Longevity Secrets (And Controversies) From The Blue Zones | Dan Buettner

Insights from the places on the planet where people apparently live the longest and healthiest lives. Dan Buettner https://www.bluezones.com/dan-buettner/ is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, and journalist. He has written a series of bestselling books, including The Blue Zones of Happiness https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-blue-zones-of-happiness-lessons-from-the-world-s-happiest-people-dan-buettner/15714041?ean=9781426219634 and The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes for Living to 100 https://bookshop.org/book/9781426220135. He is also the host of the Netflix show, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones https://www.netflix.com/title/81214929. In this episode we talk about: The origin story of the Blue Zones The nine common denominators, or Power Nine, to longevity. The surprising information about much maligned foods such as pasta and bread Why trying to pursue good health can actually work against you Why the single most important factor in longevity isn't advertised on instagram Tips for integrating Blue Zones wisdom into your daily life, including designing a life where you move more naturally And some of the critiques and controversies surrounding his work Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: Link to Buettner's collaborators' response on demographics: https://academic.oup.com/gerontologist/article/65/12/gnaf246/8381533?login=false Saul Newman's critique of Blue Zones methodology: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3 This episode is sponsored by: BetterHelp: See the reviews, see what stands out, and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com/HAPPIER http://betterhelp.com/HAPPIER. Function: Join at functionhealth.com/HAPPIER http://functionhealth.com/HAPPIER and use gift code HAPPIER25. @Function #FunctionPartner. Northwest Registered Agent: Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/HappierFree http://northwestregisteredagent.com/HappierFree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Warby Parker: Our listeners can buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at WarbyParker.com/HAPPIER http://warbyparker.com/HAPPIER — and using our link helps support the show. #WarbyParker #ad To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're diving into the secrets and also the controversies of the so-called "blue zones." If you haven't heard of the blue zones, these are the places on the planet where people apparently live the longest and healthiest lives. My guest, Dan Buettner, has been playing a huge role in exploring and publicizing and popularizing the blue zones. Dan is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, and a journalist. He's written a series of bestselling books, including The Blue Zones of Happiness and The Blue Zones Kitchen. He's also the host of the Netflix show Live to 100. In this conversation, we talk about the origin story of the blue zones, the nine common denominators, or the Power

• 0:45Dan Harris?

  Nine when it comes to longevity, the surprising information about much-maligned foods such as pasta and bread, why trying to pursue good health can actually work against you, why the single most important factor in longevity is not advertised on Instagram, tips for integrating blue zones wisdom into your daily life, including designing a life where you move more naturally, and some of the critiques and controversies surrounding Dan's work. I should say, this episode originally aired back in June of 2024, but we're bringing it back because it was an audience favorite, and there are so many actionable tips here that I think you can put to use right away. One update on the critiques I mentioned:

• 1:28Dan Harris?

  Two of Dan's collaborators on the original Blue Zones project published a rebuttal of the criticism in December 2025. So I'm going to put a link both to the rebuttal and to the original paper that called into question some of the blue zones methodology. We'll get started with Dan Buettner right after this.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  It's a delight. Let's just say I'm even more than 10% happier being here.

• 1:53Dan Harris?

  I'm happy to hear that. We'll see how you... We'll come back to you at the end and see what the percentage is.

• 2:01Dan Harris?

  Let me just ask you about the origin story of the blue zones. How did this whole thing get started?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  In a previous business, I was solving two mysteries a year. I had a whole staff, 14 people, and we had a big subscription base, and I was looking for a good mystery to solve. Most of our mysteries had been like, why did the ancient Maya civilization collapse? Or did Marco Polo really go to China? And we were hired by the Japanese government to find a mystery in Japan. And we looked at Bronze Age cultures and so forth. And it was actually my brother Nick, who was working for me at the time, stumbled upon a report from the World Health Organization that showed that Okinawa, Japan was producing

• 2:49Speaker 01

  the longest-lived disability-free people in the world. And I said, aha, now there's a good mystery. And in 1999, we did our first expedition there. We were there for about 10 days, and I was absolutely hooked because I was meeting people in their 90s and hundreds that were functioning like, you know, 60-year-olds in the United States. And of course, in a facile way, I was able to look at how. But when I was out of that business, I sold it and went back to National Geographic with some ideas and suggested that if there are

• 3:29Speaker 01

  long-lived people in Okinawa, there must be long-lived people in Europe and Asia and maybe Latin America or even Africa. And I got an assignment back in the days when National Geographic gave you nine months to write one article. And I got funding from the National Institutes on Aging to do it right. And to do it right means you hire demographers to find places where people are truly living a long time. And then, since only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes, if we found places where populations were living longer, and I'm talking eight to 10 years longer than we do in the United States,

• 4:11Speaker 01

  we had a perfect study group to look for correlations and common denominators. And that is a very long answer to a simple question.

• 4:21Dan Harris?

  That was not a long answer. You can go longer if you want. Essentially, you and your team found what are now called "blue zones," which are areas around the planet where apparently people are living longer.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  I would go beyond "apparently." It is a mathematical fact that they have lived longer over the last century and a half. And working with demographers, we're able to look at swaths of the population, say, 100 to 150 years ago, look at a swath of births, and follow those births for 100 years or more, and correct for immigration and find statistically, empirically, where people are living the longest. And that's what blue zones are.

• 5:13Dan Harris?

  When's the name "blue zones"? What's that have to do with...

• 5:17Speaker 01

  My colleague in Sardinia, Dr. Gianni Pes, he identified the Sardinian blue zone, and he did so by going village to village, looking at birth records since about 1850 and doing this exercise, counting how many centenarians have lived in these areas over the last 150 years. And ones that met the highest criteria, he put a blue checkmark. And in the Noro and Oleasta provinces of Sardinia, in the Highlands and Central Highlands, there were so many blue checkmarks that it created a blue blob. And he referred to

• 5:58Speaker 01

  that area in the map as the "blue zone." And it's between five and eight villages. It changes from year to year, but the same region where you have about 10 times more male centenarians, proportionally speaking, than you would expect to see in a similar population in the United States.

• 6:17Dan Harris?

  So you've been at this for about 20 years now, am I correct?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:22Dan Harris?

  How many blue zones are there, and what are the commonalities?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Five blue zones. The longest-lived males are in Sardinia, Italy. The longest-lived females, Okinawa, Japan. In the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, you have the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality, also very high proportion of centenarians there. In the United States, it's among the Seventh-day Adventists in and around Loma Linda, California, but to a certain extent, all Adventists. And then, our last blue zone was in Ikaria, Greece, very close to the coast of Turkey, where you have people living about eight years longer with about half the rate of cardiovascular mortality and almost no dementia, which

• 7:07Speaker 01

  makes it an interesting outlier among even the blue zones.

• 7:12Dan Harris?

