Why the People Who Live the Longest Never Try to Be Healthy | Dan Buettner

Key Takeaway

Stop relying on willpower for health and redesign one default today. Put a bowl of ready-to-eat fruit where you usually see snacks, move chips and sweets out of sight (or out of the house), and place comfortable walking shoes by the door. Blue Zones research suggests longevity comes less from intense short-term health kicks than from environments that make small, healthier choices automatic—repeated daily for years.

Episode Overview

Dan Buettner explains the Blue Zones: regions where populations have historically lived unusually long, healthy lives. He argues that their advantage is not supplements, strict diets, or exercise programs, but environments and social structures that make plant-forward eating, frequent natural movement, purpose, stress relief, and connection the default. The conversation also addresses criticisms of Blue Zones data and the erosion of these lifestyles under modernization.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why the People Who Live the Longest Never Try to Be Healthy | Dan Buettner from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Dan Harris: This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're diving into the secrets and also the controversies of the so-called Blue Zones. If you haven't heard of the Blue Zones, these are the places on the planet where people apparently live the longest and healthiest lives. My guest, Dan Buettner, has been playing a huge role in exploring and publicizing and popularizing the Blue Zones. Dan Harris: Uh, Dan is an explorer, National Geographic fellow, and a journalist. He's written a series of bestselling books, including, uh, The Blue Zones of Happiness and The Blue Zones Kitchen.

He's also the host of the Netflix show Live to 100. In this conversation, we talk about the origin story of the Blue Zones, the nine common denominators, or the Power 9 when it comes to longevity, the surprising information about much-maligned foods such as pasta and bread, why trying to pursue good health can actually work against you, why the single most important factor in longevity is not advertised on Instagram, tips for integrating Blue Zones wisdom into your daily life, including designing a life where you move more naturally, and, uh, some of the critiques and controversies surrounding, uh, Dan's work.

Dan Harris: I should say, this episode originally aired back in June of 2024, but we're bringing it back because it was an audience favorite, and there are so many actionable tips here that I think you can, uh, put to use right away. One update on the, uh, critiques I mentioned. Two of Dan's collaborators on the original Blue Zones project published a rebuttal of the criticism in December 2025. Dan Harris: So I'm gonna put a link, uh, both to the rebuttal and to the original paper that called into question some of the Blue Zones methodology.

We'll get started with Dan Buettner right after this. Dan Buettner: It's a delight. I'm-- Let, let's just say I'm even more than 10% happier being here. Dan Harris: I'm happy to hear that. We'll see how you-- We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll come, we'll come back to you at the end and see where, what the percentage is. Dan Harris: Yeah. Let me just ask you about the origin story of the Blue Zones. How did this whole thing get started? Dan Buettner: In a previous business, I was solving, uh, two mysteries a year.

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

Dan Buettner: And I said, "Aha, now there's a good mystery." And in 1999, we did our first, uh, expedition there. We, we were there for about 10 days, and I was absolutely hooked because I was meeting people in their 90s and 100s that were functioning like, you know, 60-year-olds in the United States. And I-- Of course, I, in a facile way, I, I was able to look at how. Dan Buettner: But, um, when I was out of that business, I sold it and went back to National Geographic with some ideas and, and, uh, suggested that if there are long-lived people in Okinawa, there must be long-lived people in Europe and Asia and maybe Latin America or even Africa.

And I got a, a, an assignment back in the days when National Geographic gave you nine months to write one article. Dan Buettner: And I got funding from the Na- National Institutes on Aging to do it right. And to do it right means you hire demographers to find places where people are truly living a long time And then since only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes, if we found places where populations were living longer, and I'm talking eight to 10 years longer than we do in the United States, we had a, a, a perfect, uh, study group to look for correlations and common denominators.

Dan Buettner: And that is a very long answer to a simple question. Dan Harris: That was not a long answer. You can go longer if you want. Essentially, you and your team found what are now called Blue Zones, which are areas around the planet where apparently people are living longer. Dan Buettner: I would, I would g- go beyond apparently. It, it is a mathematical fact that they have lived longer over the last century and a half. Dan Buettner: And w- we, working with demographers, we're able to look at swaths of the population, say 100 to 150 years ago, look at a swath of births and follow those births for 100 years or more, and correct for immigration and emigrate and find statistically, empirically, where people are living the longest, and that's what Blue Zones are.

Dan Harris: Whence the name Blue Zones? What's that have to do with it? Dan Buettner: My colleague in Sardinia, Dr. Gianni Pes, he identified the Sardinian Blue Zone, and he did so by going village to village looking at birth records since about 1850 and doing this exercise that counting how many centenarians have lived in these areas over the last 150 years. Dan Buettner: And ones that met the highest criteria, he put a blue check mark. And in the Nuoro and Oliastra provinces of Sardinia, in the highlands, in the central highlands, there were so many blue check marks that it created a blue blob, and he referred to that area in the map as the Blue Zone.

And, uh, it's between five and eight villages. Dan Buettner: It changes from year to year, but, uh, the same region where you have about 10 times more male centenarians- proportionally speaking than you would expect to see in a similar population in the United States. Dan Harris: So you've been at this for about 20 years now, am I, am I correct? Dan Buettner: Yes. Dan Harris: How many Blue Zones are there, and what are the, the commonalities? Dan Buettner: Five Blue Zones. The longest lived ma- males are in Sardinia, Italy.

The longest lived females, Okinawa, Japan. In the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, uh, you have the lowest rate of middle age mortality, uh, also very high portion of centenarians there. Uh, in the United States it's among the Seventh Day Adventists in and around Loma Linda, California, uh, but to a certain extent all Adventists. Dan Buettner: And then our last Blue Zone was in Ikaria, Greece, very close to the coast of Turkey, where you have people living about eight years longer with about half the rate of cardiovascular mortality and almost no dementia, which makes it an in- interesting outlier among even the Blue Zones.

Dan Harris: And is there something the people or some things that the people in all of these places are doing that, that might be instructive for the rest of us? Dan Buettner: So there are nine common denominators, I call them the Power 9, and then there's one organizing principle, which is really the important thing to pay attention to. But in general, people who are living a long time are eating mostly a whole food, plant-based diet, between 90% and 100% whole food, plant-based. Dan Buettner: It's a very high carbohydrate diet.

About 65% of their caloric intake comes from things like whole grains, greens, tubers, nuts. Cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. And the reason we know that this is because we've found dietary surveys that go back about 100 years from all five Blue Zones, 155 of them in total, and under the aegis of Harvard, uh, University, we did a meta-analysis. Dan Buettner: And, uh, if you wanna know what a 100-year-old ate to live to be 100, you have to know what he or she was eating as a little kid, and, um, middle age, and newly retireds.

