Pod Insights TED Radio Hour Living Longer ... And Better About this episode In some pockets of the world, people have a higher chance of living longer. So how do they do it? This hour, TED speaker Dan Buettner takes us to Blue Zones to learn how to live a long, happy life. Original broadcast date: December 22, 2023.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:24 Speaker 01 Our job now is to dream big.
0:25 Manoush Zomorodi? Delivered at TED conferences.
0:27 Speaker 02 To bring about the future we want to see.
0:29 Manoush Zomorodi? Around the world.
0:30 Speaker 03 To understand who we are.
0:32 Manoush Zomorodi? From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
0:37 Speaker 04 You just don't know what you're gonna find.
0:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Challenge you.
0:40 Speaker 05 We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
0:42 Manoush Zomorodi? And even change you.
0:43 Speaker 06 I literally feel like I'm a different person.
0:45 Manoush Zomorodi? Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and I'd like you to meet Lys.
0:59 Speaker 07 My name is Lys Pochet Delahoussaye. I'm 40. I was gonna say 49. I'm 94.
1:08 Manoush Zomorodi? Lys lives in Broussard, Louisiana, and has a very active life.
1:13 Speaker 07 I think the most important thing is exercise.
1:17 Manoush Zomorodi? She goes to exercise class for an hour and a half, twice a week. She cleans her home, she gardens.
1:23 Speaker 07 I love working in the yard.
1:25 Manoush Zomorodi? She also plays cards with friends, goes to mass, and eats lunch with her family.
1:31 Speaker 07 Important things, like going to the beauty parlor. And I feel good, you know? I don't feel old. I don't know what old feels like. I just feel like myself. I do have a sister that lived to be 100. And I said, if she can do it, I can do it. So I have six more years to go.
1:54 Manoush Zomorodi? And Lys just might make it because all those activities are very likely contributing to her longevity, even more, perhaps, than just having good genes.
2:06 Speaker 03 Only about 20% of it is genes. The other 80% is something else.
2:12 Manoush Zomorodi? This is writer and National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner. For the last 25 years, he's been traveling the world to places where groups of people have lived well into their 90s and beyond.
2:25 Speaker 03 We're talking about people who've achieved the health outcomes we want, which is to live a long time largely without disease. And these people do it better than anyone else in the world.
2:36 Manoush Zomorodi? These tiny towns, neighborhoods even, are referred to as "blue zones," places where the environment seems to facilitate a longer life.
2:46 Speaker 03 If you do everything right and you have an average set of genes, you can set your financial plan to age 95.
2:53 Manoush Zomorodi? But in the US, that seems less and less likely. Life expectancy has declined over the past few years. The average American makes it to about 76. Dan thinks they could live far longer.
3:08 Speaker 03 The reason that people I've found are living a long time is not because they have some magical diet or longevity hack. It's simply because they're avoiding the diseases that foreshorten their lives. They are not dying of dementia, cancer that GI track, heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, obesity, at anywhere that near the numbers we are today. They have the same machines, the same biological machines that we do. They've just managed to expose that machine to an environment that has allowed them to live out the capacity of what we're all given.
3:52 Manoush Zomorodi? So today on the show, we're spending the hour with Dan Buettner. He takes us around the world to these pockets of vitality, from mountain top villages in Sardinia, to islands off the coasts of Japan and Greece, and to the Nikoya region of Costa Rica. We'll learn how these places nurtured longevity, why, as the modern world encroaches, they may be fading away, and how we can apply blue zone wisdom to our own homes and neighborhoods right now.
4:25 Speaker 03 The vast majority of it is, I argue, your environment, much less than your lifestyle, your environment.
4:32 Manoush Zomorodi? So Dan Buettner is now a bestselling author, and his recent Netflix series is called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. But before he was into longevity, Dan was working for National Geographic, and always on the hunt for a good story.
4:47 Speaker 03 It's actually my brother Nick, who stumbled upon a World Health Organization report in the year 1999 that found that Okinawa, Japan, an archipelago of 161 islands in Southeast Asia, were producing a population with the highest disability-free life expectancy in the world. So I said, aha, now this is a good mystery. These people are living long, and there's got to be a reason for it. So Okinawa, it's part of Japan today, but before, about 1918, it was called the Rukus Kingdom. So it's actually a completely different population than people in Japan. Even though they live on islands close to the sea,
5:30 Speaker 03 they traditionally have not eaten much or any fish. Instead, they relied mostly on a type of purple potato called emo, full of complex carbohydrates and antioxidants, the same ones that you find in blueberries. They also eat a lot of tofu. And they developed a few social constructs that, you know, at the time, I kind of dismissed them, but evidence has now found are probably better explainers of their longevity than anything else. Number one, they have this vocabulary for purpose, and the word ikigai, which roughly means the reason for which I wake up in the morning. And interestingly, the Okinawan dialect has no word for retirement.
