ZOE Science & Nutrition - Live more healthy years

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Do you want to live to 100? Dan Buettner may be able to help. Dietary patterns, community, environment, and stress management play pivotal roles in longevity, and he’s studied the longest living people on earth. From Sardinia's matriarchal villages to Okinawa's garden-rich diets, this episode takes us on a tour of insights. It's not just about living longer, it's about thriving. In today’s episode, Jonathan is joined by Dan Buettner and Prof. Tim Spector to discuss the secrets of a longer, healthier life. Together, they journey through the world’s blue zones, rare global hotspots where celebrating your 100th birthday is common. The guests also address the threats to these longevity havens and the decline of traditional diets. Dan Buettner is an American National Geographic fellow and New York Times bestselling author. He’s also an explorer, educator, and creator of the Netflix series “Live to 100,” which discovers five unique communities where people live extraordinarily long and vibrant lives. Tim Spector is a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, director of the Twins UK study, scientific co-founder of ZOE, and one of the world’s leading researchers. He's also the author of Food for Life, his latest book on nutrition and health. 🌱 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 Learn how your body responds to food 👉 zoe.com/podcast for 10% off Timecodes: 00:00 Introduction 01:09 Quickfire questions 02:33 What are Blue Zones? 04:43 Why do people in Blue Zones live longer? 06:48 What is a Centenarian? 09:00 What are Blue Zone diets? 11:49 Foods for longevity 15:03 Why are these foods good for us? 19:15 Why Blue Zone diets are seasonal and inexpensive 22:30 Is eating meat 5 times a month healthy for us? 27:42 Why are the Blue Zones disappearing? 31:25 Blue Zone tactics to reduce stress 36:02 Can stress reduce life expectancy? 40:36 Why unconscious physical activity is best 45:07 How can we make our lives more ‘Blue Zone’ like? 47:23 The number one thing you can do to add years to your life is… 48:53 Dan's stress reduction techniques 51:39 What is Dan’s daily diet? 53:16 Summary Mentioned in today's episode: Telomere shortening and the transition to family caregiving in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study from PLOS One Books and series from Dan Buettner: The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-Week Plan for a Longer, Better Life The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer: Lessons From the Healthiest Places on Earth The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100 "Live to 100" 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. Today, we uncover the secrets of the so-called Blue Zones. The places where celebrating your 100th birthday is commonplace. Our guest is Dan Buettner. He's an explorer, a National Geographic Fellow, and a leading Blue Zones researcher. Dan takes us into the fascinating lives of people who have lived to be 100 in these places,

revealing their daily practices and habits. I'm also joined by Professor Tim Spector. He's one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists and Zoe's scientific co-founder. He shares what the science says about why these habits can help us live longer. Today's lessons come from centuries of collective understanding. And in this episode, you'll learn to apply them to live a longer and healthier life. Dan and Tim, thank you for joining me today. Pleasure. Good to be here.

Brilliant. Well, look, we have this tradition here, Dan, that we always start with a quick fire round of questions. And with this very strict rule, you can say yes or no, or if you absolutely have to, you can give us a one-sentence answer. Are you up for that? I'm in. Good. And Dan is a little jet-lagged this morning, so it's a particularly mean way to get it straight at the beginning, but we're going to give it a go. All right, starting with Dan.

Have you found the secret to longevity? Yes. Do people in the blue zones all eat the same food? No. Could having the right friends help me to live longer? Yes. Will you tell us today how we can build our own blue zones at home? Yes. Well, that was easy. And Tim, just a couple for you. Are there foods that can increase my lifespan? Yes. Do I have to go to the gym if I want to live a long and healthy life? No, thank God. Brilliant. And then final question, Dan, before we get into it,

and you can have a whole sentence or two, what's the biggest myth about living a long and healthy life that you often hear? That there's a pill or a supplement or a superfood that's going to be your panacea. I think that's a brilliant place to start. Well, look, Dan, for anyone who hasn't seen your recent Netflix series or read your book, I strongly recommend it. But let's assume that maybe some of the listeners here haven't done so. And so before we start to really dissect this whole idea about blue zones, could you just start by explaining what a blue zone is and why it caught your interest now many years ago? It's both a concept and a place.

