ZOE Science & Nutrition - 5 daily habits of people who live longer | Dan Buettner

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Would you like to stay healthy until you're 100? For most of us, the answer is, of course, yes. But why do some people live longer, and is it achievable? In this episode, best-selling author and longevity expert Dan Buettner, explores what decades of studying the people who live the longest reveal about health and lifespan. Instead of chasing hacks, the science suggests that a longer life is shaped by everyday food, social habits, and the places people live. We’ll look at practical habits seen across the world’s blue zones, rare global hotspots where celebrating your 100th birthday is common. Rather than relying on willpower, Dan explains why changing your routine and environment may be easier and more effective. By the end of the episode, you’ll have some simple tips to help you start your day like you live in a Blue Zone - and increase your chances of living healthily to 100. Unwrap the truth about your food 👉 ⁠Get the ZOE app  🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily 30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system Follow ZOE on Instagram. Timecodes 00:00 Intro 01:24 What people who reach 100 actually eat 03:28 Why genes only explain 20% of longevity 07:20 What all Blue Zones diets secretly have in common 08:10 The high-carb pattern that shocks most people 09:20 Why grains and beans work together 10:50 The protein food that beats beef 11:55 Why plant protein comes with an extra benefit 12:15 Why fiber is the closest thing to a super nutrient 13:00 Why ‘fiber is sexy’ but ignored 15:05 A bathtub of meat vs how centenarians eat 15:50 You don’t have to be rich to eat well 17:25 Why deliciousness matters more than discipline 18:30 How many extra years diet can add 20:20 Why chasing longevity usually fails 22:40 What breakfast looks like at age 100 24:20 Why eating earlier helps your metabolism 25:45 The blood sugar crash that drives overeating 28:15 When ‘healthy’ yogurt has more sugar than Coke 31:15 How breakfast rules were shaped by food companies 33:30 The fasting window most people can manage 34:40 The overlooked habit: Blue Zones don’t snack 38:15 Why grumpy people don’t make it to 100 42:00 Why environment beats willpower 55:50 The five forces shaping long life 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Better Breakfast Guide Mentioned in today's episode Recipe: Sardinia Minestrone The Blue Zones Kitchen One Pot Meals: 100 Recipes to Live to 100 by Dan Buettner The ZOE BIG IF Study, MDPI (2024) ZOE’s PREDICT studies: What we’ve learned  Breaking Bread: the Functions of Social Eating, Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology (2017) Consuming media, consuming food: investigating concurrent TV viewing and eating using a 7-d time use diary survey, PHN (2021) Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

Welcome to Zoe Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Would you like to stay healthy until you're 100? For most of us, the answer is, of course, yes. But is it achievable? Do you need to become a biohacker or take 43 expensive supplements every morning? Perhaps a meat-only diet or a weekly celery juice cleanse will do the trick. While there's a lot of conflicting information on social media,

it's worth noting that longevity influencers are never anywhere near 100 years old. So does anyone have any real answers? The answer is yes. Today I'm joined by Dan Boutner, a National Geographic Fellow, best-selling author and founder of the Blue Zones Project. He has spent decades studying regions where people routinely live beyond 100 without a biohacking influencer in sight. So how do they do it?

We're also joined by Professor Sarah Berry, a world leader in large-scale human nutritional studies, a professor in nutrition at King's College London and chief scientist at Zoe. In this episode, we'll learn about the morning routines of genuine centenarians, the name for people who actually have lived for more than 100 years. And by the end of the episode, you'll have some simple tips to help you start your day like you live in a blue zone and increase your chances of living healthily to 100. Dan, thank you for joining me today. It's a total delight.

It's wonderful to have you back. And Sarah, thank you for being here. Pleasure. So, Dan, hopefully you remember, we always like to kick this show off with a rapid-fire Q&A with questions from our listeners. With these strict rules,

yes or no, or a sentence if you have to. Okay. Can small lifestyle changes increase my chances of living to 100? Yes. Our diet and exercise the only things you need to live a long life? No.

Are the blue zones slowly disappearing? Some of them are. Are people in the blue zones always vegetarian? No. And finally, what's the biggest misconception that you hear about the blue zones? That it's a noun. It's actually a verb.

The thing is that the blue zones are a phenomenon in time. 150 years ago, those places weren't blue zones. People were dying of infectious diseases. back in the 19th century. Now, as you correctly point out, as time goes on, chronic diseases the same diseases that are beleaguering us, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, dementia, certain types of cancers. They're raising the mortality rates in these places. So life expectancy and concentration of people making it to 100 are diminishing. They're still going up. They're just not going up as fast. Dan, you've been on the show before, which was a fantastic episode for anyone who

hasn't listened to it. But for anyone who either needs a refresher or didn't hear that episode, I'd love to start with a quick recap of basically what are the blue zones. I led a project for National Geographic, this goes back now over 20 years, with the idea of reverse engineering longevity. So only about 20% of how long we live as a population is dictated by our genes, 80% is something else. So I reasoned that if I could find confirmed populations where people are living measurably longer, and then looked at the common denominators or the correlates, it would point me in a direction of maybe this is a formula for longevity. So we found five of these so-called blue zones, the longest of men in the world in Sardinia, Italy, the longest of women, Okinawa, Japan,

in the Nekoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, we have a population with the lowest rate of middle-age mortality. On the island of Ikaria, Greece, people live eight years longer with virtually no dementia. And then in the United States, it was among the Seventh-day Adventist living in and around Lomalindy, California. And so these are places where people are enjoying 10 extra good years, years without disease, which is a gold mine, especially when you hit a certain age. So my job and my team of scientists has been to tease out the common denominators, what they eat, what they do, how they live, their environment. And that's been the basis now of six New York Times bestsellers and an Emmy Award-winning Netflix documentary.

And why are they called Blue Zones? My colleague Gianni Pess, a Sardinian, spent his entire life identifying 100-year-olds in Sardinia. And his methodology was to look at how many people reached age 100 over the past 150 years. And it's very important to look at the concentration of centenaries over time. We're in Palm Beach right now. There's a lot of 100-year-olds. Why? Because it's full of rich, white people who, you know, are healthy enough to move down here and have, you know, great health care cover.

