The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Eat Like Blue Zones In America with Dan Buettner

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you want to get healthier, don't try to change your behavior because that fails for almost all the people almost all the time. Shape your ecosystem, shape your environment. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman. I'm all about using food first when it comes to nutrition, but there are certain nutrients I recommend everyone supplement with because it's simply impossible to get adequate amounts from your diet alone. One example is magnesium, which our soils, well, they're not too healthy. And because there's no organic matter, they can't extract the magnesium from the soil from industrial farming, which is a drag. And that leads to 50%

Starting point is 00:00:41 less of these minerals in our food than there was 50 years ago. And then, of course, we're doing things that cause us to lose magnesium, like sugar, caffeine, fluoride, even stress, which, you know, none of us have, right? 80% of Americans are actually deficient in magnesium. And that may mean insufficient, not necessarily true deficiency, but like just not enough for optimal functioning because magnesium is so important. And it's a huge problem for our health. Considering the pandemic of stress, along with the pandemic of COVID that we're facing, we should all really be conscious about our magnesium intake because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which keeps us calmer and more relaxed. Magnesium

Starting point is 00:01:20 is crucial for more than 300 other chemical reactions in the body and impacts everything from metabolism to sleep to neurologic health, energy, pain, muscle function, and lots more. My favorite new magnesium is from a company called BioOptimizers. Their magnesium breakthrough formula contains seven different forms, all of which have different functions in the body. There is truly nothing like it on the market. I really noticed a difference when I started taking it, and I've tried a lot of different magnesium products out there.

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Starting point is 00:02:14 I think you're going to like it as much as I do. If I've learned one thing during my two decades in functional medicine, it's that we're all unique. No two people are alike, which means we can all benefit from personalized medicine. But for most of the history of medicine, individualized healthcare just was not possible. We couldn't look inside the body and see what was really going on. But now, thanks to advances in technology, that is changing for the better, and it's doing so in some amazing ways. And I've got a great example of amazing healthcare technology that I'm excited to tell you about. It's called

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Starting point is 00:03:14 If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed in to meet your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now, they're offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. That's insidetracker, I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And you'll see the discount code in your cart. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about living long and living healthfully, as you get older, we're going to have a great conversation today with one of my favorite humans,

Starting point is 00:03:57 Dan Buechner, who has introduced to us the concept of the blue zones, places where people live very long and very well, and don't seem to die these long, painful, expensive deaths, but live long, happy, and engaged, connected lives. And Dan is an amazing guy. He's a National Geographic Fellow. He's an award-winning journalist, producer, New York Times bestselling author. He's discovered the five places in the world, and I've been to three of them, thanks to Dan, who's helped me, called Blue Zones, Hotspots, Where People Live the Longest, Healthiest Lives. His articles about these places have been in National Geographic, The New York Times, and also his new book, which is just coming out, Blue Zones American Kitchen, is amazing. In it, Dan uncovers

Starting point is 00:04:41 the traditional roots of plant-forward cuisine in the United States. With wisdom from more than 50 food experts, chefs, and cooks around the country, Dan's road trip across America sheds light on some of its most under-recognized plant-forward communities as Dan shares the ingredients, recipes, and lifestyles tips that will make living to 100 both delicious and easy. Welcome, Dan. Thank you, Mark. What a wonderful introduction. I'm kind of blushing. Oh, well, I think you are quite a guy. You're like one of those guys who's like

Starting point is 00:05:15 Indiana Jones of longevity. You kind of go wherever you need to go to figure out what needs to get figured out about how we can live better and live longer. Dan, I think the question that's sort of perturbing me now, and as we talk about longevity, as more research money is going into it, as more books are being published on it, including my own coming out next year, at the same time we're seeing this interest in longevity, we're seeing this dramatic drop in life expectancy, which is pretty disturbing to me. Why is this happening? Well, I think we can trace it to our food supply, actually. You know, you're right, life expectancy has dropped for the first time in living history over the last couple of years, and it's largely because of chronic disease. And of course, COVID is part of it.

Starting point is 00:06:05 But if you look at who's dying of COVID, it's mostly the oldest old and the people suffering from one or more chronic diseases. And those diseases are almost all, and I would argue, mostly driven by the food we eat. Which is? Overwhelmingly ultra processedprocessed food with added sugar. About 70% of all products in a grocery store are processed or have added sugar. We eat about 220 pounds of meat a year, which it's not to say a little meat isn't bad for us, but that's just way too much. So about 140 pounds of sugars and added sugars into our diet. This just isn't the way humans have evolved. And, you know, the idea behind Blue Zones was to look at the way people are actually making

Starting point is 00:06:53 it to 80s, 90s, and 100 without these chronic disease, how they've eaten over time. And it's vastly different than the way we're eating today. Yeah, it's quite different. Our diets are quite different. So, you know, our view of aging, and I wrote a lot about this in my book, is often anchored in what we see around us and the consequences that we see of people getting older in America, which is decrepitude, memory loss, you know, less agile, many chronic diseases, less functional in nursing homes. But these are really not necessarily necessary for aging, right? They're not necessarily natural consequences of aging. They're signs of disease that actually can be prevented in reverse. So what do you think the biggest drivers of this abnormal aging that we see so much in America is?