So it's mostly whole food, plant-based. They have a vocabulary for purpose. We know people with a sense of purpose live about eight years longer than rudderless people. Dan Buettner: They have sacred daily rituals that help unwind the stress and the ensuing inflammation, uh, which is part of the human condition. Okinawans, ancestor veneration, the Adventists pray several times a day. The Icarians and Costa Ricans take a nap, but just a way to, to lower that inflammation load that accumulates with the stress and the worry and the hurry of our lives.

Dan Buettner: And by the way, their lives are no different than ours. They worry about the same things that we do. They drink a little bit every day, and I'm, I'm very familiar with the recent research suggesting that no level of alcohol is safe. But I can tell you, people in Blue Zones, over 85% of people make, especially males, making it to 90 or 100 drink every day of their life. Dan Buettner: Most of the time was homemade wine, but nevertheless, they're drinking. They have unconscious strategies to keep from overeating.

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

Dan Buettner: Uh, they invest in their children, uh, so they, they have higher su- survivability and lower mortality rates. Um, they tend to belong to a faith. People who go to church, temple, or mosque live somewhere between four and 14 years longer than people who have no religion. Number of reasons for that, but it's, um, a demographic fact. Dan Buettner: And then they tend to pay a lot of attention to their immediate social circle. Whereas in A- America, we have this loneliness epidemic, somewhere between 20% and 30% of Americans are lonely.

That's not something in-- people in Blue Zones suffer from. And in many w- in many places, it's comes along with growing up. Dan Buettner: You're just automatically put in a meaningful social circle. But, um, i- in the absence of that, different social constructs bring people together in semi-permanent ways, so they're not suffering from the loneliness Uh, those are the, I would say the common denominators Dan Harris: It's fascinating. As a construct or a structure for the next little while, I would suggest I wanna come back to these Power Nine and really dive into them much more deeply.

Dan Harris: Before we do that, though, let's, let's go through the individual Blue Zones and hear a little bit about what, what you've learned in each of these places, and then, then we'll take a, a deeper dive into the Power Nine. How does that sound to you as a, as a structure? Works for me. Okay. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. Dan Harris: I don't know if you know this, but I've been writing a newsletter for the last couple of years. I would love for you to come check it out.

It's free. You can sign up at danharris.com. Every Monday, I drop into your inbox a little nugget of wisdom and sanity that you can operationalize in your life immediately. Dan Harris: This is an actionable practice that I'm dropping into your data stream that really can color the rest of your day. I put a lot of time and effort into it, and I'd love for you to benefit from it. It's also, by the way, the place where you can get updates on the broader Ten Percent Happier cinematic universe, including upcoming programming on my app, Ten Percent with Dan Harris, and upcoming IRL events.

Dan Harris: Again, you can sign up at danharris.com. I'd love to have you reading the newsletter. And we will be right back after this. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You've heard me talk about BetterHelp for many years on this show, but I don't know that we've ever actually talked about how many people love this service when they use it. Dan Harris: You can check it out yourself at betterhelp.com/reviews to see amazing customer reviews in real time. The reviews are updated every day with hundreds of people saying how much they love BetterHelp and how helpful it's been to them.

Please, uh, visit betterhelp.com/reviews to see for yourself. BetterHelp has an average live therapy session rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client session reviews. Dan Harris: The feedback from people who have actually used the service speaks for itself. BetterHelp therapists have at least three years and 1,000 hours of hands-on experience. They also hold all required education training and certifications across a range of mental health specialties. See the reviews, see what stands out, and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Dan Harris: Visit betterhelp.com/happier.

That's betterH-E-L-P.com/happier. Dan Buettner: Sure. Dan Harris: Okay, so you mentioned Sardinia. What's going on in Sardinia that people are living... W- w- uh, it's the mountains if I, if I've got it correct. And what's going on there? What's their lifestyle like, and, and what can we learn from that? Dan Buettner: So Sardinia's unique among the five Blue Zones insofar as that the people there are actually a Bronze Age culture, originated in what is today Spain about 13,000 years ago, and, uh, m- moved their way through s- Southern France and probably arriving in, in Sardinia about 11,000 years ago.

Dan Buettner: And unlike a usual Mediterranean population where you have a, a patriarchal society, the, the people in the Blue Zone have a matriarchal society. In other words, women are the heads of the household. They manage financial affairs. Uh, they're usually behind the defense of the village. Um, uh, and, um, they just have a different set of practices, ancient music. Dan Buettner: Uh, they tend to be poets, about 20 times more poets among males than you would expect to see in equivalent population in the United States.

They, um, un- until very recently, they ate a variant of the Mediterranean diet that was very high in fava beans. Uh, before that, which is until about 1950, so still when first 30 years of a centenarian's life, uh, they were eating mostly bread, sourdough bread, cheese, Pecorino cheese, and then garden vegetables. Dan Buettner: And then about 1950 or 1960, the roads came and their diet changed again. They're a very poor area, so they relied even more heavily on their gardens and pastas. I mean, a lot of the-- We're scared to death of carbs from pastas, and the longest lived people in the world ate, uh, a, a 65% of their caloric intake until about 1960 came from pastas and breads, which will surprise a lot of people.

Dan Buettner: They have this fanatic, uh, regard for the family. The reason-- A- a- and for neighbors. The reason is because Throughout history, even though they spread throughout Sar-- the entire island of Sardinia, when the successive waves of people, the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Romans, they were always subjugating these people. Dan Buettner: And by about the time of Christ, this founder population, blue zone population, realized that they were just better off retreating into the mountains and setting up almost fortress-type towns and sticking together against outsiders.

They developed a reputation for being barbarians. In fact, their region was given the name Barbagia, which has the same root as the word barbarian, and, um, you know, be-became very feared people. Dan Buettner: But in fact, they're lovely people, uh, just, you know, they defend themselves as needed. And as a result, they became very inward-focused and, and remote. Their-- things didn't, um evolve as quickly there. And, and the language they speak is the language most similar to the Latin the Romans spoke 2,000 years ago. Dan Buettner: Uh, they still sing the same songs, uh, that you still see the same sort of dress people wore in the Middle Ages during festivals.

Uh, until very recently, their diet hadn't changed. I wrote this book called "The Blue Zones Kitchen," where I went and sat in old ladies' kitchens, and I captured their recipes. Dan Buettner: And when I asked them what the origin of the-- these recipes were, they said, "It's always been with us. It's-- These are recipes that evolved over the millennia." So they're, they're living this very ancient way of life, and the mountains have helped keep out the forces of the standard American diet and modernization, which we've seen always corrodes the health and longevity aspects of Blue Zones.

Dan Harris: I'm keying in, perhaps unsurprisingly, to the pasta and sourdough bread part of this. I love pasta and bread, and I don't deny i-it to myself, but I don't deny myself pasta or bread. But I think a lot of people do, and there have been times in my life where I did. So why do pasta and bread have such a bad reputation, and is it entirely undeserved? Dan Buettner: Well, there are some theories that American pasta and bread contain g-glyphosate because of the pesticides used on wheat fields in America.

