Good Life Project - How to Live Longer & Feel More Alive | Dan Buettner

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

What if the secret to living longer wasn't just kale and spin class, but transforming your whole environment and community? After decoding longevity hotspots he introduced as the Blue Zones, Dan Buettner discovered their vitality ensues from ecosystems promoting natural movement, plant-based eating, purpose, community, and stress reduction. These universal experiences shape our ability to build deeply healthy lives, yet we rarely learn from those who've mastered the art - the world's most vigorous centenarians.I'm thrilled to share this myth-busting conversation to glean simple, enjoyable lessons on adding life to our years from the wisdom of history's most remarkable super-agers. Join me and Dan, author of The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer, as we sidestep pitfalls by infusing our lives and communities with insights from the globe's greatest teachers on living well past 100.You can find Dan at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with David A. Sinclair, Ph.D. offering a different and complimentary lab-based take on longevity. Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Blue zones, health and longevity aren't pursued. They ensue from the right environment. If you want to live longer, think about changing your social circle. Think about changing how you set up your home. And when it comes to longevity, there's no short-term fix. There's no short-term strategy of anything you can do for a month or a year. You got to think about things that you'll do for decades or a lifetime and finding that enjoyable thing, pickleball, gardening, riding bikes. If you set up your environment so that you make it easier and unconscious and unavoidable, it's creating an enabling environment to do the things that we know, lower stress, help you eat better,

help you move more, help you connect better, help you live your purpose. That seems to be the silver buckshot. Wouldn't it be amazing to live into your early hundreds, maybe longer, but not just live a long life, but be really present and engaged and well and have everything functioning at an extraordinary level. Have you ever wondered what the longest living communities on earth know about living well into old age that maybe the rest of us don't? Well, my guest today, Dan Buettner, has spent over 20 years decoding the secrets of the world's super agers who don't just live longer, but also thrive with health and happiness past 100.

And what he has discovered may surprise you. And the many scientists whose labs seem to sometimes contradict what's actually happening on the ground in real life. So what if the key to living longer wasn't just about more kale or supplements or the required daily dose of exercise, but rather transforming your environment and community. After decades exploring these remarkable longevity hotspots, he introduced to the world as the blue zones. Dan discovered that their secret wasn't marathon training or spinach smoothies. Instead, their health and vitality ensues effortlessly from ecosystems promoting natural movement, plant-based eating, purpose, community, stress reduction, and more. These are the universal human experiences that affect our

ability to build deeply healthy, long, and rewarding lives. But we rarely learn from those who have mastered the art, who've actually lived it. Instead, we turn to labs for, quote, empirically reviewed data, which has its place, but which also doesn't always reflect what's truly happening in the real world, which is why Dan went out into the real world and has been doing this research for more than two decades, and why I'm thrilled to share this conversation with Dan to learn some of the simple yet powerful lessons from the world's most vigorous centenarians on sidestepping pitfalls and infusing our lives with their wisdom. Dan's new book, The Blue Zone

Secrets for Living Longer, it really transports us inside the lives of history's most remarkable super agers around the globe. I'm excited to glean inspiration on adding life to our years by transforming our environments and communities in simple and enjoyable ways. So join me today for a bit of a myth-busting take on the real keys to longevity, vitality, and health from Dan Buettner. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. I have been someone who's been aware of your work for quite a long time now. And I think we're curious

about a lot of the same questions. For you, the exploration of the blue zones of not just how to live long or not just how to sort of like hack the years, but actually how to live well at the same time has been a big part of your orbit for, I guess, about two decades now. Is that right? Yes. 20 years. But working mostly under the ages of National Geographic. So I try to be evidence-based and underpinned by a certain statistical certainty in both longevity and happiness. How does that show up in your work? Because I know part of what, as you said, a lot of that was under the aegis of NatGeo. So when you're out there, on the one hand, you want to be statistically oriented and science oriented.

But on the other hand, you're out there gathering the stories. And a huge part of your body of work is saying, let's actually go to the people. Let's acknowledge the data and the numbers. But what's happening on the ground? Well, before I even get in a plane and go to one of these blue zones, we spent a year and a half with demographers, first parsing through worldwide census data to find places where people have the highest life expectancy in middle age or the highest centenarian rate. And then our first trip, before we even start looking into factors, we go verify ages.

So especially when it comes to longevity, it's not just anecdotal. It's not just Dan Butner going out and talking with a bunch of old people. We know that these populations are producing statistically longest people in the world. And we know exactly how they're doing that. And we verified birth certificates and baptismal certificates. So we know these people have achieved the outcome we want, which is to live a long time, largely without chronic disease. And so many other longevity hotspots that have come before me, the Vilcabamba Valley of Ecuador, the Hunza Valley of Pakistan, or the Caucasus in Russia, they were all anecdotal and they were debunked.

