Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Eat Like the People Who Live Happily to 100 (with Dan Buettner) About this episode Your eating habits could be cutting years off the end of your life. But there's a simple solution - eat like the people who live happily and healthily into their 80s, 90s and beyond. Dan Buettner studies the inhabitants of so-called "Blue Zones" - where people live long lives. Food and eating culture seem to play an important role this longevity.
Dan talks to Dr Laurie about Blue Zones and explains the idea behind his cookbook One Pot Meals: 100 Recipes to Live to 100 https://danbuettner.com/books/
And to hear more from Dan check out The Dan Buettner Podcast https://lemonada.lnk.to/TheDanBuettnerPodcast.
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:54 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
2:01 Laurie Santos? The standard American diet is killing us. That's a stark line from the book I want to tell you about in this episode, which is a bit different from the other works I'll be sharing in this season on my favorite books of 2025. My other choices are mostly sciency-type books related to the study of happiness. But today's pick is a bit different. It's a cookbook entitled One Pot Meals: 100 Recipes to Live Till 100. And the author of One Pot Meals is someone you may remember if you're a fan of the Happiness Lab.
2:28 Speaker 03 My name is Dan Buettner. I am a New York Times bestselling writer, a National Geographic explorer, and most significantly, I'm a guest of Laurie Santos, which is my proudest accolade.
2:40 Laurie Santos? He's most well-known for his work on what are called "blue zones," the places around the world where people live the longest and happiest lives. Dan's research has shown that there are lots of cultural factors that promote health and happiness, but he's also found that food seems to be an important factor, too. Hence, a cookbook. The premise behind One Pot Meals is that America is definitely not a blue zone when it comes to what we eat. As Dan explains in his book, Americans are suffering from chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease at higher rates than ever. He also shared the scary statistic that Americans are dying, on average, about 12 years earlier than we should be. Yikes. But in One Pot Meals, Dan shares a whole host of tasty recipes that use the kinds of ingredients that people eat in blue zones across the globe.
3:24 Laurie Santos? The dishes that result are low in sugar, salt, and other processed stuff, and high in whole grains and plants. Plus, they're really cheap. I really love Dan's blue-zone work, so I was excited to get my hands on One Pot Meals. But there was another reason I was excited to talk to Dan. You see, I recently celebrated one of those big birthdays with a zero. I just turned 50.
3:44 Speaker 03 Join the half a century club.
3:45 Laurie Santos? It is a time when you start thinking about longevity in a really different way. 40 was like, oh, yeah, I'm getting old. But 50 is like, hey, you know, this matters.
3:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, I just saw a study from the World Bank that showed that 54-year-olds in 2000 have the same cognitive level as a 71-year-old today. So in this world of bad news, 71 is the new 54, you know? So turning 50, you're probably above 38.
4:15 Laurie Santos? I'll take it. I'll take whatever I can get. Even if 50 is the new 38, Dan still thinks I could benefit from trying to emulate what people do differently in blue zones. So I asked Dan to start at the beginning. What sparked his blue zone research in the first place?
4:29 Speaker 03 Graduating from university at a time when most people are launching into careers of productive and useful things, I went and rode my bike. I biked from Alaska to Argentina, top to bottom of Africa and around the world. That took eight years, set three world records, but it sure did help me understand the world in a way, you know, somebody taking a Delta One flight doesn't absorb. And then I'd been wanting to work for National Geographic for a long time, and I had a very clever editor there who, who said, you know, my expeditions were interesting, but the expeditions they're looking for at the National Geographic Society are ones that add to the body of knowledge. You know, we've been to the top of Everest 4,000 times, and those are sort of, sort of stunts these days. So it got me thinking,
5:13 Speaker 03 could I devise a strategy for exploration that actually added to the body of knowledge? And I came up with these quests that let an online audience direct a team of experts to solve mystery, thereby harnessing the wisdom of the crowd and letting the, the audience actually vote to decide where our expedition team went to gather clues. And we did five expeditions to help solve why the Maya civilization collapsed. We did an expedition to illuminate human origins, the origins of Western civilization. Many people think that's Greece, but actually it's probably more Turkey. And got very good at networking with top scientists and reading academic papers. As you well know, reading academic
5:57 Speaker 03 papers is like learning a second language. But once you get good at it, it opens up this whole world of insights. You, you don't have when you're reading secondhand interpretations of those papers. And, and then that led me eventually to blue zones.
6:12 Laurie Santos? You just used that term, blue zone. So what is a blue zone? What does that mean?