  And is there something that people, or some things that the people in all of these places are doing that might be instructive for the rest of us?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  So there are nine common denominators. I call them the Power Nine. And then there's one organizing principle, which is really the important thing to pay attention to. But in general, people who are living a long time are eating mostly a whole-food, plant-based diet, between 90 and 100% whole-food, plant-based. It's a very high carbohydrate diet, about 65% of their caloric intake comes from things like whole grains, greens, tubers, nuts. Cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. And the reason we know this is because we've found dietary surveys that go back about 100 years from all five blue

• 8:07Speaker 01

  zones, 155 of them in total. And under the aegis of Harvard University, we did a meta-analysis. And if you want to know what a 100-year-old ate to live to be 100, you have to know what he or she was eating as a little kid, and middle-aged, and newly-retired. So it's mostly whole-food, plant-based. They have vocabulary for purpose. We know people with a sense of purpose live about eight years longer than rudderless people. They have sacred daily rituals that help unwind the stress and the ensuing inflammation, which is part

• 8:47Speaker 01

  of the human condition. Okinawa, its ancestor veneration, the Adventists pray several times a day. The Ikarians and Costa Ricans take a nap, but just a way to lower that inflammation load that accumulates with the stress and the worry and the hurry of our lives. And by the way, their lives are no different than ours. They worry about the same things that we do. They drink a little bit every day, and I'm very familiar with the recent research suggesting that no level of alcohol is safe. But I can tell you, people in blue zones, over 85% of people make, especially males, making it to 90 or 100, drink every day of their life, most of the time with homemade wine, but nevertheless,

• 9:31Speaker 01

  they're drinking. They have unconscious strategies to keep from overeating. They don't have electronics in their kitchens. They eat with their families. They tend to front-load their day with calories and taper off by late afternoon or early evening, so they're de facto 14 hours of caloric restriction a day. They tend to prioritize family, which doesn't sound very sexy, but if you keep your aging parent nearby as opposed to putting them in a retirement home, it conveys somewhere between two and six extra years of life expectancy. They invest in their relationships. Married people live longer than non-married people. They invest

• 10:16Speaker 01

  in their children, so that they have higher survivability and lower mortality rates. They tend to belong to a faith. People who go to church, temple, or mosque live somewhere between four and 14 years longer than people who have no religion. Number of reasons for that, but it's a demographic fact. And then, they tend to pay a lot of attention to their immediate social circle. Whereas in America, we have this loneliness epidemic, somewhere between 20 and 30% of Americans are lonely. That's not something that people in blue zones suffer from. And in many places, it comes along with growing up. You're just

• 11:01Speaker 01

  automatically put in a meaningful social circle. But in the absence of that, different social constructs bring people together in semi-permanent ways, so they're not suffering from the loneliness.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Those are the, I would say, the common denominators.

• 11:20Dan Harris?

  It's fascinating. As a construct or a structure, for the next little while, I would suggest, I want to come back to these Power 9 and really dive into them much more deeply. Before we do that, though, let's, let's go through the individual Blue Zones and hear a little bit about what, what you've learned in each of these places, and then, then we'll take a deeper dive into the Power 9. How does that sound to you as a, as a structure?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Works for me.

• 11:48Dan Harris?

  Okay.

• 11:50Dan Harris?

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• 12:35Dan Harris?

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• 14:03Dan Harris?

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• 16:32Dan Harris?

  Sure. Okay, so you mentioned Sardinia. What's going on in Sardinia that people are living? It's the mountains, if I, if I've got it correct? And what's going on there? What's their lifestyle like, and what can we learn from that?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  So, Sardinia is unique among the five Blue Zones insofar as that the people there are actually a Bronze Age culture, originated in what is today's Spain about 13,000 years ago, and moved their way through southern France, and probably arriving in, in Sardinia about 11,000 years ago. And unlike a usual Mediterranean population, where you have a patriarchal society, the, the people in the Blue Zone have a matriarchal society. In other words, women are the heads of the household, they manage financial affairs,

• 17:27Speaker 01

  they're usually behind the defense of the village. And they just have a different set of practices, ancient music, they tend to be poets, about 20 times more poets among males than you would expect to see in equivalent population in the United States. They, until very recently, they ate a variant of the Mediterranean diet that was very high in fava beans. Before that, which is until about 1950, so still when, first 30 years of a centenarian's life, they were eating mostly bread, sourdough bread, cheese, pecorino cheese,

• 18:10Speaker 01

  and then garden vegetables. And then about 1950 or 1960, the roads came and their diet changed again. They're a very poor area, so they relied even more heavily on their gardens and pastas. I mean, a lot of the, were scared to death of carbs from pastas, and the longest-lived people in the world ate, 65% of their caloric intake until about 1960 came from pastas and breads, which will surprise a lot of people. They have this fanatic regard for the family, the reason, and for neighbors. The reason is because

• 18:50Speaker 01

  throughout history, even though they spread throughout the entire island of Sardinia, when the successive waves of people, the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Romans, they were always subjugating these people. And by about the time of Christ, this founder population, Blue Zone population, realized that they were just better off retreating into the mountains and setting up almost fortress-type towns and sticking together against outsiders. They developed a reputation for being barbarians. In fact, their region was given the name Barabacha, which has the same root as the word barbarian. And, you

• 19:30Speaker 01

  know, became very feared people, but in fact, they're lovely people. Just, you know, they defend themselves as needed. And as a result, they became very inward-focused and, and remote. Their, things didn't evolve as quickly there. And the language they speak is the language most similar to the Latin the Romans spoke 2,000 years ago. They still sing the same songs, that you still see the same sort of dress people wore in the Middle Ages during festivals. Until very recently, their diet hadn't changed. I wrote this book called The Blue Zone's Kitchen.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Where I went and sat in old ladies kitchens and I captured their recipes. And when I asked them what the origin of these recipes were, they said, it's always been with us. These are recipes that evolved over the millennia. So they're, they're living this very ancient way of life and the mountains have helped keep out the forces of the standard American diet and modernization, which we've seen always corrodes the health and longevity aspects of Blue Zones.

• 20:48Dan Harris?

