat and all the rest of it. And if you get that, you know, you're saying I think that because they've been exposed to that early. It's like, well, that's delicious. And this is, of course, what I would choose over this other food, which is also probably harder to prepare. Being a parent is really hard, particularly I think being a mother in most cases is still today primary care.

32:46It's really hard to juggle all of this. So I think that in the reality of the food that's around and available, I think there's enough guilt around parenting. So I think that is a bit the reality of the environment we're in. And the question is, how could we make it easier? And so I think it's hard, right? I agree. It's a lack of education. It's not, I don't think it's anyone's fault. You know, they're told your kid will only have processed apple puree from a little can that's got a baby picture on it. Rather than realizing, actually, they can pretty much eat anything. and in that two-year window, they are really inquisitive and they will eat all kinds of stuff that they won't eat when they're three.

33:24And so you have that very narrow time to really expand that. And no one is telling parents this. We spend a lot of time talking about food. I would love to pick up on a couple of other areas, Dan, before we talk about what listeners could actually do. I thought one of the things that was really interesting, actually, that I had never thought about to do with this Blue Zines was stress. and I guess the obvious starting point, I think, is many people listening will assume that these centenarians have lived a life without any stress and that is why they've lived so long. Is that correct? People in the blue zones are exactly like us.

33:59They could be one of the three of us sitting here or anybody listening right now. They worry about their health. They worry about their kids. They worry about their work. They get stressed in their lives. They have a couple things that we don't have or have forgotten. Number one, they have these sacred daily rituals that help release the or tamp down the stress of everyday life. The Okinawans have this ancestor veneration. In their homes, there's always a shrine of remembrances of their parents and their grandparents and their great-great-grandparents. And they'll always begin their day with 15 minutes remembering where they came from and to a certain extent being able to relinquish their day up to these ancestors who they believe are still looking over that.

34:48In fact, you often see up along the ceiling angled down at you portraits of all their ancestors sort of looking down at you. And I think that helps. The Adventists are big prayers. They wake up in the morning and they relinquish their day to their God. They say a prayer before a meal, so they kind of slow down and probably lower the cortisol level of that meal. The Costa Ricans and the Icarians are big nappers. Believe it or not, taking a nap is a great way to lower cortisol levels, lower stress. The other big point, they live in environments that lower stress. One of the easiest ways to lower stress is to go out with your friends, to not be alone with your problems and stew on them.

35:33So every time they walk out their door, they're bumping into their friends. They tend to keep living an extended family. So there tends to often be a grandparent who has eight or nine or 10 decades of accumulated wisdom and resiliency that he or she can transmit to a grandchild who's having a tough time. They tend to be close to nature. They walk out their door and down the street and they look at the sea or they're in the forest. So much about lowering stress is the environment they live in. But I absolutely agree that stress is a very important component to manage if you want to live longer.

36:14A lot of these groups have communal eating and drinking, don't they? So I've often thought that when I go into Mediterranean countries, the fact that people are having a drink, you see old folk gathering every evening to have a glass of wine together. and they just have one glass of wine that lasts them two hours. I've often thought that some of the advantages of say red wine might be the fact that actually it's doing something social. And it might be the same if it was kombucha or a non-alcoholic drink, but it got them out. It was a reason for people to bond. And I think societies that are sort of anti-alcohol or who don't have that similar bond, which is a sort of cultural one as much as anything.

37:06It's not like they're all alcoholics. It's just a cultural mix. It does allow them to communicate and relieve stress and talk to others. And I think they're all sort of interlinked. So it's quite interesting how, you know, the idea of the aperitif hour. It's like you were saying about nutrients. You can't really pull the nutrient out and draw a conclusion. It's the package. and you can pan out even further of the package that comes with eating a meal or the package with drinking a glass of wine. Yeah. And the fact that these people are spending two or three times longer than the average American on a meal.

37:41I mean, I think the importance of that ticks all the boxes from A, digestion to communication, to de-stressing, to making these other contacts. So just the act of a communal meal sort of ticks all these boxes that we now know are really important for longevity. And is there real science behind this idea that stress can reduce your life expectancy or that being able to relieve your stress can affect this? Because I think people talk about it, but is there reality behind that? Well, there's certainly lots of animal data to suggest that's true, that stress increases inflammation levels. So, you know, mental stress has physical effects on the body, which will make those animals die earlier.