6:15 Speaker 03 A blue zone is a demographically confirmed, geographically confined area where people live the longest. But now it's grown into a movement. It's sort of a way of life that focuses on setting up your surroundings so you're more likely to live longer and a happier life.
6:34 Speaker 00 And so what was the mystery you were trying to solve with the Blue Zone work? What's the big puzzle?
6:38 Speaker 03 So it's quite literally reverse engineering longevity. And there's a few generally accepted assumptions that we work on. Number one, the Danish twin study established that only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes. The other 80% is something else. And that's not an individual, that's for a population. You understand that? And then the second thing is a team, small team of demographers were just figuring out how to authenticate ages and identify spots where people are living verifiably the longest. So I reasoned if we could find the longest of hotspots around the world and then look for their common denominators, that those common denominators would explain 80% of longevity.
7:22 Speaker 03 And that's the foundation of Blue Zones.
7:24 Speaker 00 I mean, this, the, the Blue Zone work started now a while ago, honestly. But, but you're hitting on something that folks are talking about a lot these days, this idea of what's called health span. So lifespan is kind of how long we live. But health span is this notion of how long do you live a kind of healthy life? The Blue Zones really focus on that. Why is health span so important?
7:43 Speaker 03 Well, okay, I actually, after three more years, I'm just finishing a book on health span. And just to give you a little bit of background on that. So the official term is health adjusted life expectancy, which goes under the acronym HALE. And that didn't exist when I was first doing my, my original Blue Zone work. But now there's an enormous body of scientists called the Global Burden of Disease Project, about 10,000 scientists who are trying to figure out this big problem we have on earth, which is life expectancy is going up. But us having more old people who are sicker for longer. So it's not getting us what we really want, which is more years of good life.
8:28 Speaker 03 So Health Adjusted Life Expectancy measures life expectancy minus years lost due to chronic disease like heart disease and type 2 diabetes, minus years of full health lost to disability. So it's a big cluster of things. And for this project, I found the four areas where people live the longest healthy lives and look for their common denominators. In the United States, an average person can only expect to live to age 64 before a major disability or disease comes on board. Only 64 good years in the United States. I found places where people are enjoying 77 years of full life.
9:08 Speaker 03 So I'm really interested in the cluster of characteristics, the policies and the individual interventions, and really the designs that are producing genetically average people who are living an extra 12 years more than Americans do.
9:23 Speaker 00 And so where were some of the places where you found that? Because that was what you first identified in the original Blue Zone book, where these like literal locations, cities, where people are living longer, more healthfully.
9:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, the original Blue Zones, longest-lived men were in Sardinia, Italy, just one area called the Noro province. Longest-lived women, Okinawa, Japan. The Nikoya Peninsula is the area with the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality, which means people your age, Lori, have the best chance of reaching a healthy age 95. 95 is kind of the ceiling for the average human being. People say promising you to live to 100, they probably have their hand in your pocket. But we're all kind of designed to make it to our mid 90s. Women like you, maybe a little bit more, men like me, a little bit less. But in Nikoya, they enjoy the best chance of reaching that age 95.
10:15 Speaker 03 Ikaria, Greece, virtually without dementia, living eight years longer than Americans. And then among the Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda, California, we have a population Who live about eight years longer than their California counterparts. So that's interesting because it's right here in the U.S.
10:32 Speaker 00 And so one of the things I've heard you say in other interviews is that you you learn so much from travel because I think you're meeting people and stuff. I'm just, I mean, you're always a healthy guy, but I'm curious when you first started going to the Blue Zones and meeting people, like any experiences that struck you of like, oh, my gosh, this is so different than like by life in the U.S.
10:50 Speaker 03 So I've I've had the privilege of interviewing almost 500 100 year olds, 500 centenarians. And I didn't much care for old people and I feared getting older before I started. And I really fell in love with these people. People are making it to 100, I've noticed, tend to be interested and interesting. The grump seemed to be selected out of the gene pool or out of the pool anyway. And it is done for me, it's given me this appreciation for older people, but also an appreciation for getting older. This Becca Levy from Yale has found that people with a poor attitude towards aging actually live shorter lives.
11:33 Speaker 03 And and this work has given me the gift of appreciating older people and even old age. You know, you actually get happier as you get older. And I realized that spending time with family, really curating my immediate social network and living in a walkable community are the biggest things I can do for not only quantity, but quality of life. And I've really been conscious about setting up my life like that.
12:03 Speaker 00 And so when a lot of people these days talk about kind of longevity and health span or what is it, health adjusted years per life? I already forgot that.