So I'm a lifelong explorer for National Geographic. I've led about 21 scientific expeditions. But around about 20 years ago, I started looking into this idea of longevity, mainly as a mystery. Okinawa, Japan was producing the longest lived humans in the history of the world, largely free of disability. And I thought, aha, that's a great mystery. And did a facile expedition there, but I got to thinking that perhaps I could, in a sense, reverse engineer longevity. So instead of looking for an answer in a test tube or a Petri dish or in some genetic code, find populations where people are living

statistically longest, and then look for the correlates or the common denominators to see if the patterns just repeated themselves enough that you could see a signal or draw some conclusions. And we found five places where people are living statistically longest. Longest lived men in the world are Sardinia, Italy. Longest lived women, Okinawa, Japan. The island of Ikaria, Greece. You have a population living about eight years longer, but with almost no discernible dementia. In the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, people enjoy about half the rate of middle-age mortality. And what that means is they're about three times more likely to reach a healthy age, 95. And then in the United States, we found the longest lived people

among Christians, Seventh-day Adventists living in and around Loma Linda, California. And then the second part of my work was using standardized methodologies to find the common denominators, and thus my books and the Netflix documentary. Did you find anything that actually ties these places together? Well, geographically, they're all in about the 20th parallel north, interestingly. So you don't see people way in the north living a long time, and you don't see people along the equator living a long time. And the reason I think is the 20th parallel is a sweet spot of sorts, is along the equator, people are dying of infectious diseases that hobble their longevity or life expectancy. And in the north, perhaps they spend too much time indoors and eating canned foods and not minding their garden, et cetera. I don't know,

but there seems to be- I'm feeling doomed already. So we're recording this today in London. Too far north. And it's pretty gray and wintry. And I thought you were going to say they don't get enough sunlight. So the first thing I need to do is move further south. So am I doomed? Not necessarily doomed. I would say one of the biggest findings after 20 years of this is that for most people, their environment drives their health more so than any individual responsibility. So where you live has a big impact.

In the United States, for example, within the same cities, there are neighborhoods where the life expectancy is up to 13 years higher than other neighborhoods. 13 years high within the same cities, there are neighborhoods where the life expectancy is up to 13 years higher than other neighborhoods. 13 years higher within the same city. Boston's one of them, by the way. That's a great example. Where I know Zoe has a- Where I spend a lot of time in Boston, where the weather is also not so great.

Yeah, right, right. But you're saying it's not just where, it's not really the latitude, it's like what your environment is like. No, yeah. And my research work is finding these blue zones and understanding them. My daytime job is working with cities to transport the environmental characteristics that we see driving longevity in blue zones to American cities. And that's been fantastically successful for us. And I know that one of the things you talk about, particularly within the

Blue Zones, is this idea of a centenarian. Could you explain what a centenarian is? And maybe just could you paint a picture a bit of how people are living in these Blue Zones, which is something you talk about really beautifully in the book and in the show? A centenarian is simply a person that's reached their 100th birthday. And Blue Zones isn't necessarily about centenarians. We do measure centenarian concentration, but that tends to be a byproduct of a population that is producing long-lived people, largely without chronic disease, largely without diabetes, heart disease, types of cancer, dementia. They're not people with better bodies than us. They don't have a genetic advantage. They're not more

disciplined. They're not smarter. They're avoiding the diseases that foreshorten their lives in higher percentages, and that's why they're living a long time. I mean, I wrote four books, New York Times bestselling books on this topic. But, you know, in general, people in blue zones don't exercise, which is disruptive to a lot of us. That is very surprising to hear. You don't see anybody doing CrossFit or Pilates or, you know, an elliptical in their basement. But they do live in places where every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat, it occasions a walk. They always have gardens out back and typically two or three growing seasons a year. Their houses aren't full of the mechanized

