Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #67 The Secret to a Long and Happy life with Dan Buettner

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

CAUTION ADVISED: this podcast contains swearing. A long healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. If you adopt the right lifestyle, experts say, chances are you may live up to a decade longer. So, what’s the formula for success? National Geographic Explorer and author Dan Buettner has lead teams of researchers across the globe to uncover the secrets of Blue Zones—geographic regions where high percentages of centenarians are enjoying remarkably long, full and happy lives. In this week’s episode, I talk with Dan about his adventures in the Blue Zones and discuss what we can all learn from his findings. Dan found commonalities amongst each of these Blue Zones which led to a formula for success that includes lifestyle, community and purpose. We delve into all these areas and discuss how achieving a long, healthy and happy life is something that goes far beyond personal responsibility. People in these longevity hot spots do not pursue health and happiness. Health and happiness ensues from the environment which they are in. Dan explains what you can do to design your surroundings to stack the deck in favour of health, longevity and happiness. We also discuss Dan’s Blue Zones Project - a health and longevity initiative that models the principles of communities around the world that have the longest living people and applies those principles to other cities and communities. The results have been staggering. Finally, Dan explains how he has changed his own lifestyle following his research and he shares his top tips for living a longer and more fulfilling life. This is a fascinating conversation – I hope you enjoy it! Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/bluezones 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, GP, television presenter, and author of the best-selling books, The Stress Solution, and The Four-Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into

practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier, because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome to episode 67 of my Feel Better, Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. What is the secret to a long and happy life? That is a topic up for discussion on this week's podcast. You see, living a long and healthy life does not occur by accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits. If you adopt the right lifestyle, experts say chances are you may live up to a decade longer. So what is that formula for success? Well, today's guest is National Geographic explorer and best-selling author Dan Buetner. Dan has led teams of

researchers across the globe to uncover the secrets of blue Zones, areas around the world where high percentages of centenarians are enjoying remarkably long, full, and happy lives. Like last week's guest, the endurance athlete, Kylian Jornet, I, the pleasure, have been invited to speak at a special Google event in London recently, where Dan was also a speaker, and was absolutely delighted when he agreed to be a guest on my show. In this week's episode, I talk with Dan about his adventures in the Blue Zones and discuss what we can all learn from his findings. Dan found commonalities amongst each of these Blue Zones, which led to a formula for success that includes lifestyle, community, and purpose.

We also discussed Dan's Blue Zones Project, a health and longevity initiative that models the principles of communities around the world that have the longest living people and applies them to other cities and communities. The results have been staggering. Finally, Dan explains how the findings of his research has changed his own lifestyle and shares his top tips changed his own lifestyle and shares his top tips for living a long and happy life. This is a fascinating conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Now, before we get started, I do need to give a quick shout out to the sponsors of today's

episode, who are essential in order for me to put out weekly episodes like this one. Affleck Greens have been a long-term supporter of my podcast. Now, I absolutely prefer that people get all of their nutrition from food, but for some of us, this is not always possible. Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I have come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics and digestive enzymes. I often take Athletic Greens if I'm rushing around and don't have the time to cook the ideal meal. I also tend to use it when I am traveling. If you are looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure

that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around 70 pounds with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. So Dan, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast. It's an honor to be here and serendipitously. Serendipitously, absolutely.

Kind of like the universe brought us together. It feels that way, doesn't it? Because when I saw your name on the list for this event we're at, I thought I've got to get some time with you to speak to you. I've been reading your work for years, so thanks for all the books that you have written. A lot of great useful content in there. But Dan, for a lot of people listening to this who may not know about your life, your history, your career, I wonder if you could give a quick overview of how you started off, I think, as an explorer and became one of the world's maybe leading voices on longevity? When you were doing useful and productive things after college, I bicycled from Alaska to Argentina, set a Guinness World Record,

a second Guinness Record for biking around the world, and then a third record for biking across Africa from Berserker, Tunisia, all the way to the southern tip. And that really led to a career with National Geographic. It comes from, I guess you could call it boot camp for National Geographic. And for about six years, I led a series of expeditions that sought to unravel great mysteries. Why the Maya civilization collapsed, did Marco Polo go to China? And the idea behind them was to actually let an online audience direct a team of explorers to solve a mystery. Rather than the explorer going and making discoveries and reporting what he or she found, the idea was to democratize it a little

bit and let an online audience decide where the explorer goes and then synthesize those clues, thereby harnessing the wisdom of the crowd. And one of those mysteries we came across in the year 2000, a tiny cluster of islands about 1,500 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 you, 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. Yeah, well, the word Blue Zones is one and all across the world. I've written about the Blue

Zones in both of my books, which are all based upon the research that you put out there. And I guess the starting point for me is a lot of the research on the blue zones, it's absolutely fascinating to look at that combination of factors that exist that actually push people towards long but also healthy lives. 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 life, but maybe be useful to describe what a blue zone is. So 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. 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. 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. Yeah. So the first job is to make sure people are as old as they say they are. There's been a lot of misinformation about longevity. The Vilcabamba Valley of Ecuador, the Hunza Valley of Pakistan, the Caucasus in Soviet Georgia, these all were rumored to be longevity. And in every case, people didn't either know how old they were because they didn't have birth certificates or they were lying about their age. So our first job was to work with demographers who could look at birth certificates from 100 years ago

and follow those births for a century, correct for immigration and emigration, to make sure you have people living a long time. Very complex, really. A lot of complex statistics probably behind that. And math, yes. And you have immigration. People come into countries.

People leave countries. For example, the highest percentage of centenarians in America is in a county called Lac Caparo in Minnesota, where I'm from. But if you go to that county, you discover why there's so many 100-year-olds is because all the young people have left. So you naturally have a higher proportion of really old people. So we had to correct for that. It was a big job. It took three years. And thank you, National Geographic. They funded this work. There'd be no Blue Zones if it wasn't for National Geographic.