But to do it right, you have to look at centenarian concentration over time. And he meticulously did this. And villages that had a certain threshold, in other words, it was about one standard deviation, higher than you would expect to see in the developed world, he put a little blue dot near that village. And there were a cluster of villages in the highlands of Sardinia with so many blue dots. He just started referring to it as the blue zone. And when I was on my worldwide National Geographic Project, I met him and we became friends and I evolved his blue zone concept to an international one.

So now what a blue zone means, it's a statistically verified area where people live measurably longer as compared to the rest of the world. I just took two of the top demographers, two top population scientists in the world to our Blue Zones. And Blue Zones was always, I think, by scientists, you know, they never discredited us, but they didn't quite understand it. And we showed them the records in Sardinia going back to 1860, every birth and every death. And they go, oh my God, this is a goldmine. We don't have this any place in the world. So now all of a sudden, It's drawn all these scientists of the blue zones who are doing academic papers. There's three academic papers coming out.

One in the gerontologist in December. You know, this is really kind of blowing up as a source for insight on how to eat and how to live. And then these countries are really diverse. You've got Japan, Italy, America. There must be so many things that are different about these countries. But what is it that they have in common that you think is responsible for this? longevity. As you point out, it's like a Venn diagram, and each of these places have things that may explain their longevity unique to them. For example, Okinawa, until about 1980, about 70% of all

the calories they consume came from one food, purple sweet potatoes. And we don't know purple sweet potatoes are longevity food, but we do know they ate a lot of it and they lived a long time. They also ate about eight times more tofu than we eat per person in this country. So that might have something to do with it. But we did a meta-analysis. So an average of a lot of dietary studies done over the past 100 years in all five blue zones, averaged them out to see, in general, people in blue zones are eating peasant food. They're not eating, as you might guess, ultra-processed food.

I know there's a lot of talk now about protein. But in blue zones, two-thirds of their calories came from carbohydrates. It was a high-carb diet, which shocks a lot of people, which is to say they were eating mostly whole grains, greens and garden vegetables, tubers like sweet potatoes, nuts, and the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. So if you want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be 100, I simply say, well, look at what those who've reached 100 have actually eaten.

in mass, and it gives us a pretty good idea. The good news is it overlays very well with what Zoe tells us we should be eating. With scientists like you, it serendipitously or happily converges on the same eating pattern. So the one commonality was beans across the different countries, but otherwise they were quite different, were they in other aspects of their diet? Well, the type of whole grain is different. Of course, Okinawa, it's mostly white rice. In Costa Rica, it's mostly corn, and in the Mediterranean blue zone, it's mostly wheat. But in every case, you have a grain and a bean, and when you put a grain and a bean together, what do you get? You get a balanced amino acid profile.

All the amino acids necessary for human sustenance. So even though the food stuff is slightly different, it adds up to your main point, very high in fiber, but also plenty of protein, even though it's a high-carb diet as well. When you put a grain and a bean together, you get a whole protein. And that could be pasta and fajjoli. It could be beans and corn tortillas. It could be beans and rice. And every one of these cultures have their particular combination.

So they are getting their protein. People think to get their protein, I need a slab of beef or a pork chop or bacon. But that's actually not the best place to get your protein. Your best protein is to get it from plant source. And I think this is really important because there is that misconception that the only source of good protein is for meat. And yes, meat has a really great balance of amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. But you can get amino acids from lots of plant-based sources, nuts, seeds, whole grains, pulses. But like Dan said, they have a slightly different makeup.

And so what's really important is if you are relying on plant-based sources of protein to have a mixture, to have their pulses together with the whole grains, together with the nuts. And then you'll get the same balance as you would get with meat. I'll give you a quick little quiz. Which of the following foods do you think has more protein per 100 grams? Beef, pork chops, mutton, or pumpkin seeds? I feel like you're tricking me. I would have gone with, like, beef, I guess.

I'm not answering that because I'm worried I'm going to get it wrong. It's pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin seeds have more protein, but we don't know that because there's not a huge pumpkin seed lobby behind it, reminding us that you need your protein, our product's the only place to get it. But remember when you're eating meat to get your protein, for one kilo of meat, it takes about a beef, for example, it takes 11 kilos of grain.

So in America anyway, a lot of that grain is subjected to pesticides, roundup, for example. so that animal aggregates all of those toxins 10 or 11 times for that meat. That meat is also subjected to hormones. The meat also has saturated fat, which too much of it isn't all that good for us. When you go to a plant-based source of protein, it's clean. And it also comes with a fiber package, which the two things that Zoe and Blue Zones violently agree on is how important fiber is and that we simply don't get enough of it. Yeah, I mean, that's a real problem in the U.S. and the U.S. and the U.K.

in so many countries, 95% of us don't get enough fiber. So you hear that 95% of us don't get enough five. Tell people why fiber is so important. So fiber is the only supernutrient, if I was to say, there was a supernutrient out there. It's protective against many chronic diseases, cardiovascular disease, cancer, for example, it's particularly protective against colorectal cancer. It plays a really important role in modulating how we metabolize our food, modulating our cholesterol. But it also has really important structural role. And what people don't realize is fiber is actually cell war material. And so it has this really important role in modulating how much of the food we absorb, how quickly we absorb it, and also where we absorb it, as well as the fact is it provides

the most amazing fuel for our microbiome. And we know that if we have a happy microbiome, we have a happy person. You see, I think people don't realize how sexy fibers. I mean, we kind of associate with like this woody substance or lettuce. But it's so incredibly powerful. And I just think it's hard for people to make money off of fiber. So we don't hear about it as much. And that's why 95% of us don't get enough of it. There's a small trend starting called fibromaxing.