  I'm keying in, perhaps unsurprisingly, to the pasta and sourdough bread part of this. I love pasta and bread and I don't deny it to myself, but I don't deny myself pasta or bread, but I think a lot of people do, and there have been times in my life where I did. So why do pasta and bread have such a bad reputation and is it entirely undeserved?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Well, there are some theories that American pasta and bread contain glyphosate because of the pesticides used on wheat fields in America. Also, it's the process. When you have a true sourdough bread, as, as is what is consumed in Sardinia, it's always slow fermented sourdough. So it's leavened not with the industrial yeast, but rather lactobacillus. And in that process of that slow fermentation, about 98% of the gluten is metabolized. So it's very low gluten bread. And there's been at least two studies that show when you eat a real sourdough bread,

• 21:54Speaker 01

  it lowers the glycemic load of your meal by about 25%. In other words, the sugars are absorbed much more slowly, which reduces the insulin spike and also makes it more likely those calories will be used for energy throughout your day rather than being packed on your backside. Pasta is similar. The pastas there are made with a durum wheat rather than cheaper versions. So that, once again, they have a lower glycemic load. But also, when you mix a pasta with a tomato sauce and olive oil and perhaps some protein,

• 22:36Speaker 01

  usually it's beans, by the way, traditionally speaking, you lower the glycemic load even further. So if you, you know, if you eat a piece of Wonder Bread or two, it metabolizes almost immediately into sugar. Blood sugar spikes, insulin spikes, bad for you. But you eat a piece of sourdough bread or pasta with a tomato sauce and bean, pasta and fajole, you have, you don't get the spike. And in fact, bread and pasta have important amino acids, which are building blocks for protein. When you take a bread or a pasta and you couple it with a bean, it gives you all the amino acids necessary for your human sustenance. In other words, it's a whole protein.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  So it's the way people have been processing these foods and combining them that makes all the difference in the world. The devil is truly in the details when it comes to pasta.

• 23:29Dan Harris?

  So what's your policy on pasta now, after all these years of study?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  You know, I'm half Sicilian. I, I, I grew up on pasta and I still, last meal of my life, if I have anything to say, it's going to be my pasta with my Grandma Palermo's pasta sauce. I guess you want a universal question. My policy is, you should feel free to eat it. I'll give you another interesting statistic. In Northern Italy, in 1980, about 8% of people were suffering from obesity. They ate tons of pasta up there. Meanwhile, in 1980, about 15% of Americans were suffering from obesity. In the ensuing 40 years, the obesity rate in the United States has almost tripled. 42% of us are obese.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  In Italy, in Northern Italy, it's still 8% and they eat pasta with every meals. So pasta's not the problem. Something else is the problem.

• 24:28Dan Harris?

  And what is it?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Well, if you want to, need to bottom line it, it is a fact that 70 or 80% of what we eat is processed food. We eat somewhere around 140 pounds, I'm sorry, 240 pounds of meat a year, which would fill a bathtub, whereas in Blue Zones, they're eating about 20 pounds of meat. They're eating maybe three eggs a week, very high quality, low quantity cheese, very little fish. They're, like I said, it's, they're eating mostly a plant-based diet as opposed to our diet that's far too have a reliant, reliant on animal products and processed foods with added sugars and flavor enhancers, et cetera.

• 25:15Dan Harris?

  Okay, so that's Sardinia. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's more to say, but, but in the interest of time, I want to move through the rest of these. You mentioned Loma Linda, California, which is a Seventh Day Adventist community. What's going on there?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  They're conservative Methodists who distinguish themselves from other Christians in, in that, number one, they evangelize with health. Many of the biggest hospitals in America, down here in Florida, for example, are run by Adventists and they're run very well, by the way. But they also celebrate their Sabbath, not on Sunday, but on, as the Bible prescribes, the seventh day, which is Saturday. And they take it very seriously. It's been described to me by them as a sanctuary in time where 24 hours from Friday night until Saturday night, no matter how busy they are, no matter, you know, where the kids

• 26:12Speaker 01

  need to be driven or no matter what the social schedule is, they stop everything and they focus on their families on Friday night, their religious communities on Saturday morning. They have a potluck, a lunch, reinforces their media social circle on Saturday afternoon. And then hardwired right in their scriptures is to take a nature walk. So rather than something we get excited about during the wellness week at work or, you know, when, one time in our life, we run a marathon or something, these people are ritually active and socially connecting and slowing down, downshifting every single week for decades

• 26:55Speaker 01

  or a lifetime. This starts to get at something that is really important when it becomes, comes to longevity. America and marketers are constantly focusing on a quick fix. And there, there's no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to, to adding to your life expectancy. There, there's no, nothing you can do this week or this month that's going to make you live longer in 40 or 60 years. So you have to focus on things you're going to do almost every day or every week for decades or a lifetime. And this Adventist practice, the religious practice, helps them stay on a weekly program

• 27:38Speaker 01

  of reinforcing these behaviors that easily map to lower rates of chronic disease and higher life expectancy. They also take their diet directly from the Bible. Genesis, chapter one, verse, verses 26 through 28. You might think I'm a big Bible reader, but I'm not. I happen to know this from my, my research, but God says that, or that Genesis says that God has provided every, for humans, every plant that bears seed. So that's grains and legumes and nuts. And then every tree that bears fruit.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  So that's citrus and avocado and tomatoes and apples, et cetera. And the Adventists actually adhere to that. Most of them are vegetarian. Some are even vegan or pescatarian. So you have, once again, another population that's eating mostly a whole food, plant-based diet. And we now know that health behaviors are as contagious as catching a cold. In other words, if we hang out with people who smoke or drink too much or sit around and watch TV and eat chips and drink Pepsi, we're more likely to adopt their behaviors. And the contagions that circulate through the Adventist community tend to be positive.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  You know, they're, get together and they walk and they have plant-based potlucks and they reinforce each other's spiritual growth, et cetera. So you have this self-propagating, propagating environment that helps keep them doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things. And manifestly, they're living somewhere between seven and 11 years longer than their California counterparts. And they both live next to the San Bernardino freeway. So it's, it's, it's astounding what, what this population is achieving.

• 29:39Dan Harris?

  Another thing I hear in there, and you mentioned this when we were going through the power nine, and it's, it's really come through in many of your utterances thus far, is social connection. And I mean, I, I've got this riff on, on this that some listeners to the show might be tired of hearing me go on, but I'm going to go on it again, just because I want to get your reaction to it. But, you know, we live in an era of optimization. Everybody's striving for ketosis, tracking their sleep, counting their steps, counting their calories, subscribing to intense workouts, trying to achieve streaks on their meditation app, et cetera, et cetera.

• 30:22Dan Harris?