6:15 Speaker 03 They continue to be engaged with their brains and their bodies, and they feel meaning in their life into their 90s or 100s. And that's been found to add up to eight years of life expectancy over being rudderless in life.
6:30 Manoush Zomorodi? Here's Dan Buettner on the TED stage.
6:33 Speaker 03 For this 102-year-old karate master, his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art. For this 100-year-old fisherman, it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week. For this 102-year-old woman, her ikigai was simply her great-great-great-granddaughter.
6:53 Speaker 03 Two girls separated in age by 101 and a half years. And I asked her what it felt like to hold a great, great, great granddaughter. And she put her head back and she said, it feels like leaping into heaven.
7:08 Manoush Zomorodi? I watched your recent Netflix series with my 80 year old parents. And we loved one particular woman. I think her name was Umito Yamahiro. She's 101 in the show and she is just laughing and she can balance this like vase on her head while she's dancing. And she says that she never, she doesn't get angry, that the secret to, to living a long time is having fun.
7:39 Manoush Zomorodi? It really struck me.
7:40 Speaker 03 Yeah. Probably not coincidentally, these blue zones, in addition to being the longest lived, they're in the top 10 or 20% of the happiest places in the world. So a really nice finding is that the same things that drive a long life also make the journey pleasant and wonderful. They kind of go hand in hand. You can't often separate happiness and laughter and a full, rich, purposeful life and longevity. They're part of the same mix.
8:16 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay. So you spent a lot of time in Okinawa. You learned about how they live there. And then you decided to go visit Sardinia. Why was Sardinia next?
8:27 Speaker 03 We had data for Sardinia. A researcher named Gianni Pes was just beginning to report it in this very obscure journal. Nobody knew about it except for the 108 readers of the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. It was on the other side of the planet and it was producing even more male centenarians than Okinawa was producing. So there are a few unique aspects of the Sardinian longevity phenomenon, but there are more commonalities. So first of all, the blue zone in Sardinia is only five villages in the Noro and Oleasta province. And it was a matriarchal society when the rest of the Mediterranean is patriarchal.
9:13 Speaker 03 And they lived in very steep, rugged terrain. They were largely shepherds, unlike the Okinawans, who were largely agriculturalists. But what did they have in common? Well, if you look at dietary surveys over time, if you want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be 100, they were eating a very similar diet, a whole food, plant-based diet, not sweet potatoes and tofu, but instead they were eating lots of beans and local greens and, you know, some pastas, a lot of bread, by the way.
9:48 Manoush Zomorodi? You found an amazing correlation between longevity and how steep the people lived up in the mountains. Was it basically the steeper, the better?
9:58 Speaker 03 Yes. So not the altitude. One of the top correlations was the steepness of the village predicted making it to 100 more than almost everything else. The other predictor, actually, was daughters you had. Turns out, the guys who had five or more daughters had the best chance of making it to 100.
10:17 Manoush Zomorodi? And you add that when people do get older, they don't move to nursing homes, which you say can lead to someone dying two to six years earlier than if they live with their family.
10:30 Speaker 03 Yes. I believe, from having visited the homes of over 300 centenarians, it's because when you're living with your family in a blue zone, you tend to have a responsibility. You're still in charge of the food tradition. You help raise the children. You always have a garden. So their wisdom is honored and put to work. And they have a reason to get up in the morning. They're still engaged with life. And I would encourage people to at least try to bring their aging parents nearby or incorporate them more into their family life. You know, something called the grandmother effect has showed that families
11:11 Speaker 03 with a grandparent in them, their children have lower rates of mortality and grow up healthier.
11:17 Manoush Zomorodi? You spent time with a woman named Juliana Pizanu, who was 101, never married.
11:25 Speaker 03 Right. But she had an extended family. And in Sardinia, extended family is almost as important as your immediate family. And her nieces took time, basically a day a week, to come stay with her. Do you enjoy the time you're here, or is it work? Sabe que cosa? Quando veniamo qua noi... You know, they weren't, oh, God, I go to go take care of my aunt. It was, oh, it's my day. I get to spend a day with her. The other interesting aspect of the centenaries I met in Blue Zones, there wasn't a grump in the bunch. And it seemed that possessing a certain likability, being interested and interesting,
12:08 Speaker 03 and a certain generosity actually drew people to them.