12:11 Speaker 03 It's a health adjusted life expectancy.
12:13 Speaker 00 Health adjusted life expectancy. So when so when folks are talking about that. Sometimes they kind of have their hand in your pocket, as you said, right? Like, if you talk to a lot of influencers and you talk about increasing your lifespan, you'll hear lots of things about supplements and individual fixes and workout plans and things like that. And one of the reasons I love your work so much is that you've kind of pushed back against this. You've argued that these kind of quick fixes don't work as well as we assume. What do you mean there?
12:40 Speaker 03 Well, there's an $84 billion anti-aging industry out there that has failed to produce even one pill or supplement or hormone or stem cell that is shown to reverse, stop, or even slow aging in humans. You know, there's some theoretical base, but when you take these things, you're usually being promised something they can't deliver, and you're performing an experiment on your own body. You know, I like to point out stem cells. There's no regulation of where they come from, the medium they're delivered in. There could be a medium that delivers infection as well as stem cells. I have a neighbor in Miami who went down to Central America for stem cell treatment, and he never came back. He embolized and died. So I'm not a big fan of those.
13:24 Speaker 03 You know, I always defy anybody to show me one behavioral modification intervention, say a diet or an exercise program or supplement regimen, that works for more than single-digit percentage of people over two years. You can't find it. So, you know, it's a great business plan because every year or two, you know, we promise better health or less weight or, you know, more muscle, and it doesn't deliver, but people still want it, and they'll try the new thing. And that's not the way populations who are enjoying an extra 12 good years, that's not the way they do it.
14:04 Speaker 03 So I try, I'm trying to illuminate the real characteristics or secrets of longevity.
14:11 Speaker 00 So I'm curious what's going on in these different zones. I know you've identified four different things that they might be doing that's helping them live longer. What are those things?
14:18 Speaker 03 Number one, if you want to know what a centenarian or a 100-year-old ate to live to be 100, you have to know what she ate as a little girl and middle age and lately. And you can't just ask them, you know, "What are you eating?" Because most people can't remember what they had two weeks ago Tuesday for lunch. So how are they going to remember what they ate as a little kid? So to get at that... We found about 155 dietary surveys done in all five Blue Zones over the past 80 years. Harvard's Walter Willard, who used to run the School of Public Health there, he helped me do something called a meta-analysis to see what people ate over time and sort of average it out. And you see, they're eating mostly a whole food diet.
15:02 Speaker 03 And about 90% of what they eat, 90 to 95, is plants. It's mostly whole grains, greens, tubers, like sweet potatoes, nuts. And the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. People don't realize if you eat a cup of beans a day, it predicts about four extra years of life expectancy. So number one, whole, plant-based diet. Number two, they don't exercise. But they live in places where every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat, at occasions, a walk. Their houses aren't full of mechanical conveniences to do kitchen work and housework and yard work. They do it by hand. They have gardens out back. So their unconscious decisions when it comes to movement
15:46 Speaker 03 nudges them into activity all day long, every day. The equivalent, we figured, of about 9,000 to 11,000 steps a day without thinking about it. An average American gets about 4,000 steps a day. And then there's vocabulary for purpose in all these Blue Zones. And when I first wrote the book in the mid-2000s, 2005, people looked at me and said, "purpose." It was woo-woo, airy-fairy. But we now know from studies done by the National Institutes on Aging that people who can articulate why they wake up in the morning live about seven to eight years longer than people who are rudderless in life. Maybe it's existential stress, or maybe it's you're less likely to take your pills or get exercise.
16:29 Speaker 03 And then the last one is socializing. These people live in environments where they're bumping into friends all day long, tend to live in extended families. So this loneliness, an epidemic here in the United States, is not a problem in Blue Zones. They're just born into society where they're richly socially connected from birth on.
16:50 Laurie Santos? It's time for a quick break. But I'll be back in just a moment to ask Dan how we can bring the Blue Zone lifestyle into our homes, wherever we happen to live. The Happiness Lab will be right back.
17:04 Laurie Santos? There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go-to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie. Specifically, Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft, and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere and organic cotton.