Starting point is 00:07:47 What are the biggest factors controlling this and making it happen? Well, I think the average maximum life expectancy of the human machine, your body, my body, everybody listening right now is about 95. Right now, there's not a lot we can do to lift that ceiling i know there's been a handful of people who've made it into their 100 and above age 115 but your chance of making it to 100 in america right now are about 1 in 2500 so in blue zones we found these populations who are making it into their mid 90s not because they have better genes or better bodies, but because they're eluding the diseases that foreshorten our lives. So they suffer about one-fifth the rate of diabetes, about a quarter the rate of heart disease,

Starting point is 00:08:35 in at least one of the blue zones, Icadia, about a tenth the rate of dementia. So here we have real human populations showing that we can avoid these chronic diseases and also you and me, and that it's these chronic diseases that are lopping off about 14 years of potential life expectancy for the average American. And again, part of it is we drive a lot. Part of it, we're stressed. Part of it, we spend too much time, I believe, on our devices. I think we violently agree on these. But I would say 60% of the chronic disease and therefore the unnecessary aging is due to the food we eat.

Starting point is 00:09:18 And I'll go a step forward to say that if you're overweight and unhealthy living in America today, it's probably not your fault. And if you want to dive into that, I'll tell you exactly why it's not your fault. Okay, well, let's dive into that because I want to talk about your book, The Blue Zone's Kitchen and the American kitchen in particular, because it's out and it takes us through the landscape of America and in very surprising ways uncovers populations that have kept foodways that have promised to keep us living longer. But before we get into that and what you discovered, which is a really cool story,

Starting point is 00:09:55 I want you to kind of explain what you just said and why. Why it's not our fault. Well, if you go back 40 or 50 years back in the United States, Americans had about one third the rate of obesity, one fifth to one seventh, depending on how you measure the rate of diabetes, about a fifth the rate of dementia for older people. And you start asking yourself, well, is that because people who were living in the 70s and 80s had better diets or they had better sense of individual responsibility or better discipline than we do, or they love their children more than we love our children? And the answer is none of these. The answer is

Starting point is 00:10:39 our food environment has changed. And the vast majority of choices that we have on a day-to-day basis are bad choices. The number of fast food restaurants have gone up by a factor of five. Over 50% of all retail outlets, including where you get your tires changed and you pick up your diabetes medicine, have sugar-sweetened beverages and candy bars and cookies and chips. So you can't escape it. And okay, as a result, we are fatter. Well, we weigh more and we're less healthy. And it's not because we lack, you know, basic goodness. Yeah, I think that's right. I think we live in a toxic environment, both from the perspective of our food environment, sedentary lifestyle, stress, environmental toxins. I mean, the list goes on. So what's really exciting is that because of you, I got inspired to go visit

Starting point is 00:11:34 some of these blue zones in Sardinia, in Ikaria. I don't want to say Ikaria or Ikaria. I don't know. But it was a real eye-opener to me. And I got to go into the homes and hearths of these people to see what they were eating. And it was so different. And, you know, and in Ikaria, they were eating a lot of wild foods, like wild greens and wild mushrooms and wild sage tea, which has really high levels of these catechins that are found in green tea. And, you know, clearly the diet played a huge role, but it wasn't only that. So tell us about a little bit about how you figured out what these blue zones were, you know, what they are, and what are those habits of the world's healthiest, longest people? So it's a two-step process. And both I did under the aegis of National Geographic and with funding from the National Institutes on Aging.

Starting point is 00:12:28 So you begin with the widely accepted assumption that only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes. The other 80% is something else. funded the demographers to parse through worldwide census data to find these areas where people are living statistically longest. And the number we most like to look at is the rate of middle age mortality. So where in the world are people our age most likely to reach a healthy age 95? And then we found these five so-called blue zones. And then to discern what they've been eating, we did a meta-analysis. I know you know what that means, but it's essentially a big average. If you want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be 100, you can't just ask him what he's been eating lately. have to know what they he's eating when he was a young kid

Starting point is 00:13:25 and middle age and so for that we found dietary surveys done in all five blue zones over the past 80 years and we have we see very clearly exactly what they're eating and when you average that all up the the diet is basically a whole food plant-based diet yeah yeah it's true i mean they they i remember this woman julia uh she was 103 months she was like i'm 103 months i guess it's like when you're five you're five and three quarters right and uh she said when she was little they were so poor they would eat like one egg between the family of 12 and one egg and they would share it and they would have a big one you know no and they would have like one potato some minestrone soup and it was just you know it's fascinating to see how how honestly um sparse their diet was and how

Starting point is 00:14:19 struggle it was to get food and how it wasn't sort of accessible as it is now and i think their diet has changed quite a bit but there's still a lot of very old people there. I mean, even now, even them having more adapted to, you know, eating more varied diet, they really still pretty old and robust. And it's more than just the food. That's their social connections and their activity. I remember Pietro was 95. I don't know if you know this guy, but he was in Sardinia.