conveniences to do their work for them. They're doing their own housework and their own yard work and kneading bread by hand. So my team figures that they're moving every 20 minutes or so, but unconsciously, probably keeping their metabolisms burning higher and probably burning more calories than somebody who works at their desk all day long and then thinks they're going to the gym at the end of the day. First of all, most thinks they're going to the gym at the end of the day. First of all, most people don't go to the gym at the end of the day as they think they're going to do. But secondly, it's not as good as spreading out the physical activity throughout the day. If you want to know what a hundred-year-old ate to live to be a hundred, you can't

just go ask them because people don't remember. So to get at that, we found dietary surveys done in all five blue zones over the last 100 years or so, 155 dietary surveys. And Tim, as you know, dietary surveys are perfect, but they're directionally correct. And when you meta-analyze them, you start to get a very clear signal or you see the same patterns. So we did that. What people who make it up to 100 on average, they're eating about 90% whole food plant-based. The five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains, wheat, corn, and rice, greens, and of course, garden vegetables. They all have garden vegetables. Tubers, interestingly, in Okinawa, about 70% of their caloric intake until

1970 came from one tuber known as emo, or the purple sweet potato, nuts, and the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. And if you're eating a cup of beans a day, it's probably associated with about four extra years of life expectancy over less healthy sources of protein. The other facets sort of fall into two categories. One is living your life on purpose, which seems soft and spongy to real scientists, but there's a pretty clear evidence that if you wake up in the morning with meaning, you're living about eight years longer than people who are rudderless in life. And really the foundation of blue zones is their social connectedness. They tend to

prioritize family. They tend to belong to a faith, believe it or not. And they're very careful about their immediate social circle. And you don't hear much about these things because marketers can't sell you anything. But really how you connect drives your behavior for the long run in powerful and measurable ways. And we like to talk a lot about how we connect in the blue zones. There's a lot to unpack there. I think this being like Zoe's Science and Nutrition, I feel like food is probably the place to start. And I definitely want to pull Tim in as well

as we talk a bit more about what you've found out, like looking at the diets of what people are eating across these areas. And the first thing I'm struck is like, I've been to Italy quite often, I've been to Japan once or twice. And it strikes me that those diets seem almost as far apart as I can imagine. But what's interesting is you're talking about actually how there's sort of commonality across these blue zones.

So what am I missing, I guess, that actually is linking them more closely than I had realized. In general, you know, we're constantly marketed these superfoods. Whenever I see a superfood, I basically just mentally throw it in the trash. Usually when there's a health claim on the package, you can be pretty sure it's not healthy. And real foods for longevity tend to be peasant foods, the cheap stuff everybody can afford. You know, in America, we hear all the time, you need fresh fruits and vegetables. That's the wrong way to start, especially in the inner city when there are poor people, for two reasons. One, people can't afford it and it

creates an immediate barrier. And number two, people don't know what to do with it. But you give African-Americans or Latin Americans or the Italians beans and a grain, they know exactly what to do with it. Africans, the beans and rice, the Latin Americans, beans and corn tortilla, the Italians, pasta fagioli, pasta and beans. And you have complex carbohydrates, fiber, you have all the amino acids necessary for human sustenance. So the big common denominator is peasants' food made to taste delicious. And that last part, that's the most important ingredient. Taste is the most important ingredient. And these blue zones, they know how to make this very simple food absolutely sing. Plus a bit of diversity, I think, as well. I mean, when I've gone to visit Japan and Italy and Mediterranean countries,

you do see some similarities, actually. I mean, their noodles are the kind of spaghetti, but it's what else they put on the noodles. It's the fact that they have all these different speciality restaurants in Japan that will use all kinds of different ingredients and hundreds of different kinds of mushrooms and onions and all these beans and bean sprouts and all these little pickles and fermented foods. And the equivalent, you know, so people think of it, of Japan is just sushi and rice. It's not. When you actually go there, it's very, very different to the sort of the westernized version of what Japanese food is.

It varies a lot between the islands and regions, just like it does in Italy. And so I think for me, it's that diversity of the foods, the fact that there's great food culture. So people will make all this stuff in their homes that may have had peasant origins, but is still carrying on. And they'll mix stuff together in rich soups and casseroles all the time. And they're having fermented foods as well.