17:49 Laurie Santos? And if a cashmere hoodie isn't quite right for someone on your list, Quince has so much more. From leather bags and jewelry, to cozy scarves, down outerwear, and even hotel-quality bedding. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. Okay, quick pop quiz. Ready? What's your daily routine for fueling your gut? If your brain immediately went, "Ah, that's fair." We spend a lot of time thinking about what fuels our body, but when it comes to gut
18:33 Laurie Santos? health, things can start to feel surprisingly complicated. The good news: it doesn't have to be. That's why Kashi Gut Health Granola is such an easy win. It's a straightforward, delicious way to help fuel your gut, made with prebiotics, fiber, and gut-activated cultures. Plus, it tastes good. Wait, let me rephrase that. Kashi Gut Health Granola is delicious. Their Blueberry Almond Granola, for example, starts with whole-grain oats and combines them with, well, blueberries and almonds. It's right there in the name. But it's so good. And Kashi Gut Health Granola makes a great breakfast. It's also the kind of afternoon snack that's just so satisfying. I mean, it's straightforward. It fuels your gut and it tastes great.
19:18 Laurie Santos? Gut fuel is in the bag. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola. An anniversary gives you reasons to look back, but the most valuable kind of experience is one that you can harness to help you move forward. Case in point, MassMutual has a 175-year history of helping people secure their futures and protect the ones they love. But you can't build a legacy overnight. It's shaped over time, through our connections, the moments you planned for, and your ability to show up as the best you can be. That was the motivation behind MassMutual's Living Well Rider. Now available with eligible MassMutual Whole Life Insurance, it provides policy owners with access to wellness benefits at no additional cost.
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20:24 Laurie Santos? Explorer, researcher, podcaster, and now cookbook author Dan Buettner has spent years trying to unlock the secrets of Blue Zones, those places around the world where locals live longer and happier lives. One of the striking things Dan has learned about Blue Zones is that the inhabitants there, who live well into their 90s, don't seem to be making a conscious effort to prolong their lives.
20:44 Speaker 03 Remember, none of these places, these Blue Zones, are people trying to live a long time. In America, we tend to think the road to health and longevity is achieved by finding a program, mustering the resources to buy it, finding the discipline and the presence of mind to keep at it. But that doesn't work. In Blue Zones, they're not pursuing health and longevity. It ensues. They live in environments where they're nudged to move more, eat better, socialize more, without really thinking about it. So I got to thinking, well, if the longest of people in the world are doing so because of their environment, how about the happiest people? So I worked with the World Value Survey and the World Poll by Gallup, and I looked
21:29 Speaker 03 at worldwide data, it covers about 95% of the human population, and convinced them to first tell me where in the world people are enjoying the most life satisfaction, the most positive affect, which is moment-to-moment happiness, and the most purpose. And they sent me, in Asia anyway, highest life satisfaction was in Singapore, not Bhutan, as many people mistakenly believe. In the Americas, it turns out, the area with the most positive affect, in other words, they enjoy life most from day to day. And in fact, the place that produces more happiness per GDP dollar than any place else in the world is a place called Cartago, Costa Rica.
22:14 Speaker 03 And then, back to Scandinavia, a place called Ohus. Denmark, we found that was the happiest region there. I know lately Finland is sort of outperforming by a tiny margin Denmark, but this region within Denmark is happier than the country of Finland. So I actually went there to try to find the common denominators and look for why people are happier. And in no case, I hate to tell you, Lori, are they doing positive psychology exercises.
22:46 Speaker 00 It's not just because they're listening to this podcast, is what you're telling me, Dan?
22:50 Speaker 03 Well, you know, I love positive psychology, but nobody in mass is writing journals, or they're practicing gratitude, or savoring, or, you know, these things that are good ideas. And I know they've been shown with small sample sizes to work in the short run, but as a long term, you know, we want to be happy for a long time, not just for as long as we think about it. So, you know, I tend to pay attention to the systems, the elements of their surroundings that are coinciding, or I would argue, producing happiness.
23:25 Speaker 00 And so what did you find? What are these systems doing differently when it comes to producing happiness?
23:29 Speaker 03 Well, we'll start with policies. So the World Happiness Report, when they suck in all of this worldwide data, they tell you the biggest driver of happiness on a national level. GDP is important. You know, we need enough money for food, shelter, healthcare, some mobility. We also need to be able to treat ourselves once in a while when it comes to happiness. But after too much money, then money doesn't really bring much happiness. But equality, very highly associated with happiness. Trust. Can I trust my neighbor? Can I trust the police? Can I trust politicians? It turns out that healthy life expectancy is a big predictor of happiness.