Also, it's the process. When you have a true sourdough bread as, as is what is consumed in Sardinia, it's always slow-fermented sourdough. So it's leavened not with the industrial yeast, but rather lactobacillus. Dan Buettner: And in the process of that slow fermentation, about 98% of the gluten is metabolized, so it's very low gluten bread. And there's been at least two studies that show when you eat a real sourdough bread- Uh, it lowers the glycemic load of your meal by about 25%. In other words, the sugars are absorbed much more slowly, which reduces the insulin spike and also makes it more likely those calories will be used for energy throughout your day rather than being packed on your backside.

Dan Buettner: Uh, pasta's similar. The pastas there are made with a durum wheat, um, rather than cheaper versions. So there, once again, they have a lower glycemic load. But also, when you mix a pasta with a tomato sauce and olive oil, and perhaps some protein, usually it's beans by the way, traditionally speaking, you lower the glycemic load even further. Dan Buettner: So if you, if, you know, if you eat a piece of Wonder Bread or two, it metabolizes almost immediately into sugar, and blood sugar spikes, insulin spikes, bad for you.

But you eat a piece of sourdough bread or pasta with a tomato sauce and bean, pasta and fagioli, you have, um, the, the, there's, you don't get the spike. Dan Buettner: And in fact, bread and pasta have important amino acids which are building blocks for protein. When you take a bread or a pasta and you couple it with a bean, it gives you all the amino acids necessary for human sustenance. In other words, it's a whole protein. So it's the way people have been processing these foods and combining them that makes all the difference in the world.

Dan Buettner: The devil is truly in the details when it comes to pasta. Dan Harris: So what's your policy on pasta now after all these years of study? Dan Buettner: You know, I'm half Sicilian. I, I, I, I grew up on pasta and I still... Last meal of my life, if I have anything to say, it's gonna be my pasta with my Grandma Palermo's pasta sauce. I guess you want a universal question. Dan Buettner: My policy is you should feel free to eat it. I'll give you another interesting statistic.

In Northern Italy- In 1980, about 8% of people were suffering from obesity. They ate tons of pasta up there. Meanwhile, in 1980, about 15% of Americans were suffering from obesity. In the ensuing 40 years, obesity rate in the United States has almost tripled. Dan Buettner: 42% of us are obese. In Italy, in northern Italy, it's still 8%, and they eat pasta with every meals. So pasta's not the problem. Something else is the problem. Dan Harris: And what is it? Dan Buettner: Well, if you wanna me to bottom line it, it is a fact that 70 or 80% of what we eat is processed food.

We eat somewhere around 140 pounds of... Dan Buettner: I'm sorry, 240 pounds of meat a year, which would fill a bathtub. Whereas in Blue Zones, they're eating about 20 pounds of meat. They're eating maybe three eggs a week, uh, very high quality, low quantity cheese, very little fish. They're-- Like I said, it's they're eating mostly a plant-based diet as opposed to our diet that's far too heavily reli- reliant on animal products and, uh, processed foods with added sugars and flavor enhancers, et cetera Dan Harris: Okay, so that's Sardinia.

Dan Harris: I'm sure there's- ... I'm sure there's more to say, but, but in the interest of time, I wanna move through the rest of these. You mentioned Loma Linda, California, which is an, a Seventh Day Adventist community. What's going on there? Dan Buettner: They're conservative Methodists who distinguish themselves from other Christians in, in that, number one, they, uh, evangelize with health. Dan Buettner: Many of the biggest hospitals in America, down here in Florida, for example, are run by Adventists, and they're run very well, by the way.

But they also, um, celebrate their Sabbath not on Sunday, but on, as the Bible prescribes, the seventh day, which is Saturday, and they take it very seriously. It's been described to me by them as a sanctuary in time, where 24 hours from Friday night until Saturday night, no matter how busy they are, no matter, you know, where the kids need to be driven or no matter what the social schedule is, they stop everything and they focus on their families on Friday night, their religious communities on Saturday morning.

Dan Buettner: They have a potluck, a lunch reinforces their immediate social circle on Saturday afternoon. And then hardwired right in their scriptures is to take a nature walk. So rather than something we get excited about during the wellness week at work or, you know, when the one time in our life we run a marathon or something, uh, these people are ritually active and socially connecting and slowing down, downshifting every single week for decades or a lifetime. Dan Buettner: Um, this starts to get at something that is really important when it becomes, comes to longevity.

America and marketers are constantly focusing on a quick fix, and there, there's no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to, to, um, uh, a- adding to your life expectancy. There, there's no- nothing you can do this week or this month that's gonna make you live longer in 40 or 60 years. Dan Buettner: So you have to focus on things you're gonna do almost every day or every week for decades or a lifetime. And this Adventist practice, the religious practice, helps them stay on a weekly program of reinforcing these behaviors that easily map to lower rates of chronic disease and higher life expectancy.

Dan Buettner: They also take their diet directly from the Bible. Uh, Genesis 1 verse, verses 26 through 28 You might think I'm a big Bible reader, but I'm not. I happen to know this from my, my research. But, um, God says, um, that, um, or that Genesis says that God has provided every, for humans, every plant that bears seed, so that's grains and legumes and nuts, and then every tree that bears fruit, so that's, you know, citrus and avocado and tomatoes and apples, et cetera. Dan Buettner: And the Adventists actually adhere to that.

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

You know, they're-- get together and they walk, and they have plant-based potlucks, and they reinforce each other's spiritual growth, et cetera. So you have this self-propagate- propagating, uh, environment that helps keep them doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things and, and, um, manifestly, they're living s- somewhere between seven and 11 years longer than their California counterparts, and they both live next to the San Bernardino Freeway. Dan Buettner: So it's, it's, uh, it's astounding what, uh, what this population is achieving. Dan Harris: Another thing I hear in there, and you mentioned this when we were going through the Power Nine, and it's, it's really come through in many of your utterances thus far, is, um, social connection.

And I mean, I, I've got this riff on, on, on this that some listeners to the show might be tired of hearing me go on, but I'm gonna go on it again just because I wanna get your reaction to it. Dan Harris: But, you know, we live in an era of optimization. Everybody's striving for ketosis, tracking their sleep, counting their steps, counting their calories, subscribing to intense workouts, trying to achieve streaks on their meditation app, et cetera, et cetera. This is-- we are, we're trying to pull every lever possible to be as healthy as possible.

Dan Harris: But the, the-- it appears from your work and from the work of Robert Waldinger over at Harvard, who's done this longitudinal study for many, many decades and on many generations, that the most important thing to control for, to optimize for is the quality of your relationships, and yet very few people are talking about that on Instagram. Dan Harris: And so that's my rant. What do you think of that? Dan Buettner: Well, I'm good friends with Robert, and we violent-- I guess, I guess the three of us violently agree on that.