Starting point is 00:14:44 And he was a shepherd and he literally just retired, I think the year before and was hiking up and down these rugged mountains, five miles a day. And I'm like, God, I haven't seen a 95 year old that in America, like that in America at a long time. And he had this booming voice and sang me this song, this great Italian song, you know? So tell us more about some of these. I think you said there's like nine characteristics in these blue zones that you identified that contribute to longevity. Yes. So they tend to have vocabulary for purpose. They know why they wake up and they're not stressed out to figure out what their place in the world is. They tend to have very strong family

Starting point is 00:15:21 values. They belong to faith. We know people belong to faith, live four to 14 extra years. They have these sacred daily rituals that help unwind some of the stress of everyday living, including ancestor veneration, nap taking, prayer, works, even happy hour, as you might have seen in Sardinia. They tend to have a very closely knit group of immediate friends. In Okinawa, we call this a moai, a group of friends who they can count on on a bad day, who are there to have meaningful conversations with them and reinforce the right behavior. So friends, their idea of recreation tends to be gardening or walking. You know, they're already have this habit of eating mostly whole food plant based.

Starting point is 00:16:10 But the big inside mark to all these blue zones is these people don't possess better discipline than you or I. They don't have better diet plans. They don't have a better sense of individual responsibility when it comes to their health. All they do is live their life. And the insight is that if you want to get healthier, don't try to change your behavior because that fails for almost all the people almost all the time. Shape your ecosystem. Shape your environment. And people in Blue Zones, the cheapest and most accessible foods are the food I write about in the Blue Zones American Kitchen.

Starting point is 00:16:49 They're whole food plant based. Yeah, it's so true. And I think, you know, I'm curious in your travels and explorations, was there anything super surprising that you found about these communities and some of the things that you found in the Blue Zones that maybe we wouldn't expect? A couple of interesting correlations. Mark, when I started this work in 2002, I was really sort of looking for an herb or a compound that explained longevity. And none of that's true. They don't take supplements. They don't take pills.

Starting point is 00:17:20 Yeah. But interestingly, we found in Sardinia, where I think you met Julia, that there's a strong correlation between how steep your village is and your chance of making it to 100. There was a correlation between how many daughters. These guys who had five or more daughters were the most likely to make it to 100. Wow. You know, I was. Why? It might be because daughters take care of their aging fathers, or it might be a selection bias. If you can survive five adolescent girls making it to 100, it's no problem. But it's just a core.

Starting point is 00:17:57 I can't explain why. But for me, the most really the exciting thing, you know, I started out a very scientific hell bent to find the resveratrol or the metformin or one of these other magical compounds that we could put in a pill and sell. But what I found were that these counterintuitively simple things are vastly more powerful than we think. Waking up with a strong sense of purpose, worth eight years of life expectancy. A strong social circle around you, worth seven years of life expectancy. Eating a whole food plant-based diet as opposed to the standard American diet is worth 13 years of life expectancy for a 20-year-old. So these are things that aren't sexy,

Starting point is 00:18:46 that you can't make a lot of money off of them. But they are so powerful. They literally hold the answer to this $3.5 trillion healthcare bill we grapple with, and the pain and suffering of more than three quarters of a million Americans dying prematurely every day because of eating the diet we're eating. Yeah, so true. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. As a busy doctor with multiple jobs, I'm all about tools that make my life simpler. And since testing is something I rely on to help almost all my patients, I was really excited to learn about Rupa Health. Hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, and gut bacteria are just some of the many things I look at to find the most effective path to optimal health for my patients. But that

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Starting point is 00:20:14 that I'm so excited about. You can check out a free live demo and a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Well, you know, I think one of the things that people think about when they think about diet is it's hard to do it right. It's hard to shop and cook and do all these things. But people really are, I think, disenfranchised now from their kitchens. I mean, in the 50s, there were federal extension workers that went around America teaching young families and mothers how to cook and grow gardens and feed their families. And then the food industry came in and developed the Betty Crocker Cookbook, which was Betty Crocker was an

Starting point is 00:21:00 invention of the food industry to insinuate processed food in the American kitchen. Basically, put one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup in your casserole and one, you know, row of Ritz crackers on top of your broccoli casserole. I remember that. And so we've kind of, you know, and all the ideas that cooking was drudgery and cooking was difficult and it takes too much time. And it's, you know, it's beneath most people. You deserve a break today.