24:10 Speaker 03 So you look at places like Denmark, where there's not necessarily really highs or, you know, ecstasy or something like that, but people don't have to worry about what happens if I get sick. Their healthcare system takes care of them from cradle to grave. They don't have to worry about, do I have enough money to send my kids to school or to college? Everybody's covered. They don't have to worry about what happens when I get old and retire. So a lot of the things that Americans worry about, at least, you know, the lower 25% income people, are completely absent in that culture.
24:45 Speaker 00 It also seems like those cultures have a lot of ways to get in social connection naturally. That social connection kind of ensues, like less hours at work in the Scandinavian countries, more public spaces for people to kind of go out and connect. Do we know how much that is affecting people's happiness in different places?
25:02 Speaker 03 Well, it's possible to sort of slice it out somewhat, but in rank order, I would say, in Singapore and Denmark, I would say it's trust as number one. Number two, it's safety. Safety is more important than freedom. I know we're a country obsessed with freedom, but actually, when it comes to happiness, it's more important that our kids can go out and play and we can feel like we can walk in the street. We're not nervous that our house is going to get broken into. In both of those places, they're very safe. Universal healthcare reduces a lot of the worry about what happens if I'm going to get sick. But to your point, so in 1975 Denmark or Copenhagen was a traffic clog
25:45 Speaker 03 city, a high stress, more dangerous to make your way through, bad air. By the way, the quality of air is associated with happiness too. So bad air, less happiness. So in Copenhagen, a guy named Jan Gell, a designer, an environment designer, did the first walkable, bikeable city. And now about 55% of all trips taken across Copenhagen are done on foot or done by bicycle. So gone is the danger, gone is the stress, gone is the long commute. We know from Daniel Kahneman, the least happy thing we do on a day to day basis is our commute. And what you get out of the deal is people are getting the equivalent of about 9,000
26:28 Speaker 03 steps a day without thinking about it because it's just easier to walk to work or it's easier to bike to the grocery store. So it's this environment where people are mindlessly doing the things that yield happiness.
26:40 Speaker 00 So it seems like one way that you can get these benefits is to move to these places, right? You know, if I move to Scandinavia, you know, I'm going to get access to all these walkable cities, right? If I move to Singapore, maybe I'll kind of have my life satisfaction sort of ensue. It's much easier if your whole culture is doing it, but we're not totally screwed if you're unable to move to a new city.
27:02 Speaker 03 Well, first, you know, just to drive home the point, there's been a few studies that have followed immigrants that moved from unhappy places in Southeast Asia and Africa to Canada, which is a happy place, or moved from Soviet bloc countries to Denmark. Those people, they don't change sex, they don't change age very much, they don't change education level very much, they don't change religious or sexual orientation. But within one year, they are reporting the happiness level of their adoptive home, which often represents a doubling of their happiness. And I'm not aware of anything in the academic literature that can produce a doubling of happiness. And here, All they're doing is moving environment. So you say to yourself, well, I, I can't move.
27:45 Speaker 03 And if you look at census data, it shows that the average American moves over 10 times in their life. And that gives us 10 opportunities to move to a place where happiness will ensue. And there's something called the, the Gallup Well-Being Index, which tells us where in America people are happier. And the walk score, where people are walking to work more and where air quality is better. And even within cities, I'm right now coming to you from Minneapolis and we have zip codes where the life expectancy is 13 years higher than in the worst neighborhood. You, you don't want to dismiss the idea of moving out of hand because it's so powerful. So my, my daytime job since 2009, my company and I have worked with about 70 different
28:29 Speaker 03 cities to help them change their environment to set people up for success or design for life, I like to think of. So we help these cities change their policies to favor healthy food over junk food and junk food marketing, to favor the pedestrian and cyclist over the motorist and favor the nonsmoker over the smoker. By the way, nonsmokers are happier. And then we have a certification process or program for all the restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, schools and churches so that they can optimize their designs and their policies in ways that we know are likely to produce higher happiness and better health. And then we have also a program for individuals, which gives them checklists to go into their
29:13 Speaker 03 home and set up their homes to nudge them into better behaviors. We help them find like-minded people who are healthy. We know that who you hang out with measurably influences how you're going to eat, how happy you feel, how lonely you feel, how much you smoke, how much you drink, et cetera. So we want to upgrade your social circle. And finally, we give people a purpose workshop so they know what their, their values and that what they like to do and what they can contribute. And then we make sure there's an outlet for that. We've shown that if we can do the policy, people, and then places, the certification. For five years that according to Gallup, this is a third party, uh, life expectancy goes up,
29:57 Speaker 03 obesity goes down, healthcare costs go down, happiness goes up and uh, everybody's satisfied, so to speak. This is actually works not by hounding people to change their diet or, you know, go run a marathon or run down to Central America and take stem cells, simply setting up their environment. So their unconscious decisions are slightly better every day for months, years, and in at least one case, now decades.