And we're really hopeful that that's going to overtake this trend at the moment, or that's this obsession with protein. Dan, just one more question on the diets related to the blue zones. I'm assuming that they have very, very little, heavily processed food, that it's whole foods. So most of the blue zones were geographically isolated until about the year 2000. So a hundred-year-old had the first 75 years of his or her life where they were eating a very traditional diet.

If you're eating a certain way for 75 years, even if, you know, a hamburger or pizza comes on the dietary scene, you don't necessarily adopt it. So they continue to eat the patterns they established when they were children or young adults. But now the blue zones are increasingly looking like the UK or the United States and the sad state of their food environment. So you're looking at all these people who live to be over 100 and you're understanding like what's in common across them and saying like we can learn from this to apply to our own lives. And you're saying that actually despite everything that we're hearing about protein being so central for sort of longevity, that actually the amount of protein

the head was not that high and that the protein source was primarily from this combination of sort of whole grains and beans? I wouldn't say it was a low protein diet, but I would say it's a medium protein diet. So in America, for example, the average American consumes about 110 kilograms a meat a year. That's a bathtub full of dead animal. In the blue zones, it was about 10 kilograms a year. So instead of 110 kilograms a year, it was like 10 kilograms a year. Of these people who make to be 100 years old. Yes. And by the way, these people weren't consciously known, well, meat's bad for me. I'm not going to eat it. They just simply didn't have the access to it. Meat was a celebratory food for a wedding. It was for a birthday or village festival. They'd slaughter a goat and eat it. Or on

Sunday, they might have some meat. But most of the food available to them was this sort of peasant food. Very cheap, by the way. I think another big lesson blue zones teach us is you don't have to be rich to eat healthy. Most of these ingredients are served at the bottom shelf of the grocery store and cost a euro or a dollar or two for a quarter kilo. And it's very easy to eat healthy on this sort of blue zone diet, blue zone way of eating. I think that's also an important message. I think it's really fascinating. And fascinating that you said that their diets had sort of figured out how to deliver all the protein you need through this combination of plants. because it's just like eating one plant was going to be unhealthy,

but this combination together was giving them what they need. As you know, almost all plants have protein. And spinach is very high in protein, for example. It's just not marketed to us, so we don't think about it. But in general, the easy way, you know, especially if you don't have a lot of money, and you want to get your protein, and you also want to eat healthy. We're kind of bamboozled into thinking,

I need this fancy superfood or fresh greens from the expensive market. You get one pot, some nice herbs and spices, and you make beans and rice. It's a staple in the southern part of the United States. Or if you're a Latino, every Latino is going to recognize a corn, tortilla, and beans. You put those two together, put some hot sauce. Bam, you have all the protein you need. If you're Asian, mung beans or tofu is a great way to get that protein. And these are inexpensive foods.

And the real genius, Blue Zones is harnessed. is they've known how to make these simple peasant foods high in protein, high in complex carbohydrates and fiber, taste delicious. That's the most important insight. Most important ingredient is deliciousness. Why? Because you could tell me that broccoli is the best, healthiest food in the world, or fermented tofu or sauerkraut, whatever. But if you don't like it, you might force yourself to eat it for a couple weeks or months, but you're not going to eat it for long enough to make any difference. If you can figure out how to make these foods delicious,

like people in the blue zones, peasant food delicious, bam, you've got to kill her app. So tell me about deliciousness. How did you feel after your breakfast this morning? Great, I hope. But if the answer is tired, bloated, or hungry again by noon, you're not alone. At Zoe, we always want to learn more about your nutrition habits.

So we recently asked thousands of people about, breakfast. As it turns out, only a tiny fraction of those we surveyed felt satisfied and energetic after eating breakfast. That is not good. We know that the wrong breakfast can set you up for a day filled with energy dips, hunger pangs and brain fog. The right breakfast, not the kind that big food wants you to eat, can keep you reaching for sugary snacks throughout the day and sabotaging your health goals. Because we're Zoe, we want to help you change that. We just launched our free, better breakfast guide featuring six science-backed recipes, five simple breakfast swaps, and real-life advice from our team of world-leading scientists and nutritionists, including what they eat to energize

their mornings. It's time to skip the crash and give your body what it needs to thrive. To download your free guide right now, go to zoe.com forward slash breakfast guide or click the link in the show notes. That's zoe.com breakfast guide or click the link in the show notes. So, you know, my daytime job, I get hired by insurance companies to lower the BMI of entire cities that thereby raises their life expectancy. And my job is to articulate in such a way that people want to move from a standard American diet to a blue zone Zoe type diet. And by the way, the value proposition for a 20-year-old, for a woman, it's about 10 extra years. So moving from a standard American diet, to a largely whole food plant based. And for a man, it's about 12 years. So it's an enormous value proposition. In the U.S. going from like your standard American diet,

as you're talking to these cities, you're saying like a woman can get an extra 10 years of life, a man an extra 12 years of life. That's right, 20-year-old. It drops to about six years for a 60-year-old, but even an 80-year-old could get an extra three years. And those are valuable years where you're likely to be more free of a chronic disease

and feel good and feel better. So it's one thing to know that. How do you get people to do it? So I'm particularly interested in harnessing the wisdom of deliciousness and putting it to work. And part of my first book is The Blue Zone Kitchen. My photographer from National Geographic and I went back to all the Blue Zones and we sat on a stool and we watched old ladies, grandma's cook and make this fantastically delicious food, these pies made out of beans and these wonderful stews and soups. And what we were capturing there is sometimes 500 years of observed wisdom. These people like to eat delicious food just like we do, but they had very limited ingredients.

The greens and beans and tubers, et cetera. So I got to capture a half a millennium of culinary trial and error in these recipes. And I put in the book, Blue Zone Kitchen, was a number one New York Times bestseller, number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. because we focused on deliciousness, not on hammering people over the head, this is going to help you live longer, or it voids cruelty, or it's good for the carbon footprint. I don't think people really give a crap about that for the most part when it actually comes to what they're going to eat for lunch. I always say that if a food's too healthy to be enjoyed, it's just not healthy at all.