I think that's the other thing that we don't really discuss enough is that, you know, in the Mediterranean countries, lots of goat's cheese and yogurts and other dairy ferments. And in Japan, of course, you've got all the misos and the fermented soy products that are eaten regularly. So you've got this diversity and the fermented foods and this food culture that is all about passing on what your grandmother taught you to the next generation. I think they're also very binding things that identify these very healthy groups. Hi, I'm Zoe's US Medical Director, Dr. Will Bolsowitz, and I'm excited to tell you about a free resource that's going to kickstart your journey to better gut health. If you're a regular

listener, you probably already know how a healthy gut microbiome is important for digestion, immune support, and mental well-being. And that a high-fiber diet is a great way to improve your gut health. But where to start? And what exactly does a high-fiber shopping list look like? With 95% of US adults deficient in fiber, clearly this is not common knowledge. Zoe's Gut guide has the answers to get yours for free simply go to zoe.com slash gut guide and start feeling the benefits of a healthier gut today and tim i heard dan mentioned like whole grains like like greens, tubers, nuts, beans. What are your thoughts as Dan's

saying, this is like what I've pulled across from observing across these blue zones. What does the latest science tell us about those foods? Well, tell us that Dan's exactly right. Those foods are perfect. Good one, Dan. That's good. And up to recently, we didn't know why they were good, really. Because we've had this rather reductionist view of foods. Reductionist meaning? Meaning that we take the hundreds of chemicals in any one food and we talk about one of them. So it might have been carotene in carrots, or it might be vitamin C in a lemon. And we ignore all the 800 others there.

And this is where we thought about what's good about beans, and we just thought about one thing in beans. It turns out it's the entirety. It's that diversity, not only of the food, but the chemicals within each food and the different fibers that might be there. And there's a lot of fiber in the foods that Dan was talking about? Is that the thing that really carries them together? Yeah, it's really a combination of high fiber foods, which feed our microbes, but also polyphenols, which are these chemicals within them that used to be called

antioxidants that are also fuel for our gut microbes. And these polyphenols have lots of properties on their own as health-giving properties, but I think their main action is by improving our gut health. And that's how we get all these universal effects. And I'd imagine my research on aging really is sort of pointed to the immune system being pretty critical here. Because if you can have a healthy immune system, then that immune system is repairing your body continuously. It's fighting early cancer, it's repairing the cells, it's making sure that you do live to an old age by picking up problems early. And if that's in perfect condition and it's not fighting inflammation, it's not dealing with obesity, it's really focused on its main job, that is how most of us who do succeed

to live a long time are going to do it. So foods that are good for your gut are going to be good for your immune system. And everything we've talked about, it's whole foods, and they're not poisoning their system with ultra-processed foods as well. And I think it's interesting Dan was telling me that some of these places have lost their veneer that they had because the places like Okinawa have now been exposed to ultra processed food and they're not doing as well as the diet has changed. Is that what you're saying? Their diet has gone, moved from this 100% whole food diets to increasing percentage of ultra

processed foods with chemicals and lower fiber intake and starting to see an effect on this. And just to make sure that I understood this right, I think what you're saying is if you look across the sort of set of foods that Dan was talking about, what you really see is foods that not only have all these polyphenols, which are all of these sort of magic complex chemicals, but they have a lot of fiber,

and that critically what you're saying is fiber isn't one thing, which I think is how I always thought about it. And I suspect most listeners think about it, right? You see it on the back of the packet and it says fiber. Actually, I think you're saying there's like a thousand different sorts of fiber. And we think that the individual bacteria in our gut actually eats specific fibers. So it's almost like, is that right? They're very picky. They're very specialized and very picky. So that's why the diversity of foods, you know, whether it's even different beans, different colored beans is going to produce

a different set of gut microbes inside you that are going to produce different chemicals that might enhance your immune system even more and help you live longer. But I will say just a couple of refinements on what you've said about the blue zones. The blue zones are actually subsets of the countries we're talking about. Like Sardinia, the blue zone in Sardinia is very different than Italy. The blue zone in Sardinia is actually only six villages, and they're descendant from a Bronze Age culture. They're matriarchal, like the rest of the Mediterranean is patriarchal. And they have a quite different

diet. Same thing with Okinawa. Until 1917, Okinawa wasn't even part of Japan. It was called the Rukus Kingdom. And their diet is completely different. We tend to think of Japanese as fish heavy, but the Okinawans didn't eat very much fish at all. They tended to eat, there's imo, as I mentioned, tons of tofu, and basically what grew in their garden. And both of these blue zones did not have huge access to or a tradition where there was a vast variety of food. They were poor, and they tended to have to eat what was available, what was growing that season. Of course, there were herbs and there were spices. Often they had a kitchen garden.