Starting point is 00:21:25 And I remember all those ads. What have you found about the correlation between cooking and longevity? Well, first of all, in all blue zones, and I'm sure you observed this, people are cooking for themselves. They might go out to dinner for a wedding or a birthday, but they're cooking three meals a day. So they get good at it. And once you gain the skill,

Starting point is 00:21:46 it's actually very easy. Number two, every time you go out to eat in America, you consume about 300 more calories than you would if you just ate at home. And those calories tend to be laden with sodium, added sugars, added fats. And that's what's making us sick so to you're right and i think one of the silver linings to the pandemic people were stuck at home and they relearned the art of cooking and the reart of baking and that's definitely the the right direction and um baking i don't know i wouldn't have i wouldn't have that in there well yeah cookies cakes pies it's not definitely the uh longevity diet sourdough bread though i i don't know if you taste sourdough bread in uh sardinia but it's um it seems that people eat a true sourdough bread with a plant-based meal they lower the glycemic load of

Starting point is 00:22:40 the meal you know by quarters yeah it's true actually i tell you a funny story paula and uh and elenora gave me as a present that when you hooked me up with in sardinia to go to go around to these places they they gave me this starter jar of sourdough starter that was 150 years old right and i brought it home with me but the jar broke in my suitcase over everything so i didn't get to use it i have to go back i'm actually going back your underwear and bake a loaf of bread i don't know how that would taste but i'm going back next summer uh actually in april i'm gonna i'm gonna go back and get some more but um yeah i think i think you also know as an ikaria that this they made uh this incredible bread

Starting point is 00:23:22 in this with philip remember philip Remember Philip? In this oven that was outdoor wood oven. But it was a Zia wheat, which was this ancient wheat that was used by Alexander the Great to fortify him on his expeditions to conquer the world. And it's high in protein. It's low in starch. It's full of minerals. It's really quite interesting. Very low in gluten. And it was delicious bread. was very different so yeah i thought i'd say bread

Starting point is 00:23:49 is bad it's the kind of bread we're eating in america yeah and how we bake it and yeah and um but but you know getting back to this notion of cooking cooking i mean how is it connected well if you've ever seen somebody bake bread you know the kneading takes a half hour and it's they're in there like getting a workout they're breaking a sweat they're some of these old ladies have popeye arms from from kneading bread so it's we see in blue zones people really aren't exercising i i think you'll remember you didn't see any gyms in Ikaria or in Sardinia. People are staying in shape because they're moving naturally. So they're still doing things by hand.

Starting point is 00:24:32 So they're getting that mindless physical activity. Cooking also tends to be a social activity. Ladies baking bread together, families cooking together, and they can control the ingredients. And, you know, Mark, when it comes to longevity, there's no short-term fix. There's nothing you can do today, this week or this month that's going to make you live longer in 50 years short of not dying. So when it comes to longevity, you want to think of things that you're going to do for a long time and learning the skill of cooking and learning how to cook with beans, I think are the greatest superfoods in the world.

Starting point is 00:25:10 And the people in Blue Zones have a gift for making beans taste delicious. Getting your protein from beans soaked and well cooked, so the lectins aren't an issue. Pairing them with the whole grain, adding some greens in there, man, I'll tell you what, it's another 13 years of life expectancy. So what I'm really excited about is your new book, which is the Blue Zones American Kitchen. So it's kind of like, wait a minute, Blue Zones are not in America because we're all sick and overweight and dying fast and early, and it's getting worse. But you took a trip around America, and you found four food traditions in America that

Starting point is 00:25:54 match a longevity diet, and they're kind of unexpected. I'd love you to tell us about these historical diets in various demographic groups in America and how they can help the average American live another decade or two or more. Yes. So the Blue Zone Kitchen, which we talked about, was number one New York and number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. And I thought, well, you know, if there's diets of longevity around the world, if you

Starting point is 00:26:23 looked hard, maybe you could find diets of longevity in the United States. So we knew the dietary pattern from these other blue zones. And then I hired a researcher from NYU. Marian Nessel helped me on this. And we went deep in the archives. And it turns out that there was a researcher named Atwater, Wilbur Atwater, who between 1890 and 1930 or so sent out teams of people in America to do dietary surveys. And we found not among my ancestors, the Central Europeans and Northern Europeans, they brought their pigs and their cows and their pickles over. They weren't eating such a healthy diet. But among the African, Asian, Latino and Native Americans,

Starting point is 00:27:11 according to these dietary surveys, they were eating a dietary pattern almost exactly the same way of the ones we, you and I observed in Acadia and Sardinia and even Costa Rica. So National Geographic photographer David McLean and I, after identifying this dietary tradition, then we, during the pandemic, we traveled from Maine to Miami to Minneapolis to Maui, and we found these chef historians who either could recreate or who never stopped cooking this way. And the Blue Zone American Kitchen is 100 recipes delivered to 100 from Americans. And it's the lost diet of longevity. Amazing. So give us some examples of the traditions and what the foods were

Starting point is 00:27:59 and what they're making. So there's descendants of enslaved Americans in the Southeast known as the Gullah Geechee people. The Gullah Geechee were imported, enslaved from West Africa, largely because of their rice growing ability. And they brought a type of rice, it's not an Asian strain, but an African strain of rice and started growing it. And they brought a type of rice. It's not an Asian strain, but an African strain of rice and started growing it. In fact, the biggest man-made feature in the world is called the Ace Basin. And they got very good at growing this type of rice called Carolina Gold, very healthy rice. And because they were better at it than their masters were, they were afforded some freedoms. They lived in buildings next to their rice paddies.