12:13 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, there's something that strikes me about talking about Sardinia and Okinawa is that they're both relatively remote. Is there something to that with Blue Zones? That there is a rhythm to their day that doesn't include a lot of sitting and hearing about how awful climate change is, or war is going on, or all the things that consume us every day?
12:38 Speaker 03 Their remoteness does, to your point, afford them a certain insulation from the bombardment of bad news. But more importantly, it's afforded them a insulation from the standard American diet and globalization that has engineered so much physical activity out of our lives. Being remote allows this culture of longevity to incubate and develop, apart from what the rest of the country is doing.
13:07 Manoush Zomorodi? When we come back, a Blue Zone that's not so remote. We visit Loma Linda, California. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.
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16:53 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, a conversation with TED speaker and National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner about Blue Zones, places around the world where people have lived well into their 90s and beyond. We started our show in Okinawa and Sardinia, Blue Zone havens that benefit from being cut off from the world. But the next Blue Zone we'll visit isn't very remote at all.
17:22 Speaker 03 They're right off the San Bernardino Freeway in Loma Linda, California.
17:29 Manoush Zomorodi? Recently, one of our producers visited the local recreation center there and met one couple taking their regular exercise class. I'm Jody Nichols and 78 years old. Jody Nichols was joined by her husband Glenn. Glenn Nichols, 94 years old. I think he's probably the eldest of our group. Alongside dozens of other regulars, Glenn and Jody stretched, balanced medicine balls, and stomped, along with their instructor.
18:02 Manoush Zomorodi? But here's what's different about this exercise for seniors. Most of the attendees are part of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a Christian denomination whose members view their health as sacred.
18:15 Speaker 03 They're living about seven years longer than their North American counterparts. It's not so much Loma Linda that's a blue zone. It's really the Adventist culture that's a blue zone, the best concentration of which is in Loma Linda. And they look to the Bible to inform their diet. Mostly, it's from Genesis. There's a passage where God articulates the diet of the Garden of Eden. Every plant that bears seed and every tree that bears fruit. Little, no meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, things like that. That's the original diet, according to the Bible. And from that, they've derived the message
19:00 Speaker 03 that they should be eating a plant-based diet. And their friends are all eating a plant-based diet. So that's probably the biggest driver, the fact that they're living longer, again, with a fraction of the rate of disease of their neighbors living just a county over, who are not Adventists. I've been a vegetarian since I was 19. I never smoked, never drank. I don't use coffee. And the reason they can avoid those things better than maybe the rest of us is because they are hanging out with other clean-living people who are eating plant-based foods and supporting each other spiritually.
19:41 Speaker 03 And it becomes easy to fall into the slipstream of that way of life. We have socials at the church. We go to that.
19:52 Speaker 06 I play games and socialize. She's more socially active than I am. We don't sit in front of the TV. The TV is rarely, rarely on. We play games. That keeps our brain, we hope, moving. I think God gave us that community. He wants us to be in community and prayer. Not just once or twice a day, but throughout our day.
20:22 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm really curious about the role of religion for the folks in Loma Linda. Because how much is organized religion and an affiliation with a group? What impacts longevity, do you think? Or is it belonging and identity that makes people live longer? Or the spirituality connection to a higher power that makes people live longer? Can we tell the difference?
20:48 Speaker 03 Well, you cannot. We don't know how to measure spirituality with any accuracy. But we can measure something called religiosity, which is simply measured by how often you show up to a faith-based community, whether it be a church, a temple, or a mosque. And we know from meta-analyses that people who show up four times a month are living four to 14 years longer than people who don't show up. But we don't know if that's because belonging to a faith-based community, you're less likely to engage in risky behaviors? Or if it's because you have a day every week where you're de-stressing and thinking about a higher power?
21:31 Speaker 03 Or if it's because you have a nice social network that you, you know, close and play? But we do know that belonging to a faith-based community stacks the deck in favor of health and longevity. And by the way, those people who are making it 14 years are inner-city minorities. And I argue that one of the best public health interventions we have available to us in most cities is getting young people involved with religious organizations. And I say that not as a religious person myself. I say it, look at the data. You know, I don't know of anything else that can convey 14 extra years of life expectancy. You know, other than, you know, joining up for your temple or mosque or church.
22:15 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, that's a, that's a commitment and a big decision, but then you also, you say that having a handful of nuts every day could give you three extra years.