But if you look at the patterns, typically they only had 20 or 30 ingredients at any given time that sort of rolled with the season. So as you went from summer garden to winter garden, those ingredients. But I mean, I think it makes it actually less discouraging for people because you don't have to think about having 100 ingredients. These people stayed very healthy for a long time. And Dan, I was just thinking like people are quite familiar with Italian food. There'll be a lot more people say, I don't really know Japanese at all. Could you, could you elaborate a little bit, I guess,

on the difference between what these people in this, these five villages in Sardinia are eating versus maybe sort of our traditional idea of what Italian food is? Because I think most of us are like, oh, I eat nothing but Italian food, pizza and pasta. So is that, if that's a secret to my long and healthy life, I'm feeling really good about it. Yeah. So the diet of longevity in Sardinia is more a verb than a noun because there were at least three phases. Okay.

Until about 1960, believe it or not, most of what they ate was bread and cheese. These shepherds had several different kinds of bread, sourdough usually, but also a flatbed called carta di musica. They were shepherds had several different kinds of bread, sourdough usually, but also a flatbed called Carta di Musica. They were shepherds, so these men would go into their pastures. Olive oil, I wouldn't know. Olive oil, but not as much as you think. The highlands of Sardinia, the terrain is very rugged and not conducive to the olive groves like you would see. Actually, more mastic oil, believe it or not, in the 40s and 50s.

But to your point, olive oil is now ubiquitous in Sardinia. In about 1960s, roads came in. And remember, centenarians were alive. They were middle-aged in 1960s. Amazing. Their diets shift. They were still poor people, and they relied very heavily on huge gardens. And pasta started to come in.

But there's more gnocchi than there is pasta. A lot of dishes made with fava beans. And of course, their celebratory food was pork. Never beef, very little chicken. But on average, about five times a month, they would eat pork. Five times a month. So this is a very, very low level of meat eating you're describing. Very low level. And I guess if they're in the mountains, they're not eating a lot of fish either? No. In fact, you can see the ocean from the blue zone of Sardinia, but I met several

centenarians that first time they ate fish in their life when they were in their 20s. That's because it took a day to get to the sea. They didn't have a fishing culture, but maybe they'd get some fish. By the time they got it back up to their village, it stunk. You'd see this sort of dried cod once in a while, bacalao, they called it. They'd reconstitute that. We tend to think fish is associated with longevity, but not a lot of fish in the blue zones. I think a lot of people will be surprised by that

because there's such a lot of talk about protein today and this idea that we're all short of protein. And you can find, if you walk into the grocery store, an enormous number of things saying high in protein, which suggests, oh my God, I'm like low on protein. Yeah, but you probably know this, but CDC, Center for Disease Controls in America, they tell us that the average American

gets about twice the amount of protein they need. So we're getting way more protein than we need. And I think people don't realize that you can get all the protein you need out of plant-based sources. So you don't need meat to be healthy. Meat tastes good, but... And this low level of eating like meat and fish, is that common across the blue zones? Yes, all blue zones. There's a subset of adventurers who eat no meat at all. The highest meat consumption in the blue zones, I would say, is in Costa Rica. And it's not that they don't like it. It's not

that they're more virtuous and they care about the environment or they care about animal suffering. They just couldn't afford it. And as soon as, as you were beginning to mention, as soon as roads come in and they start adopting a more Western or American way of life, their meat consumption has skyrocketed. Their processed food consumption has skyrocketed. At the same time, diabetes has skyrocketed, heart disease. And in one of the blue zones, Okinawa, it produced the longest-lived, healthiest people in the history of the world. And now they're the least healthy prefecture in all of Japan, largely because of the fast food restaurants. And this is within the period, basically. Since I started studying, 20 years.