People weren't living that long. So all of the conclusions drawn from those places are invalid. But in Blue Zones, they really are. And we've done our homework and we feel good about it. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing to sort of be able to blend those two worlds in that way. We've already been using the phrase Blue Zones. For those who aren't familiar with what we're talking about when we're talking about blue zones, deconstruct that a little bit. It's both the geographical term and it's an approach to longevity. So we found the geographical terms, there are five areas. We found the longest of men in Sardinia, the longest of women in Okinawa, Japan. In Ikaria, Greece, we found a population of 10,000 people living eight years longer, functionally without dementia.

Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality in the world. So guys our age and most of the people listening right now, people in Nicoya have about a two or three-fold better chance of reaching a healthy age, 95. And then the United States, among the Seventh-day Adventist population, are living about seven or eight years longer than Americans. But Blue Zones is also an approach. Instead of looking for secrets of longevity in a Petri dish or a test tube or some sort of longevity hack. We found the longest of people where we begin with the assumption that 20% of how long people live is genes on average. The other 80% is something else. So blue zones is a search for that 80% of something else.

These are real people, real populations. And we find clear correlations of these people in these blue zones that, and same trends, no matter where you go, whether it's Asia or Europe or Latin America, this populations have lived a long time. We see the same things over and over. It's those commonalities from which I draw that sort of lessons that I think we should pay attention to if we want to live longer, healthier lives. Yeah. And I love that your essential part of the body of work is that you're looking at populations in completely different parts of the world who have this proven history of longevity

and wellbeing within that longevity. And you're able to see these patterns. And there's no easy way to argue, well, one population communicated this to another. They're disparate parts of the world, and yet there are these commonalities. One of the things you just shared also is that I guess the max life expectancy for typically first world nations is around 93 these days. But the average life expectancy in the US is substantially lower than that, which I think a lot of people would find surprising. Yeah, it's under 80 right now after COVID. And by the way, it's down two and a half years over the last, well, since before COVID. And while the rest of the developed world life expectancy has recuperated and continued to trend up, we lost another half a year in America, which points to the fact that our chronic disease load and the fact that 42% of us are obese, another 3% or 34% of us are overweight.

We're going to continue to see life expectancy dropping in this country. Our kids have a very real chance of living shorter, unhealthier lives than even we did. And it is a catastrophe, especially given the fact that we're spending over $4 trillion a year on healthcare in this country. So the whole system is misguided and corrupt. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. And it feels like a lot of the emphasis, at least in Western culture, especially in the US, has been, okay, so how do we hack this? How do we keep living the way that we're living, but hacking on the margins? Is there a way to not have to sacrifice or change behavior or give everything up, but we can incorporate some sort of technology or some sort of supplement

to try and fix the problem without really dealing with the root of how we live. Yeah, there's two problems with a hack or some anti-aging Nostrum. The first one is there's nothing that has been proven to stop slow or reverse aging. No metformin, no remdesivir, no testosterone therapy, stem cells, nothing's proven. And even if we proved they would work, none of them would add more than a year of life expectancy. That's far, you know, even the theoretical. Meanwhile, we know, for example, simply having four friends around you who you can count on a bad day is associated with about seven extra years of life expectancy over being lonely. We know that eating a Blue Zones type whole food plant-based diet is worth 10 to 13 years

of life expectancy over eating the standard American diet. We know that if you can articulate your sense of purpose, it's worth seven years of life expectancy over being rudderless. So if any of these were, we could put it in a capsule, it'd be a blockbuster drug. But these aren't things you put in a capsule. They're things nobody can really sell you. So they're not marketed and they're not top of mind, but they not only work and there's plenty of evidence underpinning them, but also these are the building blocks of a good life. It's not an injection. It makes us feel good to live our life with friends who care about us. It makes us feel good to wake up every morning knowing there's meaning in our lives and how we're going to spend our day contribute something. It makes us feel good to start our day with a plant-based breakfast

as opposed to bacon and eggs, which make us lethargic. So once again, other than my books, I don't have anything to sell you, so there's not a billion-dollar marketing plan behind Blue Zones, but it works today and it's worked for defined populations for hundreds of years. Yeah. And I want to go into some of the patterns and the behaviors and some of that you've just shared and also explored some of these different locations because I think it's fascinating. But before we get there and before we sort of like completely move away from the conversation around hacks or supplements or meds, I do want to ask you about one thing that

has become, other than AI, I think it has been a huge focus of conversation. And that is, there's a new generation of meds, semaglutide and all sorts of variations of that. Literally just saw an article this morning that said nobody entirely understands how or why these things actually work. And yet when you look at that, demand for these things is exploding. The mechanism isn't entirely understood from what I know. Yet a lot of people are looking at these as like, well, this is finally the thing that works, that won't have to require me to change all these different things. Do you have a take on that? On one hand, we've heard this over and over again, fen-fen for a while, and then we had this for a while. When everybody believed that fat was going to make us sick,