22:23 Speaker 03 That's from the Adventist Health Study. That's when you follow 103,000 people for 30 years and you find that people who report eating a handful of nuts every day are living two to three years longer than the people who aren't eating nuts.
22:40 Manoush Zomorodi? You also visited a blue zone, Nacoya, a rural region in northern Costa Rica. And, you know, we've heard this for years, that in most of the world, as income rises, so does life expectancy. But that is not the case in Nacoya. It is one of the poorest regions in a pretty poor country.
23:00 Speaker 03 Which is why we should pay attention to it.
23:02 Manoush Zomorodi? Mm-hmm.
23:03 Speaker 03 This population has the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality, so they have about a twofold better chance of reaching a healthy age 90 than Americans do. So, you know, once again, I go there trying to solve a multi-variable equation. I just know that this place is producing super long-lived people.
23:22 Manoush Zomorodi? Mm-hmm.
23:22 Speaker 03 And we found that the Nacoya Peninsula has very different groundwater than the rest of Costa Rica. It's limestone in Nacoya, and what burbles up through the ground is a type of water very high in calcium and magnesium. So maybe that has something to do with it. It is a, the race there is a blend of Spaniards, African-Americans, and, but mostly Native Americans, the Chorotega people. So maybe it has to do with this particular mix. For most of a centenarian's life, about 80% of their dietary intake came from three foods. They call it the three sisters.
24:08 Speaker 03 Corn tortillas, squash and beans. And those three foods come together in absolutely magical ways. They produce all the complex carbohydrates, lots of trace minerals, but perhaps most importantly, all the amino acids necessary for human sustenance, which is to say it's a whole protein without the saturated fats and the hormones and the other more dangerous aspects of animal-based proteins. They have a very strong sense of community. Most of them are very strongly religious. Again, this is a very remote part of the world, so they had to stick together.
24:50 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm thinking of one of the people that you feature in your Netflix series, a cowboy named Ramiro, who really demonstrates how people in Nacoya are biologically younger than people of the same age in other places. The scene starts with him on a horse, lassoing some cattle, and it's pretty extraordinary.
25:15 Speaker 03 He's amazing. He wakes up every morning about 5:00 a.m., makes his own breakfast, saddles up his horse and trots across town through a river where he has a number of cattle, just a small herd that he takes care of, and he comes home and takes a nap and gets his lunch together and does it again in the afternoon. And he had the vitality and the physical abilities of a 50-year-old, but yet we know, because we could check his birth certificate and his ID, that he was over 100 years old. Amigo, ¿qué ya has trabajado hoy? Algo, sí. ¿A qué hora te levantaste?
26:00 Speaker 03 A las cuatro. ¿A las cuatro? Son las, son las diez, ya. And, you know, that's where we want to be. It's at that level of vitality, but also, you know, making it to our hundred and possessing all the wisdom that he did.
26:16 Manoush Zomorodi? You have said that in the US, we hope for health, but we incent for sickness. That kind of bowled me over. How, how is the approach to healthcare in the US different from Nacoya?
26:28 Speaker 03 The Costa Rican government in the 1990s instituted these basic health teams where every single man, woman, and child has the right to a visit every year from an ambassador from this team composed of a doctor, a nurse practitioner, a record keeper, and two of these sort of wandering health ambassadors. And they actually go to your front door, they have your health records, they go in your backyard and look for standing water, which could harbor disease-bearing mosquitoes, they look in your refrigerator to see what you've been eating, to see, look for signs of, you know, chronic disease, and they, they can catch diabetes or, or heart disease decades before it shows up in an emergency room.
27:13 Speaker 03 And that's because the government invests in health rather than looks for profit in, in health. There's free healthcare for everybody, no matter how poor you are, and it's proactive healthcare, not reactive healthcare like we have in the United States. So interestingly, they have about half the rate of middle-aged cardiovascular mortality. So much better health comes a fraction of the rate of, of what we spend. We, we spend about 4.4 trillion dollars a year on healthcare. About 85% of it is on avoidable diseases. And, you know, that's because our healthcare system only makes money when you get sick.
27:56 Manoush Zomorodi? All right, let's go to our last blue zone, Icaria. This is a Greek island, close to Turkey. I feel like this one makes sense, right? Greek cuisine is what the Mediterranean diet is modeled after. We hear about that here. But tell us about life in Icaria, how it's different from the rest of Greece.