It's fascinating for me, as someone who has looked at the Blue Zones research that you put out there, and just thinking back now that actually at some point that term, that concept didn't exist. Obviously those blue zones were out there, but nobody had studied them. Nobody had coined a term for them. And you went to Okinawa and you thought, this is pretty interesting. So can we say that was the first blue zone that you came across? Okinawa was first identified as a longevity hotspot by a Dr. Suzuki who started work in 1960 and followed up by Craig and Bradley Wilcox. I think that was the first area and World Health Organization recognized it as such. And then the second one to come online was, so I had done an expedition there and I got this idea.

If there is extreme longevity in Asia, there must be extreme longevity in Europe and maybe Latin America and maybe the United States. So I figured if I could find the pinnacle or the summit of longevity in each of these continents and find the common denominators. 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. Men have a higher suicide rate in Okinawa. In Sardinia, most of the Mediterranean is a sort of paternal culture. The dad sits at the head of the table and sort of pounds his fist 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 of the table who's making the decisions and how that might potentially be factoring into sort of that chronic life stress you know day after day week after week month after month i know this really good london doctor who wrote a book about stress it's amazing it's called the stress solution you should read it because you should go talk to him one day yeah you mentioned moai friendship and actually i've got a a section in this translation called moai mates um about this whole idea of a friendship and a couple things i want to pick up on um you know when i first got you know 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? So if you don't have at least three good friends you can count on on a bad day, people with whom you can have a meaningful conversation, your life expectancy is about eight years lower than if you have four or five good mates who you can borrow money from, who are there when times are tough. It's always easy to find friends if you're buying the beer, but it's a lot harder when you're depressed or you're justifiably mad about something.

So 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. People whose idea of recreation is walking or golfing or playing tennis. People, quite honestly, eat a plant-based diet. You should have one or two vegetarians in your immediate social network.

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, or some supplement that is going to make you live longer. 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. So many things to follow up there. I guess one thing we should cover, you mentioned eating more plants. And 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. You've obviously been there and studied them. Is it true that in some of these Blue Zones, they're eating a little bit of meat? So I did a deep dive. My book is The Blue Zone Solution,

and we did what's called a meta-analysis. So if you want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be, if you want to know what people ate in blue zones to live a long time, you can't go there today and look around. I mean, Sardinia right now, they'll start their day with a, or they'll start their meal with prosciutto, and then it'll go to lamb, and then they'll have a pork chop, and then they'll be smelling with prosciutto on it. That's not the way they've eaten. If you want to know what a centenary Nate to live to be 100, you have to know what he or she was eating when they were four, 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 I should say 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. 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. It's a very high carbohydrate diet. It flies right in the face of keto or paleo, neither of which I believe in, by the way. 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. beans 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. And from what I've tasted in London here, there's room for improvement as well. Depends where you go. It depends where you go. In blue zones, they know how to make chur. 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 that the 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. You mentioned low-carbon keto. Paleo and keto. Sorry, paleo and keto, yeah. And is there an argument, in your opinion, that studying the blue zones, studying people who have been, for the last century really, have been doing a lot of things right day in, day out, that's a very different society from how, let's say here, we're, you know, not far from London

at the moment having this conversation. People here are living sedentary lives. They're eating out a huge proportion of the week. They're eating processed, highly processed foods. They're sleep deprived. They are overly stressed. There's a real, you know, loneliness is on the rise here in the UK and in other countries around the world. So do it, you know, I guess what I'm getting at, we have a profoundly sick society here. And therefore, do the blues and principles work beautifully well if you sort of do that from birth and you actually are living that sort of active low stress strong sense of community sort of life what happens when you're let's say 50 years old here and you're overweight and you're

insulin resistant you've got type 2 diabetes let's say and because this old here, and you're overweight, and you're insulin resistant, you've got type 2 diabetes, let's say. And because this is where a lot of people are getting huge benefit from something like a low carbohydrate diet, let's say, for example. So do you understand what I'm getting at? Is there a clash there at all between how to fix somebody who is metabolically broken versus someone who grows up in that sort of healthy society from birth? Well, I think if you're sick in England and fat and suffering from a chronic disease, it's probably not your fault. Yeah, I would agree. So this is where i diverge from most other sort of health gurus um most health gurus will say you need to get on a diet um you need to develop the routine and the discipline and the individual responsibility you need to take responsibility for your health and i say that's

all bullshit because america in in england america are pretty parallel in this. In the 1980s, there was one-third the rate of obesity and one-seventh the rate of diabetes than there is now. Now, is that because in the 1980s, people had more individual responsibility or more discipline and they had better diets? No. What's happened is our environment has changed. In every

one of these blue zones, people are living a long time and staying sharp until the very end, not because they have better discipline, not because they're better people than us. Longevity happened to them. They didn't wake up one day when they were 50 and say, well, go darn it. I'm going to get on that longevity diet and live another 50 years. 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? You can't, we just mentioned before that loneliness. There is vocabulary for purpose. You probably write 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, 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

that you don't stress over them. You know what's right and you know what's wrong. So these are all, to my point, the environmental factor. And to get back to your question, if you want to make a healthier country here, you do well to shift the focus from trying to change individual behaviors. How many people live in this country now? Well, in the UK, maybe I think 66 million, I think. Okay. So you're a very effective doctor. I know you've been on TV.