That's incredibly sad. The longest lived people on the planet to the least healthy people in Japan, largely because of the American food culture. I'm very sorry. And of course, as soon as you start getting cheap meat on the plate, it's not so much the effect of that meat, but the fact it displaces all those healthy beans and other vegetables that they were eating before. So I think people have got this idea, a dichotomous view of meat, is it's either healthy or unhealthy, rather than the fact that, okay, if we take away ultra-processed meats, which nearly everyone agrees are unhealthy, natural, well-cooked meat is fine, but it displaces,

there's just no room on your plate. If you're having meat every day, you can't have the same level of other vegetables, legumes, et cetera, that kept these populations so healthy. So this is, I think, one reason. And also we talk about this a lot in nutrition. Sarah always talks about it. It's instead of what? You know, we take it.

It's not just one thing. It has to be in context. So as you said, Okinawa, you know, they've displaced a lot of the good stuff with the bad stuff. And so some of it is the bad stuff coming in, but a lot of it is they're no longer having the good stuff because their minds and plates are full of other stuff. One of your other guests, Walter Willett, famously said about meat, it's a lot like radiation. We know a lot will kill you, but we don't quite know the safe level. If you look at blue zones, the suggestion of five times per month seems to be associated, or it doesn't seem to be getting

in the way of them living long, largely chronic disease-free lives. And it's interesting about the fish also, because I think most people listening to this will be, there will be some exceptions. A lot of people are like, yeah, okay, i sort of know that red meat's not um good for me but a lot of people and i think sarah might be here also talking about the positive benefits of of fish so it's quite interesting that that is not something it's not good i know you're not saying it but you're not saying it's interesting that that hasn't been an essential component to be a blue zone because i might have expected that to have been like, oh, they will definitely be eating quite a lot of fish in their diet as a complement. So maybe not a huge total amount of calories, but that was a really important nutrient. But it sounds like you're saying that

actually fish eating is not essential to being one of these blue zones. That's right. For sure it's not. But you have to realize, as I said before, the diet's a verb. It's changed dramatically, especially in the last 20 years. And they're almost caught up with the rest of Italy in this case of Sardinia or exceeded Japan in the case of Okinawa at embracing this ultra-processed, meat-heavy diet. So you're basically telling a story that the blue zones are disappearing. They're going to hell. Is that really the sort of...

Which is quite sad because we're all reading everything about how our climate is being destroyed and the world is falling apart. And you have been seen almost in your own lifetime, the way in which these patterns that were so healthy are falling away. That's right. But yes, and even though- It's hard to be isolated though, isn't it? I mean, that's the other thing, is you get contaminated by cultures and pressures and

marketing that's global. And so it's very hard for these, say, mountain villages around the world to stay isolated in their bubble. And I think that's the other thing we're seeing. It's like, you know, you used to only be, if you had to live on the coast to eat fish, now it's frozen and, you know, everyone can get it in their freezer. I guess the other thing that's really interesting is it tells you that this is a bit by chance is what you're saying. It's not like these people in these zones were like, this is my absolute favorite food and i'm choosing to eat it because it's my favorite food and it's making me healthy

actually it was sort of they were quite poor this was like what was available and that they could support where they are and then when we've suddenly been offered all of this meat and candy and all the rest of it you're saying they weren't like um i don't want any of that. Actually, they're like, oh, okay, that sounds tasty. And unexpectedly, this is then affecting their health. Is that the story of what's going on? Well, there's a generational shift. The diets of the Blue Zones, I wrote about them in the Blue Zone Kitchen. There's a lot of ingenuity and intentionality in creating these recipes.