30:27 Laurie Santos? And so what's, give me an example of a city where you've done this and like some of the specific changes they've made because I find the fact that you can make these changes so quickly is quite fascinating.
30:35 Speaker 03 Well, quick is, I mean, relative and everybody wants to see it in months. It takes five years. So our biggest city was Fort Worth, Texas. There's about a million people there. They became more marginally more walkable and bikeable. They certified about 500 restaurants that, so we made sure that there were places for people to go get whole plant-based options and not just steak. About two thirds of the schools became Blue Zone certified. We got the soda pops out of their vending machines and we changed the default. So elementary school kids are not eating in hallways and classrooms. In the inner city, we raised money to put coolers in, in these convenience stores. And what was otherwise a food desert,
31:19 Speaker 03 now all of a sudden there was a way for people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. And it turns out that was a huge bonanza for both the, the convenience store owner and the local people. So we don't rely on, I could go on. There were about 40 different interventions. We made smoking harder. There was, we got them to change the default. So there was no smoking indoors or outdoors. So this all produced a, a, a 3% drop in BMI. And the city itself, working with Gallup, figured we saved them a quarter of a billion dollars in projected healthcare costs every year because of these little micro changes.
31:58 Laurie Santos? I always love chatting with Dan, but we haven't yet gotten to the main reason I wanted to bring him on the show today, to explain how he's extended his Blue Zone thinking into his new cookbook. So we'll turn to that right after the break.
32:12 Laurie Santos? Okay, quick pop quiz. Ready? What's your daily routine for fueling your gut? If your brain immediately went, "Ah, that's fair." We spend a lot of time thinking about what fuels our body, but when it comes to gut health, things can start to feel surprisingly complicated. The good news: it doesn't have to be. That's why Kashi Gut Health Granola is such an easy win. It's a straightforward, delicious way to help fuel your gut, made with prebiotics, fiber, and gut-activated cultures. Plus, it tastes good. Wait, let me rephrase that. Kashi Gut Health Granola is delicious. Their Blueberry Almond Granola, for example, starts with whole-grain oats and combines them with, well, blueberries and almonds. It's right there in the name.
32:57 Laurie Santos? But it's so good. And Kashi Gut Health Granola makes a great breakfast. It's also the kind of afternoon snack that's just so satisfying. I mean, it's straightforward. It fuels your gut, and it tastes great. Gut fuel is in the bag. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola. An anniversary gives you reasons to look back, but the most valuable kind of experience is one that you can harness to help you move forward. Case in point: MassMutual has a 175-year history of helping people secure their futures and protect the ones they love. But you can't build a legacy overnight. It's shaped over time, through our connections, the moments you planned for, and your ability to show up as the best you can be.
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35:14 Laurie Santos? Dan Buettner has written lots of books chronicling what people do better in blue zones. Those special geographic locations where people statistically live longer, happier lives. But the book I picked up over the summer, One Pot Meals, didn't just list what folks in Okinawa or Sardinia were doing better. It explained how we can cook our own meals more like they do in blue zones. I asked Dan to explain this new direction.
35:37 Speaker 03 Yes, it's a bit of a shift, you know. So I'm trying to articulate the blue zone diet to people in places like Fort Worth and Naples and Jacksonville, Florida, et cetera. So I started writing these cookbooks or working with others to write these cookbooks. First of all, you have to realize that every time you go out to eat, you consume about 300 extra calories mindlessly. Those calories tend to be laden with sodium, ultra-processed foods, and sugars. So the only real way you're going to eat healthy or eat for longevity is to cook at home. So when you tell people you got to cook at home, right away, a lot of people, I don't have time, I don't know how, or I can't afford fresh fruits and vegetables.
36:19 Speaker 03 But wait, it turns out the healthiest longevity foods in the world are peasant foods. Beans. Last I checked, you can get a pound of beans for $2. Whole grains, there are bins of them. You can fill up bags of them. Root vegetables, potatoes, sweet potatoes, they're all dirt cheap. What people in blue zones teach us is how to take those very simple ingredients and make them taste delicious. You know, I was a meat eater. Before I started on this, now I don't eat meat anymore. It's not worth it for me, not health wise. And, you know, there's other facets to that don't make sense to me. But for this new book, I wanted to take another step. I've learned the most important, and I'm going to actually quiz you on this, Lori.