  This is, we are, we're trying to pull every lever possible to be as healthy as possible. But the, it appears from your work and from the work of Robert Waldinger over at Harvard, who's done this longitudinal study for many, many decades on many generations, that the most important thing to control for, to optimize for, is the quality of your relationships. And yet, very few people are talking about that on Instagram. And so that's my rant. What do you think of that?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Well, I'm good friends with Robert and we violent, I guess, I guess the three of us violently agree on that. The reason you don't see it on Instagram is because it's very hard for marketers to make money at it. And

• 31:08Speaker 01

  The things that tend to ripple through the internet and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok are supplements and, and, um, superfoods, all of which have anti-aging stratagems and nostrums. All of those have enormous profit margins. It can't make any money off of you going out, making a friend, walking with them every day. But my answer is actually more expansive. And this sort of gets to the central premise of blue zones. People who are manifestly living on that. Now, we're talking of five disparate populations on five corners of the world, all of whom are living about eight years on average, longer

• 31:50Speaker 01

  than Americans, a fifth the rate of cardiovascular disease, a sixth the rate of type two diabetes, half the rate or less of dementia. None of them are tracking their steps, or taking superfoods, or, you know, running down to Costa Rica for stem cells, or any of this other poppycock that, um, the internet sells us for living longer. In fact, further, they don't try to live longer. They don't proactively pursue health or longevity, which I think is the most important insight that is so under celebrated, or, or under acknowledged.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  That trying to pursue health, whether it's through diets, or exercise programs, gym memberships, you know, a hundred, you start with a hundred people taking a gym, who's, uh, get a gym membership today, in one year, you lose 80%, actually more than 80% of them. Diets, you start with a hundred people today, within nine months, you lose 90% of them. Uh, they're great business models, but they're horrible at delivering any meaningful outcomes. In blue zones, people live a long time, not because they pursue health. It's because it ensues. They live a long time because they live in an environment wherein

• 33:15Speaker 01

  their unconscious decisions are slightly better all day long, as a result of their surroundings. And if we want to see a healthier America, and as your listeners, if they want to live longer, lose weight, get more exercise, eat better, they'll get a far better return on their effort, time and money by shaping their environment than they ever will by buying a gadget, or thinking they're going to change their behavior for long enough to make any difference. They won't. Or maybe single-digit percentages will. People with the inhuman discipline or presence of mind, but that's almost none of us over the long

• 33:55Speaker 01

  run. And I defy people, I defy, everybody I talk, I defy them to show me one behavioral change strategy that lasts for more than two years, for a single di, for more than 5% of the people get on it. I've never seen it.

• 34:12Dan Harris?

  So what's the answer then? You, you need to be embedded in communities where these healthy practices are normalized?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  That's the easiest way. And, um, it's not as hard as you think. There is, um, in Minneapolis, where I was born, there's neighborhoods where there's a 13-year life expectancy, expectancy difference, and neighborhoods that are less than three miles apart. And you look at the neighborhood where people are living a long time, there are parks, there are sidewalks, uh, streets are walkable, there are bike lanes, there's easy access to fruits and vegetables, easy access to recreation, the air is cleaner, and quite honestly, there's lower crime rate. So you can move within your city, you can move within

• 34:58Speaker 01

  your country. Life expectancy in places like Boulder, Colorado is about 20 years higher than in places in Kentucky. So you live in Kentucky, you're way less likely to walk places, you're, you're more likely to be confronted by fast food restaurants and junk food, and, and live in an obesogenic environment, as opposed to Boulder, where you're never more than a few steps from a nature walk, and healthy food abounds. I, I know people say, well, I can't afford to live in Boulder. That may be true. But the other point, and I wrote a whole book on this, it's called The Blue Zone Challenge, where I aggregated

• 35:39Speaker 01

  about 40 different evidence-based things you can do to your home, your kitchen, your bedroom, your social circle, your commute, and your workplace, that will permanently set up nudges or defaults, so you'll unconsciously move more, eat better, sleep better, socialize more, and no one live your purpose. And those are the exact same characteristics in place in blue zones. All, almost all of them are portable, but it, it requires you to shift

• 36:15Speaker 01

  away from the anti-aging hoax, to paying attention to environments that are the strategies we know add years to your life expectancy.

• 36:28Dan Harris?

  Buying glasses, online or in person, can be a gigantic pain in the you-know-what. And even worse, eye exams. Being able to see is often just super complicated, more complicated than it needs to be, which is why my wife, who has many pairs of glasses and many prescriptions, has been so enthusiastic about Warby Parker, both online and in person. They just make buying eyeglasses easier, and in fact, they make the entire experience easier. Now you can actually go into one of their stores and get an eye exam right there. There's no running around to multiple spots, no guessing if your prescription is even up to date. Everything is super clean, modern, and honestly feels more like a wellness

• 37:10Dan Harris?

  experience than a typical eye doctor visit. Warby Parker is covered by many major eye insurance plans. Just enter your information, see if you're eligible for benefits on frames and contacts or eye exams. If you are, they automatically apply those benefits to you. They have over 300 retail stores across the US, so there's a good chance that there's one near you. Right now, buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at warbyparker.com/happier. That's 20% off any additional pairs when you purchase one pair at W A R B Y Parker.com/happier. Can you give me just a few examples, give us a few examples of, of these, I think you

• 37:55Dan Harris?

  said 40 little changes we can make around our homes and, and social circles to get us closer to the blue zone effect?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  So I'll remind you that this is a sum of lots of little things. In blue zones, there's no one big thing. So you may have thought, well, that doesn't sound very big. But removing the toaster from your counter. Cornell Food Lab showed that if you have a toaster on your counter, after two years, you weigh about six pounds more than the same, uh, than the control, than the study group who removes their toaster. Putting a, establishing a junk food drawer, that, where you put your junk food either down low, or way up high, or around the corner in the pantry. Most of us are on what I call a seafood diet. We eat the food we see. So if you have a bag of chips with a clip-on on your counter, you're way more likely to eat that than you will if you have a fruit

• 38:50Speaker 01

  bowl. We know that if your three best friends are obese or overweight, there's 150% better chance that you'll be overweight. So changing your social environment by proactively adding people whose idea of recreation is walking, or playing pickleball, who, um, you know, who care about you on a bad day, who challenge your mind, who, um, it's not a bad idea to have a vegan or vegetarian in your immediate social circle, because they're going to show you where and how to eat more whole food, plant-based, as opposed to your friends who's,

• 39:28Speaker 01

  you know, beef obsessed. One time, learning how to take the bus to work, as opposed to driving all the time. So having a, what, you have to do it once, but automatically buying a bus, bus pass for the next six months. Having shoes, uh, comfortable, buying a comfortable pair of tennis shoes and parking them right next to your door, so you're reminded to walk. Buying a high-quality bicycle that's comfortable for you. We know, by the way, that just taking a public transportation to work lowers your chances of dying from cardiovascular disease by about 19%. So I, I say that's changing your commute environment. So these

• 40:13Speaker 01

  are a few examples.

• 40:15Dan Harris?