28:18 Speaker 03 Icaria, again, very hilly, arrives abruptly out of the Aegean Sea. There were no natural ports, so it was largely overlooked by Western civilization. You can see from Icaria, you can see Samos, where Epicurus and Pythagoras lived and created the foundations of Western civilization. But yet, Icaria, you know, nobody really stopped there much. So you don't see the whitewashed villages like you see in the rest of Greece. The villages are away from the sea, almost hidden, sometimes in like these sort of craters. And they're scattered. You often don't even see a town square.
29:01 Speaker 03 That's because they were in perpetual threat of pirates. As a result, they had to stick together socially, but every family had its own garden and its own little vineyard. So instead of relying on, you know, the farmer to create all the food for the village, everybody created their own food. So they're all actively growing food, actively growing grapes for their wine. They're in staying more physically active. They didn't have money for coffee, for the most part, so they drank these herbal teas at higher rates than the rest of Greece. And the herbal teas were made of oregano, rosemary, a catnip, and a sage.
29:44 Speaker 03 I had these herbal teas sent to the University of Athens and analyzed, and it turns out they were all antioxidants or anti-inflammatory, and in most cases, also mild diuretics, which lower your blood pressure. So, you know, one of the reasons these people are living longer might be because they're drinking these herbal teas all the time and have a lower inflammation load, or fewer vascular strokes because they have lower blood pressure.
30:15 Manoush Zomorodi? Going back to enjoying the pleasantries of life and another liquid that we have to talk about, which is alcohol. The sad headlines in the United States have recently been a rather definitive conclusion that the best amount of alcohol to drink is no alcohol. But that is not the case in Icaria.
30:34 Speaker 03 Right. Except for the Adventists who shun alcohol. In every blue zone, they're drinking. And I'm very well aware of the epidemiology studies, but it's not definitive in my mind. Alcohol or a little bit of wine in blue zones bring people together socially. In Icaria, I just read a survey of 90-year-olds, and 90% of them reported drinking every day. They suffer a fraction of the rate of heart disease, a fifth the rate of dementia, as we do in the United States. So I know for sure that making it into your 90s or 100s and having a modest amount of alcohol every day are not mutually exclusive.
31:18 Manoush Zomorodi? So is a low rate or even no rate of dementia common in blue zones?
31:24 Speaker 03 It's low rate everywhere. What people don't often realize is whether it's heart disease, type 2 diabetes, many cancers, or dementia, or metabolic syndrome, they're all driven by the same factors: lack of physical activity, eating a standard American diet, loneliness, social isolation, lack of purpose, exposure to contaminants. The same factors drive all of these chronic diseases that are killing us and costing us trillions a year. And so, yes, in blue zones, they live a long time and also suffering a fraction of the rate of dementia for the same reasons.
32:08 Manoush Zomorodi? I had always thought that dementia was just inevitable, that when you got really old, that was just another, the brain begins to atrophy.
32:16 Speaker 03 It does, but there was a recent article in the Journal of American Medical Association that showed that at least 40% of dementia or Alzheimer is avoidable. And all I have to do is point to Icaria, a population of 10,000 people, where they have 20% the rate of dementia that we have in the United States. We only found three mild cases of dementia on the entire island. And it just, to me, shows that we should be beating dementia not by looking for the cure, but by investing in prevention.
32:52 Manoush Zomorodi? Another thing you say that works as prevention is love. You talk about a couple who met later in life. She was divorced, he was widowed, and when they met, they were really open to embarking on another chapter of life together.
33:10 Speaker 03 That was a beautiful love story. First of all, it's never too late to find love. When my first wife passed away, I had lost my appetite to live. I wouldn't talk, I wouldn't laugh, I wouldn't eat. I fell to pieces. She brought me back.
33:35 Speaker 02 When I was looking at him, something was taking my soul. I married my first husband at 16. I had a gloomy life, but you have made me complete, and I have forgotten the past.
33:55 Speaker 03 This great story of how Paniotis actually invites his girlfriend out on their first date, and he sets up this picnic on a blanket with a bottle of wine overlooking this beautiful scene of the Aegean, and they made out on their first date. And, you know, when I visited them, they're canoodling, and you could see very clearly, when we visited him, he was in his 90s, he was not moving as fast anymore, but you could see this beautiful symbiosis between the two of them, living a life of love and social connectedness, and eating good food and taking care of each other.
34:36 Speaker 03 And it, you know, it underscores the central premise of Blue Zones, which is, this brand of longevity not only offers us another decade or so, but the journey is fun and loving and purposeful and connected and close to nature, and it's just a beautiful way of living life.
