Blue Zones: Unlocking the secrets to living longer, healthier lives | 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: The quest to live a long and healthy life has been around for thousands of years. Are we any closer to figuring out the real secret to longevity? A new series out on Netflix called “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones” aims to cut through the noise and give us an answer. We’re joined by series host and author, Dan Buettner, who spent the last 20 years traveling the world to get to the heart of it.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello, and welcome to 5 Things. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, September 17th, 2023.

The quest to live a long and healthy life has been around for thousands of years. Our doctors tell us the secret is to eat right, exercise, get enough sleep. The nutritional supplement industry, now worth nearly $400 billion globally, tells us, no, you just need to take more vitamins. Researchers meanwhile have posited that it really just comes down to good genes. So, what's the real secret to longevity? A new series out on Netflix called Live to 100 Secrets of the Blue Zones aims to cut through the noise and give us an answer. I'm joined now by series host and author, Dan Buettner, who spent the last 20 years traveling the world to get to the heart of it. Dan, thanks for joining me.

Dan Buettner:

It's a delight to be here.

Dana Taylor:

Dan, you define blue zones as places where people live to 100 at the highest rates in the world. And I want to get into the specifics of what you discovered in each area in a minute here. But can you tell us, is there one magic ingredient that you found in common?

Dan Buettner:

Not magic, but maybe the most sort of newsworthy is beans. The cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is a cup of beans a day, which is associated with about four x years of life expectancy. But what really gives these blue zones an extra decade or so of healthy life is this matrix, a interconnected web of mutually supporting things that help people do the right things and avoid the wrong things for long enough so they don't develop a life for shortening chronic disease.

Dana Taylor:

Well, community seems to play a big role here in America. Our town squares used to be churches, that's no longer the case. Tell us what you learned about finding belonging.

Dan Buettner:

Like most behavior in the blue zones, it's environmentally driven and it's unconscious. So in all the blue zones still when you step out your front door, you're going to bump into your neighbors. You're going to have these sort of low grade social interactions all day long, which we know add up to more life expectancy. There's a expectation to show up to the village festivals, to show up to church, to help out neighbors and so forth. The people know each other's names. And this may sound trite in this $400 billion world of supplements, but actually having a group of four or five friends who you can count on on a good day is worth about eight extra years of life expectancy over feeling lonely. So, far better research, far more powerful strategy for longevity, having a close circle of friends as opposed to chasing some marketing claim on a supplement.

Dana Taylor:

Well, a place that a lot of Americans find community these days is on social media. Can online ever replace the need for physically connecting to community?

Dan Buettner:

I would've said no before the pandemic. I was actually on a panel at the Aspen Institute that showed there was some stress reduction when you could connect with somebody with whom you had a meaningful connection on Zoom. But I think social media is useful to the point that it helps you connect in the real world. We're meeting over this Zoom connection. If we met in the real world and become friends and it all started here, social media is a good thing. But if you're using social media at the expense of real-world connection, it's for sure a negative.

Dana Taylor:

Well, then another critical factor that you cite influencing blue zone areas is having a sense of meaning in one's life. Can you talk about what you saw in this respect?

Dan Buettner:

So in all of these blue zones there's vocabulary for purpose, bonda vida in Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, ikigai in Okinawa. And people don't wake up with the existential stress of what they're doing today. They have a clear sense of where they fit in their family or in their community or the larger social construct of their place. With this sense of purpose, there's always an element of service to it. So they know what they're good at, they know their values and they know an outlet for that. Robert Butler, who's the very first director of the National Institute on Aging, was the author of a study that showed that people could articulate their sense of purpose were living about eight years longer than people who are rudderless. And once again, far better research and far bigger payoff to knowing and living your purpose than trying to find longevity in a pill or a supplement.

Dana Taylor:

Well, Gen Z has really prioritized doing meaningful work careerwise. They've overwhelmingly said that they want to work for companies that are quote, unquote "good". What's less obvious is how do people go about implementing meaning outside of work. So besides cultivating strong relationships with family and friends, how would you recommend going about doing that?

Dan Buettner:

The first one is an exercise with a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen. Four columns. First columns are articulating what your values are. I'm a conservative or I'm, a liberal, I'm Christian or I'm atheist, whatever it is. Second column, what do you like to do? What are your passions? I'm creative, I solve problems, I fix things. Third column, what are you actually good at? And then the fourth column is what can be an outlet for that? And according to Gallup, for Americans, only about 30% of us actually get to live our purpose at work.