we had this artificial fats. And then when we believed that sugar was driving all kinds of health problems, we had artificial sweeteners. None of them have panned out over time. So maybe these new compounds that curb our hunger might indeed do that. But you know what? Eating is pleasurable. And I can show you how to eat and be full and satiated in an enjoyable way that makes you feel good, that doesn't cost you $1,000 a month, and doesn't require you to jab a needle in your belly, and doesn't come with any potential side effects that we don't know about yet. I just think if people took that effort and paid attention

to these ways of living that made people live a long time happily by the chance. You know, I wrote a cover story for National Geographic on happiness. I was afforded access to worldwide data on happiness, which is technically well-being and positive affect. These blue zones are in the top 10% of the happiest places too, which you're not going to get by jabbing a needle in your belly to curb your appetite. So there's a smarter way in my opinion. Yeah.

I mean, it's such an interesting point that a lot of the behaviors that you're talking about and the patterns that are shared across all these different populations, they're things that may take extra work or extra effort, but the net effect is they actually add to your life. They're things that make you happier and more well, and they help you live that thing we call a good life. I want to talk about Sardinia a bit. This is from what I remember, I think it was one of the first places that you actually dropped into and where a lot of the early ideas around blue zones really started to take root.

I know you said you do a lot of research that drew you there in the first place. When you drop in, you start out with research that says, this is what I think is happening. These are the numbers. Then you drop in, you see on a cultural level and you're just talking to people. What were you not expecting when you showed up there that you actually experienced? I started off on a blueones 20 years ago, and I actually was kind of hoping to find a compound or some sort of diet or some kind of superfood that was explaining longevity. I didn't know. I usually try, first of all, I pull all the available academic research around longevity. So we know the highlands of Sardinia, part of Italy. I want to know

what is different about this area that may give me clues to why people are living longer. Why isn't it the next region over? I talked to historians, I talked to geologists, I talked to climate people, I talked to nutritionists, anthropologists, a whole sort of multidisciplinary approach looking for clues. What surprised me was, you know, I didn't know this before I went, it's a matriarchal society. The rest of the Mediterranean is, you know, it's the dude, the dad that sits at the head of the table and sort of issues orders, runs the ruse. But Sardinia, in the blue zone, not all Sardinia, is a matriarchal society. It's a Bronze Age culture that originally came from what is today the Basque region of Spain. They made their way along the southern coast of France through Corsica

and arrived in Sardinia 13,000 years ago. I know this from interviewing Paolo Francolacci, who's a geneticist, looking at mitochondrial DNA, he can trace the origins. And along with it comes a slightly different genetic makeup, but it's a different cultural makeup. So women are taking care of the kids and they run the garden and they fix the roof and they carry the gun for protection. And a matriarchal community probably conveys more health and safety to kids, perhaps less likely to be violent. Women are carrying more of the stress load and interestingly in Sardinia. So America, for example, for every one male centenarian, there are five female centenarians. But in Sardinia, the proportion is one to one.

For each male centenarian, there's one female. Why is that? Is that because the males have something special going on? Or is that because the stress load of the females is greater and there's not as many centenarians showing up because they're doing the hard work and stressing out? We don't know for sure, but that surprised me. The other big thing that surprised me is it was not the altitude of villages. So in other words, living in mountain villages conveys no extra life expectancy, but it was the steep steepness the pitch of the streets in the village so the steeper the streets the more higher predictability for longevity that these people don't eat fish you think sardinia you know sardines no i met centenarians that only ate

fish five times in their lives because even though you can see the ocean, it's a day's journey away and they didn't have a culture of fishing. They were pastoralists. So they didn't eat fish, which surprised me. I found a type of Blue Zones wine. You can actually Google it. A coninal that had three times the levels of the antioxidants that keep your arteries

from getting inflamed, procyanids. So that interested me. It also interested me to find out that the men most likely to make it to 100 had five or more daughters. Daughters were highly predictive of making it to 100 for men. Sons were not. So that might be because daughters are more likely to take care of their aging fathers than sons are, or it may be a selection bias. So there's lots of interesting things if you're willing to dig deep and also run the risk of digging dry wells. A lot of experts I talked to, I spent afternoons with and nothing came of it. The pitch of the streets is actually really interesting to me, right? Because as you said, there's an altitude thing there that didn't turn out to be sort of like the thing, but the fact that a lot of the streets were pitched at a steep angle, I guess the implication of that is if you're walking up those on a regular basis, basically you're moving your body in a much more intense way and probably getting

closer to that recommended daily allowance of more vigorous exercise just by the nature of the geography of the town. The other finding is nobody exercises, at least in the way that we're marketed exercise, CrossFit, run triathlons, pump iron, yoga classes, Pilates, they don't have any of that. They just have steep streets. And you see 80 or 90-year-olds, they go to church every afternoon. This forthcoming Netflix documentary and in my book profile a woman who every morning she gets up and she goes to the market. It occasions a quarter mile hike up the street to buy her food and then back down. And then at three o'clock