The reason you don't see it on Instagram is because it's very hard for marketers to make money at it. And s- you-- The things that tend to ripple through the internet and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok are supplements and, uh, and, uh, superfoods, all of which have... Dan Buettner: And anti-aging stratagems and nostrums, all those have enormous profit margins. You can't make any money off of you going out and making a friend and walking with them every day. But my answer's actually more expansive, and this sort of gets to the central premise of Blue Zones.

People who are manifestly living on... Dan Buettner: Now, we're talking of five disparate populations on five corners of the world, all of whom are living about eight years on average longer than Americans, a fifth the rate of cardiovascular disease, a sixth the rate of type 2 diabetes, half the rate or less of dementia. None of them are tracking their steps or taking superfoods or, you know, running down to Costa Rica for stem cells or any of this other poppycock that, um, the internet sells us for living longer.

Dan Buettner: In fact- Further, they don't try to live longer. They don't proactively pursue health or longevity, which I think is the most important insight that is so under celebrated or, or under acknowledged, um, that trying to pursue health, whether it's through diets or exercise programs, gym memberships. You know, a hundred-- You start with 100 people taking a gym, who s- uh, s- get a gym membership today, in one year, you lose 80%, actually more than 80% of them. Dan Buettner: Diets, you start with 100 people today, within nine months, you lose 90% of them.

Uh, they're great business models, but they're horrible at delivering any meaningful outcomes. In Blue Zones, people live a long time not because they pursue health, it's because it ensues. They live a long time because they live in an environment wherein their unconscious decisions are slightly better all day long as a result of their surroundings. Dan Buettner: And if we wanna see a healthier America, and as your listeners, if they wanna live longer, lose weight, get more exercise, eat better, they'll get a far better return on their effort, time, and money by shaping their environment than they ever will by buying a gadget or thinking they're gonna change their behavior for long enough to make any difference.

Dan Buettner: They won't. Or maybe single-digit percentages will, people with the inhuman discipline or presence of mind, but that's almost none of us over the long run. And I defy people, I defy everybody I talk-- I defy them to show me one behavioral change strategy that lasts for more than two years for a single dig- for more than 5% of the people who get on it I've never seen it Dan Harris: So what's the answer then? Dan Harris: You, you need to be embedded in communities where these healthy practices are normalized?

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

So you can move within your city, you can move within your country. Dan Buettner: Life expectancy in places like Boulder, Colorado, is about 20 years higher than in places in Kentucky. So you live in Kentucky, you're way less likely to walk places. You're, you're more likely to be confronted by fast food restaurants and junk food and, and live in a obesogenic environment as opposed to Boulder, where you're never more than a few steps from a nature walk and healthy food abounds. Dan Buettner: I, I know people say, "Well, I can't afford to live in Boulder." That may be true.

But the other point, and I wrote a whole book on this, it's called "The Blue Zone Challenge," where I aggregated about 40 different evidence-based things you can do to your home, your kitchen, your bedroom, your social circle, your commute, in your workplace that will permanently set up nudges or defaults so you'll unconsciously move more, eat better, sleep better, socialize more, and know and live your purpose. Dan Buettner: And tho- those are the exact same characteristics in place in Blue Zones. All, almost all of them are portable, but it, it requires you to shift away from the anti-aging hoax to paying attention to environments that or the s- uh, strategies we know add years to your life expectancy.

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Dan Buettner: So I'll remind you that this is a sum of lots of little things. In blue zones, there's no one big thing. So you may say, "Well, that doesn't sound very big." But removing the toaster from your counter. Cornell Food Lab showed that if you do-- you have a toaster on your counter, after two years, you weigh about six pounds more than the same, uh, c- than the control gr- than the study group who removes their toaster. Dan Buettner: Putting a, um, establishing a junk food drawer that where you put your junk food either down low or way up high or around the corner in the pantry.

Most of us are on what I call a seafood diet. We eat the food we see. So if you have a bag of chips with a clip-on on your counter, you're way more likely to eat that than you will if you have a fruit bowl. Dan Buettner: We know that if your three best friends are obese or overweight, there's 150% better chance that you'll be overweight. So changing your social environment by proactively adding people whose idea of recreation is walking or playing pickleball, who, um, you know, who care about you on a bad day, who challenge your mind, who, um, it's not a bad idea to have a vegan or vegetarian in your immediate social circle, because they're gonna show you where and how to eat more whole food plant-based, as opposed to your friend who's, you know, beef obsessed.

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

So I, I say that's changing your commute environment. So these are a few examples. Dan Harris: Because driving is just so stressful, tr- being in traffic? Dan Buettner: Well, you know, uh, Daniel Kahneman's research that on a day-to-day basis, the activity we hate most is driving, the one that causes the unhappiness. But also, so you get the stress from driving, but because you're driving, you're therefore not walking. Uh, Gallup also came up with a recent study that showed that the number of people you wave to every day is highly correlated with your overall happiness and health.

Dan Buettner: Very hard to wave to people when you get in your car, in your attached garage- drive downtown to an underground garage and take the elevator to your office. So it's both the opportunity cost and the activity itself that, uh, that are creating lower life expectancy. You know, in, in blue zones, nobody exercises. Dan Buettner: There's no CrossFit, there's no yoga class, no Pilates class. Nobody's running the-- There's no blue zone marathon. But they live in, in, uh, in communities where every time they go to work, a friend's house or out to eat, it occasions a walk.

They're taking about 8,000 steps a day without even thinking about it, just getting around. Dan Buettner: They have gardens out back, usually three to four-- two to three seasons a year, so they're out there bending and lifting and low-intensity physical activity. They have, um, their houses aren't full of mechanical conveniences to do their own work. Knead bread by hand and grind corn tortillas by hand. And what we don't realize in sort of this exercise-obsessed culture we live in, that it's far better for our bodies to move every 20 minutes than it is to sit in our chairs all day long, whether it's in our office, in our homes, and then expect to make it up in 45 minutes at the gym.

Dan Buettner: That's not how we evolved. If you're moving every 20 minutes or so, like people do in the blue zones, you're keeping your metabolism higher, and you're burning considerably more calories than you would trying to do it all in one 45-minute burst at the end of the day. Yeah, it-- this just all goes to support the notion that you're way better off living in an environment that nudges you unconsciously than to try to consciously pursue it, as is the case with exercise. Dan Harris: Just curious, do you exercise or do you just try to move every 20 minutes or both?