I love that. So much of longevity are these hacks, these quick fixes. Yep. And when you think about, you know, a plasma exchange or stem cells in my joints or ozempic injection in my gut, that's not a very enjoyable way to live to a hundred. The way I like to think is an Italian grandfather, you know, who gets up and has breakfast with his friends and a cup of coffee and then maybe spend a little time in his garden and lunch. He's back with his friends. A big, long lunch that takes three hours, comes home, takes a nap, has a glass of wine at five, another beautiful dinner over the sunset.

And these guys, by the way, are living a dozen years longer than us living in the UK and the United States on average. So what routine are you going to pick? The needle in the gut and the experimental plasma exchange or the wine with your buddies and the big, you know, beautiful Mediterranean meal. I know what I'm picking. painting a beautiful picture. I know which one I would definitely be going for. I'd love to talk a bit now about some of the behaviors you've seen from these people who are living to be 100 and what we might be able to apply to ourselves. Could you tell me about how these people tend to

start their day? And is it similar across these completely different regions? It turns out that none of them are consciously adopted in a new healthy routine for the morning. They just live their lives. Longevity is much better if it ensues than trying to pursue it. In other words, when we try to change our behavior and our habits, it occasionally works in the short run, but fails for almost all people, almost all the time in the long run. It's about changing your environment. That's why, you know, I like to talk about evidence-based ways to shape your surroundings so your unconscious decisions are better. That's the idea behind me. That's the idea behind blue zones. But we want to talk about morning routines because it's buzzy.

Morning routines of 100-year-olds. Okay, here we go. The first big one, breakfast, it tends to be savory. They're not having cereal and milk or a smoothie or eggs and bacon like we have in the United States. It tends to be, you know, olives, a piece of sourdough bread, and a little tiny piece of feta cheese. In Sardinia, it's often a minestroni, which is this vegetable soup with beans that gives you about half of the fiber you need for the day and a piece of sourdough bread. A coffee accompanies almost every breakfast. Not a macchiato, but a cup of black coffee, which is, I would argue, is one of the better longevity beverages around. They tend to eat a large breakfast because they're off to work in the morning. So they wake up, this is traditional. It's changing. It's

quickly now, but they go to sleep and wake up with the sun. There'll often be a period at night where they'll wake up. It's often a two-sleep situation where they might wake up at four and do some work and then go back to bed till sunrise. But it's a big breakfast. In Costa Rica, it'll be beans and rice and avocado and some fruits from their gardens. And then it's off to work. And when I say work, it's not intensive, stress-laced work. It tends to be work that requires regular, low-intensity, physical activity. And there's a couple of points that I'd love to pick up on, Jonathan, because I think these are points that could just be applied to anyone wherever they live.

And one is the point you made that they have a big breakfast. And this is something that we see a big difference in the U.S., the U.S., the U.K., many of the countries that there is a big problem with obesity type 2 diabetes, they tend to have the majority of their calories later in the day. And yet you see many of the European countries and the blue zone-style countries tend to front-load their calories. And we know that you are metabolically healthier earlier in the day compared to later in the day. And again, we've seen from our own Zoe research that if you're having particularly carbohydrates or heavy meals later in the day, that's associated with poorer metabolic health. So I think that's

really fascinating. I wasn't aware that in the blue zones particularly, they did that. And then the other thing that was really interesting, you talked about the quality of the breakfast. These savory breakfast tend to be higher in fiber, higher in protein, maybe healthy fats. By having these kind of breakfast rather than a refined carbohydrate, it sets you up on a kind of really stable day. So if you have a refined carbohydrate, you have these big peaks in circulating glucose. If you have it for breakfast, then you have these big dips. And Sarah's circulating glucose means blood sugar in simple terms. And Dan, we've done some lovely research at Zori where we found that if people have these high carbohydrate breakfast that are refined,

so devoid of the kind of fiber. Like cereal or so. Yeah, like cereals, like white bread. Or even smoothie. I love to hear what you think about smoothies. Oh, we've done studies on that. I'll come to smoothies. What's really fascinating is we see that people, yes, they have a increase in circulating blood sugar, but what they have is they have these dips. So about two hours after they've had this refined carbohydrate-style meal, they have a crash. And what that causes is them to consume more calories over the day. Our research shows that people that have that dip after breakfast consume 300 more calories over the day. They feel less energetic.

It impacts their mood and they feel less alert. And so a really simple switch people can do, add some protein, add some healthy fats, add some fiber to your breakfast. And we've seen, again, from trials that we've done, by doing that, you stabilize your sugar for the rest of the day, but you feel more energetic and you actually go on to eat less calories. As for smoothies, that's a really interesting area because that all relates to the food structure and so forth. And so top line is, is that if you can eat your food in the original matrix, the original structure in which it came in, i. if it's an apple, eat it as an apple, rather than as a smoothie. Because what happens is by changing the texture of the apple,

making it into a smoothie, you actually eat it fine. times more quickly, the same amount of calories. By eating it more quickly, then you feel less full. You tend to eat your next meal sooner, and then you have these bigger spikes, but more importantly, these bigger dips and glucose. And there's been some fascinating research published on this. You also said something about weight protein, negative or positive, putting that scoop of protein in. I believe that you should be getting your protein and all of your nutrients from whole foods. So if you just follow a simple, basic, healthy, balanced diet, You get all the nutrients that you need.

You get all the protein that you need. This obsession about protein is ridiculous, in my opinion, that there's very few people that don't get enough protein. Yes, if you're older, yes, if you're really, really active, then maybe then we need to think about it. We've done some research showing that if you have a bagel for breakfast, and then the next day you add a kind of cup of Greek yogurt to that breakfast, that you totally change your metabolic response throughout the day,

you totally change how many calories you consume throughout the day. for the better. Just caveat with you. So you see yogurt in the Greek blue zone, you see fermented sheep's milk in the sardinium blue zone, but it's never in these little plastic containers with fruit, which, by the way, have you ever looked on the back of fruit yogurt? Almost always, it has more sugar per gram than a Coke.