So for most of us, that probably means volunteering. If you love animals and you're good with animals, maybe volunteering for the Humane Society. If you like to help people out, it might be working in a soup kitchen or the homeless shelter. It's also a good place, by the way, to meet like-minded people and to augment your social network. It can also just be with your family or it could be with a hobby or a group of friends. But again, purpose is so underrated and so powerful, mostly, I believe, because marketers can't make money off of you and it isn't relentlessly sold to us as a way to live longer like the supplement industry.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, so we can't talk about blue zone lifestyles without talking about exercise. In your series, a lot of the communities you spoke with have exercise as an organic element of their lifestyles, either through gardening or walking uphill to each other's houses. Here in the US a lot of people simply don't have access to a regular way to exercise besides the gym. How might we implement exercise in the US in a more organic way?

Dan Buettner:

First of all, lose the word exercise. I think exercise has been an unmitigated public health failure in the United States. We've been trying it for the last 80 years and fewer than 23% of Americans get the minimum amount of quote, unquote "exercise", which is 20 minutes of physical activity a day, 23%. In blue zones, everybody's getting 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day, not because they're checking their outlook and scheduling it in. It's because every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat, it occasions a walk. They have gardens out back. They haven't engineered all the physical activity out of their lives with mechanical convenience. The easiest thing Americans can do is to learn how to walk to their grocery store, to their neighbor's house, out to eat or to work. 90% of training for a marathon is getting 8,000 steps a day. Almost any American can do it and that's much more a product of your environment than it is remembering to exercise.

Dana Taylor:

And diseases of the mind have long been blamed for the deterioration in quality of life. As people age, Alzheimer's and senility are both huge factors. What's the biggest takeaway you had that might help people shift their lifestyles in later years for the positive?

Dan Buettner:

At least 50% of dementia is avoidable. We don't realize that. And the way we avoid dementia is eating a whole-food plant-based diet. We stay socially connected, we stay physically active. The same things that will keep us from dying prematurely from heart disease or type two diabetes, keep our brains sharp. Social interaction. We know that if we stay socially connected, we're far less likely to suffer from depression, commit suicide, or suffer from Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia later in life. We just put too much emphasis on quote, unquote "the cure" when there's way more opportunity for prevention beginning right now in everybody's lives.

Dana Taylor:

Well, Dan, as you know, life expectancy in 2020 and 2021, saw its biggest two-year drop in about a century. It went from nearly 79 years in 2019 to just over 76 in 2021. What do you hope people take away from your series that might reverse the tide?

Dan Buettner:

What's even worse, by the way, is after the pandemic life expectancy continued to drop in the United States where in other developed worlds it's now recuperated. The reason we're dying prematurely is mostly from avoidable chronic disease. Most of that is driven by eating the American diet. Most of what we buy in grocery stores is processed with added sugars. We could probably eliminate 60% of that foreshortening of our lives if we moved to a whole-food plant-based diet.

If we learned how to cook at home, got our hands on a few good plant-based cookbooks, paged through it, found a dozen recipes with our families, took the time to learn how to make it, tasted of them until we find a handful that we love and your job as a homemaker's over because once you find delicious healthy food your family will eat, you don't have to hound them about health or the environment or animal cruelty. If you're 20 years old and you're eating a whole-food plant-based diet, it's worth about 10 years of extra life expectancy over eating a standard American diet. It's not buying a superfood, it's not a fad diet. It's whole-food plant-based, just like people in blue zones have been eating for hundreds of years.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, so in the course of your past research and in filming this series, what aspect of longevity did you find most surprising?

Dan Buettner:

Well, that people drink in blue zones. I know there's a lot of trendy research saying that alcohol is unsafe at any amount, but I just saw a survey of 90-year-old Koreans and 85% of them drank wine every day of their adult life. It's organic wine, it's consumed with food and it's consumed with friends. But it doesn't seem to be inconsistent with a long, healthy life. If you're not drinking now, I would never encourage you to start and if you have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, you should work on that. But I think this sort of blanket can't drink alcohol is inconsistent with the human condition for the past 4,000 years and it's inconsistent with what we're clearly seeing as a lifestyle of longevity in the blue zones.

Dana Taylor:

And finally, when it comes to people really extending not just their years but their quality of life, what gives you the most hope?

Dan Buettner:

Well, in America we get funded by insurance companies to take this DNA from blue zones, which is not trying to change people's behaviors because that never works in the long run, but reshaping their environment so the healthy choice is the easy choice. And the fact that insurance companies are paying for community-wide interventions taken right from places like Okinawa Blue Zone, I think that really offers some hope for the rest of America. The only way we're going to start to see our $4.4 trillion healthcare bill start to turn the other way is when we stop beating the dead horse of individual responsibility and reshape our food environment and our built environment so that Americans are set up for success instead of set up for failure, which we are right now.

Dana Taylor:

Dan, thank you so much for joining us.

Dan Buettner:

It was a delight and I'll see you when you're 100.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of 5 Things.