38:38That's certainly true. It's hard to do those same experiments in humans. Obviously, no one wants to be particularly stressed. There's one study done among caretakers. You have people taking care of someone with a disease and they measure telomeres. The longer your telomeres, the younger you are biologically. And they follow a control group. And telomeres are just the ends of chromosomes that are like there's a plastic bed on a shoelace that over time erodes and is a way of estimating your lifespan in a way. Right. And you want long telomeres. So a control group who just lived a normal life and then caretakers of sick people, presumably under a lot of stress, over five years they had shorter telomeres than people who didn't have the stress.

39:29So there's pretty good evidence. And there is some epidemiological evidence when they followed up. There's a whole study back a few decades ago of civil servants. And they had all the civil servants records in the UK when they'd worked out when they died. and they adjusted for all factors like weight and social class and education. And one of the big factors determining when they liked to die was what they call the locus of control. How many people were their boss? And if you were at the bottom of that food chain, the idea was that person had very little idea they were in control of their life.

40:10Whereas the people at the top of the food chain did feel at the top of it And they would live twice as long as the people on the bottom when you're adjusted for all these other factors. And they've done similar studies in, I think it's gorillas and various other primates. So the amount of stress you perceive is definitely linked to longevity. And so as you're listening to Dan talking about these ways that could de-stress, that sounds a plausible element. Yeah, because you may not be able to change your position in a company or a job or a family. But if the way you react to it can be dissipated, then this is how you need to do it.

40:51And if you're in that sort of community, you're much less likely to feel those effects than if you're perhaps on your own or in a sort of northern, sort of western type community where everyone fends for themselves. Yeah, I mean, you haven't touched on it, but sitting here in a northern climate in November, I'm also thinking that the sun is shining quite a lot in these environments as you talk about it as well. And therefore, your ability to be outside and take pleasure is presumably quite high. Is that right? Yeah, well, we don't know if it's sun exposure. It might be in the vitamin D that comes from sun exposure, or you're more likely to be physically active, or you're more likely to have a garden.

41:34Or meet your friends. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the other. They're all links. But it's void rain. Yeah, you don't want to go outdoors. But I'll add to that sort of stress conversation. In blue zones, people tend to have a vocabulary for purpose. Plan de Vida in Costa Rica or Ikigai in Okinawa, people tend to have a very clear idea of why they wake up in the morning. And I believe that's also a big stress shudder because for people who wake up and, you know, what's my place in life? What should I do today? You get this sort of existential stress. The unemployed, I think, have it as well. Whereas people in blue zones don't have that.

42:17They know they have a responsibility to their family or their communities. And ask the average American what their sense of purpose is. They don't know. I've got to go to work. But in Okinawa, you ask people that are ikigai, they can, off the top of their head, they'll know why they're waking up in the morning, their purpose. And I think that also relieves a lot of stress of the human condition. That's amazing. I'd like to touch quickly on something that we mentioned right at the beginning, which is physical activity. before talking about what someone listening might do. And I just want to pick up on something you said earlier, which is sort of none of these people are doing exercise.

42:59What are they doing? They're moving naturally throughout their day. They're moving all day long, but unconsciously. You know, I know this exercise is popular and it's sort of been a public health intervention, but I have to say in America, it's been a miserable failure. In the United States, fewer than 24 % of people even get 20 minutes of physical activity a day. So we spend$150 billion a year on the exercise industry and people don't go. Yeah, and blue zones are moving all the time, but they spend zero money on it. And my argument is, you know, instead of trying to hound people to get up and go to the gym or pay for this gold level membership to sign our streets so it's easy, safe, and aesthetically pleasing to walk to get our coffee, to walk to work, for our kids to walk to school, which we don't do anymore.

43:56When I was a kid, 50 % of American kids walk to school. We're down to 10%. 50 % down to 10%. Yeah, in the United States. So we engineered that physical activity out of our lives. And for most people, simply walking 45 minutes a day is about 90 % the value of training for a marathon. And is exercise a good idea? Yes. But does it work on the population level? No. I mean, if I were a government investing in an intervention, I would not invest in exercise. I would invest in walkable streets, parks, meeting places, aesthetically pleasing outdoors. We know that works. I think it's incredibly powerful.

44:41And it's interesting. I think that I now work from home. It's worked incredibly well for the company. But it took me a while to realize that basically my level of movement had collapsed because before I used to commute and I was living in London, which like New York or Boston or quite good public transportation. So I would like walk to then go and take a underground train and then walk again at the other end. And then at lunch, you would go out and you'd walk somewhere to get some food. And what I realized is, you know, I was regularly doing 10 ,000 steps a day before that without really having to think about it.