every afternoon, she walks up to church. She doesn't need to go to the gym, you know, and then she spends a half hour a day in her garden. And, you know, if you ask her if she exercises, she'll say no. But if you count her steps, probably 8,000 steps a day, and they're enjoyable. She's walking through her village. It's a beautiful town. She's waving to her neighbors. She's stopping to talk to the bread maker and the butcher and her friends at church. This is where we got to get in America if we want to live longer. It's not what we think when it comes to longevity. I love that notion because I think we're, America, especially such as sort of like an exercise-focused culture.

Well, I mean, to the extent that people actually embrace that, there's so little focus on how do I just bring fun, engaging, natural movement into my day throughout the day rather than how can I just blast out the required 30 minutes of quote exercise so I can check that off the box and make it like just done because that's what I'm supposed to do to live a healthy life, which for many people is really unenjoyable the way that they end up doing it. And also what you're saying, there's a much more enjoyable, just fully integrated way of finding movement in your day that has the same, if not better effect. We don't really think about it that way.

Yeah. Our new exercise has been an unmitigated public health failure. Fewer than 24% of Americans get even the minimum amount, which is 20 minutes of equivalent of a walk a day. And if you look at the data of gym memberships, people start out with a lot of zeal usually after the first of the year, but within about a year, 80% of people are functionally not even using their gym memberships. They say, yeah, I go to the gym, but they really don't. Two more problems. The second problem is we did not evolve sitting on our butts all day long and then a half hour burst of energy. We evolve moving naturally all the time. You wake up in the morning and you have to go gather your food and find wood and start a fire and build our shelter and walk to the neighbor. So we're

genetically hardwired to move all the time. And it's much better for us to keep move every 20 minutes or so like people in blue zones do it, keep your metabolism higher all day long. So you're burning calories, even when you're not quote unquote, moving or exercising. The third problem with it is people who do sedentary and then a big burst of physical activity that creates inflammation. When you work out too hard, the next morning you wake up and your muscles hurt and you're achy and fatigued, lactic acid, that's inflammation. It's the same inflammation that stress occasions or very similar, at least metabolically, wreaks havoc on our arteries, shrinks our brains, wrinkles our skins. Is it good to do it once in a while? Yes, it is. But the notion of twice a week, I'm going to go

crush it in the gym and I'm going to get healthy is wrong-minded. There are studies that show that marathon runners have more calcification in their arteries and they're more likely to die of a heart attack. Minnesota, where I spend part of the year, there is a huge spike in heart attacks after the first snow. People are sedentary all the time. Then they go, okay, I'm going to get some exercise or something like snow and boom, they dropped dead from a heart attack. Big spike. So the right way to do it is regular, low intensity physical activity. Do something you love, but do it every day. And why do I say love? As you pointed out a minute ago, Jonathan, if it feels like a chore, we stop doing it. All but

single digit percentage of people will stop doing it over time. And when it comes to longevity, there's no short term fix. There's no short term strategy of anything you can do for a month or a year. You got to think about things that you'll do for decades or a lifetime and finding that enjoyable thing. Pickleball, gardening, riding bikes. I'm a bike fanatic. I've been doing it for 40 years. I love it. Did it this morning, but I love it. I don't like CrossFit. I never do CrossFit. Every day, I do something I enjoy. Yeah, I love that. I'm in Boulder, Colorado. After 30 years in New York City, we bounced out here about three years ago. And where we are actually in Boulder is I am a seven-minute walk to some of the most beautiful trails and some of the most beautiful mountains in the world.

And I'm basically in there for an hour and a half to two hours, almost every day hiking. And if you had told me when I was living in New York City that, okay, you need to go and quote exercise for an hour and a half to two hours a day, absolutely rejected the idea that I could even find time for that because I was just quote too busy. And then the notion of actually like applying myself to some exercise like that for that amount of time was almost inconceivable. And I'm somebody who's pretty somatically oriented. Here, I can't wait to get out to the mountains. Like I wake up in the morning, first thing in the morning, and I can't wait to put my hiking shoes on. And when I'm out there, I regularly see folks in their seventies and eights out on the trail, not because they're trying to

get their exercise in, they're just enjoying it. And they've been doing it for decades. You strike up conversations and they are just so happy being out on the mountain. And it's just a completely different way of thinking about movement in the context of your life and longevity. And you don't have to move to the mountains to do this. I think it's really about finding what is the thing that actually is joyful movement for you, no matter where you are. I happen to know about Boulder.

