Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Longevity Secrets (And Controversies) From The Blue Zones | Dan Buettner

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Insights from the places on the planet where people apparently live the longest and healthiest lives.Dan Buettner is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, and journalist. He has written a series of bestselling books, including The Blue Zones of Happiness and The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes for Living to 100. He is also the host of the Netflix show, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones.This is the kickoff official interview of our Get Fit Sanely series. (If you missed it, go back and check out the informal chat I posted on Friday with lead producer, DJ Cashmere). This is the third time we’ve done Get Fit Sanely, and in this go-round, we’ll be covering not only longevity but also ozempic, exercise, and the Buddhist case for laziness. In this episode we talk about:The origin story of the Blue ZonesThe nine common denominators, or Power Nine, to longevity.The surprising information about much maligned foods such as pasta and breadWhy trying to pursue good health can actually work against youWhy the single most important factor in longevity isn’t advertised on instagram Tips for integrating Blue Zones wisdom into your daily life, including designing a life where you move more naturallyAnd some of the critiques and controversies surrounding his workRelated Episodes:Get Fit Sanely PlaylistSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/dan-buettnerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast of Dan Harris. Hello everybody, how we doing? Today we're going to dive into the secrets and also some of the controversies of the so-called Blue Zones. If you haven't heard of them, these are the places on planet Earth where people apparently live the longest and healthiest lives. My guest, Dan Buettner, has played a huge role in exploring and publicizing and popularizing the Blue Zones.

Dan is an explorer himself. He's a National Geographic Fellow and a journalist. He's written a series of best-selling books including The Blue Zones of Happiness and The Blue Zones Kitchen and he's the host of a very popular new show on Netflix called Live to 100. In this episode we talk about the origin story of The Blue Zones, the nine common denominators or the power nine when it comes to longevity, the surprising information about much maligned foods such as pasta and bread, I found that part especially electrifying.

Why trying to pursue good health can actually work against you sometimes. Why the single most important factor in longevity is not advertised on Instagram. Tips for integrating Blue Zone's wisdom into your daily life, including designing a life where you move naturally, and some of the critiques and controversies surrounding Dan's work.

Just to say, this is the official kickoff interview for an occasional series we run on this show called Get Fit Sanely. If you missed it, go back and check out the informal chat that I posted this past Friday with my lead producer, DJ Cashmere, who's overseeing this series. This is the third time we've done Get Fit Sanely, and in this go-round we'll be covering not only longevity, but also Ozempic, exercise, and the Buddhist case for laziness.

We'll get started with Dan Buettner right after this. But first, a little BSP or blatant self-promotion. I want to let you know that we just restocked the merch store over on danharris.com. We've got sweatshirts, t-shirts, baseball hats, tote bags. Some of them are nice and clean and just say 10% happier. And some of this stuff has my signature profanity on it. I also want to say that my wife, Dr. Bianca Harris, oversaw all of the stuff has my signature profanity on it. I also want to say that my wife Dr. Bianca Harris oversaw all of the aesthetic decisions on this so you can have some confidence that the stuff is good, high quality, looks good, etc. etc. Go check it

out, shop.danharris.com, shop.danharris.com. Also want to tell you about a course that we're highlighting over on the 10% Happier app. It's called Healthy Habits. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal and the meditation teacher Alexis Santos. It's great stuff. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% dot com. That's one word all spelled out. Hello, I'm Emily. And I'm Anna. And we're the hosts of Terribly Famous,

the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And just a warning, our latest season will feature a lot of accents. Can I just check what accents? Because... I can't tell this story without going all in. OK, I'm scared to ask, but can you give us a clue?

Why I, man? Ooh, aunt and or death? I'm afraid not, and it's not Alan Shearer either. I am talking about a young woman, plucked from obscurity, who rose to become the Neershyn sweetheart. A woman who's had a lot of surnames? And has ditched them all to become just Cheryl. Love it.

Girls Aloud fans, strap in. We're going to follow Cheryl from her Girl Band Glory days, getting together with Ashley Cole, and the many scandals and humiliations that followed. Not to mention a near-death experience. Oh, she's been through a lot. And she has needed every ounce of her Northern grit to see her through. I promise you it's going to be an emotional rollercoaster. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on

Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wdoch saga. Last year, we also started a second weekly show, Shorthand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting because it's our show and we can do what we like. We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood, the gruesome history of European witch hunting, and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction.

Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior. Like, can someone give consent to be cannibalized? What drives a child to kill? And what's the psychology of a terrorist? Listen to Red Handed wherever you get your podcasts and access our bonus short-hand episodes exclusively on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondry Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app.

Dan Buettner, welcome to the show. It's a delight. That's just to say I'm even more than 10% happier being here. I'm happy to hear that. We'll see how you, we'll come back to you at the end and see where, what the percentage is. So let me just ask you about the origin story of the Blue Zones.

How did this whole thing get started? In a previous business, I was solving two mysteries a year. I had a whole staff, 14 people, and we had a big subscription base. And I was looking for a good mystery to solve. Most of our mysteries had been like, why did the ancient Maya civilization collapse or did Marco Polo really go to China? We were hired by the Japanese government to find a mystery in Japan and we looked at bronze age cultures and so forth. It was actually my brother Nick who was working for me at the time, stumbled upon a report from the World Health Organization that

showed that Okinawa, Japan was producing the longest lived disability-free people in the world. And I said, aha, now there's a good mystery. And in 1999, we did our first expedition there. We were there for about 10 days. And I was absolutely hooked because I was meeting people in their 90s and 100s that were functioning like 60-year-olds in the United States. And of course, in a facile way, I was able to look at how. But when I was out of that business, I sold it and went back to National Geographic with some ideas and suggested that if there are long-lived people in Okinawa, there must be long-lived people in Europe and Asia and maybe Latin America or even Africa. And I got an assignment back in the days when National

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

And that is a very long answer to a simple question. That was not a long answer. You can go longer if you want. Essentially, you and your team found what are now called blue zones, which are areas around the planet where apparently people are living longer. I would go beyond apparently. It is a mathematical fact that they have lived longer over the last century and a half. Working with demographers, we're able to look at swaths of the population, say, 100 to 150 years ago, look at a swath of birth and follow those births for

100 years or more, and correct for immigration and emigration, and find statistically, empirically, where people are living the longest. And that's what Blue Zones are. Whence the name Blue Zones? What does that have to do with? My colleague in Sardinia, Dr. Gianni Pess, he identified the Sardinian Blue Zone, and he did so by going village to village, looking at birth

records since about 1850 and doing this exercise, counting how many centenarians have lived in these areas over the last 150 years. And ones that met the highest criteria, he put a blue checkmark. And in the Nauro and Oléosta provinces of Sardinia and the highlands and central highlands, there were so many blue checkmarks that it created a blue blob. And he referred to that area in the map as the blue zone. And it's between five and eight villages. It changes from year to year, but the same region where you have about 10 times more male centenarians, proportionally speaking, than you would expect to see in a similar population in the United States.