Dan Buettner: Well, I'm very... You know, I live in, I live in Miami Beach here, the very southern tip, and I'm looking at the ocean in which, you know, I can't wait to go jump in and swim at the end of the day. I have 20 restaurants very nearby, Whole Foods that I bike to. Dan Buettner: I do most of my calls walking around, so I live in an, in an environment, a neighborhood that's e- very easy for me to get healthy food, to recreate, to get physical activity and to walk.

But I happen to also love, you know, exercise in the more traditional modality and, um, I usually get out and do something every day. Dan Harris: So it's a yes and. You're not sitting-- You're not sedentary 23 hours and 15 minutes and then 45 minutes of working out. You're, you do some working out but your life is designed to move naturally. Dan Buettner: Co-correct. And I don't- I don't exercise in the way most people exercise. It is not... I'm not competitive. I'm not, uh, it's, it's not in my outlook.

Dan Buettner: It's not a chore as part of my day. I really make it a rule for myself, two rules. One, I'm gonna do something every day, but the second part of it is that I enjoy. Today it might be swimming, it might be, I have a fat tire bike, I go pedal in the sand. I have a bunch of friends who play pickleball or padel, maybe it's to go out with them. Dan Buettner: I do go to a gym, but it's very social, and I go down there and I listen to my f- favorite podcast, Ten Percent Happier.

And lift weights and stretch a little bit, and it's a joy. You know, it's not, it's not a chore. The minute it becomes a chore people stop doing it. And again, if it, when it comes to longevity, unless you're doing it close to daily for a lifetime, it's probably not making a difference in how long you're gonna live over the long run. Dan Harris: Let me go back to something small. This was at the beginning of your list of little nudges and hacks that you can do around your house to make it more conducive to longevity.

You said something about ditching the toaster, and maybe I'm being obtuse, but I didn't quite understand why having a toaster could have deleterious effects. Dan Buettner: Because there's almost nothing that comes out of a toaster that's good for us. You know, most of the breads, and the Pop-Tarts, and the bagels, it's not good. It, it provides a prompt for y- You know, we walk through our kitchen a dozen times a day. You don't remember you're hungry until you see the toaster and you say, "Oh, t- toaster." Dan Buettner: You go into our, in our pantry, and we find that raisin cinnamon bread or white bread that we're gonna put butter and jam on, whatever it is, or Pop-Tarts, and we pop it in our toaster.

Again, it's, um, it's what we see, as opposed to having a, a high quality fruit bowl. This- Dan Harris: He's walking to get his fruit bowl Dan Harris: this is the- Now he's returning with said fruit bowl. That looks like- Uh, Dan Buettner: that's an, that's a Michael one ... Dan Harris: that looks like a still life. Dan Buettner: Well, it's avocados, and tangerines, and limes, and lemons, and, um, you know, that's what I see. So when I'm hungry, I'm way more likely to pick this up than to, you know, put something in a toaster that I'm gonna put butter on or, or...

Dan Buettner: The worst thing is chips. Those chip clips, those are the worst. The Cornell Food Lab has done a study, and I can't quote you right now what the results were, but I remember seeing a study that those are the, the, um, the worst source of eating junky food in your home. Hmm. The other little hack is, you know, I like to treat myself like everybody else does with ice cream and sweets and sorta... Dan Buettner: I just don't bring them in my house. So then when I'm here I'm not even tempted by it 'cause I can't get at it.

When I go out I like to treat myself. I think it's, I think it's wrong minded to restrict yourself because if you're restricting yourself you're eventually gonna fail. So Dan, if you bring, invite me over to your house, and you serve me chocolate cake and ice cream, I'll eat it. Dan Buettner: But you won't find it in my house. Dan Harris: If and when you come to my house, I will definitely serve you cake and ice cream. Well- I'm a fan of both. Dan Buettner: Well, I'm, I'm expecting an invitation, Dan.

I'm, you know, given your first name. Dan Harris: Let's keep going through some of these blue zones just so we can get some more flavor of the, of the locales. Dan Harris: Another one, and I'm probably gonna make mincemeat of this name, but, uh, it's an island in Greece, Ikaria? Dan Buettner: Ikaria. Dan Harris: Ikaria. B- What do we need to know about Ikaria? Dan Buettner: It is a, once again, isolated island of 10,000 people, largely overlooked by Western civilization, live about eight years longer than us, but about 1/10 the dementia we suffer in the United States.

Dan Buettner: We don't know why, but along with living a long time, they're staying sharp to the very end. Now, a few things that are interesting. Number one, it very hard to find more than 100, uh, yards of flat terrain there, except for the airport, and just like Sardinia, where we found that the steeper the village, the higher the life expectancy. Dan Buettner: First of all, they, they eat the strictest version of the Mediterranean diet in the world, and they also include in their diet liberal use of, of herbs, specifically rosemary, sage, oregano, and kind of a, a mint, con- catnip they call it.

And, um, these herbs are used not only for medicinal purposes and to flavor food, but as teas, largely because they weren't importing coffee, but they liked warm beverages, so they'd just go into the fields or their backyard, and they'd take these herbs, which grow like weeds, and they make infusions from them. Dan Buettner: But all of these herbs are, are anti-inflammatory. They're oxidant. Uh, they're diuretics, which lower blood pressure. So, you know, one theory as to this, uh, one of the possible contributors to longevity, they, um, they have lower blood pressure for a long time, so fewer heart attacks and l- and less vascular dementia.

Dan Harris: Let's, uh, let's keep going through the, two, two others, and then I have a million other questions for you. Nicoya, Costa Rica. To-- What stuck out to me is, and you may have other things you wanna say about Nicoya, but is this notion of purpose. Th-they have this concept in Nicoya of plan de vida, which is, like, a, a life plan, I guess. Dan Buettner: Yeah. In all blue zones, there's vocabulary for purpose. In Okinawa, it's ikigai. And believe it or not, people who can articulate their sense of purpose live above eight years longer than people who are rudderless.

Uh, a lot of it in, um, Nicoya comes from their religion. About 95% of them are Catholic. Dan Buettner: They're very family-oriented. So if you ask most of them what their plan de vida, almost always involves the Lord and family. And for as cliched or trite as that may sound, it actually does work Dan Harris: What's the mechanism? Dan Buettner: When you're clear on your sense of purpose, day-to-day decisions are easier. It forms sort of ballast in hard, hard times. Dan Buettner: You're not dealing with the existential stress of, you know, what am I doing on this planet?

Where, where's my v- self-worth? Where's my value? It's a very useful way to make life less stressful. Dan Harris: You know, I know you've made a lot-- that your study of the Blue Zones has had an impact on, on how you live your life. Dan Harris: Do you have an articulation of your purpose that has been useful to you? Dan Buettner: Yes. Uh, my purpose is going out into the world, researching traditional peoples, learning their wisdom, and translating their wisdom to my audiences, I guess, m- in my writing.