Starting point is 00:28:51 And they made friends with the Native Americans. They had European influences from their overlords. Cuisine that includes the black eyed peas, the scotch bonnet peppers, the sesame seeds, the vinegar, the okra. West African word for okra is gumbo. And they brought that back and they made these fusions of of gumbos that, you know, unlike New Orleans, which are filled with sausage, here they're filled with beans. So really healthy food that makes your eyes tear up with tears of joy. That's quite amazing. I actually just watched an amazing movie called Gather. I don't know if you've seen it, but it was a movie about reclaiming Native American foodways and the ways in which they were able to sort of draw

Starting point is 00:29:48 from the land these extraordinary foods that actually were far healthier. And I remember this one woman, and it was teaching her niece actually how to find and get the mice. They were eating mice. Not my thing. But she's like, we kind of look at where the plants are around where the mice are living, and we can tell how healthy that's going to be from the medicinal plants that the mouse eats that actually get in their system that we then benefit from. It was quite amazing. And I was recently reading about a Sioux chef who has a restaurant in Minneapolis where you're from.

Starting point is 00:30:26 I don't know how to say this. Oh, a mini restaurant. And it's this Lakota chef who's gone and actually created a restaurant where they cook only foods that are from America, that were here before, that were the delicious foods that were wild or that they cultivated. And they were quite amazing and delicious foods. So I think a lot of these cultural and ancestral foods have been co-colonized. In other words, they've been displaced. And a lot of these people are reclaiming them, whether it's the chokeberries they're eating or the various kinds of native foods that they find growing wild or even the bison that they grow.

Starting point is 00:31:14 This is incredible in terms of their cultural food programs that they're now reclaiming. And I wonder what else you found in some of the Native American explorations of their diets. Because a lot of these populations are extremely overweight, extremely obese, and have diabetes at rates far exceeding us. And up to 80% of some Native American populations are diabetic by the time they're 30. And that's, you know, that's compared to one in 10 of the rest of us, which is still a lot. So what did you learn around their foods and their food ways? So the chef that you were talking about is Sean Sherman, the sous chef. He's from Minneapolis. He actually, as part of this book, he contributed three recipes. And as he'll point out to you, chickens and beef and pork were never part of the Native American diet. Either was refined sugar. So they've been victims of this food environment imposed upon them.

Starting point is 00:32:10 Originally, you know, where I'm from, Minnesota, they ate a lot of wild rice. You know, they had some wild game, but they were mostly hunting and gathering. On the East Coast, interestingly, part of this book, we found a Wampanoag Native American who lives up near Plymouth Rock and a modern day pilgrim named Paul Marco. She's a historian. And they recreated a Thanksgiving, original Thanksgiving dinner. In other words, a meal that might have been served in the early 17th century. And contrary to what most of us believe, there was probably no turkey at the original Thanksgiving. There was no pumpkin pie. They didn't have flour. They didn't have eggs. They didn't have sugar. So what were they eating? Well, they were eating foods that these native

Starting point is 00:32:56 Wampanoag people were providing. And it was probably foods like succotash, which is a stew made from beans, corns and squash. Also tamales, but maybe stuffed with hazelnuts, with squash, stuffed with dried blueberries and maple syrup, which were all available. So not at all the foods we think were at the original Thanksgiving, manzanita berries, you know, wild rice, you know, rose hips, hickory, acorns, walnuts, really quite amazing. And corn, obviously, some of them used, but it was very ancient varieties of corn that are quite different than what we have. So they had, you know, smoked salmon and wild teas and native squash. It's quite a different diet. And those foods are so medicinal. We know that, and this is what sort of struck me about, Kari, I don't know if you really noticed this, but how much wild food they ate as part of their normal diet. And as a doctor, I know that

Starting point is 00:34:14 studying phytochemicals in the food, that wild foods are far richer in phytochemicals than conventionally raised. And obviously, organic know, organic is a little better, but still wild foods are the most nutritionally dense. So it was kind of, you know, very interesting to sort of observe that in Ikaria. And I think, you know, when we look at the Native Americans, there was no obesity, diabetes, heart disease, none of the diseases that we see today

Starting point is 00:34:37 that are just crippling these populations. So to your point about wild foods in Ikaria, I don't know if you noticed, they use about 80 types of wild greens you know are you even whole foods you might see spinach and kale and collard greens but you know they're using fennel tops and dandelions and the kind of you know shit we eat out of our backyard they're making delicious salad out of them and cooking them into pies. And a lot of these greens have 10 times the antioxidants in a glass of red wine.