So you've been at this for about 20 years now, am I correct? Yes. How many blue zones are there and what are the commonalities? Five blue zones. The longest lived males are in Sardinia, Italy. Longest lived females, Okinawa, Japan, in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica.

You have the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality. Also very high portion of centenarians there. In the United States, it's among the seventh day Adventists in and around Lomolinda, California, but to a certain extent, all Adventists. And then our last blue zone was in Ikaria, Greece, very close to the coast of Turkey where you have people living about eight years longer with about half the rate of cardiovascular mortality and almost no dementia, which makes it an interesting outlier among even the blue zones. And is there something or some things that the people in all of these places are doing

that might be instructive for the rest of us? Yes. So there are nine common denominators. I call them the power nine. And then there's one organizing principle, which is really the important thing to pay attention to. But in general, people who are living a long time are eating mostly a whole food plant-based diet, between 90 and 100% whole food plant-based. It's a very high carbohydrate diet.

About 65% of the caloric intake comes from things like whole grains, greens, tubers, nuts. Cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. And the reason we know this is because we've found dietary surveys that go back about 100 years from all five blue zones, 155 of them in total. And under the aegis of Harvard University, we did a meta-analysis. And if you want to know what a 100-year-old ate to live to be 100, you have to know what he or she was eating as a little kid, and middle-aged and newly retired. So it's mostly whole food, plant-based. They have vocabulary for purpose. We know people with a sense of purpose live about

eight years longer than rudderless people. They have sacred daily rituals that help unwind the stress and the ensuing inflammation, which is part of the human condition, the Okinawits ancestor veneration, the Adventist pray several times a day, the Ikariens and Costa Ricans take a nap, but just a way to lower that inflammation load that accumulates with the stress and the worry and the hurry of our lives. And by the way, their lives are no different than ours. They worry about the same things that we do. They drink a little bit every day. And I'm very familiar with the recent research suggesting that no level of alcohol is safe. But I can tell you people in blue zones, over 85% of people make, especially

males making it to 90 or 100 drink every day of their life. Most of the time it was homemade wine, but nevertheless they're drinking. They have unconscious strategies to keep from overeating. They don't have electronics in their kitchens. They eat with their families. They tend to front load their day with calories and taper off by late afternoon or early evening, so they're de facto 14 hours of caloric restriction a day. They tend to prioritize family, which doesn't sound very sexy, but if you keep your aging parent nearby as opposed to putting them in a retirement home. It conveys somewhere between two and six extra years of life expectancy. They invest in their relationships. Married people live longer than non-married people. They invest in their children so that they have higher survivability

and lower mortality rates. They tend to belong to a faith. People who go to church, temple, or mosque They tend to belong to a faith. People who go to church, temple, or mosque live somewhere between four and 14 years longer than people who have no religion. A number of reasons for that, but it's a demographic fact. And then they tend to pay a lot of attention to their immediate social circle. Whereas in America, we have this loneliness epidemic, somewhere between 20% and 30% of Americans are lonely. That's not something people in Blue Zone suffer from. In many places, it comes along with growing up. You're just automatically put in a meaningful social circle. But in the absence of that, different social constructs bring people together in semi-permanent ways.

So they're not suffering from the loneliness. Those are the, I would say the common denominators. It's fascinating. Okay, as a construct or a structure for the next little while, I would suggest I want to come back to these Power Nine and really dive into them much more deeply. Before we do that, though, let's go through the individual blue zones and hear a little bit about what you've learned in each of these places, and then we'll take a deeper dive

into the Power Nine. How does that sound to you as a structure? Works for me. Okay. Sure. Okay. So you mentioned Sardinia. It's the mountains, if I've got it correct. And what's going on there? What's their lifestyle like? And what can we learn from that? So Sardinia is unique among the five blue zones in so far as that the people there are actually a Bronze Age culture, originated in what is today Spain about 13,000 years ago and moved their way through southern France and probably arriving in Sardinia about 11,000 years ago. And unlike a usual Mediterranean population where you have

a patriarchal society, The people in the Blue Zone have a matriarchal society. In other words, women are the heads of the household, they manage financial affairs, they're usually behind the defense of the village. They just have a different set of practices, ancient music. They tend to be poets, about 20 times more poets among males than you would expect to see in an equivalent population in the United States. Until very recently, they ate a variant of the Mediterranean diet that was very high in fava beans. Before that, which is until about 1950, so still when first 30 years of a centenarian's life, they were eating mostly bread, sourdough bread, cheese, Pecorino cheese, and then garden vegetables. And then

about 1950 or 1960, the roads came and their diet changed again. They're a very poor area. So they relied even more heavily on their gardens and pastas. I mean, a lot of the, you know, we're scared to death of carbs from pastas and the longest lived people in the world ate it. But 65% of their caloric intake until about 1960 came from pastas and breads, which will surprise a lot of people. They have this fanatic regard for the family and for neighbors. The reason is because throughout history, even though they spread throughout the entire island of Sardinia, when the successive waves of people, the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Romans, they were always subjugating these people. And by about the time of Christ, this founder population, the Blue Zone population,

realized that they were just better off retreating into the mountains and setting up almost fortress type towns and sticking together against outsiders. They developed a reputation for being barbarians. In fact, their region was given the name Barabacha, which has the same root as the word barbarian, and became very feared people. But in fact, they're lovely people. They defend themselves as needed. As a result, they became very inward-focused and remote. Things didn't evolve as quickly there. The language they speak is the language most similar to the Latin the Romans spoke 2,000 years ago. They still sing the same songs. You still see the same sort of dress people wore in the Middle Ages during festivals. Until very recently,