I've done that 40 years ago. My first, quote-unquote, "job" after college was biking from Alaska to Argentina. Dan Buettner: And I biked around the world, and then I biked across Africa. And, uh, in a more superficial way, I, you know, I wrote books and I wrote for Outside Magazine and Chicago Tribune. Uh, and then I did a series of these expeditions that solved mysteries. And it, it never really occurred to me. You know, they started out as kind of facile, you know, why did the Maya civilization collapse?

Dan Buettner: But ultimately, the best answers came from talking to the contemporary people who are still living there today. And I'm was more and more intrigued with how their quality of life was greater than ours. And many-- even though they're not necessarily as rich, they lived richer lives. And Blue Zones is the summation of that. Dan Buettner: And, uh, my books, Blue Zones of Happiness, also, you know, sought to even delve into that notion even, even deeper. Dan Harris: It reminds me of, I think it was Benjamin Franklin who observed that there were so many w- white people running away and joining indigenous tribes, but never the opposite, or rarely the opposite.

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

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

They know their purpose, and their path for an extra eight to 10 years is joyous. Dan Buettner: And, uh, I mean, that, that's a, that's the real value proposition. Dan Harris: Staying on the subject of purpose, and this will get us to the, the fifth Blue Zone. You mentioned in the context of Okinawa, the Japanese island, this notion of ikigai. What is that? Dan Buettner: It's basically purpose, but it always has a altruistic dimension to it. Dan Buettner: It's-- In other words, it's, it's not just pursuing your hobby, it's pursuing something because it benefits somebody else, either the community or a younger generation or a family.

So it's s- sort of a purpose on steroids. Dan Harris: Maybe you would call this a kind of enlightened self-interest. Dan Buettner: Well, I suppose. I don't know if they think of it as self-interest, though. Dan Buettner: I think they think of it as they're doing their duty to their family or their community. But, um, I guess to the extent that doing your duty makes us feel good, it would be self-interest. Dan Harris: Yes. That's-- It's a slippery concept, but it reminds me of the Dalai Lama's idea of wise selfishness.

Everybody's selfish, he says. Dan Harris: But if you wanna do selfishness correctly, you should live an altruistic and compassionate life, because that is what will make you feel the best. Dan Buettner: That's beautiful. Dan Harris: Okay. So Okinawa, y- I have not watched this video myself, but my staff told me about it, that there was a recent video, I believe posted by you, saying that maybe Okinawa had been disqualified as a blue zone. Dan Harris: What's happening there? Dan Buettner: Well, s- since I started studying the place in 25 years ago, 1999, they were producing the longest, uh, human beings in the history of the world.

But now, thanks largely to the American military base that attracted a forest of fast food restaurants, your McDonald's, KFCs, Pizza Huts, A&W, and also a snarl of, of highways- And now Okinawa has among the highest obesity rates, the highest type 2 diabetes rates, the highest smoking rates, and it's the least healthy of Japan's prefectures. Dan Buettner: So it, it is comp-- in one generation, they've lost their Blue Zone standing. You can still see vestiges of it. If you go to the villages in the smaller islands, Okinawa's 151 islands, it's not just one island, so some of the smaller islands are still Blue Zone-ish.

And in the north, uh, the Motobu Peninsula and places like Ogimi, you still see-- it's still Blue Zones. Dan Buettner: But most of the 1.6 million people on Okinawa are among Japanese, Japan's least healthy people, and that's a tragedy. Dan Harris: Are you s- are you seeing similar threats to the other Blue Zones, or because many of them are isolated, is, are they safe? Dan Buettner: The, they're only isolated to an extent, and they're all disappearing. Dan Buettner: They're all, um, they'll all be gone in a generation, I think.

I mean, I wa- I was just in Nicoya about three weeks ago, and, uh, there's a city of Nicoya as well as a peninsula. And as you enter the city of Nicoya, you see a McDonald's, a Burger King, and a KFC. And, um, it-- that is the beginning of the end. Dan Buettner: Obesity's on the rise. Type 2 diabetes on the rise in all of these Blue Zones. A little bit more protected at Ikaria. The young people there really do honor older people and older traditions, and the younger generations are bringing back these and preserving these traditions of gardening and, uh, the pana- panegyri, their, their, um, social gatherings and so forth.

Dan Buettner: But, um, I'm, I'm afraid Blue Zone will be a thing of the past in the very near f- near future. Dan Harris: So the bad news is, as you just said, Blue Zones may be a thing of the past. I guess the good news is We ca- we can still take the lessons from the traditional lifestyles and apply them to our own lives. Dan Buettner: That's right. Dan Buettner: We captured the blueprint. My daytime job, I've worked with 72 cities in America, and, um, we get paid by insurance companies or hospital systems to lower the obesity rate and the chronic disease loads of entire cities, thereby raising their life expectancy.

And it actually works. And it works not by trying to convince a million people to change their behavior, but it works because we change people's environments so the healthy choice is the easy choice or the unavoidable choice. Dan Buettner: And, uh, therein Blue Zones will survive. And I also had a, uh, Netflix series called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, and in the fourth episode of that, I announce a Blue Zone 2.0, Singapore, where in one lifetime, life expectancy has jumped by over 20 years, and now they currently have the longest health-adjusted life expectancy in the world.

Dan Buettner: In other words, they live more years in full health than anyplace else in the world, and that is a wholly manufactured Blue Zone. Um, it's the result of, uh, leadership that has proactively aggregated policies that favor human health and wellbeing, and they have manifestly produced healthier people. I, uh, further proof of the central premise that if you create an environment where pe- humans can thrive, you see it in their life expectancy and their happiness. Dan Buettner: And, um, you know, if you rely on diets and exercise programs and a bloated healthcare system like we do in the United States, we get very expensive ill health.

Dan Harris: I wanna go back to the Power Nine. These are the lifestyle habits of the, uh, world's healthiest and longest-lived people. You ran through a k- you, you kinda did a drive-by of them, and we-- And then when we were talking about the specific Blue Zones, you said a lot about many of these, but I'm just gonna read them quickly to the audience and then pick a few where I feel more could be said. Dan Harris: So first, move naturally. We've talked about that, that the world's longest-lived people aren't necessarily going to the gym.

They just live in v- in environments that encourage them to work without thinking-- to, to move without thinking about it. Two, purpose. We've talked about that. Three, downshift. Might be worth stopping on this for a second. Dan Harris: I know we've touched on it a little bit, but it seems like l-life in a Blue Zone has built into it breaks that many of us, in our headlong effort to check things off our to-do list, do not have in our lives. So what more would you say about that?

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

Dan Buettner: Ancestor veneration or taking a moment to remember that you're not just a point in time, but part of a continuum, as we see in O- in Okinawa. In, in Sardinia, it's almost all, you know, we call it happy hour, but at the end of a day's work, there's always the reward where you're going to walk down to the town square or the town tavern and see your friends, uh, have an hour of conviviality, maybe a glass or two of wine. Dan Buettner: These are the things that, that not only bring joy to life, but they actually lower cortisol levels, they lower stress levels, and they...