  Because driving is just so stressful, trip, being in traffic?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Well, you know, uh, Daniel Kahneman's research, on a day-to-day basis, the activity we hate most is driving, the one that causes the unhappiness. But also, so you get the stress from driving, but because you're driving, you're there for not walking. Uh, Gallup also came up with a recent study that showed that the number of people you wave to every day is highly correlated with your overhaul happiness and health. Very hard to wave to people when you get in your car, in your attached garage, drive downtown to an underground garage, and take the elevator to your office. So it's both the opportunity cost and the

• 41:03Speaker 01

  activity itself, that, uh, that are creating lower life expectancy. You know, in, in blue zones, nobody exercises. There's no CrossFit, there's no yoga class, no Pilates class, nobody's running, there's no blue zone marathon. But they live in, in, in communities where every time they go to work, a friend's house, or out to eat, it occasions a walk. They're taking about 8,000 steps a day without even thinking about it, just getting around. They have gardens out back, usually three to four, two to three seasons a year. So they're out there bending and lifting and low-intensity physical activity. They have,

• 41:46Speaker 01

  um, their houses aren't full, mechanical conveniences to do their own work, knead bread by hand, and grind corn tortillas by hand. And-

• 41:56Speaker 01

  What we don't realize in sort of this exercise obsessed culture we live in, that it's far better for our bodies to move every 20 minutes than it is to sit in our chairs all day long, whether it's in our office in our homes, and then expect to make it up for 45 minutes at the gym. That's not how we evolved. If you're moving every 20 minutes or so, like people do in the blue zones, you're keeping your metabolism higher and you're burning considerably more calories than you would trying to do it all in one 45 minute burst at the end of the day. Yeah, this just all goes to support the notion that you're way better off living in an environment

• 42:38Speaker 01

  that nudges you unconsciously than to try to consciously pursue it, as is the case with exercise.

• 42:45Dan Harris?

  Just curious, do you exercise or do you just try to move every 20 minutes or both?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Well, I'm very, you know, I live in Miami Beach here, the very southern tip, and I'm looking at the ocean in which, you know, I can't wait to go jump in and swim at the end of the day. I have 20 restaurants very nearby, Whole Foods that I bike to. I do most of my calls walking around, so I live in an environment and neighborhood that's very easy for me to get healthy food, to recreate, to get physical activity and to walk. But I happen to also love, you know, exercise in the more traditional modality. And I usually get out and do something every day.

• 43:29Dan Harris?

  So it's a yes and, you're not sitting, you're not sedentary 23 hours and 15 minutes and then 45 minutes of working out. You're, you do some working out, but your life is designed to move naturally.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Correct. And I don't, I don't exercise in the way most people exercise. It is not, I'm not competitive. I'm not, it's not in my outlook. It's not a chore. It's part of my day. I really make it a rule for myself, two rules. One, I'm going to do something every day. But the second part of it is that I enjoy. Today it might be swimming. It might be a fat tire bike. I go pedal in the sand. I have a bunch of friends who play pickleball or padel. Maybe it's to go out with them. I do go to a gym, but it's very social. And I go down there and I listen to my favorite podcasts,

• 44:27Speaker 01

  10% happier and lift weights and stretch a little bit. And it's a joy. You know, it's not, it's not a chore. The minute it becomes a chore, people stop doing it. And again, if it, when it comes to longevity, unless you're doing it close to daily for a lifetime, it's probably not making a difference in how long you're going to live over the long run.

• 44:51Dan Harris?

  Let me go back to something small. This was at the beginning of your list of little nudges and hacks that you can do around your house to make it more conducive to longevity. You said something about ditching the toaster and maybe I'm being obtuse, but I didn't quite understand why having a toaster could have deleterious effects.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Because there's almost nothing that comes out of a toaster that's good for us. You know, most of the breads and the pop tarts and the bagels, it's not good. It provides a prompt for you. You know, we walk through our kitchen a dozen times a day. You don't remember you're hungry until you see the toaster and say, oh, toaster. You go into our pantry and we find that raisin cinnamon bread or white bread that we're going to put butter and jam on, whatever it is, or pop tarts, and we pop it in our toaster. Again, it's, it's what we see as opposed to having a high quality fruit bowl.

• 45:49Dan Harris?

  He's walking to get his fruit bowl. Now he's returning with said fruit bowl. That looks like, that's a, that's a my colony. That looks like a still life.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Well, it's avocados and tangerines and limes and lemons. And, you know, that's what I see. So when I'm hungry, I'm way more likely to pick this up than to, you know, put something in a toaster than with butter on or, or the worst thing is chips. Those chip clips, those are the worst. Cornell Food Lab has done a study in that. I can't quote you right now what the results were, but I remember seeing a study that those are the, the worst source of eating junky food in your home. The other little hack is, you know, I like to treat myself like everybody else does with ice cream and sweets and sort of,

• 46:41Speaker 01

  I just don't bring them in my house. So then when I'm here, I'm not even tempted by it because I can't get at it. But I go out and I like to treat myself. I think it's, I think it's wrong minded to restrict yourself because if you're restricting yourself, you're eventually going to fail. So Dan, if you bring, invite me over to your house and you've served me chocolate cake and ice cream, I'll eat it, but you won't find it in my house.

• 47:08Dan Harris?

  If and when you come to my house, I will definitely serve you cake and ice cream. I'm a fan of both.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I'm expecting an invitation, Dan, you know, given your first name.

• 47:19Dan Harris?

  Let's keep going through some of these blue zones just so we can get some more flavor of the, of the locales. Another one, and I'm probably going to make a mincemeat of this name, but it's an island in Greece, Ikaria?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Ikaria.

• 47:34Dan Harris?

  What do we need to know about Ikaria?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  It is a, once again, isolated island of 10,000 people largely overlooked by Western civilization. Live about eight years longer than us, but about one tenth the dementia we suffer in the United States. We don't know why, but along with living a long time, they're staying sharp to the very end. Now, a few things that are interesting. Number one, it's very hard to find more than 100 yards of flat terrain there, except for the airport. And just like Sardinia, where we found that the steeper the village, the higher the life expectancy. First of all, they, they eat the strictest version of the Mediterranean diet in the world.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  And they also include in their diet liberal use of, of herbs, specifically rosemary, sage, oregano, and kind of a mint, catnip they call it. And these herbs are used not only for medicinal purposes and to flavor food, but as teas, largely because they weren't importing coffee, but they liked warm beverages. So they just go into the fields or their backyard and they take these herbs, which grow like weeds, and they make infusions from them. But all of these herbs are, are anti-inflammatory. They're oxidant, they're diuretics, which lower blood pressure.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  So, you know, one theory has, there's one of the possible contributors to longevity. They, they have lower blood pressure for a long time. So fewer heart attacks and, and less vascular dementia.

• 49:14Dan Harris?

  Let's, let's keep going through the two, two others, and then I have a million other questions for you. Nicoya, Costa Rica, what stuck out to me is, and you may have other things you want to say about Nicoya, but is this notion of purpose, they have this concept in Nicoya of plan de vida, which is like a life plan, I guess?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  In all blue zones, there's vocabulary for purpose. In Okinawa, it's ikigai. And believe it or not, people who can articulate their sense of purpose live above eight years longer than people who are rudderless. A lot of it in Nicoya comes from their religion. About 95% of them are Catholic. They're very family oriented. So if you ask most of them what their plan de vida, almost always involves the Lord and family. And for as cliched or trite as that may sound, it actually does work.