45:17This is just what would happen. And then I was suddenly realized I'm doing like 3000 steps. I now am trying to engineer walking into my day. So for example, I like to walk my daughter to school because actually that just creates in a really nice way, you know, sort of 45 minutes of walking. And similarly, I really try and make sure I have some reason I have to be out of the house. And I have to proactively create that though, Dan. And I'm just thinking a little bit about your example of these people living on their hill villages, right? Where they're presumably having to go like up and down the steps quite a lot just to do anything.

45:57What's happening in America, there's a sort of centrifugal development where the cities are dying and people are moving out into the suburbs. So imagine you start working at home and you live in a typical middle American suburb. There's nothing to walk to. Your garage is attached to your house, so you don't even walk to your car. So you walk out your door, you get in your car, you drive to the mall, or you go to a drive through Starbucks and pick up your coffee, there's almost no opportunity to unconsciously move. Until we look at the elephant in the room, that you can't not keep flogging the dead horse of individual responsibility if you want to get populations healthier.

46:38You have to set up their environment so you set them up for success. You have to create cities where it's easy for people to move naturally. And we're doing the opposite. it. And Dan, you are pushing on this yourself, right? This has sort of become your passion as well as your business is to try and get cities to redesign themselves. Because it works. So if you're listening to this and you're in charge of a city, then you should be following up with Dan. If you're listening to this and you're not in charge of a city, but you want to understand what's the actionable advice or how can I do this for myself?

47:08How could you make your life more blue zone-like? Without having to move to a mountainous area? Well, okay. The first thing is to shift away from the silver bullet mentality, which most of us have, to what I call a silver buckshot mentality. Silver buck means sort of a scatter pattern of little BBs instead of – it's a little self-serving. But I wrote a book called The Blue Zone Challenge where I aggregated about 40 or so evidence-based ways for you to set up your kitchen, your bedroom, and your home so you mindlessly move more, eat less, and eat better, and socialize more. And they tend to do – like in your kitchen, I'm a big believer that we're all on a seafood diet.

47:54We eat the food we see. so if if on your counter a lot in america a lot of you know we start eating a bag of chips and we don't finish it we put a clip on it we put it on the counter bad idea uh instead if you put a bowl you go out by yourself a fan the most beautiful fruit bowl you can afford and put that in the middle and keep that full so when you walk through the kitchen the default is fruit rather than the chips uh there's actually been a cornell food lab did a study on toasters very little of what we put in toasters produces something healthy on the back end. So taking the toaster off the counter occasions people losing about two kilos after two years, as opposed to those who don't.

48:38People who have plants throughout their homes actually move more because they're watering plants. There's little things you can do to nudge yourself into moving more. And I'm a much bigger believer in setting up your home, your commute, your social life. If your three best friends are obese and unhealthy, there's 150 % better chance that you'll be unhealthy yourself. So in other words, if your three best friends sit around and eat wieners and chips and watch TV, guess what you're going to be doing when you hang out with them, as opposed to friends whose idea of recreation is biking or walking or playing tennis.

49:18And And it's not a bad idea to have friends like Tim who love plant-based food. We think it's so hard for middle-aged people. But I argue the number one thing you could do to add yours to your life is re-curate your immediate social circle. Those three friends who you count on when you're having a bad day or people with whom you can have a meaningful conversation, those people are going to have a measurable and long-term impact on how active you are, on what you eat. And it's a counterintuitive. Nobody can make any money off of you, but being very careful about who you let in the room. What do your studies tell us about gardening?

49:58Because there's some evidence that gardeners, well, epidemiologically are healthier and have healthier microbiomes. Do the Blue Zones tell you anything about how that might help them or is it very variable? I don't know why, but I can tell you in every blue zone, almost everybody who are making it into their 90s and 100s not only garden their whole life, but continue to do so. And it might be because it's low intensity physical activity. It's a nudge. When you have a garden and you planted something you can't wait to eat, it gives you an incentive to go out every day and weed and water and harvest.

50:37And, you know, they're bending over. It's a range of motion. I've seen the studies that show that when you're gardening, your cortisol levels or your stress hormones drop. And it could very well be you get your hands dirty and you wipe your mouth and you're getting the microbiomes. There's a little bit of dirt. But I argue that gardening is probably much better than joining a gym, the best longevity exercise you could do. That's fascinating. The one thing I guess we haven't touched on so much is around the stress reduction. So you talked about these rituals in these blue zones, but those are rituals that sound very rooted in the culture they're in.

51:14So if someone's listening and saying, I really like that idea, what are the rituals that I guess, you know, that you do, for example? First of all, take your TV or your computer screen out of your kitchen. I think you'll eat more intentionally with less stress if you do that. Eat together as a family as opposed to with one wheel, one hand on your steering wheel. Take a nap, known stress reducer. Belong to a faith. I'm not a hugely religious person, but people have a Sabbath. Jewish people or the Adventists, this idea of a sanctuary in time where 24 hours a day, they're putting their work aside and they're putting their busy social calendar aside and focusing on their God or focusing on their internal life.