I wrote a cover story for National Geographic, which included Boulder. The life expectancy in Boulder and people in Boulder is about 20 years greater than that in certain areas in Kentucky. 20 years. Now, is that because people in Boulder are smarter or have more individual responsibility or are somehow better humans or better genes? No. You live in Boulder. And part of it, as you correctly point out, you have easy access to mountains. But also, I happen to know the streets are designed such that it's faster to bike across Boulder than it is to drive your car. Yeah, true.

When you go to crosswalks, when a pedestrian shows up, all the traffic is stopped so the pedestrian can walk across the street safely and quickly. So this is a city that says to its pedestrians and bikers, we're going to prioritize you and you get more of this natural physical activity. Boulder also bought up what they call your green belt. You probably know about it where you can sit on Pearl Street for lunch or have a meeting there if your business is there and you can walk within a few minutes you can be walking in a green space you don't even have to go up in the mountains and you can be back for your one o'clock meeting now this is an environment that invites and nudges people into physical activity and that's the kind of physical activity that counts because you do it unconsciously every day. And the statistics back me up on that. Yeah, no, completely. It's funny. One of the running jokes when we got here was,

nobody meets for coffee here, you meet for a hike. It's just like that is sort of like the standard for if you want to hang out with friends mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what's the difference between me and you're gonna die don't shoot him we need him y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. One of the other communities that you've explored, I think is interesting also because it exists within the US, but it's also almost like its own capsule within the US, which is the Seventh-day Adventist community in Loma Linda. Curious about your interest in that

community and also your take on how it really sort of exists as almost this bubble within the culture immediately surrounding it. It is definitely a bubble. The National Institutes on Aging has been funding studies for the Adventist epidemiology studies for 30 years. They followed 100,000 Seventh-day Adventists and they look at their lifestyle and then they follow up in a series of years after to see who survives and who doesn't. And they find that Seventh-day Adventists who are adherent live as much as 10 years longer than their California counterpart or the people, you know, this is in Loma Linda, California. You look at just one city over and they're living a decade less.

So you start saying, well, what's going on here? So the Adventists are conservative Christians who distinguish themselves from other Christians that, you know, they tend to emphasize education. They evangelize with health and they celebrate their Sabbath on Saturday instead of Sunday. And they take their Sabbath very seriously. So they become a little bit isolated from other people in the area because their kids aren't playing football on Friday night or Saturday. And they're not going to dance classes and they're not going to movies. They spend that 24-hour sanctuary and time focusing on their family.

They have long church services Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon. They're going to these potlucks where they're meeting their friends and reinforcing those social circles. And then they take a nature walk. Right in their religion or their religious writings is the prescription, take a nature walk on Saturday afternoon. And the power of this is they're doing it for decades or a lifetime. None of this would work very well if you did it once or twice or got excited about it for a few months. They're doing it for a lifetime. Adventists also take their diet directly from the Bible. Genesis chapter 1 verse 26, God has provided all trees that bear fruit and plants that bear seed. And one stanza later god talks about green plants so and nowhere in the garden of eden

does the diet call call for you know sausage or hamburgers or cheese or or egg you know it's basically the diet that god hands down to humans uh is a plant-based diet and the adventists actually adhere to that at higher levels. So you see the same patterns in all blue zones, mostly a whole food plant-based diet. And sure enough, when they're doing it here in America, they're living a longer time. And it provides a really good example. Yeah. The shared food patterns, I think, is interesting. But one of the things that also jumps out at me is that this was one of the communities, and I think it's the only one that I know of, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, that you dropped into over the years, where it is largely

a faith-based community rather than others, where it's more of just a local population. Curious what your take is on the role of, whether you define it as faith, religion, spiritual devotion, a sense of participation in something bigger, whatever it may be, whether that has a central place in this conversation around well-being and longevity. Belonging to a faith-based community, I do. We know that people who show up to church or temple or mosque live four to 14 years longer than people who have no faith. And it might be because people who belong to a faith are less likely to get involved in risky behaviors like drugs or, you know, weird sexual things where you might get a disease. It might be because

they have a built-in social circle. You know shaves eight years off. Every Saturday or Sunday, you see your church or temple buddies, you share something in common. It may be because people show up to church once a week, they can shed stress because they're taking their focus off of their daily woes and focusing on a higher purpose. Or there might be a God treats his or her subjects favorably. I'm not a particularly religious person, but it seems to work. And it works best, by the way, for inner city youth, 20-year-old inner city minority. Probably the most effective public health intervention is to get them involved with faith-based community. And the impact is vast and the cost is very low. And with the Adventists, it's not just their faith, it's the community.