• 50:13Dan Harris?

  What's the mechanism?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  When you're clear in your sense of purpose, day to day decisions are easier. It forms sort of ballast in hard, hard times. You're not dealing with the existential stress of, you know, what am I doing on this planet? Where's my self-worth? Where's my value? It's a very useful way to make life less stressful.

• 50:40Dan Harris?

  You know, I know you've made a lot, that your study of the blue zones has had an impact on, on how you live your life. Do you have an articulation of your purpose that has been useful to you?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yes. My purpose is going out into the world.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Researching traditional peoples, learning their wisdom and translating their wisdom to my audiences, I guess, in my writing. I've done that 40 years ago. My first quote unquote job after college was biking from Alaska to Argentina. And I biked around the world. Then I biked across Africa. And in a more superficial way, I wrote books and I wrote for Outside Magazine and Chicago Tribune. And then I did a series of these expeditions that solve mysteries. And it never really occurred to me, you know, they started out

• 51:39Speaker 01

  as kind of facile, why did the Maya civilization collapse? But ultimately, the best answers came from talking to the contemporary people who are still living there today. And I was more and more intrigued with how their quality of life was greater than ours. I mean, even though they're not necessarily as rich, they lived richer lives. And Blue Zones is the summation of that. And my book's Blue Zones of Happiness also, you know, sought to even delve into that notion even, even deeper.

• 52:12Dan Harris?

  It reminds me of, I think it was Benjamin Franklin, who observed that there were so many white people running away and joining indigenous tribes, but never the opposite, or rarely the opposite.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  I believe it. A lot of these people go to these Blue Zones and never come back, especially in Costa Rica. Because, once you start living there, yeah, maybe you're not living in as big of a house, or shopping at Costco, or driving a fancy car, but the quality of life, it's an important aspect. I mean, you're familiar with the Gallup's life satisfaction data. When you look at these Blue Zones, they're all in the top quintile of the happiest places in the world. In fact, Costa Rica, which is near the top

• 53:07Speaker 01

  in positive affect, is also a Blue Zone. You know, you spend, we spend about $83 billion a year on anti-aging. None of it's been proven to stop slower reverse aging in humans. And even if it does work, it would probably just prolong a crappy life. Meanwhile, in Blue Zones, they're living a long time because they're growing their own food. And they live close to nature. And they walk to their friend's house, and they eat with their families. And they go to church or temple on Sundays, or they, they slow down, they know their

• 53:45Speaker 01

  purpose. And their path for an extra eight to 10 years is joyous. And that's, that's the real value proposition.

• 53:55Dan Harris?

  Staying on the subject of purpose, and this will get us to the fifth Blue Zone, you mentioned in the context of Okinawa, the Japanese island, this notion of Ikigai. What is that?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  It's basically purpose, but it always has a altruistic dimension to it. It's, in other words, it's, it's not just pursuing your hobby, it's pursuing something because it benefits somebody else, either the community, or a younger generation, or a family. So it's sort of a purpose on steroids.

• 54:36Dan Harris?

  Maybe you would call this a kind of enlightened self-interest?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Well, I suppose. I don't know if they think of it as self-interest, though. I think they think of it as they're doing their duty to their family or their community. But I guess to the extent that doing your duty makes us feel good, it would be self-interest.

• 54:57Dan Harris?

  Yes, that's, it's a slippery concept, but it reminds me of the Dalai Lama's idea of wise selfishness. Everybody's selfish, he says, but if you want to do selfishness correctly, you should live an altruistic and compassionate life, because that is what will make you feel the best.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  That's beautiful.

• 55:17Dan Harris?

  Okay. So Okinawa, I have not watched this video myself, but my staff told me about it, that there was a recent video, I believe posted by you, saying that maybe Okinawa had been disqualified as a Blue Zone. What's happening there?

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Well, since I started studying the place in 25 years ago, 1999, they were producing the longest of human beings in the history of the world. But now, thanks largely to the American military base, they'd attracted a forest of fast food restaurants, McDonald's, KFCs, Pizza Huts, A&W, and also a snarl of highways. And now, Okinawa has among the highest obesity rates, the highest type 2 diabetes rates, the highest smoking rates,

• 56:11Speaker 01

  and it's the least healthy of Japan's prefectures. So, in one generation, they've lost their Blue Zone standing. You can still see vestiges of it. If you go to the villages and the smaller islands, Okinawa's 151 islands, it's not just one island. So some of the smaller islands are still Blue Zone-ish. And in the north, the Motobu Peninsula and places like Ogimi, you still see, it's still Blue Zones. But, most of the 1.6 million people in Okinawa are among Japanese, Japan's least healthy people. And that's a tragedy.

• 56:52Dan Harris?

  Are you, are you seeing similar threats to the other Blue Zones? Or because many of them are isolated, is, are they safe?

• 57:00Speaker 01

  They're only isolated to an extent. And they're all disappearing. They're all, they'll all be gone in a generation, I think. I mean, I was just in Nikoya about three weeks ago. And there's a city of Nikoya, as well as a peninsula. And as you enter the city of Nikoya, you see a McDonald's, a Burger King, and a KFC. And it, that is the beginning of the end. Obesity's on the rise, you have 2 diabetes on the rise, and all of these Blue Zones. A little bit more protected at Ikaria. The young people there really do honor older people and older traditions. And the younger generations are bringing

• 57:43Speaker 01

  back these, and preserving these traditions of gardening, and the panayiri, their, their social gatherings and so forth. But I'm afraid Blue Zone will be a thing of the past in the very near, near future.

• 57:59Dan Harris?

  So the bad news is, as you just said, Blue Zones may be a thing of the past. I guess the good news is, we can, we can still take the lessons from the traditional lifestyles and apply them to our own lives.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  That's right. We captured the blueprint. My daytime job, I've worked with 72 cities in America. And we get paid by insurance companies or hospital systems to lower the obesity rate, and the chronic disease loads of entire cities, thereby raising their life expectancy. And it actually works. And it works not by trying to convince a million people to change their behavior, but it works because we change people's environment. So the healthy choice is the easy choice, or the unavoidable choice. And therein, Blue Zones will survive. And I also had a Netflix series called Live to 100: Secrets of the

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Blue Zones. And in the fourth episode of that, I announced a Blue Zone 2.0, Singapore, where in one lifetime, life expectancy has jumped by over 20 years. And now, they currently have the longest health adjusted life expectancy in the world. In other words, they live more years in full health than anyplace else in the world. And that is a wholly manufactured Blue Zone. It's the result of a leadership that has proactively aggregated policies that favor human health and well-being. And they have manifestively produced healthier people. Further proof of the central premise, that if you create an environment where humans

• 59:40Speaker 01

  can thrive, you see it in their life expectancy and their happiness. And, you know, if you rely on...