So I always like, whoa, you can't just tell people to eat yogurt, can you? Absolutely. When we talk about yogurt in the healthy sense, We're talking about yogurt that doesn't have, you know, the fruit compot with it, doesn't have all the added sugars or sweetness. We're talking about Greek yogurt or plain natural yogurt or plain peffir, for example, as well. One thing I'm interested in listening to this is that what they're eating for breakfast feels quite different from what I was brought up thinking a breakfast should be. Because you talked about things like beans and rice or minestrone soup. And I was brought up, well, that might be dinner or lunch, but it's not breakfast.

Breakfast is like this special food that you only eat for breakfast, and I was definitely brought up that Kellogg's probably made it. Is that like a common thing across the Blue Zone? So you're eating for breakfast meals that are not special breakfast meals? By the way, Kellogg's, which makes cereals, has famously funded the studies discovering that children need cereal for breakfast. So there's a little bit of self-interest there in what we've grown up to believe. But in all the Blue Zones, traditionally speaking,

they're eating a whole food, largely plant-based, savory breakfast. It's delicious. The advent and the timing of it, you know, in Costa Rica, for example, it's that right at sunrise, which will be six or seven. But in Lomalinda, a common, a popular meal pattern is a giant breakfast at 10, which is more like a brunch, and then what they often call a linner, halfway between lunch and dinner at 4 p.m. and that'll be it. In the Western world here, I think that's about the healthiest pattern. You could, you know, just that up or down an hour either way. And so, Dan, when you're talking about breakfast and Sarah, you're talking about it as well, you're not saying I have to have breakfast at like 7 a.m. the first thing that I wake up,

even if you are saying that this is like a big meal and setting me up well. The debate is ongoing whether or not we should be de facto intermittent fasting or restriction, or restricting our calories. But I think most of the data would suggest that 12 hours is a minimum. So in other words, if you eat dinner at, finish dinner at 8, you don't want to start eating until 8 o'clock in the morning. Other evidence suggests you should wait 14 hours. So that would mean if you're finished eating dinner at 8, the next morning at 10, you're eating

your first meal. Evolution often provides us a good source for insight. You can imagine our caveman ancestors didn't toddle over to their refrigerator and make a smoothie or, you know, have eggs and bacon. They had to get up and find food or hunt food or at least kind of repurpose the dinner from the night before. So they're not getting up and eating right away. There's a great scientist from the National Institutes on Health named Mark Matts and also a John Hopkins professor who asserts that actually if you look at evolutionarily speaking, much better not to have your breakfast until about noon, which is probably the pattern of our ancient humans. And by not eating first thing in the morning, we're sharper in the brain.

We have more endurance. And of course, you're going to burn up that visceral fat after about 12 hours for most of us. Yeah, something we advocate for at Zoe is having a 12 or 14 an hour fast period. We wouldn't advocate for the extremes, and I know there's lots of people that do these like six-hour eating, you know, 18-hour fast periods. We don't think that that's necessary, and we've done a big study called the big intermittent fasting study, where we looked in hundreds of thousands of people. We asked them to fast, but just for 14 hours. So we said, eat in a 10-hour window, exactly in the way that you've said, you know, you're having your last meal of the day, maybe at 8, and then you have your breakfast at 10. And we found in as little as 2 weeks,

people reported a reduction in body weight, but more importantly, they felt better. They had better mood. They had less hunger. They were more energetic, and that was just after two weeks. And so you don't have to do it to extreme. So it's really interesting hearing

that this is what naturally is happening in many of these blue zones as well. That's right. They tend to have an early dinner. It tends to be the smallest meal. You know, it's usually leftover lunch. And the other thing I noticed in blue zones, people don't snack.

That's interesting. They're not going from the hand full of chips or the superfood crunch or whatever the hell is marketed to us. But they eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they're done. And Dan, when you look at those, because obviously these five very different periods, are they normally having about that sort of 12 to 14 hours, like overnight fast? Is that sort of the pattern? The sun is down by seven and they've already done eating.

And, yeah, it's 12 to 14 hours. Okinawans might have a very small, dinner at four in the afternoon, and then it's not until they wake up the next morning that their breakfast is likely to be, traditionally speaking, a miso soup full of root vegetables or some of the herbs growing. And I think this is really interesting because our research at Zoe has shown from our predict studies that people who are eating after 9 o'clock in the evening tend to have poorer metabolic health, tend to have higher propensity to obesity, type 2 diabetes and so forth. And so this is something we often say.

to people, just try not to eat after eight or nine. I love that. That's so simple and it's nice to hear the research under Pinsett. And I'm guessing nine isn't the magic hour. I mean, that's for the sake of our analysis. I mean, you know, we looked at eight o'clock, nine o'clock. Those eating after nine, we found that there was a particularly heightened increased risk of poor metabolic health.

But ideally, you eat in tune with your body clock. So ideally not eating after eight, nine or so forth would be better for you than snacking away to your diet. what I called a seafood diet. I'd see food and I'd eat it. It took a while to get off. I think we were all brought up. I feel like this is what the food industry is teaching us, right? And we're surrounded. I assume that part of the not snacking in these environments is you're not always within like 60 seconds and someone's selling new food. If you bring in the snacks and the ice cream and the chips and the cookies and the sodas, the temptation is going to overwhelm you.

The key is to shape your environment to rid them of the temptations. The decision points to be at the grocery store where you just don't buy it. If you want to help your friends and family live longer, healthier lives, and who doesn't, be sure to share this episode with them now. I'm confident they'll thank you for it. I understand from the research team that there might be a couple of real people that we might be able to talk about about sort of their. routines. And I was thought we might be able to start with Don Ramirez in Costa Rica. Amazing guy. A hundred years old. He looks like he's about 70. He's got this perfect sort of smooth skin still. He wears blue jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid shirt and a cowboy hat,

light cowboy hat. He's always got his knife on his belt. He's in Nicoya Costa Rica. He wakes up every morning. And he's got cattle. He's got a horse. And he's got a horse. And he's always got his knife on his belt. And And he leads his cattle through town to where they pasture in the morning. You know, at first, I didn't believe it, because I've seen 500-100-year-olds, and I know what 100-year-old looks like. This guy doesn't look like 100, but we checked his age. Now the guy's probably 102. But anyway, the funny part about his morning routine is he's single.