Starting point is 00:35:13 But this, once again, goes back to the 1970s when Nixon told his agriculture secretary, Earl Butts, we need more food at all costs. And at lower cost. Yeah, right. At lower cost. But the sort of monoculture began that subsidized corn, soybeans, rice and wheat and sugar beets. And farmers actually get penalized when they grow a greater diversity. In fact, you can't get the subsidies if your farm is growing specialty crops, which are some of these more sort of, you know, arcane, wild-like.

Starting point is 00:35:54 Well, specialty crops are fruits and vegetables. They're not even wild. They're not even just wild greens. They're like just fruits and vegetables. It's crazy. Yeah, it's nuts i mean you know we we we support the growing of foods that are killing us and not the growing of foods that are going to heal us so it's it's kind of all backwards um you also found um you know latin

Starting point is 00:36:16 american cuisine uh which i think is is we typically think of as a lot of starchy stuff and but but you found sort of sources of it that were actually very helpful and more sort of traditional. Can you talk about some of those foods in your Blue Zones American kitchen? Yeah, I argue that the best diet the human species has ever invented are the three sisters. It goes back about 7,000 years in Mesoamerica. And it's three simple ingredients, beans, corn, often ground up into a tortilla, and squash.

Starting point is 00:36:50 And you combine those three foods, you have complex carbohydrates, you have all the amino acids necessary for human sustenance, i.e. a whole protein, high in folic acid, niacin. And Latin Americans, you know, we see this in Nicoya, but also the food tradition I captured in the Blue Zone American Kitchen, they're still using those foods. But, you know, one of the chefs pointed out when all you're doing is frying meat or adding oil and sugar, it takes no creativity. But when you're using these simple plant-based products, it forces a creativity that evolves over the centuries. So, you know, there's Diego Tosini. He's an Argentinian here in Miami. His Love Life Cafe, which takes these basic Latin American foodstuffs, it's the hottest restaurant in Miami right now. The mayor eats there all the time. The Guadarrati is there. I think the Latin Americans among us, we have this Adan Medrano we met in Houston.

Starting point is 00:38:01 You know, we tend to think of Tex-Mex fare as steak fajitas or slathering cheese on enchiladas. But he actually went back and found that the original Texas Mexican cuisine is full of amaranth and pecans and walnuts and moles and peppers and, you know, once again, corn and beans. But he's brought back this nuanced flavor and these highly nutritional food ingredients and created a cuisine. He was just honored by the city of Houston. He's been written up in the New York Times. And there's all these gems, these under-celebrated people who are wildly gifted, but they're, you know, cooking in relative isolation.

Starting point is 00:38:52 And for the Blue Zone American Kitchen, I tried to capture these chefs who are recreating the diet of longevity. it's it's quite amazing and and um you know the the book is really beautiful and it's it's sort of inspiring to think about how right here in america we have a lot of the the kind of secrets to our own blue zones if we if we reclaim some of these old food ways that we've disrupted through our colonized food system and you know the the three sisters thing is quite interesting too from an agricultural point of view because they grew the corn stalks and the beans grew up around the corn as a pole as they don't need bean poles and the squash they used in between the plants as a cover crop in other words it kept the moisture in the soil so they didn't need to water it so it was this brilliant intercropping system and the beans put nitrogen in the soil

Starting point is 00:39:42 as fertilizer for the corn. So it's just this incredibly beautiful synergistic system. They didn't probably know about nitrogen. They didn't know about fertilizer. They didn't know about all this stuff, but sort of it just, they knew that it created much more delicious food. And I think historically we were always going for flavor in our food and our flavor comes from the phytochemical richness of the food which comes from how we grow it and the the kind of the the natural qualities of the food now i was i was sort of fascinated when i went to korea about the honey because there they have all these different areas where they grow honey throughout the island at different elevations and different microclimates and with different plants that all have different medicinal properties,

Starting point is 00:40:25 right? So it's kind of fascinating. Even they kind of knew without really knowing, you know what I mean? Like it was like they kind of had this sort of indigenous knowledge that we completely lost. And our diet has become so depleted. Even if you go to Whole Foods or what you think is healthy food, unless you go to a farmer's market where there really are growing foods that are kind of weird, I call weird