their diet hadn't changed. I wrote this book called The Blue Zone's Kitchen, where I went and sat in old ladies' kitchens and I captured their recipes. And when I asked them what the origin of these recipes were, they said, it's always been with us. These are recipes that evolved over the millennia. So they're living this very ancient way of life and the mountains have helped keep out the forces of the standard American diet and modernization, which we've seen always corrodes the health and longevity aspects of Blue Zones. I'm keying in, perhaps unsurprisingly, to the pasta and sourdough bread part of this. I love pasta and bread, and I don't deny myself pasta or bread, but I think a lot of people do,

and there have been times in my life where I did. So why do pasta and bread have such a bad reputation, and is it entirely undeserved? Well, there are some theories that American pasta and bread contain glyphosate because of the pesticides used on wheat fields in America. Also, it's the process. When you have a true sourdough bread as is what is consumed in Sardinia. It's always slow fermented sourdough. So it's leavened not with the industrial yeast, but rather lactobacillus. And in that process of that slow fermentation, about 98% of the gluten is metabolized, so it's very low gluten bread. And there's been at least two studies that show when you eat a real sourdough bread, it lowers the glycemic load of your meal by about 25%. In other words, the sugars are absorbed much more slowly, which reduces the insulin spike

and also makes it more likely those calories will be used for energy throughout your day rather than, you know, being packed on your backside. Pasta similary, the pastas there are made with the durum wheat rather than cheaper versions. So, once again, they have a lower glycemic load. But also, when you mix a pasta with a tomato sauce and olive oil and perhaps some protein, usually it's beans,

by the way, traditionally speaking, you lower the glycemic load even further. If you eat a piece of Wonder Bread or two, it metabolizes almost immediately into sugar and blood sugar spikes, insulin spikes, bad for you. But you eat a piece of sourdough bread or pasta with the tomato sauce and beans, pasta and fagioli, you don't get this spike. And in fact, bread and pasta have important amino acids, which are building blocks for protein. When you take a bread or a pasta and you couple it with a bean, it gives you all the amino acids necessary if you're human sustenance. In other words, it's a whole protein.

So it's the way people have been processing these foods and combining them that makes all the difference in the world. The devil is truly in the details when it comes to pasta. So what's your policy on pasta now after all these years of study? You know, I'm half Sicilian. I grew up on pasta and I still last meal of my life. If I have anything to say, it's going to be my pasta with my grandma Palermo's pasta sauce. I guess you want a universal question.

My policy is you should feel free to eat it. I'll give you another interesting statistic. In Northern Italy, in 1980, about 8% of people were suffering from obesity. I ate tons of pasta up there. Meanwhile, in 1980, about 15% of Americans were suffering from obesity. In the ensuing 40 years, the obesity rate in the United States has almost tripled. 42% of us are obese. In Northern Italy, it's still 8%. And they eat pasta with every meal. So pasta is not the problem. Something else is the problem. And what is it? Well, if you want to need a bottom line,

it's the fact that 70 or 80% of what we eat is processed food. We eat somewhere around 240 pounds of meat a year, which would fill a bathtub. Whereas in Blue Zones, they're eating about 20 pounds of meat. They're eating maybe three eggs a week, very high quality, low quantity cheese, very little fish. Like I said, they're eating mostly a plant-based diet as opposed to our diet that's far too heavily reliant on animal products and processed foods with added sugars and flavor enhancers, et cetera. Okay. So that's sardinia.

I'm sure there's more to say, but in the interest of time, I want to move through the rest of these. You mentioned Loma Linda, California, which is a Seventh-day Adventist community. What's going on there? They're conservative Methodists who distinguish themselves from other Christians in that number one, they evangelize with health. Many of the biggest hospitals in America, down here in Florida, for example, are run by Adventists, and they run very well, by the way. But they also celebrate their Sabbath not on Sunday, but as the Bible prescribes, the seventh day, which is Saturday. And they take it very seriously. It's been described to me by them as a sanctuary in time where 24 hours from Friday night until

Saturday night, no matter how busy they are, no matter where the kids need to be driven, or no matter what the social schedule is, they stop everything. They focus on their families on Friday night, their religious communities on Saturday morning. They have a potluck, Friday night, the religious communities on Saturday morning, they have a potluck lunch, reinforces their media social circle on Saturday afternoon. And then hardwired right in their scriptures is to take a nature walk. So rather than something we get excited about during the wellness week at work or when one time in our life we run a marathon or something. These people are ritually active and socially connecting and slowing down, downshifting every single week for decades or a lifetime. This starts to get at something that is really

important when it comes to longevity. America and marketers are constantly focusing on a quick fix. And there's no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to adding to your life expectancy. There's nothing you can do this week or this month that's gonna make you live longer in 40 or 60 years. So you have to focus on things you're going to do

almost every day or every week for decades or a lifetime. And this Adventist practice, the religious practice helps them stand a weekly program of reinforcing these behaviors that easily map to lower rates of chronic disease and higher life expectancy. They also take their diet directly from the Bible. Genesis chapter 1 verses 26 through 28. You might think I'm a big Bible reader, but I'm not. I happen to know this from my research. But Genesis says that God has provided every plant that bears seed, so that's grains and legumes and nuts, and then every tree that bears fruit, so that's citrus and avocado and tomatoes and apples, etc. And the Adventists actually adhere to that. Most of them are vegetarian, actually adhere to that. Most of them are vegetarian. Some are even vegan or pescatarian.

You have, once again, another population that's eating mostly a whole food, plant-based diet. We now know that health behaviors are as contagious as catching a cold. The contagions that circulate through the Adventist community tend to be positive. They get together and they walk and they have plant-based potlucks and they reinforce each other's spiritual growth, etc. So you have this self-propagating environment that helps keep them doing the right things. Manifestly, they're living somewhere between seven and 11 years longer than their California counterparts. And they both live next to the San Bernardino Freeway. So it's astounding what this population is achieving. Another thing I hear in there,

and you mentioned this when we were going through the Power Nine, and it's really come through in many of your utterances thus far is social connection. And I mean, I've got this riff on this that some listeners to the show might be tired of hearing me go on, but I'm going to go on it again, just because I want to get your reaction to it, but you know, we live in an era of optimization. Everybody's striving for ketosis, tracking their sleep, counting their steps, counting their calories, subscribing to intense workouts, trying to achieve streaks on their

meditation app, etc. etc. This is, we are, we're trying to pull every lever possible to be as healthy as possible. But it appears from your work and from the work of Robert Waldinger over at Harvard, who's done this longitudinal study for many, many decades on many generations that the most important thing to control for, to optimize for, is the quality of your relationships. And yet very few people are talking about that on Instagram.