He's a widower, but he still likes pretty girls. So every single morning, he rides his horse and with all his cows in tow. passed a house where he knows there's a pretty girl sitting on the porch and he waves at her. You know, most people in the booza, and this is just an anecdotal, but it comes from interviewing 500 or so 100-year-olds, grumpy people don't make it. Is that true? I mean, there's a handful of them, but for the most part, the people are making it to 100. They're interesting.

They're interested. They attract people to them. They enjoy telling their stories. They're generous. You know, they often, I remember I met this 108-year-old woman named Ponchita, also in Costa Rica. They're descended from the Chorotega indigenous people. And she still cooks on something called a Fogon, which is this giant adobe kind of oven stove-type thing. And, you know, we had cameras, and we asked her if she'd cook her dinner so we can get some context.

And she patted tortillas and cooked up her beans. and she chased down a chicken and got an egg and put an egg, and it made this beautiful meal and then put it down. And this woman is stick thin. I say, well, can we watch you eat it? And she goes, no, that's for you. And we, no, no, we're not going to eat your food. And absolutely iron resolve.

You eat that. And so it was this generosity. This woman doesn't have much. By the way, we made sure she was, you know, got a big, huge gift. She wasn't expected. So it wasn't like we're taking the food on her mom. But it was just that act. of generosity that gives you insight to the bigger ecosystem of the blue zone.

You know, we tend to get down to the nutrient and the fiber and that, but the bigger magic in the blue zone happens in the ectoskeleton of it, to use a metaphor, the matrix of social and psychological characteristics that are in place that, I'd say reduce stress and make for a stronger, safer, more supportive society. And there's a generosity where people look out for each other. They're not about a bunch of selfish people, you know, shooting up GLP-1s and eating superfoods. That's really fascinating.

We've had some podcasts with researchers who've done these really big studies looking at how much social interaction affects your health in older age and that basically having much more sociability, apparently, is one of the big things that means you live longer than otherwise. and it sounds like this is something you're like seen for real with people all the way up to 100 years old? Yes. Julia, who I met on set with this lived-in-100 Netflix documentary series, 100 years old, never

got married, but she stayed in the village of her family and no kids of her own, but she has like a dozen nieces and nephews, and she's got a separate room in her place, and these nieces and nephews take turns staying at her house. They actually stay 24 hours. She doesn't need a nurse. By the way, this Julia is wonderful. She laughs. She tells dirty jokes.

She goes outside. And you actually want to hang out with her. And the difference between being a lonely spinster and having this regular social interaction with the nieces that stay overnight and take her out and so forth, it's about eight years of life expectancy. It's interesting. It feels like there's almost two things you're talking about here. One is just having social interaction is really important.

important, but we're also talking, I think, about maybe these people having a sort of a more positive attitude and being quite sociable. Yeah, you know, people sort of turn the same research. Yeah, you should be social. Or yeah, you should have a sense of purpose or, yeah, you should shed stress. That's why I come back to the core premise of blue zones. Don't try to change your behavior. Don't say, okay, I'm going to be more social now. Change your environment. The best example, Well, imagine somebody living in a cul-de-sac in a suburb of London or a suburb of the United States here, where every time you want to see somebody new, you've got to get in your car and drive to a shopping mall, and everybody's on their phone looking down, as opposed to a small town where you have a walkable downtown,

you move to a place like that, and you walk to the place to get the coffee every morning. And every morning you bump into half a dozen people you say hi to. and eventually one of those people we get into a conversation and pretty soon they become a friend. People who live in blue zones, well, first of all, they tend to live in extended families. It's a big important idea. So right there they have that sort of social network baked in. And number two, they tend to live in places where they're nudged into bumping into each other, to talk into each other, to needing each other. And so much of our health is a function of our environment, and that's social is right up at the top of that list.

But I think you can have this in cities. When I think about where I live, I live in London. My sister lives 100 yards up the road. My in-laws live within five-minute walk. My kids go to my old school. When I want my kids to school, I see all my old school friends. And so I have what I feel is that kind of community. I live in London, but I see.

still have that. At the weekend, people are constantly in and out of our house, old school friends, family, we eat in that social way. And so I think that we shouldn't disillusion people just because they're living in a city. And so I think you can still have all of that, even if you are from New York or London. Well, we have the suburbanization here in the United States where cities are sprawling. And that's an environmental direction that's going to breed loneliness. It's not just an opinion, it's a fact. That makes sense. We're in Florida right now, and it's hard to get anywhere right without getting in a car and driving a long way to be somewhere else.

And so clearly these cities have been built for cars first rather than humans first. I did want to pick up on one other story because we've spoken a lot about people living in environments. I think are very different from the ones that we're used to in the West. But actually one of your blue zones is in California, right? And so could you tell us a bit about Marge? Marge de Tonne. Marge, 105 years old, wakes up every morning at 6 a.m., reads her Bible. Long live people are almost always religious, or they belong to a faith-based community,

half hour. Then she has her breakfast, and she's very prescriptive about her breakfast. She has slow-cooked oatmeal, not the quick oats, with dates, walnuts, topped with soy milk, followed by what she calls a prune juice shooter. Now, in America, prune juice is kind of a laxative, so you can kind of get the shoot her end of that. But then she goes and she's busy. At 105, she still volunteered for seven organizations. She was in charge of a recycling program, a tape copying effort at her church. She adopted a 78-year-old woman, and she get in her 1994 Cadillac barrel down the San Bernardino

Freeway in Los Angeles, where she would volunteer for these organizations, including the Loma Linda Senior Center where she'd go help out the old folks, who of course are like 40 years younger than she is. But for me, she was the personification of purpose. And what's purpose? This is something we often don't think deeply enough about. True purpose almost always has an altruistic element to it. It's not just, you know, I love to knit or I love collecting cars. It's knowing what their values are. what their passions are, what they're good at, what they like to do. And then the most important is an outlet. If you don't have an outlet, it ain't purpose.