How many lives do you think that you impacted for the long run they're going to be healthier because of you for the long run on your patients i mean the people people i see in my practice yeah well i mean this is actually one of the reasons why i i did the tv shows because you could scale exactly because i realized that um you know i sat sat there one day in my clinic and I looked at my whole list of people I'd seen. I think it was maybe 40 or 46 people in a day I saw that day. And I went through the list and I thought, how many people have you really helped today? And I thought, honestly, there's about 20% of people I think I've really helped. And the other 80%, I don't feel I've done much

for I feel I put a sticking plaster on their problem maybe giving them a pill for to suppress a symptom but get to the root cause of the problem I didn't really feel I'd done much and I thought and over the last years I've realized that about 80 percent of what I see as a doctor in my practice is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles. And so when the opportunity came up to, you know, make my two sort of series of Doctor in the House TV shows, which went around the world, I thought, I remember when I signed up to it, when I got chosen to do it, and when I, before I agreed to do the whole series, I sat down with my wife and I was discussing this. I thought, this is a really big opportunity,

but also a huge amount of exposure. And I thought, is this what we want as a family, you know, to have that level of exposure? And I thought, well, we're told that about 5 million people are going to watch the show each week. And I thought, if 1% of people who watch the show each week make a change, you know, much is that i'm a bit sleep deprived today maybe 10 000 no 50 50 50 50 000 people i thought god well i can i can maybe

and with one show help 50 000 people so sorry to come back to your original question i don't feel i was helping that many people in my practice i think we can help more if doctors get a new new way of being trained. But ultimately, I think, as you are coming to, I'm sure, is that we have overestimated willpower and determination, and we've underplayed hugely the role of the environment. Yes. So even if you were 100% successful for the long run with your 5 million viewers, of getting them to change for decades, you're still only talking about fewer than 10% of the people in this country.

So it is delusional. You see these finger wagging politicians that say it's your individual responsibility to take charge of your health. No, you can't. So in middle America, where I come from, you can tell a single mother, you have to feed your child healthy food. Stay away from the fast food restaurants and the pizzas and the chips and the sodas. And then you unleash her into town and there's no restaurants where you can get a good plant based food. 98 out of 99 decisions, 98 out of 100 food decisions that she will be confronted with

will be bad, will be bad, will be some junk food or some fast food or some chips. So unless we shift the focus from trying to change individual behavior to modifying the environments we live in, we're not going to see the major health improvements that everybody wants and that we see in Blue Zones. And what's really interesting about that is that that's what you have started to do, right? You have taken your research from these five pockets, these populations around the world, and you are trying to bring those blue zone principles into helping cities in America change their environments. It's actually working.

I started my first... This is probably the most interesting thing for me because it's all very well. People will be listening and go, that's great. But you know what? They're active every day. They're doing this. They've got all these communities. If I don't show up, someone comes and knocks on my door. And people might be listening thinking, you know what? That's not a world that I can live in. But you're trying to show that maybe we can devise an environment where that can happen. Right. And we can do it. So 2009, I was given one small city, Albert Lee, Minnesota. It was middle America. They were obese, heavy smokers. And I brought a team in and the team had three different squads. One squad worked with city government and we brought in menus of food policy.

So if you live in a city where chips, sodas, pizzas, and burgers are cheapest and most accessible, you're going to have much more obesity than a city where fruits and vegetables are cheaper and more accessible. That's mostly driven by policy, by the way. Business is part of it. So for example, if you live in a neighborhood where there are more than six fast food restaurants within a half a kilometer of your home, you're about 40% more likely to be obese than you are if you live in a neighborhood where there are fewer than three fast food restaurants. So rather than me going to the neighborhood, knocking on every door and trying to convince every individual in that neighborhood to change

their diet, if I can convince city council to just only allow for three fast food restaurants in this half a kilometer radius, I'll drive down obesity by 30%, way cheaper and more effective. If you live in a neighborhood where there are billboards, is that what you call them here? Billboards? Billboards that advertise junk food, that neighborhood has a BMI or obesity rate of about 10% higher than the same neighborhood where there are no billboards allowed. So I will try to convince city council to get rid of the billboards, to pass an ordinance to get rid of it. So we have 30 ordinances like that, and we don't tell the city, you don't have to do any of them. But we say, if you want us to help

you, we'll help your city get consensus on what will work best here. And then you pick what's most effective and most feasible. We'll help you get it implemented. We do the same thing with a built environment. So if you live in a neighborhood where there's bike lanes in your streets, there are sidewalks, there's public transportation and parks are clean. The physical activity level of that whole neighborhood is 20% to 30% higher. Just because it's that. Because it's walkable.

Because you can walk to the cafe. You can walk to the store. You can walk to your friend's house. By the way, in blue zones, nobody's running triathlons. Nobody is pumping iron or doing CrossFit or any of that crap that we do to try to get healthier. They're keeping their metabolisms running at a higher rate all day long because their body's in constant motion. They're not sitting in their office for eight hours a day and then driving home and then watching four hours of TV. Is that because their lives are a little bit inconvenient in some ways?

That's right. Yeah. And is that not, man, there's so many problems, but is not the root of the root of the root of this maybe that modern life is just too damn easy? Yeah, I think we're a little bit too obsessed with comfort. And much of the things that we get that's gratifying to us is the result of putting forth a little bit of effort. And I think that's true in our day-to-day, uh, day-to-day living. Um, yeah, in blue zones, their houses aren't full mechanical convenience. There's not a button to push for housework and another button to push for yard work and another button to push for kitchen work. They're needing that bread by hand, you know, which could take a half hour. They're grinding their corn. I like to think of

it in terms of nudges and defaults. They're gently, mindlessly nudged into movement every 20 minutes or so. And they don't mind it. It doesn't feel like they're getting up to go do a workout. They're just living their life, but they're nudged it. They're lifting up their own garage door. They're going out in the garden and picking the weeds. They are walking to their friend's house. And they don't think about it, exercise, but it is exercise. It burns calories and it keeps their metabolisms higher all day long. And that's what we have to start thinking about, I think, if we want to get to a healthier country. In these blue zone, well, in these cities, in these neighborhoods in the United States, where you are trying to bring in these blue zone, well, in these cities, in these neighborhoods in the United

States where you are trying to bring in these blue zone environmental concepts, what's happening? Are people getting more active? Are they getting tighter communities? Are they getting healthier? What's going on? So remember I said there are three squads. One squad optimizes policy and we get the mayor and the city manager and the city council on board. A second squad administers a blue zone certification for restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, and schools and faith-based organizations. And our team can usually get about 30% of all those places certified. That means those environments are 30% healthier. People are nudged into moving more in these workplaces and schools to eating less, to

eating more plant-based, to knowing their sense of purpose and living their purpose. And then a third squad works to get 15% of the population. There's some tipping point theory. If you can get 15% of the population to do something, it spreads. To take a Blue Zone pledge, to join a Moai. We actually manufacture Moais, these committed social networks around walking and plant-based potlucks. How many Moai friends do you think you've got?