W- we know that inflammation is at root of every major age-related disease. And if you're muscling through your day, you're working nine hours a day, you drive home, your hour-long commute, it's stressful commute. Dan Buettner: You get home, your kids are screaming or kids are hungry, you gotta bring dinner together quickly. You go to bed late and tired. You wake up tired. Sure, that might be a recipe for making more money, but in blue zone, that whole process is slowed down with- without the hormones and could very well explain much of their seven to eight year life expectancy gain.

Dan Harris: Thanks for that. Number four on the list is the 80% rule, which I also think bears some explication from you. Uh, it has to do with not overeating. Can you explain it? Dan Buettner: So it's riffing off of a Confucian adage, hara hachi bu, which means roughly stop eating when your stomach is 80% full. And in Okinawa, you'll still see people before a meal, instead of saying grace, they'll say h- hara hachi bu So I expanded it a little bit to evidence-based strategies to keep from overeating.

Dan Buettner: And a few things we know work, taking screens, TV screens out of the kitchen, eating with family, saying, uh, some prayer or some gratitude before a meal to put some punctuation between your busy life and your, your mealtime. Um, front-loading your calories at the beginning of the day and, uh, and eating a light dinner and then, and then not eating for 14 hours. Dan Buettner: These are all strategies to keep from overeating. Uh, this runs right into opposition to where we've been marketed for most of our lives, this idea that we need more nutrients.

Every power bar and every vitamin-fortified cereal and vitamin D-fortified milk. We've been told for decades that the path to health is through these additive minerals and, and vitamins and nutrients. Dan Buettner: But actually, in Blue Zones, it's, it's, uh, about taking calories out of the meal, not adding new things to it Dan Harris: I love that. Number five on the list is plant slant. We've covered that, that, uh, many of these people are not eating too much meat. Uh, number six is wine at 5:00, which you also talked about that folks are drinking alcohol moderately and regularly.

Dan Harris: How do you square that with, and I know you referenced this earlier, the more recent data that, that suggests that alcohol is basically poison at any dose? Dan Buettner: First of all, I know it's not mutually exclusive with living a long, healthy life because these people are manifestly living eight or 10 years longer, and they're drinking every day. Dan Buettner: And obviously you can't draw a causal relation, but you can, you c- and maybe if they didn't drink at all, they live two or three more years m- or maybe not.

But I think these studies miss, um, the healthy byproducts of drinking, um, coming together around a glass of wine as part of a daily ritual that socializes people and, and, uh, uh, sheds stress. Dan Buettner: It's the, it's the, um, fuel for these parties, these paniyiris, which ultimately are fundraisers for the village and, and, uh, cement social bonds. Also, the type of alcohol they drink in blue zones. You know, these studies are done with alcohol. Well, when you drink a blue zone, a Cannonau, for example, in Sardinia, that has the highest levels of polyphenols of any other wine in the world.

Dan Buettner: One of those polyphenols is known to reduce inflammation of the endothelium, the lining of the arteries. So when you're drinking that every day as opposed to a margarita or a beer, biochemically, the results could be hugely different. So All I know is people in the blue zones live a long time, and they drink a little bit every day, and they enjoy it Dan Harris: The final three, three entries in the power nine all are about social connection. Dan Harris: Number seven is belong, and that's about, uh, the data that seems to suggest that belonging to a faith-based community, uh, no matter what the d- denomination, has, uh, longevity implications.

Eight is loved ones first, people putting their families first, which we've talked about. And nine is having the right tribe, ba- s- being in a tight-knit social circle that lasts for quite a while. Dan Harris: Anything more worth saying about this portion of the list, or do you think we've covered it? Dan Buettner: I think you've covered it. Dan Harris: Buying glasses online or in person can be a gigantic pain in the you know what, and even worse, eye exams. Being able to see is often just super complicated, more complicated than it needs to be, which is why my wife, who has many pairs of glasses and many prescriptions, has been so enthusiastic about Warby Parker, both online and in person.

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Dan Harris: So it-- so this data has been warped in some way. What's your pushback on that? Dan Buettner: You're probably referring to a, uh, plant scientist by the name of Saul Newman, who wrote, uh, one paper which actually wasn't accepted by an academic journal. He brought up, uh, errors in recording areas in non-blue zone area, other parts of Japan, not in blue zones. Dan Buettner: I work for National Geographic. Uh, the record, the fact-checkers occupy the corner o- offices. We hired the, or we collaborate with the top The demographers in the world to carefully check ages in each one of the blue zones.

And, um, uh, in every case, we were able to find birth records and death records and do the math between the two Dan Harris: So summation, this guy, Saul Newman is criticizing the Blue Zones methodology, but you're saying the methodology is sound? Dan Buettner: Yeah. He's criticized-- He's finding places that aren't Blue Zones, and he's leveling criticisms that may be true elsewhere, but not, but they're not true in Blue Zones, at least in record-keeping accuracy. He also correctly, you know, as an effort to undermine, uh, Blue Zones' works, he cites Okinawa's high rates of obesity.

Dan Buettner: But what he doesn't do is go back 25 years when I started my work to discover that actually then it was the highest-- They were producing the longest-lived people in the world, and it has deteriorated in the last 25 years. Nothing I can do about that, something I readily acknowledge in my writings and in Netflix. Dan Buettner: But it no way undermines the, the fact that they lived, did live a long time and that there were a set of attending characteristics that went along with that longevity.

Dan Harris: Let's talk about the diet. There have been some folks who've said that the Blue Zone diet is based l-less on solid science and more on speculation. Dan Harris: How solid, in your view, is the science of the Blue Zone diet? Dan Buettner: Yeah, so the criticisms are usually from the carnivore crowd who go to Sardinia or Okinawa today, and they look at what people are eating today, and they correctly see that people are eating a lot of meat. Uh, my work, however, in-- I wrote about it in The New York Times Sunday magazine article, "The Island Where People Forget to Die," and also the book called The Blue Zone Solution, which was a two-time New York Times bestseller.

Dan Buettner: For that, we did a meta-analysis of 155 dietary studies, dietary surveys that were-- If you wanna know what, as I said before, what a centenarian ate, you have to look not what they're eating today, but they were eating throughout their lives. And the closest we could approximate that was pulling dietary surveys and doing a meta-analysis, which essentially is an averaging. Dan Buettner: And is it 100% accurate? No, but it's the best available, and it's very clear that in all these places, these were poor areas.