And she had seven outlets. And she got out of bed in the morning, jumped out of bed, and she didn't wake up with the existential stress of 105. I'm no good to anybody anymore. No, these seven organizations need me. She took her medicines. It kept her active. It kept her brain engaged.

It's not a coincidence. 105 and healthy. So, Dan, what's your morning routine? My morning routine? Well, I travel a lot these days because I'm still working for National Geographic. But typically it's a cup of coffee in the morning, which I believe is a longevity beverage. And I live in Miami, and the first thing I do is I walk down to the beach and I get a huge eye full of sun, rises over the Atlantic where I am.

and then I walk up to my favorite coffee shop and have a cup of coffee and read the papers. And I know a bunch of people. I always bump into and then at noon I come home to my place and I go swimming in the ocean. I would say three days out of five, a couple of days it's too turbulent. But I live in a very walkable, bikeable neighborhood and hardly ever get in a car. And what do you typically have for breakfast? So I fast more like 16 hours. And I don't know if that's necessarily the right thing for people, but I tend to fast.

So I have my breakfast at about 11, and I go have, I have the same thing every day. I make a huge pot of Sardinian minestrone. The recipe, by the way, is on my website, damnbutner.com or in my Blue Zone Kitchen Books. But I make it in a big instapot, and then I store seven servings of it for the whole week. I store them, and this is a tip, in glass Pyrex Tupperware. I don't like the plastic. And then I can just take the top off, and that's my lunch. And I'll often put avocado on top of it.

So my minestrone has got three beans, eight or so other vegetables, extra virgin olive oil, put herbs and red pepper in there. Sounds pretty. You've pre-prepared it, so during the week? It takes three minutes in the microwave, and it's piping hot. Can I ask you one last question? to do with the way that people in the blue zones eat. Because it's something that I'm really interested in,

and we're really interested in its own is how fast they eat their foods. So they eat in a social setting, which we know slows down the rate. But we know in the U.S. and the U.K., people are eating their food so fast, which we know is a big problem. Yes, yes. I'm really curious because I think it's something that's a really easy, actionable thing for people to take away. So breakfast might be a little fast, but lunch is a to-do.

lunch is their main meal usually and it happens a little later in the afternoon the whole family sits down in all places there is some prayer or some phrase people say hadahachi boo for example in okinao which means stop my stomach is 80% full or the lord's prayer it's some punctuation between whatever the heck they were doing before and now oh thank you for this food this food special I'm going to honor it. Let's slow down and now we'll eat. And these bigger dinners are always with family. I was just in Sardinia a couple weeks ago. I met the mayor and he had to cut off my interview at two because he had to go home.

And he told me he has a two-hour lunch on a school day and his whole family. And it's not just his family. It's his brother and his brother's family. So there's 10 people sit down to lunch every day. What it be? And they talk. And they unpack the day. And they're not just eating to their favorite TV show or woofing it down so they can run back to the office.

It's a ritual. It's a celebration. And to your point, I think, they're consuming those calories more slowly over the course of time. And you're probably going to tell me why that's good for us. I think it's really good for you. And I think we have a problem in many countries, US, UK, particularly, that we're consuming our lunch in about 20 minutes. We're consuming our dinners similarly in about 30 minutes. And so by eating so fast, you're not allowing the fullness and signals to get to your brain. You're having bigger metabolic

responses. And we know again from our own research that this is associated with poor metabolic health, increased levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes and so forth. And there's been research showing if you just slow down the rate that you're eating by 20%, you subconsciously reduce your calorie intake by 15%. And in addition, you get these metabolic effects. And I think that's what's so lovely when you hear about the blue zones and this social way of eating

that naturally ensures that you slow down anyway because you're talking. Jonathan doesn't have that problem because he talks so much. He eats slowly. I have to admit, when I have my minestronea, I eat alone, I'm probably done in 10 minutes. How do you slow down practically?

So there isn't an optimum time. Practically, there's different ways you can do it. You can have smaller spoons, smaller bowl. All right. The biggest simplest way to do it, is to be in a social setting. That's why I think as well in these blue zones, where all of the eating has done,

or most of it's done in that social setting, you're naturally slowing it down. Studies show that if you eat in front of the TV, you eat about 50% more quickly. Okay, so recapping, I mean, I would say three things. I'd say, express gratitude for your food. And this is something we saw in Kyoto, that there's this whole manner of eating

where before the first bite people take, stock and all the people who brought the food to their table the farmer the person who delivered the food the person who prepared the food the person who cooked the food the person who served the food and that takes a minute sit down with people and make it a social event so you're talking I would say if you can bring food out in stages the first plate the second plate and third plate and then I like this idea that we don't have a TV on or we're not looking looking at a screen. When we sit down to eat, we just eat and try to taste the food and ponder

it a second before you go into your second bite. Are the old blue zones still as healthy as they've always been? No, they're under siege. As soon as the American way of eating, convenience, ultra-processed food, and you see immediately their rates of heart disease and type to diabetes and obesity began to skyrocket and then you get a commensurate drop in life expectancy. The life expectancy is still going up, but it's decelerating. And what the scientists are finding is the blue zones are kind of the canary in the coal mine. Being able to study them gives us an advanced glimpse of what's going to happen to us. Things are happening quicker there.

I'd say the corruption of the food environment, you know, because they were isolated until 2000 or 2010 and now it's hitting hard. Cars are arriving. Mechanized convenience is hitting there and it's hitting there faster for the young people. Young people want the same thing that kids in America or kids in the UK do, but the older people are hanging on. So Okinawa is now the least healthy prefecture in Japan. Produced the highest healthy life expectancy in the history of the world. And now it's the least healthy. But for people, Over 60, they're still the healthiest cohort. They're still the highest concentration of female centenarians in the world is still in Okinaw.