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Diets and exercise programs and a bloated healthcare system like we do in the United States, we get very expensive ill health.

• 59:56Dan Harris?

  I want to go back to the powered nine. These are the lifestyle habits of the world's healthiest and longest-lived people. You ran through, you kind of did a drive-by of them. And we, and then when we were talking about the specific blue zones, you said a lot about many of these, but I'm just going to read them quickly to the audience and then pick a few where I feel more could be said. So first, move naturally. We've talked about that, that the world's longest-lived people aren't necessarily going to the gym. They just live in environments that encourage them to work without thinking, to move without thinking about it. Two, purpose. We've talked about that. Three, downshift. Might be worth

• 1:00:39Dan Harris?

  stopping on this for a second. I know we've touched on it a little bit, but it seems like life in a blue zone has built into it, breaks that many of us, in our headlong effort to check things off our to-do list, do not have in our lives. So what more would you say about that?

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  I would say our grandparents knew it. The, you know, I'm not a religious person, but prayer is a pretty good strategy to slow down and take the focus off of whatever you're busy with onto something else. Taking a nap. You see it throughout the Mediterranean area in Europe. People taking a siesta. You see it in Latin America as well, but we know people who take a nap, their lower cortisol levels, there, I saw one study, it showed the chance of cardiovascular disease is about 30% lower in people who nap than people who don't nap. Ancestor veneration or taking a moment to remember that you're not just a

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  point in time, but part of a continuum, as we see in Okinawa. In Sardinia, it's almost all, you know, we call it happy hour, but at the end of a day's work, there's always the reward where you're going to walk down to the town square, the town tavern and see your friends, have an hour of conviviality, maybe a glass or two of wine. These are the things that, that not only bring joy to life, but they actually lower cortisol levels, they lower stress levels and they, we know that inflammation is the root of every major age-related disease. And if you're muscling through your day, you're working nine hours

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  a day, you drive home, hour-long commute, it's stressful commute, you get home, your kids are screaming, or kids are hungry, you gotta bring dinner together quickly, you go to bed late and tired, you wake up tired. Sure, that might be a recipe for making more money, but in blue zone, that whole process is slowed down with, without the hormones and could very well explain much of their seven to eight years life expectancy gain.

• 1:02:59Dan Harris?

  Thanks for that. Number four on the list is the 80% rule, which I also think bears some explication from you. It has to do with not overeating. Can you explain it?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  So it's riffing off of a Confucian adage, hara hachi buh, which means roughly stop eating when your stomach is 80% full. And in Okinawa, you'll still see people before a meal, instead of saying grace, they'll say hara hachi buh. So I expanded it a little bit to evidence-based strategies to keep from overeating. And a few things we know work, taking screens, TV screens out of the kitchen, eating with family, saying some prayer or some gratitude before a meal, to put some punctuation between your busy life

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  and your, your mealtime, front-loading your calories at the beginning of the day and, and eating a light dinner and then, and then not eating for 14 hours. These are all strategies to keep from overeating. This runs right in opposition to where we've been marketed for most of our lives, this idea that we need more nutrients. Every power bar and every vitamin fortified cereal and vitamin D fortified milk. We've been told for decades that the

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  path to health is through these additive minerals and, and vitamins and nutrients, but actually in blue zones, it's, it's about taking calories out of the meal, not adding new things to it.

• 1:04:47Dan Harris?

  I love that. Number five on the list is plant slant. We've covered that, that many of these people are not eating too much meat. Number six is wine at five, which you also talked about, that folks are drinking alcohol moderately and regularly. How do you square that with, and I know you referenced this earlier, the more recent data that, that suggests that alcohol is basically poison at any dose?

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  First of all, I know it's not mutually exclusive with living a long, healthy life, because these people are manifestly living eight or 10 years longer and they're drinking every day. And obviously you can't draw a causal relation, but you can, and maybe if they didn't drink at all, they lived two or three more years, or maybe not. But I think these studies miss the healthy byproducts of drinking, coming together around a glass of wine as part of a daily ritual that socializes people and, and sheds stress. It's the, it's

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  the fuel for these parties, these paneris, which ultimately are fundraisers for the village and, and cement social bonds. Also, the type of alcohol they drink in blue zones, you know, these studies are done with alcohol. Well, when you drink a blue zone, a Cognol, for example, in Sardinia, that has the highest levels of polyphenols of any other wine in the world. One of those polyphenols is known to reduce inflammation of the endothelia, the lining of the arteries. So when you're drinking that every day as opposed to a margarita

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  or a beer, biochemically, the results could be hugely different. So all I know is people in the blue zones live a long time and they drink a little bit every day and they enjoy it.

• 1:06:49Dan Harris?

  The final three, three entries in the power nine, all are about social connection. Number seven is belong, and that's about the data that seems to suggest that belonging to a faith-based community, no matter what the denomination, has longevity implications. Eight is loved ones first, people putting their families first, which we've talked about. And nine is having the right tribe, being in a tight-knit social circle that lasts for quite a while. Anything more worth saying about this portion of the list, or do you think we've covered it?

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  I think you've covered it.

• 1:07:27Dan Harris?

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• 1:08:12Dan Harris?

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• 1:08:56Dan Harris?

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• 1:10:14Dan Harris?

  There was a recent study that suggested that the number of centenarians in blue zones is factually inaccurate, in part because of errors in record-keeping, or because some people are claiming to be older than they are in order to get their pensions earlier. So this data has been warped in some way. What's your pushback on that?

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  You're probably referring to a plant scientist by the name of Saul Newman, who wrote one paper, which actually wasn't accepted by an academic journal. He brought up errors in recording areas in non-blue-zone areas, other parts of Japan, not in blue zones. I work for National Geographic. The fact-checkers occupy the corner offices. We collaborate with the top demographers in the world to carefully check ages in each one of the blue zones.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  And in every case, we were able to find birth records and death records and do the math between the two.

• 1:11:24Dan Harris?

  So, summation, this guy Saul Newman is criticizing the blue zones methodology, but you're saying the methodology is sound?

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's finding places that aren't blue zones, and he's leveling criticisms that may be true elsewhere, but that are not true in blue zones, at least in record-keeping accuracy. He also correctly, you know, as an effort to undermine blue zones works, he cites Okinawa's high rates of obesity. But what he doesn't do is go back 25 years, when I started my work, to discover that actually then, it was the highest, they're producing the longest-lived people in the world. And it has deteriorated in the last 25 years. Nothing I can do about that. Something I readily acknowledge in my writings and in Netflix. But it no way

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  undermines the fact that they did live a long time, and that there were a set of attending characteristics that went along with that longevity.

• 1:12:31Dan Harris?