Starting point is 00:40:43 foods, you know, that you kind of don't find in the supermarket that are more heirloom foods that are grown in regenerative ways that you're going to get some of these kind of plant-rich diets that are incredibly helpful. I would like to inject a note of optimism there. I mean, you're quite right about the scarcity of these phytonutrient, scarcity of these foods. But, you know, if you are a mom living in Iowa or Fort Worth, Texas, and you know, my daytime job, I'm hired by cities to lower the obesity rate, uh, of these entire cities, people, mom, mom say, I can't afford to eat healthy. I can't afford to go out and buy organic foods. And she's right. But on the other hand, what she probably doesn't realize that a 25 pound bag of pinto beans

Starting point is 00:41:32 from Costco and another bag of brown rice, 25 pound bag of brown rice will set you back about $30. And then with the combination of, you know, a little bit of oil, olive oil or some other healthy fat with some herbs, some salt, some spices, you can get about 90 percent the way there. At least it's a diet absent of a lot of the things we know will kill you, like high fructose corn syrup, which is in so many products, added sugars, these highly refined grains in ultra-processed foods. So is it the Icarian super greens? No, but we have to give Americans a place to start in making tasty, delicious beans with a grain, makes a whole protein. You're well on your way. Yeah, no, it's really great advice and i think you know eating healthy doesn't have to be expensive you might not be getting a

Starting point is 00:42:30 you know heirloom variety this for that but you can get really delicious real whole foods at reasonable costs i mean i mean walmart's the biggest organic grocery store in the world right so you can get stuff at fairly inexpensive prices if you pick smartly and wisely and use the right foods. I saw this when I was down in East South Carolina, one of the worst food deserts in America. And this family I took care of there, part of this movie Fed Up, they were a family of five living in a trailer. They had food stamps and disability only. The father was 42, already on

Starting point is 00:43:07 dialysis from this toxic American diet from diabetes at 42 years old. The mother was huge. The son was 50% body fat and diabetic at 16, almost diabetic. And I said, look, rather than actually tell them, eat this, do this, do that, I went to their kitchen. I went shopping. I got some real ingredients, simple things. Really simple. We made a chili with lots of beans, little ground turkey, salad. We made stir-fried vegetables. We made roasted sweet potatoes.

Starting point is 00:43:37 I mean, they never cooked in their kitchen before. Never. Everything was from a box, a can, a package, frozen this or that, microwaved. And they loved the food. It was really delicious. And I gave them a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget, which was how to eat well for you and the planet in your wallet. And they did it. And they lost 200 pounds as a family. They were able to do this, again, in one of the worst food deserts. So within a very limited budget. So I think it's possible. I think it may take a little education, a little training, a little support.

Starting point is 00:44:06 And that goes to the whole conversation that you really created about community. And I want to sort of talk before we close about some of the work you're doing in communities around America. Because you didn't just go to the Blue Zones and have a good time and write these books and do talks and all that. But you got serious. And you went into really difficult places in America, which needed help. And you actually recreated, in a sense, American Blue Zones by constructing

Starting point is 00:44:33 environments for people that made the easy choice the healthy choice instead of the easy choice, the hard, the unhealthy choice, which is what we have now. So can you talk about some of the work you've done there and some of the outcomes? It's pretty dramatic, you know, dropping healthcare costs and how you did it and what you're doing in that way. So the key insight I drew from 15 years of studying blue zones is not, they don't have better behavior or better discipline. They live in environments where the easy choice is, The healthy choice is the easy choice. So beginning with a small city called Albert Lee, Minnesota, we developed a process. It requires a full-time team of people working for five years called the Blue Zone Project. It's funded by hospital systems and insurance companies.

Starting point is 00:45:20 And we work with city council. We have a policy bundle that favors healthy food over junk food and junk food marketing, favors the pedestrian over the motorist. So we help over a five year period, help the city council pick politically feasible and effective policies that are going to work in that community. And that really has a huge impact. Then we have a Blue Zone certification program for schools, restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, and churches. And over a five-year period, we can usually get 50% of all those places certified, which means that they've changed their policies and designs to favor unconsciously healthier choices when it comes to food and movement. And then a third squad within these teams gets 15% of the adult population to become Blue Zones ambassadors and optimize their homes and their social circles. So they're

Starting point is 00:46:21 mindlessly making better choices. And our biggest city, Fort Worth, Texas, over five years, we saw a three percent drop in the and will continue to do so for every year in the foreseeable future because we made a lot of change. Their environment. Yeah. Yeah. Quarter billion dollars is not some change. You know, so that's huge. I mean, yeah, this is no, this is something should be done in every city, town, state in America. It's so clear to me that, that we have to kind of reimagine our communities. And the, you know, it wasn't like hard stuff. You're like, Oh, we're going to get rid of all the crap at the checkout counters, or we're going to, you know, change people's plates and their home to 10 and 10 inches instead of like 12 inches and just simple little nudges like that have profound benefits.