Why? Because they still eat the same way. They're still eating tofu and goya champuru. They're stir fry. They're still eating sweet potatoes. So what's happened to the younger people? They're drinking Coke and they're going to McDonald's and Burger King and KFC. Their habits, their way of eating isn't solidified.

You know, they're online and they're getting pushed the marketing messages where the older people, they don't have an iPhone. They're getting together with their moai and having sake and gossiping together. And so, Dan, for you, really the introduction of sort of Western processed food is like a huge part of that, moving from like the healthiest people to the least healthy people in Japan? You know, I'd say it's 50%. But here's the cluster. People are constantly looking for the silver bullet, and there's no silver. bullet. You have to think a silver buckshot. And there's essentially five mutually supporting

interconnected features to Blue's own life. They're eating mostly a whole food plant-based diet. They're moving naturally. They're not exercising, but they live in environments where every trip occasions a walk, they have gardens out back, they don't have mechanical conveniences. They're getting the equivalent of 10 to 12,000 steps a day without thinking about it. Number three, their life is underpinned with purpose. They know why they wake up in the morning, and that makes it easier for them to stick to staying active and staying socially and mentally engaged. They surround themselves with the right people.

They're around people who care about them on a bad day, and they tend to share values. So they reinforce the right diet. They reinforce the downshifting. They reinforce being part of a spiritual community. And finally, they live in places where the healthy choices, easy choice. That is the big insight that we miss over and over and over again. It's a harder way to go about, you know, where it's like, you know, on this mouse wheel of, you know, we're going to adopt this new diet or this new exercise program or supplement or longevity hack. And even if they worked,

and they might, we don't do them for long enough to make a difference. In blue zones, again, it's about the environment. It's about these five interconnected mutually supporting facets of their life, they keep people doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things for long enough so they don't develop type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease or 40% of cancers or most of dementia. That's the secret. I would like to try and do a little summary and we covered a lot of grounds. Hopefully I'll pick out the key things. The thing that's most on my mind actually is grumpy people don't make it to 100. I absolutely love that. You said they're like interesting and interested that if you implement change from like the standard American diet, which is a standard

Western diet, to the sort of blue zone style diet that you're talking about, if you're 20 years old, you can add 10 to 12 years. But even if you're 80 years old, you can add another three years. So like it's amazing, right? This impact that you're talking about. That when you look at these five blue zones that you've been studying now for so long, these people on average, I think, had like 10 extra years that they were living and this amazing number of people living to 100 and living to 100 with a quality of life. When you really dig into what they're doing, there's a lot of things that are very different

from the way in which we're living in the Western world. But this being Zaria, I guess I'm focusing particularly on nutrition. You give this amazing statistic that average American is eating 110 kilograms of meat, and they were on average eating 10. So it's not that they were vegetarian, but it's like much, much less. And despite all this sort of obsession of like getting as much protein and added protein, They weren't getting this a lot from meat. They are, however, getting it from plants, and they all have this diet where they've got

these combination of plants, which is really effective for getting you all the mix of these amino acids, this sort of healthy protein. And that it's a sort of grain and a bean, very, very high in whole grains. Actually, a lot of the food is coming from these carbohydrates, but very high in fiber and all the polyphenols and everything. Basically, no processed foods because they live before this sort of like big food. industry had arrived in these places. They have a lifestyle where they're tending to sort of go to sleep with the sun and waking up in the sun, and that is having an impact also on their eating

duration. So in general, it's not like they're only eating for six hours in the day, but they are generally having 12 to 14 hours when they're not eating. They're not snacking, but basically they're having these sort of regular meals in patterns that are quite different between the blue zone. So it's not like there's just like one magic pattern that everyone has, but they're living this pattern with other people. And that interesting in almost all of these cases, when they do eat, it's actually quite a large breakfast. It's a breakfast that is not like the one that Kellogg's taught me. I should be having for breakfast. It's quite opposite. It sounds often like lunch and dinner, and this is your own meal now, right? This minestronee soup, you know, for your breakfast at 11am.

Sarah was explaining that actually, you know, doing that is really efficient because your body can cope with like this meal better if you're having this big meal early rather than later, even if you start at midday, right? It's not the timing. It's the fact it's your first meal. And they're very much like whole foods, so not processed, plant-based, whether it's beans and rice or in Australian soup. And, you know, the contrast I understood from this area is like the sort of Western diet we eat, like you fill yourself up with this thing that's very processed, your blood sugar spikes through the roof, you know, then collapses. And then, of course, you're hungry a few hours later, so you have your snack beforehand. And you wrap all of that up, this is

the food, in an environment where these things are really social. So in, Instead of like, I'm all off eating on my own and I'm living on my own, you gave us these beautiful stories of these centenarians and what was really striking is how sociable they are. I'm going to remember the cowboy taking his cows out every morning in order to like doff his hat to the pretty girl. Like, you're still involved in life. There's a lot of encoded wisdom in the traditional ways of doing things. There's a reason for it.

And there's a reason people have done the same things for centuries or millennia that we ought to pay attention to. I know AI is the great white hope for the infinitely better future, but there's a lot of value in looking back as well. I'll end this episode with something I think you'll like, a free Zoe gut health guide. If you're a regular listener, you know just how important it is to take care of your gut. Your gut microbiome is the gateway to better health, better sleep, energy and mood. The list just goes on. but many of us aren't sure how to best support our gut. I wasn't sure before doing Zoe, which is why we've developed an easy-to-follow gut health guide.

It's completely free and offers five simple steps to improve your gut health. You'll get tips from Professor Tim Specter, Zoe's scientific co-founder and one of the world's most cited scientists, plus recipes and shopping lists straight to your inbox. We'll also send you ongoing gut health and nutrition insights, including how Zoe can help. Get your free Zoe gut health guide. Head on over to zoe.com slash gut guide.

Thanks for tuning in and see you next time.