I have five. Yeah. Serious friends. Same as me. I know it's a slight tangent from what we're talking about, but I think it's so fascinating that technology, this world of Facebook and Instagram, where we have, you know, and Facebook, we might have, I think the average user has maybe five, 600 friends. And this whole, but Moai is something different, aren't they? They're really that tight group that you can rely on when you're down in the dumps.

That's right. You can call them. Yeah. So, and it seems to me, I ask people, because it's interesting how many you have. And think about, I'm honest, it's probably five as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have friends who, you know, a lot more friends I can call and go out and have a beer with or something or a bike ride.

But people who would, you know, a sustained stretch of bad luck, if they'd still be around, I'd say it's five. So, by the way, it's not easy. We're now doing this in 35 cities, and in every city we've worked in, we've seen the BMI or the obesity rate drop single or double digits. And that's really the marker of disease. that just by changing the environment, you are getting these sort of results almost without trying. Of course, there's a lot of work going on behind it, but that individual doesn't realize it. Doesn't realize it. And that has to be the key for, look, I'm all for educating and empowering people, right? I get that. I love writing books to help show people what they might want to consider doing to live healthier and happier lives. But ultimately, it just becomes so much easier when you're not fighting the environment around you. And I've got a question that pops into my head there. And I don't know what you

think about this. As a kid, I went to a school called Manchester Grammar School. and I went and gave a talk there a few months ago when the stress solution came out. And I remember on stage being quite vocal that they have something called an ice cream van that comes in every lunchtime. And I remember it as a kid and I would often go and you'd get your change out and you'd buy the sweets and the fizzy drinks because it was there. And I said quite vocally on stage, I don't think that there is a justification anymore for having that in the grounds, which they still do in the face of such obesity that we're now facing, particularly childhood obesity. I wonder what your view would be. Is it acceptable now in the West? Do you think, acceptable is the wrong word. Do you think it's advisable

that schools have things like ice cream vans in their premises at lunchtimes? So it's more than just a van. So in our Blue Zone, to become a Blue Zone certified school, and this also extends to the city, there's what we call a no-fly zone, 500 meters around the school. There's no trucks or any other fast food vendor. It also extends to vending machines and also snack trolleys that we have in schools. They also agree no eating in classrooms and hallways. That right there will lower the BMI or the obesity rate in a school by about 11%. Because if you let kids eat in hallways and classrooms, what are they eating?

Quick junk food, something they can have really quick, easy, sweets, crisps. Exactly. So if you cut that out, you cut out eight hours of... So we asked this school to pass a policy, no eating in classrooms and hallways. We asked them to pass a policy where you don't sell candy bars as fundraisers. So there's a walk-a-thon or something like that. I want to lock you up and take you with me to my children's schools right now, because I'm so passionate about this. And it almost feels sometimes as though...

I know there's many parents listening to this podcast who may share my view, or maybe may think I'm being a little bit extreme, but I just don't think there's any place for it anymore in society to have, you know, fundraisers at school where everyone, you know, is being fed fizzy drinks and cakes and sweets. I just don't get it. All these sports games, there's a policy that parents can't bring the juice box, which is sugar or the Cokes or the cookies. But the point is we live in a society where you can't limit people's freedoms, but you can give them – we call them policy menus. policy that four ideas that I just reffed, that's four of about 25. And as long as they adopt 16 of them that work for them and their PTA, we'll give them Blue Zone certification. So here's the big idea. We tend to look for silver bullets in health. And the answer is silver buckshot. So we look across the whole life radius, the schools, the restaurants, policy, your home. And we look at all the nudges and defaults that we can implement. And we can usually get 70 or 80 of them working.

And it takes about five years, by the way. It's not quick. It takes five years to get these implemented. But in every city we worked in, now I have huge cities now that have hired me. Fort Worth, Texas, a million people. Orlando, Florida, 2 million people. They just hired my team. I have 200 people on my team, full-time people. And it's very methodic. It's very programmatic. by piece, change the environment so the healthy choice is not only the easy choice, and as many times as possible, it's the only choice. And that's the secret. Yeah, it's so profound what you're doing. Because I think this sort of work is what's really going to move the needle in a big way. It's going to move away from those individual success stories, which are great when people do motivate themselves and they do make a change, but it brings the whole of society up.

Are you getting inquiries from other countries, are people from the UK getting in touch, saying, hey, can we use some of your work here, or is it mainly US-based at the moment? See, UK would work so much better. The problem with the US health system, all the incentives are lined up behind sickness. As Jack Welsh, the CEO of GE once pointed out, the folly of incenting for A and hoping for B. So in the US, all of the incentives, the only way you make money

in America, if you're a pharmaceutical company or you're a hospital or you're a doctor, I hate to say it, is if people get sick. Pharmaceutical companies need you to get a prescription and hospitals need you to rent a bed and doctors need you to come in for a procedure or test. Here in the UK, you have this universalized health where there's actually government. Government wants to see people get healthier here. It's in their best interest. In the United States, it's not so clear. I mean, of course, everybody wants to see people get health, but all the money is lined up behind sickness. So this is all a long winded way of saying it's very hard for us to operate in the environment where sickness is, where money is made, as opposed to in the UK where health is where money can be

made. How much are people sleeping in the Blue Zones? Centenarians are sleeping about eight hours, but north of seven, seven hours. For the duration of their life, pretty much. Yeah. They often have two sleeps. They'll go to bed at sunset and then they'll wake up after midnight and clean their house and go back to bed. Really? Well, that's mostly seen in Nicoya Peninsula. Wow. But yeah, they're sleeping from just after sunset to just before sunrise.