And so that's my rant. What do you think of that? Well, I'm good friends with Robert. I guess the three of us violently agree on that. The reason you don't see it on Instagram is because it's very hard for marketers to make money at it. And the things that tend to ripple through the internet and Instagram and Twitter and

TikTok are supplement and superfoods, all of which have an anti-aging stratagems and nostrums. All of those have enormous profit margins. Can't make any money off of you going out making a friend walking with them every day. But my answer is actually more expansive. And this sort of gets to the central premise of Blue Zones. People who are manifestly living on it. Now we're talking of five disparate populations on five corners of the world, all of whom are living about eight years on average longer than Americans, a fifth the

rate of cardiovascular disease, a sixth the rate of type 2 diabetes, half the rate or less of dementia. None of them are tracking their steps or taking superfoods or running down to Costa Rica for stem cells or any of this other poppycock that the internet sells us for living longer. In fact, further, they don't try to live longer. They don't proactively pursue health or longevity, which I think is the most important insight that is so under-celebrated or under-acknowledged that trying to pursue health, whether it's through diets or exercise programs, gym memberships, you start with 100 people taking a gym, who get a gym membership today, in one year, you lose 80%, actually more than 80% of them.

Diets, you start with 100 people today, within nine months, you lose 90% of them. They're great business models, but they're horrible at delivering any meaningful outcomes. In blue zones, people live a long time not because they pursue health, it's because it ensues. They live a long time because they live in an environment where in their micro unconscious decisions are slightly better all day long as a result of their surroundings. And if we want to see a healthier America, and as your listeners, if they want to live longer, lose weight, get more exercise, eat better, they'll get a far better return on their effort, time, and money by shaping their environment than they ever will by buying a gadget or thinking they're going to change their behavior for long enough to make any difference. They won't. Or maybe single digit percentages will. People with the inhuman discipline or presence of mind, but that's

almost none of us over the long run. And I defy people. I defy everybody I talk, I defy them to show me one behavioral change strategy that lasts for more than two years, for more than 5% of the people who get on it. I've never seen it. Coming up, Dan Buettner talks about practical ways to integrate these learnings into your life and his two daily routines. Summer is here and adventures await. Wondery and Tinkercast are teaming up to bring you a summer of wow with new episodes of your favorite podcasts.

Go on an epic adventure with Portuga the pirate as she takes a road tripping adventure across the country on little stories everywhere. Immerse yourself in the life of someone amazing and listen closely for clues to guess who this person is on who's amazing life. Listen to wow in the world to discover something new about science, technology, and innovation and the world around us. This summer, bring your imagination out into the world and find your wow. Visit Wondery.com slash Summer of Wow to find new episodes of your favorite shows and to

download scavenger hunts for the entire family. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankapin. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're going to be exploring the life of Margaret Thatcher. The first female leader of Britain. Her 11-year premiership completely overhauled British society. The political legacy of Thatcherism is both pervasive but also controversial. So who was

the woman behind the policies? Wow, what a titan of modern British history, Peter. It's kind of intimidating, actually. We spent days, days recording this one. And just to cut it down, there is so much that happens over the course of Margaret Thatcher's life that we've had to think really hard about what we can include. And this is, of all the characters we've done so far,

the one who's had the most personal impact on my conscious, waking, real-time life. I mean, I lived through her, I was born under her. I'm a Thatcher baby. That's gonna be set to dance music. So follow Legacy Now from wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery+. Before we get back to the show,

just a reminder about the Healthy Habits course over on the 10% Happier app taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps. So what's the answer then? You need to be embedded in communities where these healthy practices are normalized? That's the easiest way. It's not as hard as you think. In Minneapolis where I was born, there's neighborhoods where there's a 13-year life expectancy difference and neighborhoods that

are less than three miles apart. And you look at the neighborhood where people are living a long time, there are parks, there are sidewalks, streets are walkable, there are bike lanes, there's easy access to fruits and vegetables, easy access to recreation, the air is cleaner, and quite honestly, there's lower crime rate. So you can move within your city, you can move within your country. Life expectancy in places like Boulder, Colorado is about 20 years higher than in places in Kentucky. So you live in Kentucky, you're way less likely to walk places, you're more likely to be confronted by fast food restaurants and junk food and live in an obesogenic environment as opposed to Boulder where you're never more than a few steps from

a nature walk and healthy food abounds. I know people say, well, I can't afford to live in Boulder. That may be true. But the other point, and I wrote a whole book on this, it's called The Blue Zone Challenge, where I aggregated about 40 different evidence-based things you can do to your home, your kitchen, your bedroom, your social circle, your commute, and your workplace that will permanently set up nudges or defaults so you'll unconsciously move more, eat better, sleep better, socialize more, and no one live your purpose. And those are the exact same characteristics in place in Blue Zones. Almost all of them are portable, but it requires you to shift away from the anti-aging hoax to paying attention to environments or strategies

we know add years to your life expectancy. Can you give me just a few examples, give us a few examples of, of these, I think you said 40 little changes we can make around our homes and, and social circles to get us closer to the blue zone effect? Yes. So I'll remind you that this is the sum of lots of little things.

In Blue Zones, there's no one big thing. So you may say, well, that didn't sound very big. But removing the toaster from your counter, Cornell Food Lab showed that if you have a toaster on your counter, after two years, you weigh about six pounds more than the study group who removes their toaster. Establishing a junk food drawer where you put your junk food either down low or way up high

or around the corner in the pantry. Most of us are on what I call a seafood diet. We eat the food we see. So if you have a bag of chips with the clip-on on your counter, you're way more likely to eat that than you will if you have a fruit bowl. Changing your social environment by proactively adding people whose idea of recreation is walking or playing pickleball, who care about you on a bad day, who challenge your mind, who it's not a bad idea to have a vegan or vegetarian in your immediate social circle because they're going to show you where and how to eat more whole food plant-based as opposed to your friends who's beef obsessed. One time learning how to take the bus to work as opposed to driving all the time. So having a, you have to do it once, but automatically buying

a bus pass for the next six months, buying a comfortable pair of tennis shoes and parking them right next to your door so you're reminded to walk, buying a high quality bicycle that's comfortable for you. We know by the way that just taking public transportation to work lowers your chances of dying from cardiovascular disease by about 19%. So I say that's changing your commute environment. So these are a few examples. Because driving is just so stressful, being in traffic. Well, you know, Daniel Kahneman's research on a day-to-day basis, the activity we hate most is driving, the one that causes the most unhappiness. So you get the stress from driving, but because you're driving, you're therefore not walking. Gallup also came up