52:07hanging out with low stress friends. These are all sort of ecosystem changes we can make to our lives that as opposed to remember to meditate, which I believe in, I'm a meditator, but I forget about it all the time. So the benefit of your friends is it just makes it natural and it just happens versus something like a meditation, which is a bit like going to the gym. It requires you to sort of do something. Is that the difference that you're describing? So it's not that you're against it, but the point is it's a lot easier if it's just built into your social fabric. That's right. That's the approach.

52:41Because if you look at any sort of intentional health behavior, whether it's exercise, getting on a diet, taking supplements, there's a recidivism curve. They all last months pretty well, and only a few amount of months, three to seven months, but then it drops off precipitously. I challenge anybody to tell me about one diet in the history of the world that's worked for more than 4 % of the people who get on it after two years. So it's a great business plan, great marketing vehicle. You get people on it every year, but it's a bad longevity strategy because when it comes to longevity, mark my words, other than dying, other than not dying rather, there's nothing you can do this month that's going to make you live longer in 30 years.

53:32You have to think about things that you're going to do most days for the next few decades if you really want it to work for longevity. One last question. We talk a lot with Tim about what he eats on a regular basis. And I know that lots of listeners are going to be really curious about what your daily diet is. Could you share what you typically eat in a day? So I found the minestrone that the longest lived family in the history of the world eats. It's the Melis family in Sardinia, nine siblings, collective age, 860 years. They make the same minestrone every day. And it's three beans with all kinds of vegetables, carrots, celery, onions, some oregano, some red pepper, some potatoes, or else maybe some barley, finish with an extra virgin olive oil.

54:24I make a huge pot of that every week. Then I store it in glass Tupperwares, glass containers I can freeze. And then every morning, my, it's more like a brunch. I usually eat about 11 o 'clock and that's, that's how I start my day. So in the Tim Spector way of thinking, I have this cocktail of, of all these fibers because it's got a grain and beans. I get my protein in there, all kinds of trace minerals. And I feel like I get a good base for my day. That's amazing. Can we get the recipe? You can get the recipe. Yes. Okay. We will follow up on the recipe. I will give you the Luzone longevity cocktail.

55:03Yeah. Well, we'll call it the Dan Boutner minestrone. And we will definitely share it because I am actually just, my mouth is actually salivating, nevermind the longevity. I would like to try and do what we always do, which is a quick summary. And Dan and Tim, will you just correct me if I get any of this wrong? So we start off by explaining what Blue Zones were, which are these particular places where people have aged healthily much more than anywhere else. And they're very small places. So it's not like Japan or Italy. It's like these very particular sort of villages where, interestingly, what really distinguishes them, I think, is that they're not getting sick through middle age and later.

55:44and therefore they're ending up very old and healthy. And so levels of dementia and cardiovascular disease and all of these things are really low. That there's a lot that's just built into the environment that is achieving this. There are no silver bullets, to use Dan's phrase. But some of the things that are in common is the sort of foods they're eating, the fact that they're having to move constantly. So no one is going to the gym, but they are effectively doing exercise by just what happens in their life. They all live in places where the weather is quite good, but not right in the tropics where they're going to get sort of infectious diseases.

56:17And then I think we talked about three particular aspects, and I know that there's more in the book and the show you talk about. We obviously talked a lot about diet. And interestingly, although they are eating very different foods, there's some real similarities. And you mentioned whole grains, you mentioned greens, tubers, nuts, and beans. And then Tim was basically saying, well, I'm not at all surprised about that because actually what you see in common with those foods is two really important things. Lots and lots of fiber, and not just one type of fiber, but all of these diverse types of fibers, and lots of these polyphenols.

56:53And so Tim is saying, well, that is what feeds their microbiome, supports all of these different bacteria that then creates all of these things that support the immune system. And your research, Tim, I think, saying that this healthy immune system seems to be really crucial for fighting aging in the long term. You then shared this rather sad fact that I had not really fully understood that these blue zones are sort of dying. I guess they're becoming red zones, Dan. And gave Okinawa as this example where even just in 20 years, you've seen that as the diet has shifted dramatically, you see that suddenly they go from being some of the healthiest to the least healthiest.