34:58 Manoush Zomorodi? In a minute, can blue zones be created, manufactured even? Dan heads to the middle of America to find out. Stick around. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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36:26 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, TED speaker and National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner. Dan has spent decades researching the blue zones of the world, very different places with surprisingly similar habits. For example, the oldest people in these areas just keep moving all day long.
36:50 Speaker 03 Instead of exercising, they live in places where every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to the occasions of walk. They have gardens out back. They knead bread by hand and grind corn by hand. So my team figures they're moving every 20 minutes or so naturally.
37:06 Manoush Zomorodi? People in Blue Zones have a sense of purpose.
37:09 Speaker 03 Iquigay or Plante Vida, like in Costa Rica.
37:12 Manoush Zomorodi? They have regular spiritual rituals.
37:15 Speaker 03 The Adventists pray. Costa Ricans, Icarians take a nap. The Okinawans have ancestor veneration.
37:22 Manoush Zomorodi? They eat simple, plant-based diets.
37:25 Speaker 03 Whole grains, greens and garden vegetables, tubers like sweet potatoes, nuts. And the cornerstone of every longevity diet is beans. And if you're eating a cup of beans a day, it's probably worth about four years of life expectancy over unhealthier sources of protein.
37:42 Manoush Zomorodi? And perhaps most importantly.
37:44 Speaker 03 They put an enormous emphasis on their family over their work or their hobbies. So they keep aging parents nearby. They invest in their spouse and they invest in their children. They tend to belong to a faith-based community. All but about five centenarians I met said that they believed in a god of some sort and showed up. And finally, they tend to have carefully curated immediate circles. They surround themselves with people who care about them on a bad day and reinforce healthy eating or some sort of an active hobby so that when they get together with their friends, they're doing healthy things instead of unhealthy things.
38:27 Speaker 03 And those are, whether you're in Asia or Europe or Latin America, you see these same things happening over and over and over again.
38:36 Manoush Zomorodi? I'm guessing that the vast majority of people hearing what you have to say, that they're intrigued by this idea of changing themselves, of changing their own community. You know, I would love to move to Icaria, cannot. But you are actually trying to create Blue Zones out of places that are not blue yet.
39:00 Speaker 03 Yes. The big insight, which took me about eight years to realize, is that health and longevity aren't something we pursue very successfully, but it very successfully ensues from the right environment. In other words, people in Blue Zones are living a long time because they live in surroundings that nudge them into doing the right things.
39:27 Speaker 03 And avoiding the wrong things for long enough so they don't develop a chronic disease.
39:33 Manoush Zomorodi? And you actually started a company to try and replicate these habits in places that are not Blue Zones, but where you think they could become Blue Zones. For example, Albert Lee, Minnesota, it's about a town of 18,000 people, and you started working there in about 2009.
39:53 Speaker 03 Yeah.
39:54 Manoush Zomorodi? Tell us what you did.
39:55 Speaker 03 So, in 2009, I started a pilot project in a place called Albert Lee, Minnesota, with the idea of instead of trying to convince an entire city to change their behaviors, I would recruit the best experts in changing the environment of a city, changing the policies, the restaurants, the grocery stores, the workplaces, the schools, the churches, and even people's homes, to engineer their unconscious decisions to be incrementally better every single day for years, and then measure the outcome. And remarkably, it worked fantastically.
40:35 Speaker 02 Albert Lee got a makeover.
40:37 Speaker 06 The first community in the country to be a certified Blue Zones community.
40:41 Speaker 02 City leaders are holding a meeting about how friendly Albert Lee is to pedestrians. Restaurants in Albert Lee added healthier menu options. People pledged to eat less fast food. Kids walked to school.
40:52 Speaker 01 More walking, more socializing, better diet. Right. Happier, longer life. Albert Lee has really dropped in the percentages of people with high blood pressure. The same with high cholesterol.
41:03 Speaker 06 Residents' report their overall well-being, sense of community, and sense of purpose is up.
41:08 Manoush Zomorodi? So many people report that they are thriving.
41:13 Manoush Zomorodi? What happened? What did you do?
41:15 Speaker 03 First, we found food policies that favored healthy food over junk food and junk food marketing. We found policies that favored the pedestrian, the cyclist, over the motorist, and we found policies that favored the nonsmoker over the smoker. And then through a consensus process, we helped city council evaluate each One for effectiveness and feasibility. And then, once they identified some politically expedient policies, we got them to implement several of them. The big one in Albert Lee is they were about to widen their main street and draw more traffic from the interstate. And we convinced them to actually, instead of widening the street, widening the sidewalks
42:00 Speaker 03 and taking that street widening money and putting a walking path around the adjacent lake. And also put in about three miles of sidewalks to connect every neighborhood to downtown. And lo and behold, once you invited pedestrians to walk downtown, downtown filled up. And it not only increased the number of amount of physical activity people got by, we calculate between 15 and 20 percent. Downtown became a vibrant place. People were sitting at the local cafes and and visiting the local marketings. So it created this virtuous circle.