37:03 Speaker 03 What do you think is the most important ingredient for longevity?
37:07 Speaker 00 The most important ingredient, like a food ingredient?
37:09 Speaker 03 Yes, or a characteristic.
37:11 Speaker 00 Uh, I would say plant-based, social connection, time, having free time.
37:17 Speaker 03 Those are all important, but number one is taste.
37:20 Speaker 00 Taste, right, because if it doesn't taste good, I'm not going to eat it.
37:23 Speaker 03 That's right. And if it does taste good, you don't much care what it is. If it's good for you or bad for it, you're going to eat it for the long run. So to make sure that people like this one, this, this new book is called The Blue Zone Kitchen One Pot Meals. So I worked with Stanford in AI lab and we scraped 650,000 recipes from the most popular sites on the internet. We isolated all the recipes with 100 or more five-star reviews. And then we analyzed it and we saw seven very clear flavor patterns. And then I gave the Blue Zone's food guidelines, these seven patterns to the most gifted recipe developer, guy from the New York Times, and he helped me create 100 recipes to live
38:08 Speaker 03 to 100 that are maniacally delicious and formulated for longevity. And you can make them in one pot and they cost less than $3 a serving. And you can make most of them less than 20 minutes. So overclaim every single objection somebody might have and led with deliciousness.
38:28 Speaker 00 I mean, I love that you're doing this with an eye for saving people time because I think there's the, you know, there's the finance thing, there's the people don't know how to do it thing, but I think the time thing, you know, is real. And I think one of the big hits on happiness that we see in the US right now is that people self-report being really time famished, right? They don't have time to cook a whole meal. And so I think. Kind of adding to that, adding to the time famine by having them cook, you know, a plant-based meal. It's going to take hours and hours to make it delicious. Like, that just doesn't really help. But all your meals, one of the reasons I'm so excited about this cookbook, it seems like all the meals are, are quick. Like, they're frugal, like monetarily, but they're also frugal for our time, too.
39:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's several in there where you can just, it takes you 15 minutes to assemble in the morning. You put it in Instapot. I have no connection to Instapot, but it's, it's a basically electric pressure cooker. And you push a button, you come home from work, dinner for eight people is done. But I also want to make a very important point. So if you're eating the standard American diet, which means you're not paying a hell of a lot of attention to what you're eating, and you're a 20-year-old, you're losing about 10 years of life expectancy. For a male, it's 12 years. And if you're, if you're 60, you're still losing six years over eating a whole food, largely plant-based diet. So
39:48 Speaker 03 people say, I don't have time to make healthy food. But if you take those, let's just say those six years of extra life expectancy and average them back through your life, it's an extra two hours a day. You can't afford to not eat healthy.
40:02 Speaker 00 I do, I do love that framing that like, by eating, by spending this, you know, 20 minutes, half hour to cook the healthy meal, I'm actually getting two hours a day over my whole lifetime.
40:10 Speaker 03 What do you call that? It's, it's a cognitive trap, right? To think, oh, I don't have time.
40:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, such a cognitive trap, right? Because we're not thinking over the long term. We're thinking this Thursday at 5 o'clock. Like, what am I doing with my time? We're not kind of thinking for the long term.
40:24 Speaker 03 The cookbook is called The Blue Zones Kitchen One Pot. And, and to test it out, you know, I live in Miami these days, and I went to something called the Overtown Center. And this is a place where inner-city moms who don't have a lot of money, you know, bring their kids. And I invited 20 moms to spend 10 weeks with me. And every week we got together and I put them in what we call MOIs, which are these sort of committed social circles. And we spend some time making sure they get to know each other. Then I brought my cookbook and I said, page through this and identify a recipe you'd like to cook. Well, you know, it's actually for next week, but then I hired a chef to help me. And we brought cutting boards. I gave them all Instapots.
41:09 Speaker 03 And every Wednesday at from 11 to one, we all cook together. It was simple and it was fun and it was just chopped and we put it in the Instapot. We put the lid on and then, and a lot of these ladies are eating, you know, Popeyes and frozen pizza and junk food from the convenience store. And once they realize that A, they could afford it, B, they could make it. And C, now they have an Instapot, they have the hardware to cook it. And then the closer was they tasted it and oh my God, this is delicious. My job is done. I send them home and we captured their blood pressure and their weight. And every one of them lost weight. Every one of them had a little to a lot drop in blood pressure in just 10 weeks.