57:27You see just how important the diet is in this. Then you talked a little bit about things that people could do about diet. and I thought one of them, which I'd never heard before, is redesign your kitchen. So how do you have like all this beautiful, healthy food on display, like fruit? I was immediately thinking you could have the nut bowl there, but remove the toaster, which is, I think, really interesting way to redesign. And then you said, you have the magic minestrone. So there are no silver bullets, but everybody listening to this now wants that minestrone recipe. We will follow up. So if you're signed up for a Zoe email, we will make sure that we share the minestrone recipe.

58:05Then we talked a bit about stress. And you said one of the things that's really interesting is there are sort of daily rituals that everybody has across these different blue zones. And so they were very different in different areas, but all of them are somehow very mindful. And whether it was like a prayer or like having a nap at a particular time or, you know, happy hour, it created this. And that in almost all of this case, there's very close community. So this is like with your, not just your immediate family, but sort of extended family. and therefore if you want to think about how you can do that at home, get rid of the things that get in the way.

58:40So, you know, take the TV out of your kitchen, eat as a family. If you can, then actually belonging to a faith is really powerful because creating this sort of sanctuary is your word, which I loved. And the thing that you said that really stuck with me is like go out with your friends, but re-curate your three best friends. So if your three best friends are not supporting all of this, Who is the other friend that maybe you could be spending more time with who, like Tim, is going to pull you into eating better food? It's going to take you out and do something physical. And I guess that brings us to the last point about exercise.

59:15These people are all moving all the time. But you basically think this whole push to go to the gym has failed, right? We've been saying this in the West, whether it's the States or the UK or anywhere, for decades. But actually, nobody is moving. So think about how you design your life to move. How do you design your kids' life so that they move? And I think the example that you both spoke about right at the end, which was really interesting, is can you have a garden? That actually if you have a garden and you're doing something actively, that creates this movement and this outside. So again, rather than thinking about exercise as this little spot that you do a few times a week, how would you just get this movement that you're seeing in the blue zones throughout?

59:58But first of all, the brilliant summation. I can't believe you've gathered all that, remembered it all, and were able to so articulately repeat it. But a couple refinements. First of all, exercise programs do work for some people. The very disciplined and people can – presence of mind. And there is a subset. I just say as a population intervention, it's not a very good return on the investment we put at. And then the central idea I like people to take away is in blue zones, people don't pursue health or longevity. It ensues, and it ensues from the right environment. And what we ought to be thinking about is not so much New Year's, starting a new diet, which we know is going to fail for almost everybody almost all the time, but how can we set up our lives and our ecosystem so the right behavior is more unconscious?

1:00:56And therein lies the long-term possibilities for longevity. I love that. And I think that, you know, one of the stories I think that I've taken from the last, you know, 18 months of doing this podcast is the way in which, as a society, we've sort of been sleepwalking into this really unhealthy place. And in fact, mostly that hasn't been some evil plan by the government or whatever. I mean, in fact, often it's come from really good things, right? Like new discoveries, like you can have a car or, you know, antibiotics saving so many lives. But then it turns out that it's changed our lives and there's been these sort of unexpected negative impacts.

1:01:36And so somehow we need to design the world that we live in in a way which is just better suited to our human bodies. We spent most of human history uncomfortable and hungry. and quite rightly we've innovated you know recently and we've we we now you know live in this environment of abundance and ease and and a glut of food and we have a just we're genetically hardwired to crave fat crave sugar crave salt and take rest whenever we can and that works really well in this environment of scarcity, but in our environment of overabundance, it's a big negative. We're not going to change our genes. We're not going to change our genetic predisposition anytime soon.

1:02:23So we need to re-engineer our environment so that we still have the acceptable level of comfort, but that the healthy choice is easier, cheaper, and more appealing than the unhealthy choice. And I think if anyone has listened to this right now and would like to redesign their town or city, wherever it is in the world, let us know. We'll put you in touch with Dan, because that is sort of your life mission, isn't it? To try and to make that better. And you're doing that in 70 cities. 72 American cities so far. Yes, it's worked. Brilliant. Dan, Tim, thank you so much. I really enjoyed that. Pleasure.

1:03:01An honor. Thank you. Thank you for joining me on Zoe Science and Nutrition Today. Today's conversation about the Blue Zones has once again highlighted the critical importance of diet in supporting us to live a long and healthy life. And the story of Okinawa is another depressing example of how rapidly a switch to a modern Western diet can damage our health. If you're interested in getting personalized advice on the right food to eat for your body to help you feel better now and enjoy many more healthy years to come, then you can learn more about becoming a Zoe member by going to zoe.com slash podcast.

1:03:38You can also get 10 % off your membership on this link. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yellow Hewins Martin, Richard Willen, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time.

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