And is napping something that features that? All of them. And there's good evidence too that people who are taking naps have significantly lower rates of cardiovascular disease naps are a good thing hey i'm a huge fan of naps and it just it feels quite in tune with our body's natural rhythm and it's something here i've always struggled with actually because um you know my family uh came over to the uk my dad came over in the early 60s from india and on the days where he wasn't working, he'd always take a nap after lunch. So I sort of grew up with that and thought, you know,

it's just a normal part of what I saw happening. And then as you, you know, become an adult here in the UK and the culture around you, it's almost as if napping is frowned upon. And obviously, the work culture lends itself to, you know, working right through. So it's not that convenient to take a nap. But I've always, I often feel like taking a nap after lunch and you know if i'm not in practice or in my surgery i may actually do that may take half an hour or try and sort of put my head down sometimes i don't fall asleep but i switch off for half an hour yeah and it totally recharges you there's a pile of evidence behind the power of that lowering cortisol levels and lowering stress levels yeah regenerating your brain, regenerating your immune system.

What's interesting is a lot of these big employers now, from what I understand, are actually taking note of that research and saying, hey, guys, we've got – I think Google actually have sleeping pods or – Yeah, or just a nap room. Yeah, which is great. To be Blue Zone certified, if you're an employer, to be Blue Zone certified, you allow your employees to take a nap. You provide a provision where they can take, or at least allow them to figure out how to do it themselves or better yet, provide a room. Yeah. I don't want to move this on from health because what I've realized over the last few years is that, yes, I'm a doctor and I want to help people get

healthier. But for me, it's not about health, actually. It's about happiness, really, because health is a necessary ingredient, I think, to getting the most out of your life. And it's interesting for me that, was it your last book was actually on happiness? Yes. So, you know, you've written about health, you've written about happiness. I think these things are sort of closely intertwined and it's very hard to separate them out. Is that something that you've found? And I guess before we go down this sort of rabbit hole, it's probably worth defining what is happiness? Happiness itself is a meaningless term academically because you can't measure it, but social scientists can measure life satisfaction, which is how you evaluate your life.

And they can measure how you experience your life by asking you to recall the last 24 hours. And they can kind of measure purpose by asking you how often you use your strengths to do what you do best. That's sort of the academic. So these are measured by social scientists, the Eurobarometer on this continent. But it's best measured by the Gallup World Poll, which represents 95% of the world population. the Gallup World Poll, which represents 95% of the world population. So for Blue Zones of Happiness, I worked with Gallup to identify the places in the world where people themselves rate their life's best. And then as an extension, kind of a big data exercise to find out what sorts of things we can do to make it more likely we're going to be happy because 40% of your happiness or lack thereof is genetically driven.

15% is luck, but about 40% is how you play that chess game with your life to optimize the satisfaction you get out of it. This was a cover story for National Geographic last November's issue. What exactly can you do to stack the proverbial deck in your favor so you're more likely to be happy? And that's about all you can promise people. And what are those things? What's the secret? When we want to be happy, we want to be happy we want to be happy for decades not just for the next week so similar to longevity it's about shaping your surroundings so the most powerful thing if happiness were a cake recipe and um the ingredients of happiness is you you need your

necessities you need food you need it's very hard to be happy if you don't have food. You need shelter. You need safety. You need some healthcare. You need meaningful work. You want to marry a nice person. That's really important. You want to have a feeling of giving back. But the most important ingredient in the happiness recipe is where you live.

The ingredient with the most statistical variability. So in other words, that if you're unhappy, the most statistically powerful thing you can do is move. And we know that, and I'll tell you why. This has been replicated twice. When you follow immigrants from Moldavia, which is one of the least happy places in Europe, it's a Soviet bloc country, to Copenhagen. In Moldavia, they self-report on a scale of one to 10 about a four. But in Copenhagen, they self-report about an eight. If you follow Moldavian immigrants to move to Copenhagen within one year, they don't change their sex. They don't change significantly their education level. They don't often change their profession, their marriage status. They don't change their sexual orientation. But within one year, they start reporting the happiness level of their adoptive home. And we've seen this even more powerfully in Canada. Canada is one of the top 10 happiest countries in the world. When you take immigrants from India and

Africa and unhappier places in Latin America, 500,000 of them, and they move to Canada, once again, within a year, they're reporting the happiness level. So it's a bit like when we talk about health in Blue Zones and longevity, you were saying that the environment dictates it, the environment nudges them along so that without thinking about it, they're healthier. And it's almost the same thing that you're saying with happiness. Exactly. And so it's perceived, am I safe?

That's huge. Yeah. Being in a place where you perceive danger. And it doesn't have to be there's a mugger around every corner. It can be graffiti. It can be broken windows. So you move to a place where it's green. Your social surroundings, who you surround yourself with. We know that unhappiness

and loneliness are measurably contagious. So if your three best friends are lonely and showing up at the pub bitching every night, that's going to be contagious. You can reshape that social environment. And that can be really challenging. I've seen this with patients before that you're really helping them to change their lifestyles, really inspire them, motivate them. I appreciate everything you're saying about environments, but as a doctor, when you're one-on-one with a patient who needs help, I can't really wait for the environment to change. I have to do as much as I can to help them, the person in front of me. And often, they do really, really well. And then it's their friend

circle that drags them down. And it can be incredibly challenging for them, especially they don't feel hugely secure in themselves. It could be a real challenge. So what I've tried to do actually, and I have a team of people whose expertise is they've gone into the deep science and they're deeply trained on how to take a bunch of people and help. We don't tell them to dump their old friends. That's to your point. It's impossible. But when you start to help them add healthy and happy friends to their social network, they sense that after a while and the energy drains out of those old unhealthy friends. Completely agree.