with a recent study that showed that the number of people you wave to every day is highly correlated with your overhaul happiness and health. Very hard to wave to people when you get in your car, in your attached garage, drive downtown to an underground garage and take the elevator to your office. So it's both the opportunity cost and the activity itself that are creating lower life expectancy. You know, in blue zones, nobody exercises. There's no CrossFit. There's no yoga class, no Pilates class. Nobody's running them. There's no blue zone marathon. But they live in communities where every time they go to work, a friend's house or out to eat, it occasions a walk. They're taking about 8,000 steps a day without even thinking about it, just getting around. They have gardens out back, usually two to three seasons a year. So they're out

there bending and lifting and low intensity physical activity. Their houses aren't full of mechanical conveniences to do their own work. They knead bread by hand and grind corn tortillas by hand. And what we don't realize in sort of this exercise-obsessed culture we live in, that it's far better for our bodies to move every 20 minutes than it is to sit in our chairs all day long, whether it's in our office, in our homes, and then expect to make it up in 45 minutes at the gym. That's not how we evolved. If you're moving every 20 minutes or so, like people do in the blue zones, you're keeping your metabolism higher and you're burning considerably more calories than you would trying to do it all in one 45 minute burst at the end of the day.

This just all goes to support the notion that you're way better off living in an environment that nudges you unconsciously than to try to consciously pursue it, as is the case with exercise. Just curious, do you exercise or do you just try to move every 20 minutes or both? Well, I'm very, you know, I live in Miami Beach here, the very southern tip, and I'm looking at the ocean in which, you know,

I can't wait to go jump in and swim at the end of the day. I have 20 restaurants very nearby, Whole Foods that I bike to. I do most of my calls walking around. I live in an environment, a neighborhood that's very easy for me to get healthy food, to recreate, to get physical activity and to walk. But I happen to also love, you know, exercise in the more traditional modality. And I usually get out and do something every day. So it's a yes and you're not sitting, you're not sedentary 23 hours and 15 minutes and then 45 minutes of working out.

You do some working out, but your life is designed to move naturally. Correct. And I don't exercise in the way most people exercise. I'm not competitive. It's not in my outlook. It's not a chore as part of my day. I really make it a rule for myself. Two rules. One, I'm going to do something every day. But the second part of this, that I enjoy. So today it might be swimming. It might be a fat tire bike. I go pedal in the sand. I have a bunch of friends who play pickleball or padel. Maybe it's to go out with them. I do go to a gym, but it's very social. I go down there and I listen to my favorite podcast, 10% Happier, and lift weights and stretch a little bit. And it's a joy. It's not a chore. The minute it becomes a chore, people stop doing it.

And again, when it comes to longevity, unless you're doing it close to daily for a lifetime, it's probably not making a difference in how long you're gonna live over the long run. Let me go back to something small. This was at the beginning of your list of little nudges and hacks that you can do around your house to make it more conducive to longevity.

You said something about ditching the toaster, and maybe I'm being obtuse, but I didn't quite understand why having a toaster could have deleterious effects. Because there's almost nothing that comes out of a toaster that's good for us. You know, most of the breads and the pop tarts and the bagels, we walk through our kitchen a dozen times a day. You don't remember you're hungry until you see

the toaster and say, oh, toaster. You go into our pantry and we find that raisin cinnamon bread or white bread that we're going to put butter and jam on, whatever it is, pop tarts, and we pop it in our toaster. Again, it's what we see, as opposed to having a high quality fruit bowl. He's walking to get his fruit bowl. Now he's returning with said fruit bowl. Yeah, this is my fruit bowl. So that's on my counter.

It looks like a still life. Well, it's avocados and tangerines and limes and lemons. And that's what I see. So when I'm hungry, I'm way more likely to pick this up than to put something in a toaster that I'm gonna put butter on. The other little hack is, I like to treat myself like everybody else does with ice cream and

sweets and sort of, I just don't bring them in my house. So then when I'm here, I'm not even tempted by it because I can't get at it. But I go out and I like to treat myself. I think it's wrong minded to restrict yourself because if you restrict yourself, you're eventually going to fail. So Dan, if you bring, invite me over to your house and you've served me chocolate cake and ice cream, I'll eat it. If and when you come to my house, I will definitely serve you cake and ice cream. I'm a fan of both.

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

I brought a team there from the University of Athens. We use the same instrument the National Institutes on Aging uses. And we found only three mild cases of dementia on the entire island. We don't know why, but along with living a long time, they're staying sharp to the very end. Now, a few things that are interesting. Number one, it's very hard to find more than a hundred yards of flat terrain there, except for the airport. Just like Sardinia, where we found that the steeper the village, the higher the life expectancy. I suspect there's the same thing going on here in Icaria. You see, first of all, they eat the strictest version of the Mediterranean diet in the world. They also include in their diet liberal use of herbs,

specifically rosemary, sage, oregano, and kind of a mint, catnip, they call it. And these herbs are used not only for medicinal purposes and to flavor food, but as teas, largely because they weren't importing coffee, but they liked warm beverages. So they just go into the fields or their backyard and they take these herbs, which grow like weeds and they make infusions from them. But all of these herbs are anti-inflammatory, they're anti-oxidants, they're diuretics, which lower blood pressure, so fewer heart attacks and less vascular dementia.

Let's keep going through the two others and then I have a million other questions for you. Nicoya Costa Rica, am I pronouncing that correctly, Nicoya? That's right, you got that, you nailed that one. What stuck out to me is, and you may have other things you want to say about Nicoya, but is this notion of purpose, they have this concept in Nakoya of plan de vida, which is like a life plan, I guess.