It's usually the older women who maintain the food tradition. And they are genius at taking these very simple, inexpensive peasant foods and making them taste delicious. And they have a taste for them. So the cohort of people over 60 in Okinawa, for example, still have the highest concentration of centenarians in the world. It's the 20-year-olds who started eating the burgers and the Kentucky fried chicken, and their taste buds have been napalmed, and they're now used for the richer, fattier, you know, enhanced flavored food. You immediately play straight into my guilt as a parent about the fact that I'm not bringing my children up well enough to like appreciate the sort of food that I know is good for their health. They were exposed to all of this, like very easy to eat food, which tastes really sugary

fast and lots of meat and all the rest of it. And if you get that, you know, you're saying, I think that because they've been exposed to that early, it's like, well, that's delicious. And this is, of course, what I would choose over this other food, which is also probably harder to prepare. Being a parent is really hard, particularly, I think, being a mother in most cases is still today primary care. It's really hard to juggle all of this.

So I think that in the reality of the food that's around and available, I think there's enough guilt around parenting. So I think that is a bit the reality of the environment we're in. And the question is, how can we make it easier? And so I think it is hard. I agree. It's a lack of education. I don't think it's anyone's fault. You know, they're told your kid will only have processed apple puree from a little can that's got a baby picture on it, rather than realizing actually they can pretty much eat anything. And in that two-year window, they are really inquisitive

and they will eat all kinds of stuff that they won't eat when they're three. And so you have that very narrow time to really expand that. And no one is telling parents this. The show you're listening to right now that's providing you the latest evidence-based health and nutrition information from the world's top scientists, well, making it takes a lot of time. We think it's well worth it,

all in the name of improving your health. All we ask in return is this. Send a link to this podcast to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click follow this podcast wherever you're listening right now. Okay, let's get back to the show. We spent a lot of time talking about food. I would love to pick up on a couple of other areas, Dan, before we talk about what listeners could actually do. I thought one of the things that was really interesting, actually, that I had never thought about to do with this Blue Zones was stress. And I guess the

obvious starting point, I think, is many people listening will assume that these centenarians have lived a life without any stress, and that is why they've lived so long. Is that correct? People in the Blue Zones are exactly like us. They could be one of the three of us sitting here, or anybody listening right now. They worry about their health. They worry about their kids. They worry about their work. They get stressed in their lives. They have a couple things that we don't have or have forgotten. Number one, they have these sacred daily rituals that help release or tamp down the stress of everyday life. The Okinawans have this ancestor veneration in their homes. There's always a shrine of remembrances of their parents and their grandparents and their great-great-grandparents. And they'll always begin their day with 15 minutes

remembering where they came from and to a certain extent, being able to relinquish their day with 15 minutes, remembering where they came from, and to a certain extent, being able to relinquish their day up to these ancestors who they believe are still looking over them. In fact, you often see up along the ceiling, angled down at you, portraits of all their ancestors sort of looking down at you. And I think that helps. The Adventists are big prayers. They wake up in the morning and they relinquish their day to their God. They say a prayer before a meal, so they kind of slow down and probably lower the cortisol level of that meal. The Costa Ricans and the Ikarians are big nappers. Believe it or not, taking a nap is a great way to lower cortisol levels, lower stress. The other big point, they live in environments that lower stress.

One of the easiest ways to lower stress is to go out with your friends, to not be alone with your problems and stew on them. So every time they walk out their door, they're bumping into their friends. They tend to live in extended families. So there tends to often be a grandparent who has eight or nine or 10 decades of accumulated wisdom and resiliency that he or she can transmit to a grandchild who's having a tough time. They tend to be close to nature. They walk out their door and down the street and they look at the sea or they're in the forest. So much about lowering stress is the environment they live in. But I absolutely agree that stress is a very important component to manage if you want to live longer. A lot of these groups have communal eating and

drinking, don't they? So I've often thought that when i go to mediterranean countries the fact that people are having a drink you see old folk you know gathering every evening to have a glass of wine uh together and they just have one glass of wine that lasts them two hours yeah yeah i've often thought that some of the advantages of say red wine might be the fact that actually it's doing something social. And it might be the same if it was kombucha or a non-alcoholic drink, but it got them out. It was a reason for people to bond. And I think societies, you know, that are sort of anti-alcohol or don't have that similar bond, which is a sort of cultural one as much as anything.