But because nobody thinks of health or happiness in terms of actually thinking what it would take to help people reboot their social network to happier, healthy people. And if you do that, you see the results. So that's what we kind of do. Yeah. It is amazing. I'd love to find out more about the work you're doing. Come to Naples, Florida or Fort Worth, Texas. We'd be happy to host you. I will take you up on that for sure at some point. I'm saying it on the podcast. I have to do it. Yes. I hold you accountable. I'll just call you up and leave this part. I'll play record. We'll do a follow-up of this when we're out there. How's that?

Okay. So community environment is key. 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 just taking the time with people to help them identify what they're good at, what they like to do, and what they have to give back. And that takes about two hours. There's a process we take. And we get people, we force them to get into one

phrase. Let's just try it with you for a second. If you had to sum up your sense of birth, the Okinawans call it ikigai, the reason you wake up in the morning, your brand, your personal brand stands for, what is it? It is to empower as many people as I possibly can to become the architects of their own health. Perfect. So very few people can actually say that with meaning or have control over that. But just asking people that very question and making them articulate it and write that down. We even have them put it on a sticky piece of paper and put it on their bathroom mirror so they read it every day. And that is governing some of their daily decisions. That'll make a big difference. Yeah, that's incredible. You know,

even I can see the value of putting it down every day, writing it there, seeing it every day. It's a bit like something I wrote about in the last book on affirmations and how, you know, our brain, our subconscious brain is incredibly powerful in just repeating those positive messages day in, day out. It does start to feed in that information to your brain and it can often change your behavior. But I just wonder how many of these blues owners, maybe they didn't have a gratitude journal by their beds, but I'm guessing some of them would have a daily practice that before they ate their meal, they would give thanks. Okay. So you hit the nail right on the head. So I don't know anybody who journals for mental health for decades, but in Okinawa, there's this notion of ancestor veneration, which means respect for

your elders. In the nicest room in the house, there'll be a shrine. And in that shrine, there'll be a lock of deceased grandmother's hair, a picture of a great-great-grandfather, some artifacts from maybe a deceased parent. And they'll spend 10 or 15 minutes a day remembering where they came from, that they're not just a point in time, but part of a continuum of the ancestors. And to a certain extent, they can relinquish up the challenges and the stresses of their day to their ancestors. And that's a form of gratitude. In the Adventists all pray, they start their day with a prayer. Beginning of every meal, there's an expression of gratitude, thank you, Lord, for our food. That at least makes it at the brings it to the fore of their thinking for a minute so there there's this gratitude but it's part of the daily ritual

that goes on for years and decades it's not just for a you know a few weeks after you heard about this cool idea of the appreciation journal yeah so you got think long-term, both longevity and happiness. And that's the key thing I'm getting from you and your work is that it's not about what you're doing for the next few weeks. It's not about going on that January diet and you knew you. It's the small things you do day in, day out. They may not appear that big in isolation, but they add up over a long period of time. Let me give you an easy one, an easy long-term nudge to illustrate my point. Adopting a dog. We know that dog owners have about 50% the rate of obesity as non-dog owners. Can you guess why? Well, they just have to go and take the dog for a walk every day.

That's right. It's a nudge. And dogs are around for 12, 13 years. So that's a daily nudge. There's also some evidence that when you pet a dog, your cortisol levels go down and you feel loved unconditionally. So Blue Zones would say, go buy a dog. Blue Zones would say, forget the January resolution. Forget running that one marathon you'll do and never do it again. Go buy a dog or adopt a dog.

You're not, from what I've read, a huge fan of marathons. Is that fair? Or shall I put it a different way? Well, instead of putting words in your mouth, why don't I just ask the question? What do you think of marathon runners? Because I believe on the same sort of shape as that question, what do you think of marathons? And do you think walking has become undervalued in Western society? Walking is vastly undervalued. We're way too focused on the automobile and building roads for automobiles. That's why London is such a great template, I think, for the rest of the country, because so much of it is still very walkable. Marathons aren't a bad thing. Until you're probably 40, running a marathon, your body's forgiving,

it's malleable. You can subject your body to the pain and the pounding of a marathon, and there's probably not too many consequences. When you're over 40, it's just dumb. Okay, if you needed to get yourself out of a bad routine to run a marathon, that's fine. But to think that it's going to contribute to your health. If you're over 40 or 50, there are chances of being injured. I have a neuroma right now. I have a neuroma because I overdid it. Basically, I bruised a nerve in my foot because I went on a 60 kilometer hike. I'm 58. That was actually

dumb of me because now it's hard for me to walk. I hope it'll go away. And that's what we're going to talk about after the podcast since you're a doctor. You certainly don't look 58, that's for sure. Thank you very much. A lot of work. No, I'm just kidding. But the chances of injury and also the inflammation that comes from working out, overdoing it for too long is a net negative. It's bad for your arteries. It's bad for your skin. It shrinks your brain. I think you're much better off finding a walking buddy or to use your cool phrase, a Moai mate, and gentle, low-intensity physical activity that you enjoy. That you enjoy. Because if you enjoy it, you'll do it for a long time.

If it's a chore, oh, I've got to train for my marathon in three, you're not going to do it for long. It's the same thing where you mentioned with food, right? It can't be that struggle, oh, I'm doing health this month. Oh, isn't it boring? You know, I can't wait until I finish this health scheme so I 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? That's right. So the Blue Zone solution gives, there's a whole basically checklist of things you can do with your home, your social life, how you set up your kitchen, how you set up your physical activity life, your friends, so that you can set it up once and forget about it.