In all blue zones, there's vocabulary for purpose and Okinawa is Ikigai. And believe it or not, people who can articulate their sense of purpose live above eight years longer than people who are rudderless. A lot of it in Nicoya comes from their religion. About 95% of them are Catholic. They're very family oriented. If you ask most of them what their Ponte Vita almost always involves, the Lord and family. And for as crocheted or trite as that may sound, it actually does work. What's the mechanism? When you're clearing your sense of purpose, day-to-day decisions are easier, forms sort of ballast in hard times. You're not dealing with the existential stress of, you know, what am I

doing on this planet? Where's my self-worth? Where's my value? It's a very useful way to make life less stressful. You know, I know your study of the Blue Zones has had an impact on how you live your life. Do you have an articulation of your purpose that has been useful to you? Yes, my purpose is going out into the world, researching traditional peoples, learning their wisdom and translating their wisdom

to my audiences, I guess, in my writing. I've done that 40 years ago. My first quote unquote job after college was biking from Alaska to Argentina. I biked around the world, then I biked across Africa. In a more superficial way. I wrote books and I wrote for Outside magazine and Chicago Tribune. And then I did a series of these expeditions that solved mysteries. And it never really occurred to me. They started out as kind of facile, why did the Maya civilization collapse? But ultimately, the best answers came from talking to the contemporary people who are still living there today. I was more and more intrigued with how their quality of life was greater than ours, even though they're not necessarily as rich. They lived richer lives. Blue Zones is the

summation of that. My book's Blue Zones of Happiness also, you know, sought to even delve into that notion even deeper. It reminds me of, I think it was Benjamin Franklin who observed that there were so many white people running away and joining indigenous tribes, but never the opposite or rarely the opposite. I believe it. A lot of these people go to these blue zones and never come back, especially in the Costa Rica because once you start living there, yeah, maybe you're not living in as big of

a house or shopping at Costco or driving a fancy car, but the quality of life. It's an important aspect. I mean, you're familiar with the Gallup's life satisfaction data. When you look at these blue zones, they're all in the top quintile of the happiest places in the world. In fact, Costa Rica, which is near the top and positive affect is also a blue zone. So, you know, we spent about $83 billion a year on anti-aging. None of it's been proven to stop slower reverse aging in humans. And even if it does work, it would probably just prolong a crappy life. Meanwhile, in blue zones, they're living a long time because they're growing their own food and they live close to nature and they walk to their friend's house and they eat with their families and they go to church or temple on Sundays

or they slow down, they know their purpose and their path for an extra eight to 10 years is joyous. That's the real value proposition. Coming up, Dan talks about Ikigai, which Dan refers to as purpose on steroids. And he responds to some of the critiques of the Blue Zones. Music Music Music Music Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online.

It's about damn time. I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All time. Yeah. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions, if you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second, then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix, the host of Wondry's newest podcast, Let Me Say This. As beacons of truth and connoisseurs of mess, we are scouring the depths of the internet

so you don't have to. We're obviously talking about the biggest gossip and celebrity news. Like it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the b-sides, don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise.

Mother, a mother to many. Follow, let me say this, on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to episodes everywhere on May 22, or you can listen ad-free by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery app on Apple Podcast. Hey y'all, it's your girl Kiki Palmer, your favorite quadruple threat actor, singer, dancer, and my new role, podcaster.

My podcast Baby This is Kiki Palmer is blowin' up, y'all, because every episode I bring on an icon. Like when John Stamos and I talked about internet trolls hating on Disney adults Oh when Jordan Peele explained why we love scary movies, even though the world is already creepy as fuck Tune in to learn a little and laugh a lot cuz your girl keeps it real Listen on wonder E plus join wonder E plus in the wonder E app or on Apple podcasts Staying on the subject of purpose and this will get us to the fifth blue zone, you mentioned in the context of Okinawa, the Japanese island, this notion of Ikigai.

What is that? It's basically purpose, but it always has a altruistic dimension to it. In other words, it's not just pursuing your hobby, it's pursuing something because it benefits somebody else, either the community or a younger generation or a family. So it's sort of a purpose on steroids, I guess. Hmm. Maybe you would call this a kind of enlightened self-interest. Well, I suppose. I don't know if they think of it as self-interest though. I think they think of

it as they're doing their duty to their family or their community. But I guess to the extent that doing your duty makes us feel good, it would be self-interest. Yes, it's a slippery concept, but it reminds me of the Dalai Lama's idea of wise selfishness. Everybody's selfish, he says, but if you want to do selfishness correctly, you should live an altruistic and compassionate life, because that is what will make you feel the best. That's beautiful. Okay. So Okinawa, I have not watched this video myself, but my staff told me about it, that there was a recent video I believe posted by you saying that maybe Okinawa had been

disqualified as a Blue Zone. What's happening there? Well, since I started studying the place 25 years ago, 1999, they were producing the longest human beings in the history of the world. But now, thanks largely to the American military base that attracted a forest of fast food restaurants, McDonald's, KFC's, Pizza Hut's, A&W, and also a snarl of highways. And now Okinawa has among the highest obesity rates, the highest type two diabetes rates, the highest smoking rates, and it's the least healthy of Japan's prefectures. In one generation, they've lost their blue zone standing. You can still see vestiges of it.

If you go to the villages and the smaller islands, Okinawa is 151 islands. It's not just one island. Some of the smaller islands are stillinawa is 151 islands, it's not just one island. So some of the smaller islands are still blue zone-ish. And in the north, the Motobu Peninsula and places like Ogemi, you still see it's still blue zones. But most of the 1.6 million people in Okinawa are among Japan's least healthy people. And that's a tragedy. Are you seeing similar threats to the other blue zones or because many of them are isolated, are they safe?

That they're only isolated to an extent and they're all disappearing. They'll all be gone in a generation. I think, I mean, I was just in Nikoya about three weeks ago and there's a city of Nikoya as well as a peninsula. And as you enter the city of Nikoya, you see a McDonald's, a Burger King, and a KFC. And that is the beginning of the end. Obesity is on the rise, you have two diabetes on the rise, and all of these blue zones. A little bit more protected at Ikaria, the young people there really do honor older people and older traditions, and the younger generations are bringing back these and preserving these traditions of gardening and the Panayiri, their social gatherings and so forth. But I'm afraid Blue Zone will be a thing of the past in the very

near future. So the bad news is, as you just said, Blue Zone's maybe a thing of the past. I guess the good news is we can still take the lessons from the traditional lifestyles and apply them. That's right. We captured the blueprint. My daytime job, I've worked with 72 cities in America, and we get paid by insurance companies or hospital systems to lower the obesity rate and the chronic disease loads of entire cities, thereby raising their life expectancy. And it actually works. And it works not by trying to convince a million people to change their behavior, but it works because we change people's environments. So, the healthy choice is the easy choice or the unavoidable choice. And therein, blue zones

will survive. And I also had a Netflix series called Live to 100, Secrets of the Blue Zones. a Netflix series called Live to 100, Secrets of the Blue Zones. And in the fourth episode of that, I announced a Blue Zone 2.0 Singapore where in one lifetime, life expectancy has jumped by over 20 years. And now they currently have the longest health adjusted life expectancy in the world. In other words, they live more years in full health than any place else in the world. And that is a wholly manufactured blue zone. It's the result of a leadership that has proactively aggregated policies that favor human health and well-being, and they have manifestly produced healthier people. So So further proof of the central premise that if you create an environment where humans can thrive, you see it in their life expectancy and their happiness.

