Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #201 BITESIZE | How to Live a Long, Healthy and Happy Life | Dan Buettner

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

Experts say that with the right lifestyle, the chances are you may live up to a decade longer. But we all want to make sure we stay fit, healthy and active in our old age too. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 67 of the podcast with National Geographic Explorer and author Dan Buettner Dan has led teams of researchers across the globe to discover the secrets of Blue Zones – geographical areas where high percentages of centenarians live long and active lives. In this clip, he explains what we can all learn from his findings in order to live a healthy, happy and full life. Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/67 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 67 of the podcast with National Geographic Explorer and bestselling author Dan Boettner. Dan has led teams of researchers across the globe to discover the secrets of blue zones, pockets of areas around the world where high percentages of centenarians live long and active lives. In this clip, he explains what we can all learn from his findings in order to live a healthy, happy, and full life.

The research on the blue zones is absolutely fascinating. Look at that combination of factors that exist that actually push people towards long but also healthy lives. The idea originally was to, in a sense, reverse engineer longevity. So rather than looking for longer life in a Petri dish or a test tube, we had the idea, or I guess I had the idea, to identify the populations around the world where people are living manifestly longest. around the world where people are living manifestly longest. And then, so once you find that, you have thousands and sometimes millions of people that are avoiding heart disease and cancer and diabetes and obesity and dementia, the diseases that are killing us today. And then I brought another team of experts after I identified these places. And by the way,

it took me three years to find the five blue zones. The blue zones are Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Ikaria, Greece, Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, and among the Seventh-day Adventists. So we have five places that produce longevity. Then we brought another team of experts to identify what's correlating, what are the common denominators in all five of these places that is producing manifestly the health that the rest of us want. So these are real world results rather than hypothesizing about what might be going on.

You actually went into these areas and studied them heavily to find out actually in real life what is going on. Yes. And one of those mysteries we came across in the year 2000, a tiny cluster of islands about 1500 kilometers south of Tokyo, the islands of Okinawa, there's 161 of these islands. You find the longest lived population in the history of the earth. And I thought, aha, now there's a good mystery. How do these islanders, you know, with no great technology, with no great access to top of the line medicine, how are they living so long and avoiding disease? And that really launched me into Blue Zones, which is what I do now.

And that really launched me into Blue Zones, which is what I do now. Do Blue Zones still exist today, or has modern living permeated them and changed longevity in them? I would say the Blue Zones are disappearing. The elements that produce long life are still visible in most of them, if not all of them. But the phenomena is disappearing along with the American food culture, along with modernization as mechanical conveniences push physical activity out of everybody's lives. So the longest-lived women in the world live in Okinawa. The longest-lived men live in the highlands of Sardinia, an area called the Nuoro province, six villages, 40,000 people. And you have about eight to 10

times more male centenarians there than you would expect to see in London, for example. And do we know why there's that difference between male longevity and female longevity? I can only hypothesize. Okay. So in Okinawa, for example, women have much stronger social networks than men do. Men tend to be solo and women form these and stick with these social constructs known as a moai. So they support each other, not only literally, but figuratively, they take care of each other. In Sardinia, most of the Mediterranean is a sort of paternal culture. The dad sits at the head of the table and says, this is how our family's going to live. In Sardinia, it's the woman. The women are the heads of the household. And while that confers a certain amount of authority, it also confers stress. So they're

the ones worrying about the kids. They're worried about the leaky roof. They're worried about the finances. Meanwhile, the traditional male centenarian in the blue zone, the men who reach 100, are shepherds. They have low-intensity physical activity. In Great Britain here, for every one male centenarian, there are five female centenarians. In Sardinia, that proportion is one-to-one. So it may just be that the women in Sardinia are taking the load off the men and allowing them to succeed better in the longevity department. It's so fascinating that to just think about that, you know, who's at the head of the table, who's making the decisions and how that might

potentially be factoring into sort of that chronic life stress. When I first came across the Blue Zones, I remember thinking, you know, what's the diet? What's going on there? As maybe many people do, but it's become quite clear, hasn't it, that there are multiple factors. And you've mentioned two already, stress, and you've also mentioned strong social networks. And I wonder if you could just sort of expand on those two and how important do you think those two areas are for longevity? I argue in the blue zone, the one most dependable thing you can do to add years to your life is to curate a circle of friends, four or five friends who A, you can count on, but that also means you have to be willing to be counted on on their bad days. of people whose idea of recreation is walking or golfing or playing tennis and people who will keep your mind challenged. The thing is, we live in this world where we're always looking for