42:38 Manoush Zomorodi? I have to say, part of me is surprised because I think, you know, the the places where you did research, blue zones, these were habits that had been around for centuries. I mean, isn't it really hard to change people's habits that quickly?
42:53 Speaker 03 Absolutely. Blue zones, there is zero habit modifications. Nobody there is trying to change their habit. They are just living the life that their environment makes easy, accessible, and affordable. So what I try to do is, again, reverse engineer, try to bring the environmental components of blue zones to American cities. And we've now done it in 72 cities. And every city we've worked in, we've seen the BMI drop. In other words, the obesity rate goes down and people report higher levels of life satisfaction. Not because we try to change their minds, though we do a little bit, but because we change their environment to make the healthy choice the easy choice.
43:40 Manoush Zomorodi? So 15 years later, after you started this experiment in Albert Lee, Minnesota, are they keeping it up? Ha- ha- has this been a long-term change? Are people living longer there?
43:50 Speaker 03 So they continue to do the Blue Zone work. Their ranking in Minnesota has continually gone up as a healthier city. They've reported a drop in healthcare costs by about 30% for city workers. And they continue to say do the same work that we instituted in 2009. But in more contemporary times, Fort Worth, Texas, a city of a million people, after five years doing our Blue Zone project, they report obesity has gone down, physical activity has gone up, and they report healthcare cost savings of about a quarter of a billion dollars a year. I would say projected healthcare cost savings of about a quarter of a billion
44:33 Speaker 03 dollars a year occasioned by our work.
44:36 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, people in the US don't like being told what to do, right? It's un-American. So you're almost doing it to the point where they don't even realize that their lifestyle is changing.
44:46 Speaker 03 Right. We, we never tell people what to do. We don't tell city councils what to do. We show city councils policies that have worked elsewhere to produce a health community, and then we evaluate it for effectiveness and feasibility in their community, and they choose. So we're not coming in with, you know, you gotta tax sodas. We come that evidence-based things that we know. If you make a city walkable and bikeable, we know that physical activity will go up to by up as to as much as 20%. And we can show them how to do that if they want to do that. You know, in, in the Netflix documentary series, I profiled Singapore.
45:26 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
45:26 Speaker 03 In my lifetime, their life expectancy has gone up over 20 years. They now produce the longest-lived, healthiest people on the planet. How does Singapore achieve that?
45:38 Speaker 02 We don't have natural resources. People are our natural resource. Singapore works on nudges. There's a war on diabetes, for instance, in Singapore. People are taking too much sugar. They eat the wrong foods. So what do we do? What does the government of Singapore do? They try to help you.
45:59 Speaker 03 Help yourself. And it's not because that, you know, they have great diet plans and exercise programs. It's because they have systematically gone through and made the healthy choice easier, cheaper, more accessible. And lo and behold, it produced a manifestly healthier environment and healthier people.
46:21 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, the key thing that's different about Singapore is the government there. Yes, it's a democracy, but also has autocratic tendencies, very strict rules of behavior. Is that the quickest way to get people to fall in line? I mean, I remember living in New York City and the mayor Bloomberg trying to tax sodas. And people were up in arms, you know, like, we can die by ever, any method we choose to, you know, you can't tell us how to do that.
46:49 Speaker 03 Okay, Bloomberg effectively got rid of trans fats from the New York diet, which saved countless lives from cardiovascular disease. Who, who misses that trans fat right now? Probably nobody. The fact that New York is so bikeable and walkable was largely due to Bloomberg's policies. And that, that means people are getting unconscious physical activity that they wouldn't otherwise be getting, which, you know, one of the quickest ways to raise your life expectancy is if you're sedentary is just walk 20 minutes a day. It's worth about three years of life expectancy. That's all Singapore has done. Smart policies. For example, as we talked about earlier, we know that people who live at home, older
47:31 Speaker 03 people who live at home have higher life expectancies than those warehoused in retirement homes. Well, Singapore doesn't tell you, you have to keep your aging parent living with you, but it does give you a tax break if, if they live with you or even live nearby because they know their kids are going to take care of their parents if they're nearby.