  Let's talk about the diet. There have been some folks who've said that the blue zone diet is based less on solid science and more on speculation. How solid, in your view, is the science of the blue zone diet?

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  So, the criticisms are usually from the carnivore crowd, who go to Sardinia or Okinawa today, and they look at what people are eating today. And they correctly see that people are eating a lot of meat. My work, however, and I wrote about it in the New York Times Sunday Magazine article, The Island Where People Forget to Die, and also the book called The Blue Zone Solution, which was a two-time New York Times bestseller. For that, we did a meta-analysis of 155 dietary studies, dietary surveys, that were, if you want to know, as I said before, what a centenarian ate, you have to look, not what they're eating today, but they were eating throughout their lives. And the closest we could approximate

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  that was pulling dietary surveys and doing a meta-analysis, which essentially is an averaging. And is it 100% accurate? No. But it's the best available. And it's very clear that in all of these places, these were poor areas. There weren't any McDonald's. People didn't have enough money to be able to eat meat more than about once a week. There were no processed foods. So to assert that somehow I've made this up is just foolishness. What did they somehow import burgers from the mail or something like that? They just weren't

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  around to eat. What was around was peasant foods, beans and grains and sweet potatoes and tubers and vegetables they could get in their gardens and greens that were available. Yes, they did have a family pig, which they butchered once a year. They might have had a few goats. There weren't cows in blue zones, except for the Nikoya Peninsula. So, I stand by my work.

• 1:14:38Dan Harris?

  And has there been any longitudinal studies on people on the blue zone diet as you prescribe it?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  I don't prescribe anything. I simply say, here's what the longest-lived people have eaten over their lifetime. You can do what you want.

• 1:14:54Dan Harris?

  And what about the fact that the diets are often hyper-localized? You know, there's raw honey and grease, the sourdough bread that you mentioned in Sardinia, squash in Costa Rica. Can the recommendations be translated to Des Moines and Dubuque?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  I don't see why not. I mean, all of the products eaten in blue zones are available in Des Moines. You may not have the exact same honey, but anybody with an Amazon account can get Ikari and honey delivered to their house. If you want to mimic the way people in any one of the five blue zones eat, and you can very easily do it in the United States. For much cheaper, by the way, than you would spend eating steaks and having customized meals delivered via Amazon.

• 1:15:48Dan Harris?

  One last critique I want to run by you has to do with the blue zone checklist that you talked about before, the 40 or so tweaks that we can put into our environment to get our lives closer to the way life is lived in the blue zones. And this is a quote from one paper that looked at the checklists. It said that the checklist assumed that an individual lives in an environment that allows pets, has space for a garden, has a garage, and a separate space for an exercise area. The implication being that the checklist is, you know, not universally accessible to people who don't have a bunch of dough. Is that a fair critique?

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  I didn't know that study existed, and I'm kind of flattered that somebody would take the time to critique it. There's about 40 things, and it's a multiple choice. The more that you can check off, the bigger impact it would have. But, I mean, if you have a kitchen, most of what I suggest you do to your kitchen is easily implementable. The most powerful part of that checklist is, I would argue, is optimizing or curating your immediate social circle, which anybody can do, no matter how rich or poor, to a certain extent, I guess. So, yeah, not everybody can do everything on that list, but if you get half of them in, I would

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  bet that your weight drops and your life expectancy goes up.

• 1:17:16Dan Harris?

  It's super interesting to talk about this with you. Are there things you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to?

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  No, I think we covered it pretty well. Yeah, we covered it well. I've been at this for 20 years. And the central premise of blue zones, if you want to live longer, don't try to change your environment, don't try to change your behavior, change your environment. I think that's the most important takeaway. I guess a couple of interesting things. There's an association between eating beans and higher life expectancy. People eat a cup of beans a day, live about four years longer than people who get their protein from less healthy sources. A handful of nuts a day is associated with about two extra years of life expectancy. People are interested in easy longevity hacks, and those are two of

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  them. And, you know, I've written six books on blue zones. Four of them are New York Times bestsellers, and I'm proud of them. And if people have any other questions, I'm @DanButner on Instagram, and I answer all my questions, all my direct messages personally.

• 1:18:25Dan Harris?

  That's very cool. You're making me sheepish about the fact that I don't answer, I answer a fraction of mine. And I suspect I get a fraction of yours. Let me just go back to beans for a second, because I was a vegan for five years. Now I'm mostly plant-based, but I do eat some animal products. And one of the reasons was, I just could never build up a tolerance for beans, even with taking Beano and whatever, it made me very unpleasant to be around, for reasons that I'm assuming you can put together. Any thoughts on that?

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Okay, there are outliers, and you might be one of the outliers, that would just never be able to metabolize beans very well. But your gut has about 100 trillion bacteria in it. Most of them, the bacteria are almost 100% responsible for extracting energy out of our plant food. Of those 100 million bacteria, most of them depend on their survival fiber, or plant-based material. There's no fiber in meat. If you feed your gut meat and cheese and eggs, the bad bacteria

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  start to proliferate. Whereas if you feed it high-fiber food, like beans, the good bacteria proliferate. So, the good bacteria, the ones that take fiber, and they convert it into short-chain fatty acids, which make their way into our bloodstream, and they provide energy for our cells. They lower inflammation. They fine-tune our immune system. They're the precursor, a lot of the feel-good hormones. If you're not eating fiber, you're not getting that. To your question about beans, often if people start with just a tablespoon or two of beans, and

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  work up to a cup gradually over two or three weeks, they sort of prune their bacterial garden such that they can handle the beans, as opposed to starting today with a cup of beans, it might be too much for people who aren't used to eating these high-fiber diets.

• 1:20:40Dan Harris?

  I like the sound of that. Start small. Dan, you mentioned your six books. Can you just remind us of the names of some of them, any that come to mind, and also remind us again of the name of your Netflix show, which was and is super popular?

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Thank you. Blue Zones, Nine Lessons from the World's Longest-Lived People, The Blue Zone Solution, Blue Zone Kitchen, which was a cookbook, was a number-one New York Times bestseller, Blue Zones of Happiness, and the Netflix show is Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. And then, in All Whole Foods, I have Blue Zone Kitchen Frozen Meals, which are formulated for longevity with a maniacal focus on deliciousness. So, I'm starting to create a retail environment of healthy eating as well.

• 1:21:31Dan Harris?

  Dan Buettner, thank you very much for your time.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Dan, it was a delight and you'll be pleased to know that I am now 19% happier. So we're trending. Your show works.

• 1:21:44Dan Harris?

  I love it. May also be the fact that you're now free to go swimming in the ocean, but I'll take it.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  That might be a real delight, Dan. Nice to spend time with you.

• 1:21:55Dan Harris?

  Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one last thing before you go. Remember to sign up for my new app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers, ad-free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes

• 1:22:40Dan Harris?

  twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Peace.

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