the quick fix, the magic diet, the 30-day diet to 100. it doesn't exist. It's not even on the scientific horizon. The only things that work for longevity are things that help you do the right things and avoid the wrong things for decades so you don't develop a chronic disease. And I should make it clear, my branch of longevity is not about extending the limit of the human body, which on average is about 93, by the way. It is about avoiding the diseases that foreshorten our lives. So as you know, about 85% of the diseases that most of us are grappling with are avoidable if we do the right things. So the essence of what I did in Blue Zone is figure out how these measurable, verifiable populations have avoided these diseases that make our lives crappy and that foreshorten them. Yeah. From what I understand of the Blue Zones, I mean, for me, the commonality appears to be that

all of their diets appear to be minimally processed. They're sort of whole food diets, but there do appear to be some blue zones which, from what I know, eat meat and some eat more meat than others, but they're having a lot of vegetables and plants as well. If you want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be 100, you have to know what he or she was eating when they were 4 and 24 and 44 and 64. So we went in and we found dietary surveys done over the past 100 years in all five blue zones. And if you look at what they've eaten over the last 100 years and you average it out, you see, first of all, as you pointed out, minimally processed. 90 to 95% of their dietary intake comes from plants, but they're eating mostly complex carbohydrates, and the rest is fats and proteins. The five pillars of every longevity diet in the world, and it took me eight years to tell you what I'm going to tell you right now.

Whole grains, corn, wheat, rice, nuts of all kinds, tubers, which include sweet potatoes and like the Okinawan emo, greens. Some of these blue zones, they're eating 80 or 90 different kinds of greens, the kind of stuff we would weed whack from our backyard. They're making beautiful salads and pies with them. And then I argue the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. Great source of protein, great source of fiber. We don't know how to make beans taste good in

our country. They know how to make beans sing. The beautiful Icarian stew with fennel and extra virgin olive oil and beautiful red onions or a Sardinian minestrone with five different beans and vegetables. There's something in that, isn't there? That there's this perception with so much of society that healthy eating is boring and it's a bland salad. And I guess what you're saying is in these blue zones that they're eating healthy food, but they're making it taste good as well.

You hit the point right on the head. The most important ingredient when it comes to a longevity diet is taste. I could tell you with some evidence that the healthiest foods in the world are turmeric, bitter melon, also known as Goya, or sweet potatoes, purple sweet potatoes, or fermented miso. But if you don't like those foods, you're not going to eat them. So it doesn't matter because remember,

when it comes to longevity, you have to do it for decades or a lifetime. If I make for you a beautiful minestrone with barley and five beans and tomato and maybe just a little bit of pecorino cheese on the top and you love it, you might eat it every week. And there's when the longevity power comes into it. It can't be that struggle. I'm doing health this month. Isn't it boring? I can't wait till I finish this health scheme so I can get back to living. If we're thinking like that, we're destined for failure, right? The mistake we make with health in this country, in the United States, is we pursue health. The reality is health ensues. Longevity ensues from the right environment. So in Blue Zones, for example,

they eat mostly a plant-based diet because the cheapest, most accessible foods are beans, nuts, whole grains, greens, and tubers. They have time-honored recipes to make those delicious. Their kitchens are set up so they can make it fast and they have rituals around these foods that it figures into their quotidian diet, not necessarily the celebratory. Celebratory, they're going to kill a pig or goat and pig out. But the day-to-day is going to be these very simple peasant foods to taste delightful. The option to recede into your home and into your devices doesn't exist. They live in places where if you don't show up to the village festival, if you don't show up to church, temple, or mosque,

somebody could be pounding on your door saying, where are you? There's vocabulary for purpose. You're probably right about this in the stress solution, but people who are rudderless in the world, they don't know why they wake up. They don't know how they fit in. They don't know why their lives matter. It is very hard to navigate a world when you don't feel like you need it. In blue zones, the purpose comes with mother's milk. There's Ikigai in Okinawa, Plante Vida in the Nicoya Peninsula. People know their sense of purpose, live their sense of purpose, and they have a rudder to get through every single day. And that eliminates not only the existential stress of, do I matter? But it also

makes day-to-day decisions really easy. How important is having a strong sense of meaning and purpose in your life to happiness? It's important. And you'd be shocked how many people live in the middle of our continent, wake up every morning, pull breakfast together for their kids, rush to work an hour, 45 minutes in traffic, work at a job. Only 30% of Americans actually like their job. They come home tired, throw together a dinner, and then they watch 4.4 hours of TV. So I would take the time to get clear on what you like to do, what your passions are, what you're good at, and what's an outlet for it. Volunteers, and when I say outlet, I mean volunteering. For most of us, volunteers are happier, healthier. People in the Blue Zones are not only living long lives,

they're living happy lives. They're rich, they're fulfilled, they're full of great social connection, they're full of meaning, they're full of the things that make life worth living. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday

and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.