47:50 Speaker 06 They are quite happy that I'm here and I'm quite happy to be here. My grandchildren, I took the opportunity to give them tuition in mathematics because
48:02 Speaker 03 So you're their tutor?
48:03 Speaker 06 I'm quite good in mathematics. And in return, they will have me in a computer because I'm a computer idiot.
48:12 Speaker 03 I love that. So yet another two-way street. Yeah. I mean, they do heavily tax cigarettes. Uh, because, you know, their Minister of Health has shown that cigarette smoking is bad for people and it's bad for the economy. So lo and behold, lowest smoking rates. Uh, they wanted to get people on their feet and lessen the traffic problem. So they heavily tax gasoline and cars, but as a result, they've taken that money and invested in a very clean, fast, efficient, safe, air-conditioned subway system that's no more than about 300 yards from anybody's home. So guess what? Everybody gets 8,000 steps a day without
48:57 Speaker 03 even thinking about it because it's just easier to walk to the subway than to get in your car and you muscle through traffic to get places.
49:06 Manoush Zomorodi? The original Blue Zones that you visited, you know, you've been researching them for 20 years now. Have they, are they delighted by their status as Blue Zones? Are they committed to protecting that? Or are they finding that screen time and fast food and sedentary habits are infiltrating them as well?
49:30 Speaker 03 Mostly the latter. In a Blue Zones, as soon as the McDonald's and the Pizza Huts arrive, they start going to those places and eating the same junk food we eat. You know, as soon as that way of eating arrives, you can already see their, their longevity disappearing. Okinawa, I would say is no longer even a Blue Zone.
49:53 Manoush Zomorodi? Oh, wow.
49:54 Speaker 03 It's been so overridden by junk food and highways that it is now about the least healthy place in Japan, which is just a tragedy. And yeah, there are individuals that want to preserve, but there's not enough collective will to hold back the corrosive influences of the American way of living and modernization.
50:24 Manoush Zomorodi? I have to finish with asking about you, Dan. How old are you?
50:30 Speaker 03 I'm 104.
50:34 Speaker 03 No, I'm 63.
50:37 Manoush Zomorodi? 63, and how long do you expect to live? What is your biological age?
50:42 Speaker 03 I'm probably a lot younger than my peers at 63. I'm very healthy. I don't know of any health problems. I live in a Blue Zone neighborhood, so I live at the southern tip of South Beach. It's a very walkable neighborhood. I have very easy access to healthy food. I live in a place where it's very social. I know all my neighbors. Plus, I look out of my window and I see the ocean. And every morning, I wake up and I swim to the place where I get my cup of coffee. So I believe I'm going to hit 100, and I'll be very happy with that.
51:17 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, there is a real aversion to being old or growing old in the United States. A fear of being irrelevant or infirm and a burden. I feel that that needs to change, too. This idea that being older is not a terrible thing, but something like you hope for.
51:36 Speaker 03 Yes. You know, in America, we tend to celebrate youth. And if you look at advertising, it's almost always young people who we aspire to. And beauty and this anti-aging industry. In Blue Zones, the older you get, the more honored you are, the more distinguished you are. The biggest day of your life in Okinawa is your 96th birthday. In Sardinia, I met this centenarian named Raffaella. I was 106. And every day at 3 o'clock, she'd go out and sit on her porch, which was right in the path of kids getting out of school. And kids would line up to just have Raffaella touch their forehead for a second, give them a little blessing.
52:17 Speaker 03 So kids grow up with the idea that their grandmothers are treasures and their grandfathers are treasures. And they really are. The definition of wisdom is knowledge plus experience. People are in their 90s and 100s, they're repositories of resilience, of observed human history. They can help us get through the tough times. They can help raise our children. They can help get through depression in many ways because they've experienced it and worked their way out of it and survived. And we ought to be turning to these treasures more so than AI or some new technology to solve our problems. There's a lot of wisdom looking backwards that we forget about.
53:02 Manoush Zomorodi? That's Dan Buettner. His Netflix show is called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. He's also written several books, including a cookbook called The Blue Zone Kitchen. You can see his TED Talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and Fiona Giran. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour, James Delahoussaye, and me. A special thank you to James's grandma, Lois Pochet Delahoussaye, for sharing her thoughts at the beginning of the show. Thanks also to Rana Anfarad and Hassan Agdam for their voices as well. Our production staff at NPR
53:43 Manoush Zomorodi? also includes Katie Monteleone, Harsha Nahada, and Matthew Cloutier. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez, Gillian Moon, and Margaret Luthar. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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