All Blue Zones are somewhat isolated. And that isolation has kept the standard American diet and the fanaticism around electronics at bay. And it's allowed their natural or their traditional culture to continue to exert the healthful influence on people. And the Adventists, as you point out, they're less of a geography blue zone and more of a faith-based blue zone. Loma Linda enabled me to claim it a blue zone because Loma Linda is almost all Adventist. And it's the highest concentration of Adventists. It's where Ellen White, the founder of the religion, lived for most of her life, Loma Linda University. It's really an Adventist culture there. Great plant

based eating restaurants and great co-op there associated with the university. So I called it a blue zone. Some demographers will quibble with me because it doesn't meet the same standard or the same characteristics as other blue zone, but I invented it. So I get to call it a blue zone. Right. The other thing that you shared is that literally part of the daily practice, or I guess the weekend practice at least, stepping into nature as nature walks. And it seems like you see this regular immersion exposure and the embrace of nature in pretty much and they probably think, well, you know, like city, you know, like just urban environment, you know, like all sorts of stuff. But as you actually write about and describe, they've invested very heavily for decades in really making a lot of movement within green spaces available to the population. Yeah.

So I've named Singapore as a blue zone 2.0 because unlike the rest of the blue zones that just had a culture that's evolved over centuries, Singapore in the 1960s was a fishing village. And life expectancy was about a quarter of a century lower than it is today. And the government there led by Lee Kuan Yew. Lee Kuan Yew gets a lot of ridicule for caning and his laws against gum chewing and spitting, etc. But I interviewed him. He was fluent English, went to Cambridge, imbued with values, Confucian values of order, of harmony, of respect for elders respect for authority and he went about building a society based on these values and health is also was a big value and um the green spaces were largely he didn't go about putting green spaces in because well there's association between green space and higher well-being no you know confusion values that you create a harmonious environment by mitigating traffic and having more parkways and parks and reservoirs and green spaces. About 40% of the island, even though it has about the highest population density in the world,

is full of green spaces. Traffic became a problem very early on in the 1970s. It's a problem in this country. Instead of letting traffic run wild and succumbing to lobbyists or business interests like we do in the United States, he said, you know, people are healthier. It's more harmonious if they're walking. So he taxed the heck out of a car. If you want to buy a Honda Civic, be ready to shell out about $100,000, most of it's taxes.

You're going to pay very high gasoline. They don't subsidize gas there. Pay about over $10 a gallon for gas. You're going to pay heavy tolls to go into the middle of the city. And I know people listen and say, oh, my God, what a nightmare. I can't drive. But on the other hand, nobody is more than about 300 meters away from a fast, efficient, safe, pleasant subway, which is cheap, get you anywhere in the island fast, no parking, no traffic, no waiting on the

freeway, no traffic accidents, very little chance your kid's going to get hurt in an accident. And instead, also, there's going to be very pleasant walkways, covered walkways, tree line walkways, walkways along beautiful rivers where you can get this unconscious physical activity, you can see your neighbors, you can enjoy the greenery. We know from our happiness research, the most unhappy thing we do on a day-to-day basis is our motorized commute to work. And Lee Kuan Yew effectively eliminated that and created money in the coffers to build a beautiful built environment. That's just one of the many facets, but it's something that we don't understand in America.

We make the same mistake over and over and over again by prioritizing the automobile over the pedestrian. Yeah. It's so interesting how we make just completely opposite decisions. When you think about what I guess you would describe as government-sponsored or social programs that seem to be very intentional in addressing a lot of different things. You write about a program called Healthy 365, mobility applications, programs to help people quit certain health-deteriorating habits, programs to bring wellness into the workplace, programs to bring social support to youth. And it seems like large-scale investment

in supporting the types of behaviors that would lead to not just a better day-to-day life, but better longevity. Well, as I mentioned before, in this country, our current healthcare spend per year is $4.4 trillion. To put that in perspective, the value of all farmland in America is $3.7 trillion. So we spend more than the value of all of our farms. And 96% of it is in mopping up the mess from chronic disease, from diabetes, heart disease, cancers, many of which are avoidable, dementia, strokes. They're just putting a slightly higher percentage of their healthcare spend in prevention. And it's the best money you'll spend. There's about a 16-fold return on the prevention dollar as opposed to

the sick care dollar that we spend money on. The problem in this country is all the, in the healthcare industry, all the incentives line up behind sickness. Nobody makes money if you stay healthy. Pharmaceutical companies are going to lose money because you're not getting a prescription. Doctors are going to lose money because you're not coming in for procedures. Hospitals are going to lose money because you're not renting a bed. So their lobbyists are going to be out in throngs looking for support for making sick people sick. And there's no lobbyists out, or very few lobbyists who are saying,

let's make streets more walkable. Let's curb the access for junk food. Let's stop subsidizing cheap grains and feedlot livestock and processed food, which we de facto do in this country. And we hope for health in this country and we get sickness, the folly of incenting for A and hoping for B. One of the other populations I know you've been studying for years is Okinawa, which is interesting because it seems like it's also, and you write about this, the generation that you the history of the world and now they are the least healthy of 47 prefectures in japan why is that that's since i started studying that place

i first went in 1999 so it's been 24 years i've been going there and i've seen it deteriorate largely because there's an enormous american base there. And around that base is a forest of fast food restaurants, McDonald's, the biggest A&W root beer stand in the world. And there's like even an American town there where it's just pizzas and burgers and all of the sickness that we're exporting to the rest of the world through our processed food and our burgers and our junk food. You know, yes, there's a certain romance around that food. Sure, it's okay as a treat once in a while, but the ubiquity of it and the daily nature of it is killing us.