Starting point is 00:47:23 Yeah. So we're always looking for the silver bullet. And the answer lies in silver buckshot. So we have about 120 small interventions like the ones you just mentioned. And our team endeavors, you know, we're going to try all 120. We're going to fail at 40 of them. But the 80 or so that remain in place, they exert a positive influence on people's unconscious decision. And therein lies the power. You know, for example, I'll give you one big macro example. Billboard signs. We know that neighborhoods that were there are billboards that are advertising, you know, sodas and McDonald's and so forth. Those neighborhoods, the BMI are between 10 and 15 percent higher

Starting point is 00:48:13 than the exact same neighborhood with no billboard signs. So I'm not going to go in that neighborhood and beg everybody in the neighborhood to start eating healthier food. I'm going to talk to city council. I'm going to show them the data. I'm going to ask who benefits from those billboards and ask them if, well, maybe people won't miss those billboards. And sure enough, when the billboards go out, you see the obesity rate drop. We've seen it in Vermont. We've seen it in Boulder, Colorado. So why not aggregate interventions like that and put them to work rather than, you know, hoping that our food system is going to change or that we're all going to start eating like people in a caria again. It's never going to happen until there is a focused effort at

Starting point is 00:48:59 comprehensively changing the environment. Yeah, I like that because, you know, you could, I'm working on the federal level, which is challenging and there's a lot of obstacles, but you work on the local level and you work with local people and local communities and people who live in those communities care more about their communities. And I think they're more willing to make those changes and people in the city governments and sort of local governments and town governments actually are more incentivized to do the right thing? Sometimes, but you can get done. It could take a decade to change major policy in Washington. It could it could change in three months in a small city. You know, government happens at the local level and the mayors and the city councilmen and women are way more powerful at

Starting point is 00:49:46 exerting a healthy influence on people in their city than anybody in Washington. It's so true. I can see it's such a smarter play. I think you're doing amazing work with that, Dan. And I want to sort of close by having you talk about the last group of the four that we didn't talk about, which is the Asian-Americans population, because we don't think of that as an indigenous American population. I mean, slavery, yes, that brought people a long time ago, and they really have brought their indigenous ways from Africa, and Native Americans have been here, and Latin America, Central Mesoamerica are clearly, you know, Americans. But Asian-Americans, you don't think of as originating here.

Starting point is 00:50:27 But how has their foodways helped us to sort of live long? Yeah. So, you know, it's not necessarily indigenous people that I was focusing on. I was looking at immigrants. People have come here and the fusion of their homeland cuisines with American influences. So Asians came here. Asians taught us how to eat greens. You know, you get you see these wet markets in or these vegetable markets still in New York City, where there are literally dozens and dozens of kinds of greens.

Starting point is 00:50:58 And I would say Asians, Korean-Americans, Japanese-American, Chinese-American, you look at what they ate around the turn of the century and it was fewer than 15% animal products. So they got really good at making plant-based food taste delicious and really have excelled in it. So we spent a lot of time in Hawaii, where I think the most interesting Asian fusion is taking place because they've had strong influence from the Filipinos, the Japanese, the Koreans, a lot of it in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles area. We spent a lot of time in Minnesota with the Hmong populations. Oh, yeah. populations. In all cases, it was sort of an austerity that has forced creativity and innovation. And we captured about 20 of their best recipes that are really American inventions. Like? Give me some examples of the recipes in your book. It sounds like they're just full of these really unusual but incredibly delicious recipes. Yes.

Starting point is 00:52:14 So like these Vietnamese tacos, which or a – this is not going to sound Asian, but it's a tofu that's made to taste like feta. On top of that is tomatoes and cherries and sort of a sweet umami flavor on top of that. So it's 100% plant-based. It's mainly taking these original recipes you'd expect to see in these countries, but then using the available American ingredients to prepare the final dish. I can't wait till I get my copy, Dan. I'm going to start cooking them. I'll send them to you. Dan, you've really done some amazing work. I mean, your work has touched so many people,

Starting point is 00:52:54 not just obviously the stuff you've done in communities, but just the inspiration to understand how we can start to reimagine creating our lives in ways that make it easier to be healthy and live longer by changing the way we eat, by building community, by naturally moving, by taking time to be and hang and just enjoy life, which I know you do so well. So Dan, thank you so much for your work. Everybody,

Starting point is 00:53:16 make sure you go out and get this book right now, The Blue Zones of American Kitchen. You can get anywhere you get books, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, wherever. And I hope you enjoy it as much as I know I will because I'm going to get it right now and go check out some of those recipes because I think those are important to include in our diet and start to reclaim these old food ways that are so embedded with natural food as medicine principles. So Dan, thanks for doing the hard work and making it happen. Love seeing you as always. and keep up the good work. Anyway, if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family. Leave a comment. How have you actually used

Starting point is 00:53:53 foods that are a little unusual, maybe from your ancient traditions of your family and history? I know mine's Vegas and locks, which is definitely not good for me, but I think I've got them excited to sort of see what we hear from you and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share

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Starting point is 00:55:10 I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, Thank you.

The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Eat Like Blue Zones In America with Dan Buettner

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