41:53 Speaker 03 So, you know, I just think it's the killer app to get people cooking at home again. You don't have to buy my books, but the idea of eating whole plant-based food is the biggest gift you can give to your family when it comes to longevity.
42:07 Speaker 00 I also love that you've mentioned this idea of like getting the MOIs together or that you're making dinner for eight, because another thing that we know about the power of home-cooked meals is that oftentimes our home-cooked meals are eaten with the family together. And one of the most recent World Happiness Reports talked about the power of shared meals and eating together, right? I think another thing we do when we're kind of getting our standard American diet fast food is that we, you know, run over to fast food, we eat in our car by ourselves. But, you know, the Instapot meal that we're making for multiple people, it means we can get the benefit of social connection while we're enjoying that meal as well.
42:40 Speaker 03 There's two other things besides social connection. Number one, you know, if you're eating with one hand on the steering wheel or standing up, you tend to eat much faster and it takes about 20 minutes for that full feeling to travel from your belly to your brain. And if you're, if you're eating on the run, you're much more likely to overeat than if you're sitting with your family or even with friends and punctuating the meal with a conversation. The other thing is, If you eat when you're stressed, cortisol interrupts the digestion process. It makes it less complete. It makes it more like you're going to get indigestion. Creates an inflammatory situation in your body. So you really want to slow down. And it's other thing you see in blue zones.
43:25 Speaker 03 You know, in the Christian countries, they're always saying grace before a meal. Or in Okinawa, it's hara hachi buh, a Confucian adage. It reminds them to stop eating when their stomach is 80% full. But they're putting some punctuation between their busy life and, okay, now we're eating. Thank you, higher power, for this food. Honoring the food, so it's not just stuffing stuff in their mouth. And now this is a social activity. We're going to eat with our family or friends. Makes a big difference over time.
43:58 Speaker 00 As I mentioned, I just turned 50. And so I feel like I'm looking forward to the next 50 years so I can become a Saginarian as well. Any advice for me to live longer and better during my next 50 years?
44:09 Speaker 03 Well, number one, think about who you're spending time with. I don't know your socials. First of all, you look pretty happy and healthy to me. So maybe nothing. But if I look at an average person, I would say, who are my three best friends? Who are the people I spend the most time with? We know if your three best friends are obese or unhealthy, there's about 150% better chance you'll be overweight. So I wouldn't tell you to dump your, you know, your old unhappy, unhealthy friends because they might need you. But I would say that adding happy and healthy friends, probably one of the most powerful things you can do to add yours because friends have a long-term impact on your health behaviors without you even thinking about it. I'd also think about where I'm living.
44:54 Speaker 03 You know, if you live in a place with too much stress or traffic or not access to good food, I would think about moving. And then the last thing, take it a few moments to write down what your values are. I care about women's issues. I'm a Christian. I'm a Republican. I'm a Democrat, whatever it is. Write them down. Then in a separate column, write down what you love to do. Oh, I love, I love writing or I love teaching or I love to, I love to fix things. I'm really good at resolving conflicts, whatever. Boom, boom, boom, list them. And then a third column, what am I good at? Well, I'm really good at taking care of people.
45:36 Speaker 03 I'm really good at inspiring the next generation, whatever it is. Get that out in front of you and then make sure you have an outlet for those things. You know, the main values, passions and what you're good at. And if you're not getting it at work, and by the way, according to Gallup, about 70% of Americans don't get it at work. They don't have purpose at work. Um, make sure you're deploying it at home or volunteering. It seems like such a cliche to volunteer, but it is so powerful for both longevity and happiness.
46:08 Speaker 00 I love it. This is my, this is my Dan Buettner approved recipe for living into a hundred years. Private consultation.
46:16 Speaker 03 And it's free. Notice I can't sell you a supplement and I'm not selling you, I'm, or a hormone or any of that other snake oil that other influencers, but this is, these are, I'm, I'm coming to you from the, the populations who are manifestly living the longest, healthiest lives. It's just a distillation. I'm just a, a medium here.
46:40 Laurie Santos? If this discussion has whet your appetite, then you should check out Dan's cookbook, One Pot Meals, which is out now. And for more tips on living happier and healthier, you should check out Dan's new podcast. It's called The Dan Buettner Podcast. In our next episode, I'll be leaving the cookbooks behind to explore a classic text on behavioral science with a brand new and improved edition for 2025. It's even written by a Nobel laureate.
47:03 Speaker 00 You don't mic drop the like, and Nobel laureate?
47:06 Speaker 04 I don't. I'll let you mention that.
47:09 Laurie Santos? All that next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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