These were-- There weren't any McDonald's. Uh, people didn't have enough money to be able to eat meat more than about once a week. There were no processed foods. So to assert that somehow I've made this up is just foolishness. Dan Buettner: What, did they s-somehow import burgers from, uh, the, the mail or something like that? They just weren't around to eat. What was around was peasant foods, beans and grains and sweet potatoes and tubers and, and, uh, vegetables they could get in their gardens and greens that were available Yes, they did have a family pig, which they butchered once a year.

Dan Buettner: They might have had a few goats. There weren't cows in Blue Zones except for the Nicoya Peninsula, so I stand by my work. Dan Harris: And have there been any longitudinal studies on people on the Blue Zone diet as you prescribe it? Dan Buettner: I don't prescribe anything. I simply say, "Here's what the longest lived people have eaten over their lifetime. Dan Buettner: You can do what you want." Dan Harris: And what about the fact that the diets are often hyperlocalized? You know, there's raw honey in Greece, the sourdough bread that you mentioned in Sardinia, squash in Costa Rica.

Can the recommendations be translated to Des Moines and Dubuque? Dan Buettner: I don't see why not. I mean, the, all of the products eaten in Blue Zones are available in Des Moines. Dan Buettner: You may not have the exact same honey, but anybody with an Amazon account can get Ikarian honey delivered to their house. If you wanna eat a, if you wanna mimic the way people in any one of the five Blue Zones eaten, you can very easily do it in the United States. For much cheaper, by the way, than it, than you would spend eating steaks and, and, uh, having customized meals delivered via Amazon.

Dan Harris: One last critique I wanna run by you has to do with the Blue Zone checklist that you talked about before, the, the 40 or so tweaks that we can put into our environment to, to get our lives closer to the way life is lived in the Blue Zones. And this is a quote from one paper that looked at the checklists. Dan Harris: It said that the checklists assume that an individual lives in an environment that allows pets, has space for a garden, has a garage, and a separate space for an exercise area.

The implication being that the checklist is, you know, not universally accessible to people who don't have a bunch of dough. Is that a fair, is that a fair critique? Dan Buettner: I didn't know that study existed, and I'm kind of flattered that somebody would take the time to critique it. There's about 40 things, and it's, it's a multiple choice. It's, um, y- the more that you can check off, the bigger impact it would have. But I mean, if you have a kitchen, most of what I suggest you do to your kitchen are as easily implementable.

Dan Buettner: The most powerful part of that checklist is, I would argue, is, uh, optimizing your or curating your immediate social circle, which anybody can do no matter how rich or poor, to a certain extent, I guess. So yeah, not everybody can do everything on that list, but if you get half of them in, I would bet that your weight drops and your life expectancy goes up. Dan Harris: It's very super interesting to, to talk about this with you. Are there things you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to?

Dan Buettner: No, I think we covered it pretty well. Yeah, we covered it well. I've been at, I've been at this for 20 years and, and the central premise of Blue Zones, if you wanna live longer, don't try to change your, uh, environment. Dan Buettner: Don't try to change your behavior, change your environment. I think that's the most important takeaway. I guess a couple interesting things. There's an association between eating beans and higher life expectancy. People who eat a cup of beans a day live about four years longer than people who get their protein from less healthy sources.

Dan Buettner: A handful of nuts a day is associated with about two extra years of life expectancy. People are interested in easy longevity hacks, and those are two of them. And, um, you know, I've written six books on Blue Zones. Uh, four of them are New York Times bestsellers, and I'm proud of them. And, uh, if people have any other questions, I'm @danbuettner on Instagram, and I answer all my question, all my direct messages personally. Dan Harris: That's very cool. Uh, you're making me sheepish about the fact that I don't answer-- I answer a fraction of mine.

The-- And I suspect I get a fraction of yours. Let me just go back to beans for a second, because I was a vegan for five years. Now I'm mostly plant-based, but, um- I do eat some animal products. And one of the reasons was m- I just could never build up a tolerance for beans, even with taking Beano and whatever. Dan Harris: I just-- It made me very unpleasant to be around for reasons that I'm assuming you can put together. Any thoughts on that? Dan Buettner: D- Okay, there are outliers, and you might be one of the outliers that will just never be able to metabolize beans very well.

But y- your gut has about 100 trillion bacteria in it. Most of them, the, the bacteria are a-- almost 100% responsible for extracting energy out of our plant food. Dan Buettner: Out of those 99-- uh, out of those 100 million bacteria, most of them depend on their survival fiber or plant-based material. There's no fiber in meat. If you feed your gut meat and cheese and eggs, the bad bacteria start to pro- proliferate, whereas if you feed it high-fiber food like beans, the good bacteria pro- proliferate.

Dan Buettner: So the good bacteria are the ones that take fiber, and they convert it into short-chain fatty acids, and, um, which make their way into our im- our bloodstream, and they provide energy for our cells. They lower inflammation. They fine-tune our, our immune system. They're the precursor to a lot of the feel-good hormones. Dan Buettner: If you're not eating fiber, you're not getting that. To your question about beans, often if people start with just a tablespoon or two of beans and work up to a cup gradually over two or three weeks, they sort of prune their bacterial garden such that they can handle the beans, as opposed to starting today with a cup of beans.

Dan Buettner: It might be too much for people who are not-- who aren't used to eating these high-fiber diets. Dan Harris: I like the sound of that. Start small. Dan, just-- you mentioned your six books. Can you just remind us of the names of some of them, any that come to mind? And also remind us again of the name of your Netflix show, which was, was and is super popular. Dan Buettner: Thank you. "Blue Zones: Nine Lessons from the World's Longest-Lived People," "The Blue Zone Solution," "Blue Zone Kitchen," which was a cookbook.

It was a number one New York Times bestseller. "Blue Zones of Happiness," and, um, the Netflix show is "Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones." And then I-- in all Whole Foods, I have Blue Zone Kitchen frozen meals, which are formulated for longevity with a maniacal focus on deliciousness. Dan Buettner: So I'm starting to create a retail environment of healthy eating as well. Dan Harris: Dan Buettner, thank you very much for your time. Dan Buettner: Dan, it was a delight, and you'll be pleased to know that I am now 19% happier.

So we're trending the ri- Your show works. Dan Harris: I love it. May also be the fact that you're now free to go swimming in the ocean, but, uh, I'll, I'll take Dan Buettner: it. Dan Buettner: That might... No, a real delight, Dan. Nice to, nice to, nice to spend time with you. Dan Harris: Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Ten Percent Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Dan Harris: Also, one last thing before you go, remember to sign up for my new app, which is called Ten Percent with Dan Harris. You can sign up over at danharris.com. On the app, you'll find a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers, ad-free access to the full expertise of our podcast guests, meaning you'll get this podcast with no ads, exclusive live stream events, which we do weekly, sometimes twice a week, robust discussion threads to connect you with our team, with our teachers, and with one another.

Dan Harris: There's a free 14-day trial if you wanna try before you buy. Peace.