And if you rely on diets and exercise programs and a bloated healthcare system like we do in the United States, we get very expensive ill health. I wanna go back to the powered nine. These are the lifestyle habits of the world's healthiest and longest lived people. You ran through, you kind of did a drive by of them, and then when we were talking about the specific blue zones, you said a lot about many of these, but I'm just going to read them quickly to audience and and then pick a few where I feel more could be said. So first move naturally we've talked about that that the world's longest-lived people aren't necessarily going to the gym they just live in environments that encourage them

to move without thinking about it. Two, purpose, we've talked about that. Three, downshift. Might be worth stopping on this for a second. I know we've touched on it a little bit, but it seems like life in a blue zone has built into it breaks that many of us in our headlong effort to check things off our to-do list do not have in our lives. So what more would you say about that?

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

In Sardinia, it's almost all, we call it happy hour, but at the end of a day's work, there's always the reward where you're going to walk down to the town square, the town tavern and see your friends, have an hour of conviviality, maybe a glass or two of wine. These are the things that not only bring joy to life, but they actually lower cortisol levels, they lower stress levels. We know that inflammation is the root of every major age-related disease. If you're muscling through your day, you're working nine hours a day, you drive home, you're on an hour-long commute, it's a stressful commute, you get home, your kids are screaming or kids are hungry and got to bring dinner together quickly. You go to bed late and tired, you wake up tired.

Sure, that might be a recipe for making more money, but BlueZone, that whole process is slowed down without the hormones and could very well explain much of their seven to eight year life expectancy gain. Thanks for that. Number four on the list is the 80% rule, which I also think bears some explication from you. It has to do with not overeating. Can you explain it? So it's ripping off of a confusion adage adage, hara hachi bu, which means roughly stop eating when your stomach is 80% full. And in Okinawa, you'll still see people before a meal instead of saying grace, they'll say hara hachi bu. So I expanded it a little bit to evidence-based strategies to keep from overeating. And a few things we know work, taking TV screens out of the kitchen, eating with family, saying

some prayer or some gratitude before a meal to put some punctuation between your busy life and your meal time, front loading your calories at the beginning of the day and eating a light dinner and then not eating for 14 hours. These are all strategies to keep from overeating. This runs right into opposition to where we've been marketed for most of our lives, this idea that we need more nutrients. Every power bar and every vitamin fortified cereal and vitamin D fortified milk, we've been told for decades that the path to health is through these additive minerals and vitamins and nutrients, but actually in blue zones, it's about taking calories out of the meal, not adding new things to it. I love that. Number five on the list is plant slant. We've covered that, that these people are not eating too much meat.

covered that that these people are not eating too much meat. Number six is wine at five, which you also talked about that folks are drinking alcohol moderately and regularly. How do you square that with, and I know you referenced this earlier, the more recent data that that suggests that alcohol is basically poison at any dose? that can be basically poisoned at any dose? Well, first of all, I know it's not mutually exclusive with living a long, healthy life because these people are manifestly living eight or 10 years longer and they're drinking every day.

And obviously you can't draw a causal relation, but you can, and maybe if they didn't drink at all, they live two or three more years, or maybe not. But I think these studies miss the healthy byproducts of drinking. Coming together around a glass of wine is part of a daily ritual that socializes people and sheds stress. It's the fuel for these parties, the panayires, which ultimately are fundraisers for the village and cement social bonds.

Also the type of alcohol they drink in Blue Zones. These studies are done with alcohol. Well, when you drink a Blue Zone, Contenal, for example, and Sardinia, that has the highest levels of polyphenols of any other wine in the world. One of those polyphenols is known to reduce inflammation of the endothelia, the lining of the arteries. So when you're drinking that every day as opposed to a margarita or a beer, biochemically the results could be hugely different. So all I know is people in the blue zones live a long time

and they drink a little bit every day and they enjoy it. The final three entries in the Power Nine all are about social connection. Number seven is belong and that's about the data that seems to suggest that belonging to a faith-based community and no matter what the denomination has longevity implications. Eight is loved ones first, people putting their families first, which we've talked about. And nine is having the right tribe,

you know, being in a tight-knit social circle that lasts, you know, for quite a while. Anything more worth saying about this, this portion of the list or do you think we've covered it? I think you covered it. Okay. You know this, but there, I want to give you a chance to respond to some of the critiques of the blue zones. One of them is that there was a recent study that suggested that the number of centenarians

in blue zones is factually inaccurate, in part because of errors in record keeping or because some people are claiming to be older than they are in order to get their pensions earlier. So this data has been warped in some way. What's your pushback on that? You're probably referring to a plant scientist by the name of Saul Newman, who wrote one paper, which actually wasn't accepted by an academic journal. He brought up errors in recording areas

in other parts of Japan, not in blue zones. I work for National Geographic. The fact checkers occupy the corner offices. We hired or we collaborated with the top demographers in the world to carefully check ages in each one of the blue zones. In every case, we were able to find birth records and death records and do the math between the two. So summation, this guy, Saul Newman, is criticizing the Blue Zones methodology, but you're saying the methodology is sound.

Yeah, he's finding places that aren't Blue Zones and he's leveling criticisms that may be true elsewhere, but they're not true in Blue Zones, at least in record-keeping accuracy. He also correctly, as an effort to undermine Blue Zones' works, he cites Okinawa's high rates of obesity. But what he doesn't do is go back 25 years when I started my work to discover that actually then it was the highest, they're producing the longest lived people in the world. And it has deteriorated in the last 25 years. Nothing I can do about that, something I readily acknowledge in my writings and in Netflix. But it no way undermines the fact that they did live a long time and that there were a set of attending characteristics that went along with that longevity.