You put this all in the books in beautiful detail, haven't you? Yeah. And it's all evidence-based. I write for National Geographic where we actually have to pay attention to evidence and facts. And yeah, it follows this basically thesis of mine, which is if you want to live longer or be happier, don't try to change your behavior. Change your environment. Change your surroundings. Right at the start of our conversation, Dan, you said that when you went out to these blue

zones, you mentioned that there were very low technology environments. They were still kneading the bread themselves. They were walking where they had to go. And I guess it's just been sort of going there at the back of my mind throughout our conversation. How much of a problem do you think is, you know, this explosion of technology that now, you know, dictates and is involved with pretty much every aspect of our lives? Is this something that you're concerned about? Well, I think technology, when it comes to diagnosing disease, great, and creating new drugs that will address bad diseases, I'm all for it. I do think we're too obsessed with comfort in

this culture, and it will lead to a diminishing of happiness and a diminishing of health. will lead to place, it'll lead for a diminishing of happiness and a diminishing of health. So I think that the mechanized conveniences that pervade our life, it's probably not that great. I know most of the things I'm proud of in my life took a heck of a lot of effort. My physical fitness comes from putting forth some effort. So I don't think we can turn to technology to endlessly add ease to our life and expect it to make our lives better. Sure. And before we start to wrap this conversation up, one thing that comes up a lot when I go around talking about health is this whole idea of poverty. There's this whole idea of poverty and the fact that areas in the country where they are of lower socioeconomic status tend to have much worse health outcomes than higher socioeconomic areas. So my question is, is the pursuit of longevity a middle-class endeavor? No.

So in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, you have the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality in the world. In other words, they have the least chance of dying at any age after age 50, two and a half times more likely to reach a healthy age 90 than Americans. They are the poorest people in Costa Rica. They spend one 15th the amount we do on healthcare in Costa Rica, their poverty, and they're way healthier than Americans are. Not only that, I worked with a researcher at Stanford who was taking a telomere samples of people throughout Costa Rica. We found this area demographically through numbers. He found that the poorest people in Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica have the longest telomeres. In other words, they're biologically youngest and they have the least amount of money.

So it is a complete myth that you have to have money to be healthy. But what we do have to do for poor people, they are going to disproportionately benefit by us improving their environment, making their environment more walkable, more bikeable, getting rid of the temptations of junk food marketing, getting rid of all the chips and the sodas, and populating that environment with healthy defaults. Yeah. I mean, super inspiring, Dan, to hear that. And, you know, for people who still do think it's all individual responsibility and personal responsibility, you know, I challenge you to go to one of these food deserts. I used to work in the middle of one in Oldham. And I remember Oldham, you probably don't know, is just a bit north of Manchester.

I was working in a practice right in the center, very deprived area, lots of immigrants, lots of people on benefits, on social security. And I would take a long time with them and try to educate them on what they could be doing with their diets and helping them see where they might be going wrong or how they could improve things. And then they were going out literally into an environment which made it almost impossible. Not quite impossible, but very, very challenging to make those decisions. And that's when I realized that this is not built to ask the environment needs to change. Yeah. It may be morally correct to expect people to take individual responsibility, but I will tell you, it is delusional if you think or if any politician thinks they're going to get 55 million people in the UK to take charge of their own health and eat better, move more, get socially connected in the environment they live in. It's just not going to happen. If you are a responsible policymaker, you're focusing on creating a healthier environment in the UK, and we know how to do it now. We just have to pay attention and shift the focus from the behavior change to environment change, and it'll happen. It will happen, absolutely. If you think about it, we're not the first generation of humans now to suddenly become

gluttonous and lazy, are we? We're not suddenly changed that much. We're now suddenly all old, all previous generations were motivated and they were active. No, it's because the environment allowed them to do it without thinking. And that's what we need to move back to. Remember that old experiment in high school? If you threw a frog in lukewarm water, you could turn up the temperature one degree at a time, and it'll eventually boil and die. If you throw a frog in hot water, it jumps out right away.

But we're in that water that's getting hotter and hotter and more lethal without us really realizing it. And that's why we're seeing all these premature deaths. Dan, what have you changed in your own life since you've been on this voyage of discovery about longevity and happiness? I'm mostly plant-based, probably 97, 98% plant-based. I've led a bunch of toxic friends. So a bit of fish? Yeah, I'll eat a little bit of fish. You know, I eat meat maybe once a year or something like that. I'll put some cheese on pasta, but I'm mostly plant-based. And that's based upon what you have seen?

Yeah. There's just no question that the longest-lived people, probably 15 meals out of 16 are 100% plantbased over time you know on on so um so you've changed your diet yeah um for physical you know i've set three world records for so i used to be a fanatic and now i i commute to work on bicycle and i and i live in walkable communities have you have you dialed down the intensity of your exercise? Yeah. It's impossible to lure me into some competitive. I have no competition at all. But I do something every day I enjoy.

I do yoga. I bike. I walk. I rollerblade. I lift weights with my son. That's our way of connecting socially. I'm very clear about my sense of purpose. Like you, I'm very clear on why I wake

up in the morning and it's very hard for me to, it's very hard for somebody to get me to deviate from that. And that makes life a lot easier. You have ballast when times get tough and day-to-day decisions are very easy. Family first is another thing. I put my, I just got done with a week with my son in Croatia. I'm very cognizant of the importance of keeping my aging parents nearby and really putting my kids first and my partner first. I show up to church once in a while. I never showed up in the past. My mom thinks, you should go every week. So you changed quite a lot. I guess it must be hard not to when you study this. It becomes part of your life and you see the research. You meet the people.