And it is created in Okinawa, a place with one of the highest rates of obesity, one of the highest rates of type 2 diabetes. Increasingly, they're making the same mistake that Los Angeles made and Miami and Tallahassee, where they're paving over their cities with multi-lane freeways, which are loud and spew pollution and displace these peaceful walkways. It's the wrong way. And you can look at it and say, oh my God, this place is going to hell. And then you look at the numbers and sure enough, it is. It's no longer a blue zone. It's amazing in a sad and unfortunate way to see how quickly

generations of behavior and a certain outcome, many, many generations can be flipped on its head, literally in a matter of a handful of years. One of the things I'm curious about though, in Okinawa in particular, because this was one of the places where in your early work in the Blue Zones, one of the things that you identified as being a potential driver of longevity was what seemed to be a fairly universal sense of purpose of, like know, like race on debt, like you use the word icky guy, right? And that is one of the things that you identify as sort of central to being qualified as a blue zone. I'm wondering if you see a shift in that, along with more of a shift in the lifestyle behaviors in that population.

So I want to make a few things clear. So along with universal purpose, there's universal health care in all blue zones, by the way, which we don't have in America here. Everybody has access to basic primary care in all blue zones, which we don't have, except for Loma Linda. They don't. They're Americans, too. Yes, the notion of ikigai was for sure prevalent among the last generation and before that.

There's no word for retirement in Okinawa. In Okinawa, instead, the sense of purpose imbues their entire life. People say lifestyle all the time. Blue Zones, do people have a better lifestyle when it comes to better discipline or better diets or better exercise or better individual responsibility? They don't pursue health at all. They don't take supplements. They don't go to CrossFit. They just live their lives. And the big universal insight, the big idea that I hope Blue Zones conveys, that if you want to get healthier, get happier, or live longer, don't try to change your behavior. You'll fail in the long run. You look at the recidivism curves of diets, of exercise programs,

of even pharmaceutical adherence. People can pay attention for a number of months, but within a year or two, you lose about 90% of people who try to change their behavior. Behavior change is a great business plan. It's a great way to sell diets and pills and so forth. It doesn't work. In blue zones, health and longevity aren't pursued. They ensue from the right environment, which goes back to when I was talking about walkability. People in Okinawa never exercised. They lived in walkable communities. Now you displace that walkable community with a superhighway, boom, you've just taken away their major source of physical activity, paved over their garden or whatever.

It used to be the food environment in Okinawa, you ate largely from your garden, sweet potatoes, tofu, bitter melon, wonderful stir fries. And a lot of people had a small industrial garden that was big enough that it produced food for the local farmer's market. So every little neighborhood had a farmer's market. That was the food environment. Now you displace that with a KFC and a McDonald's, and all of a sudden, people are naturally buying burgers instead of sweet potatoes, and their health spirals down. It's not because the Okinawans all of a sudden lost their sense of purpose or they somehow became lesser people. It's their environment change. And in America, anybody listening here, if you want to live longer, think about changing your social circle. Think about changing how you set up your home.

Blue Zones has lots of strategies for optimizing your social network, your home, your workplace. And my main business, my daytime job since 2009, we have a team of over 200 people. We get hired by cities and insurance companies to go into cities and lower the BMI, not by trying to convince everybody in that city to eat more vegetables and walk more, but by changing their environment so it becomes easy or unavoidable. So far, 71 cities have hired us and take Fort Worth, Texas. It was cow town. We've helped make it more plant-based, more walkable, more purpose-driven, more connected. And in the five years we were there, we saw the obesity rate drop by 3% while the rest

of Texas got heavier. We didn't try to change people's minds. We changed their environment. And that's the big idea I want to leave people with. Yeah. And that's huge. I mean, if you go into it, accepting the fact that just sort of like in general, we're horrible at sustained self-regulation, but if we literally change the environment that we're in so that the only choices are really just better choices, then it sort of takes the whole notion of willpower out of the equation, which makes it better and easier for everything and everyone. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required,

charge time and actual results will vary. May mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you're gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what the difference between me and you is you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk Flight Risk. One of the things that we haven't talked about that I'm really curious about is stress. We live in a day and age where most people report being under some level of sustained stress. And of course, the last three years were a super high level stress for everyone. But even before that, and now as we emerge from it, what's your take? And this is actually, I know you included this in sort of like the nine critical things list that you write about is downshifting stress. But when we think about behavior change and stress versus environment