Let's talk about the diet. There have been some folks who've said that the Blue Zone diet is based less on solid science and more on speculation. How solid in your view is the science of the Blue Zone diet? So the criticisms are usually from the carnivore crowd who go to Sardinia or Okinawa today and they look at what people are eating today and they correctly see that people are eating a lot of meat. My work, however, and I wrote about it in the New York Times Sunday magazine article, The Island Where People Forget to Die, and also the book called The Blue Zone Solution, which was a two-time New York Times bestseller. For that, we did a meta-analysis of 155 dietary studies, dietary surveys that were, if you want to know what, as I said before, what a centenarian ate, you have to look not what

they're eating today, but they were eating throughout their lives. The closest we could approximate that was pulling dietary surveys and doing a meta-analysis, which essentially is an averaging. Is it 100% accurate? No, but it's the best available. And it's very clear that in all of these places, these were poor areas. There weren't any McDonald's. People didn't have enough money to be able to eat meat more than about once a week. There were no processed foods. So to assert that somehow I've made this up is just foolishness. What did they somehow import burgers from the mail or something

like that? They just weren't around to eat. What was around was peasant foods, beans and grains and sweet potatoes and tubers and vegetables they could get in their gardens and greens that were available. Yes, they did have a family pig, which they butchered once a year. They might've had a few goats. There weren't cows in Blue Zones except for the Nicoya Peninsula. So I stand by my work. And have there been any longitudinal studies on people on the blue zone diet as you prescribe it? I don't prescribe anything. I simply say, here's what the longest lived people have eaten over their lifetime. You can do what you want.

And what about the fact that the diets are often hyper-localized? You know, there's raw honey and grease, the sourdough bread that you mentioned in Sardinia, squash in Costa Rica. Can the recommendations be translated to Des Moines and Dubuque? I don't see why not. I mean, all the products eaten in Blue Zones are available in Des Moines. You may not have the exact same honey, but anybody with an Amazon account can get a Korean honey delivered to their house. If you want to mimic the way people in any one of the five Blue Zones eat,

you can very easily do it in the United States. For much cheaper, by the way people in any one of the five Blue Zones eat and you can very easily do it in the United States. For much cheaper, by the way, than you would spend eating steaks and having customized meals delivered via Amazon. One last critique I want to run by you has to do the Blue Zone checklist that you talked about before, the 40 or so tweaks that we can put into our environment to get our lives closer to the way life is lived in the Blue Zones. And this is a quote from one paper that looked at the checklists. It said that, the checklists assume that an individual lives in an environment that allows pets, has space for a garden, has a garage and a separate space for an exercise area.

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

The most powerful part of that checklist is, I would argue, is optimizing your or curating your immediate social circle, which anybody can do no matter how rich or poor to a certain extent, I guess. So yeah, not everybody can do everything on that list, but if you get half of them in, I would bet that your weight drops and your life expectancy goes up. It's super interesting to talk about this with you. Are there things you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to? No, I think we covered it pretty well. Yeah, we covered it well. I've been at this for 20 years the central premise of Blue Zones, if you want to live longer, don't try to change your behavior, change your environment.

I think that's the most important takeaway. I guess a couple of interesting things. There's an association between eating beans and higher life expectancy. People eat a cup of beans a day, live about four years longer than people who get their protein from less healthy sources. A handful of nuts a day is associated with about two extra years of life expectancy. People are interested in easy longevity hacks and those are two of them. I've written six books on Blue Zones. Four of them are New York Times bestsellers,

and I'm proud of them. If people have any other questions, I'm at Dan Buter on Instagram, and I answer all my questions, all my direct messages personally. That's very cool. You're making me sheepish about the fact that I don't answer. I answer a fraction of mine, and I suspect I get a fraction of yours.

Let me just go back to beans for a second, because I was a vegan for five years. Now I'm mostly plant-based, but I do eat some animal products. And one of the reasons was I just could never build up a tolerance for beans. Even with taking Beano and whatever, I just, it made me very unpleasant to be around for reasons that I'm assuming you can put together. Yeah. Uh, any, any thoughts on that?

Okay. There are outliers, and you might be one of the outliers that will just never be able to metabolize beans very well, but your gut has about 100 trillion bacteria in it. Bacteria are almost 100% responsible for extracting energy out of our plant food. Those 100 million bacteria, most of them depend on their survival

fiber or plant-based material. There's no fiber in meat. If you feed your gut meat and cheese and eggs, the bad bacteria start to proliferate. Whereas if you feed it high fiber food like beans, the good bacteria proliferate. So the good bacteria are the ones that take fiber and they convert it into short chain fatty acids which make their way into our bloodstream and they provide energy for our cells. They lower inflammation, they fine tune our immune system, they're the precursor, a lot of the feel-good hormones. If you're not eating fiber, you're not getting that. To your question about beans, often if people start with just a tablespoon or two of beans

and work up to a cup gradually over two or three weeks, they sort of prune their bacterial garden such that they can handle the beans as opposed to starting today with a cup of beans. It might be too much for people who aren't used to eating these high fiber diets. I like the sound of that. Start small. You mentioned your six books. Can you just remind us of the names of some of them, any that come to mind and also remind us

again of the name of your Netflix show, which was and is super popular. Thank you. Blue Zones, Nine Lessons from the World's Longest of People, The Blue Zone Solution, Blue Zone Kitchen, which was a cookbook, was the number one New York Times bestseller, Blue Zones of Happiness. The Netflix show is Lived to 100 Secrets of the Blue Zones. And then in All Whole Foods, I have Blue Zone Kitchen Frozen Meals, which are formulated for longevity with a maniacal focus on deliciousness. So I'm starting to create a retail environment of healthy eating as well. Dan Buettner, thank you very much for your time. Dan, it was a delight. And you'll be pleased to know that I am now 19% happier. So we're trending. Your show works.

I love it. May also be the fact that you're now free to go swimming in the ocean, but I'll take it. Real delight, Dan. Nice to spend time with you. Likewise. Thanks again to Dan Buettner. If you're interested in learning more about how to get fit sanely, we're going to put a link in the show notes to our Get Fit Sanely playlist

so you can hear all of our prior content. And don't forget, there's much more coming up. In this series, we're gonna be talking about motivation, the sort of promise and perils of ozempic and related drugs. We'll be talking about the latest science on exercise and also a fascinating interview in which we talk to a Buddhist monk about his case for laziness.

And don't forget to sign up for my new newsletter where I will list out for me the biggest take away from each of the episodes of the week. Before I go, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. With additional pre-production support from Wanbo Wu, our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer,

DJ Cashmere is our managing producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Play us out, Nick. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.