It must be very hard not to apply that into your own life as much as you can. Yeah, when you're confronted by living evidence. I've been doing this for 20 years, by the way. We set off on the first Blue Zone in 1999 in Okinawa. So I've been marinating in this stuff. And at first, I ignored it I ignored it, first four or five years, but then you see it over and over again. And to your point, as you were making, 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. And when you pay attention to that, you say, oh, yeah, yeah, I should start doing that. Yeah. Love it, Dan. Look, Dan, thanks for all the work you have done over the years. You've certainly informed a lot of people's views on longevity around the world. Dan, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More, because I genuinely believe, and I've seen it over and over again, that when people feel better in themselves, they get more out of life. I wonder if you could leave some of your top tips for my listeners in terms of what they can think about doing. Of course, it would be better if the environment around them changed. I accept that. But maybe three or four of your top non-food tips, potentially,

for what they can do to actually improve their happiness and their health? Okay. Like finance or weight management, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So if you go to my website, bluezones.com, I have two free tools, one called the Vitality Compass will measure how long you're going to live and how long you're going to stay healthy. That's 33 questions. And the True Happiness test, which will measure not only how you experience your life, but how you evaluate your life. So get a baseline, right? And they'll give you some suggestions on exactly what you should do given your current lifestyle. Number two, 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, lower chance of heart disease, and measurably lower healthcare costs. So find out what you love to do, whether it's walking dogs or taking care of women in better women's shelter, volunteer. I would do an assessment of your five immediate friends. And if they're all sort of people who are eating bacon and jammers, what do you call them? Bangers or whatever the- Sausages. Yeah. Yeah. Then you might bring a couple of vegetarian friends into your immediate social network. And then actually food is important. And I would try a few plant-based recipes until you find a few you like it might be indian it might be southeast asian it might be mexican but if you find a few that

you like and you know how to do it you'll keep doing it for a long time uh if you're single uh get in a committed relationship it's really important adopt a dog really important. Adopt a dog, really important. I think there's an argument for getting rid of all your big plates and having 10-inch plates. I don't know how that translates to centimeters, but eating off of smaller plates works. Yeah, it's very powerful. You've seen some of the research on that, haven't you? Yes. In fact, in our Blue Zone cities and our personal pledge, one thing we ask people to do is get rid of all their big plates because if they're eating off a smaller plate, they're probably consuming 15% fewer calories. I have literally done this at home with wife and kids and it's made a big difference.

Similarly, take the toaster off the counter. The toaster is a reminder to put something in there when you're hungry and most of the crap we put in toasters aren't healthy. I love that. That's a great tip. There's actually good evidence that people who don't have a toaster weigh about six pounds less or three kilos less after two years than people who have a toaster. So it's about doing all these little things that add up. Yeah. Well, Dan, these are great tips. Thank you. I appreciate your time today. Honestly, guys, everything that Dan and I spoke about and a link to all dan's books website all these resources will be on the show notes page which is going to be drchatterjee.com forward slash blue zone so guys do check that out dan i don't know how active

you are on social media people do want to connect with you is there somewhere they can go yeah at blue zones at um at Instagram. We have Twitter. We have very active social media as well. We'd love to. By the way, if you tweet at me or Instagram at me, I will answer every one of your questions. So if you had a question that developed during this interview, I'd be happy to answer personally. Oh, Dan, I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

And I look forward to seeing you again when I come out to one of your Blue Zones in America. I'll be waiting for you. It's been a deep honor. And by the way, just so those of you who haven't had the pleasure of meeting Ranji,

he was the first person I met when I came into this conference. He immediately makes you feel at home. He makes you feel like you're his best friend and he doesn't really even know you yet. So I hope you all have the opportunity to meet in person like I have. So it's been a real great honor and I can't wait to wrap my brain around the stress solution. So thank you for all your work. Dan, thank you so much and until the next time.

All right. That concludes this week's episode of the Feel better live more podcast i really hope you enjoyed the conversation as always do try and have a think about something specific you can take from this episode to apply in your own life immediately is it going to be removing the toaster from the counter or will it be that you take some form of volunteering? What you choose doesn't matter, but I would highly encourage you to pick one thing and try and introduce it into your own life. Please do let Dan and I know what you thought of today's show. As well as the Blue Zones social media channels, Dan has his own Instagram page at Dan Boetner. So do tag Dan,

the Blue Zones and myself on social with the hashtag FBLM and let us know what you thought. Everything that Dan and I spoke about today is available to see on the show notes page, drchastity.com forward slash Blue Zones. Here you will find links to Dan's TED Talk, some articles that he has written, his website, and his many books. So if you want to continue your learning experience now that the podcast is over, do check out the show notes page drchastji.com forward slash Blue Zones. Now I wrote about some of the principles of the Blue Zones, particularly in relation to food, in my very first book, The Four Pillar Plan, which was also released in America and Canada with the title

How to Make Disease Disappear. In fact, this book outlines in detail my philosophy on food. Many of you repeatedly ask me on social media what my view on different diets is, and I do cover that in a reasonable amount of detail in this book. So if you are interested, do check it out. I also plan to do some specific podcast episodes on the topic of detail in this book. So if you are interested, do check it out. I also plan to do some specific podcast episodes on the topic of food in the near future. So do let me know on social media what you would like me to cover. As you heard today, a lack of stress and a strong sense of purpose are critical ingredients to a long and happy life. If you want to know more about this, as well as some simple tips that you

can absolutely apply in your daily lives, I would encourage you to check out my latest book, The Stress Solution, which is available in paperback, ebook, or as an audio book, which I am narrating. If you enjoy the weekly shows, please do give them your support by leaving a review on whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. You can alternatively take a screenshot and share on social media, or you can simply tell your friends and family about the show. I really do appreciate your support. A big thank you to Richard Hughes, the sound engineer, Vedanta Chastity for editing the podcast, and Ali Ferguson and Liam Saunders for the theme tune. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week.

Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest episodes. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time.