change and stress, like how do these things all work so that we feel like we effectively really can reduce stress? Because I think a lot of people think, okay, I'm under stress. I feel it. I know it's doing harm to me, but they don't really see a way out of it. Well, there's not a silver bullet, but it is silver buckshot. We know driving in traffic is stressful. We know what it's stress inducing. So if you figure out how to walk to work, bike to work, or even take public transportation you take that stress out we know that socially interacting with people lowers stress so making time to reshape your social circle so you have four or five people who care about you who live nearby who meet with you regularly that takes that stress out of we know eating meat and smoking contribute to stress

producing chemicals so taking those out of the diet so living in a healthy food and tobacco environment is going to risk that we know people take the time to know their sense of purpose wake up in the morning they know exactly what they're going to do they take the existential stress out of their day like oh my, what am I here on earth for? What am I going to do today? That becomes much clearer. Taking a nap lowers cortisol. So having a place at work or at home where you can go up and take a nap.

All of these things incrementally work when it comes. Taking the electronics out of your kitchen will lower stress, lower cortisol levels when you're eating. Once again, being a little disruptive by saying the answer is only changing your environment. There's a behavioral component and, you know, single digit percentage of people can get by on raw discipline and presence of mind. But some folding, some mix of the right education, the right intention is good. But if you set up your environment so that you make it easier and unconscious and unavoidable, it's sort of creating an enabling

environment to do the things that we know, lower stress, help you eat better, help you move more, help you connect better, help you live your purpose. That seems to be the silver buckshot. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. Rather than looking for that one big thing, what are all the little things that are probably a lot more accessible also to a lot more people? If you have a list of 20 different little things that you could do, a lot of people could look at that and say, yeah, I could do this, or I could do that, or I could make this shift or change this in my environment rather than saying, what's the one thing that's just going to completely turn everything around,

which for a lot of people probably doesn't exist. We're having this conversation. You've got a new book coming out. And by the way, the photography in the book is stunning. And for those who are thinking, what are the things that I can do? What about eating? You offer a lot of great roadmaps advice, like ingredients, things to eat incentive for you? What do you want to convey by taking people on a visual journey that is different than the story that you've been telling for the last two decades? Well, 2005, when I wrote the cover story for National Geographic, we had 40 million readers. It's down to about 1 million readers now. When I wrote my first book in 2008, a lot of people read books. I sold a million books. Now, the way people are consuming stories is through Netflix and social media.

So I've switched to these mediums. I mean, the forthcoming book, The Secrets of Living Longer, represents 20 years of work. It looks and reads like a very long National Geographic article. It's full of our best National Geographic photography, brings up to date all five blue zones, and reads like a manual for taking this wisdom and putting it to work in your life. But at the end of the day, you know, if I sell 100,000 copies these days, it'll be big.

Netflix has about 300 million subscribers worldwide. It's translated into 40 languages. We got the same crew that did Chef's Tables. So it was visually gorgeous to shoot it. They had low-rent talent leading it. That was me. But other than that, it's a phenomenal, phenomenal show that takes people on the journey that I've taken over the last 20 years reveals

the secrets and shows how to put those secrets to work in your life in a way where you can sit down with a bowl of popcorn please don't put butter on it but roll popcorn and um you know have four enjoyable evenings and pretty much download what took me 20 years to find yeah curious for you just on a personal level, what it was like for you to travel to these different places, sort of like rather than on your own, sort of like a personal quest and inquiry and on more of a journalistic approach,

literally with a whole crew and capturing this whole thing. I'm curious what that experience was like just for you personally and how it was different. Well, I took some satisfaction in being able to shine the light on these these cultures that deserve attention and um celebrate them and they enjoy it i find that most people live 80 90 100 years they love it telling their story to interested people but i did learn it's a it's a hell of a lot harder to make TV than it is to watch it. It was a fairly grueling five months, 12 hour days, but ultimately very satisfying. And I learned a new way to tell stories, which is, you know, through TV. But yeah, I'm proud of it. I

hope people watch. Yeah. I'm excited for that to meet the world as well. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation in this container of good life project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Wake up knowing your place in your community, being able to contribute to it, to be able to walk, to go get you a cup of coffee, to do something active that you enjoy, to have time with your best friends every day, to be nurturing of your family and of those friends, and to eat good food, plant-based, and have all those. You not only enjoy life, you'll have a lot of life. I want to just mention that if any of your listeners have more questions, they can direct

message me at Dan Buettner on Instagram. I answer all questions people ask. I know, Jonathan, you and I feel like the two of us have had this conversation together, but I know a lot of people out there took an hour or however long to pay attention. And I take it as a real honor that they would take this time out of their day and spend it with us and learn about the Blue Zones. So thank you. Thank you all. Thanks. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation that we had with David Sinclair. Thanks. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable,

and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you wanna help navigate this thing called life

a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him!

Y'all need a pilot?