It's not like they're all alcoholics. It's just a cultural mix. It does allow them to communicate and relieve stress and talk to others. And I think they're all sort of interlinked. So it's quite interesting how, you know, the idea of the aperitif hour. It's like you were saying about nutrients. You can't really pull the nutrient out and draw a conclusion. It's the package. And you can pan out even further of the package that comes with eating a meal or the package with drinking a glass of wine.

Yeah. And the fact that these people are spending two or three times longer than the average American on a meal. I mean, I think, you know, the importance of that ticks all the boxes from, A, you know, digestion to communication to de-stressing, you know, to making these other contacts. So just the act of a communal meal sort of ticks all these boxes that we now know are really important for longevity. And is there real science behind this idea that stress can reduce your life expectancy or that being able to relieve your stress can affect this? Because I think people talk about it, but is there reality behind that?

Well, there's certainly lots of animal data to suggest that's true, that stress increases inflammation levels. So mental stress has physical effects on the body, which will make those animals die earlier. That's certainly true. It's hard to do those same experiments in humans. Obviously, no one wants to be particularly stressed. There's one study done among caretakers, people taking care of someone with a disease, and they measure telomeres.

The longer your telomeres, the younger you are biologically. And they follow a control group. The telomeres are just the ends of chromosomes that are like, there's a plastic bed on a shoelace that over time erodes and is a way of estimating your lifespan in a way. Right. And you want long telomeres. So a control group who just lived a normal life and then caretakers of sick people, presumably under a lot of stress. Over five years, they had shorter telomeres than people who didn't have the stress. So there's pretty good evidence. And there is some epidemiological evidence when they followed up. There's a whole study back a few decades ago of civil servants. And they had all the civil servants records in the UK when they'd worked out when they died. And

they adjusted for all factors like weight and social class and education. And one of the big factors determining when they like to die was what they call the locus of control. How many people were their boss? And if you were at the bottom of that food chain, the idea was that person had very little idea they were in control of their life, whereas the people at the top of the food chain did feel at top of it, and they would live twice as long as the people on the bottom when you're adjusted for all these other factors. And they've done similar studies in, I think it's gorillas and various other primates. So the amount of stress you perceive is definitely linked to longevity.

And so as you're listening to Dan talking about these ways that could de-stress, that sounds a plausible element. Yeah, because you may not be able to change your position in a company or a job or a family but if the way you react to it can be dissipated uh then then this is how you need to do it and and if you're in that sort of community you much less like to feel those effects than if you're perhaps on your own or in a you know a sort of northern uh western type community where everyone fenced themselves. Yeah, I mean, you haven't touched on it, but, you know, sitting here in a northern climate in November,

I'm also thinking that the sun is shining quite a lot in these environments as you talk about it as well, and therefore your ability to, like, be outside and sort of take pleasure is presumably quite high. Is that right? Yeah. Well, we don't know if it's sun exposure. It might be in the vitamin D that comes from sun exposure, or you're more likely to be physically active, or you're more likely to have a garden. Or meet your friends. Or be, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the other, they're all linked.

It's point rain. Yeah, you don't want to go outdoors. But, you know, I'll add to that sort of stress conversation. In blue zones, people tend to have a vocabulary for purpose. Plan de Vida in Costa Rica or Ikigai in Okinawa, people tend to have a very clear idea of why they wake up in the morning. And I believe that's also a big stress shutter because for people who wake up and, you know, what's my place in life? What should I do today? You get this sort of existential stress. The unemployed, I think, have it as well. Whereas people in blue zones don't have that. They know they have a responsibility to their family or their communities. And ask the average American what their sense of purpose is. They don't know. I've got to go to work. But in Okinawa, you ask people their ikigai, they can, off the top of their head, they'll know why they're waking up in the morning, their purpose.

And I think that also relieves a lot of stress of the human condition. That's amazing. I'd like to touch quickly on something that we mentioned right at the beginning, which is physical activity, before talking about what someone listening might do. And I just want to pick up on something you said earlier, which is sort of none of these people are doing exercise. What are they doing? They're moving naturally throughout their day. They're moving all day

long, but unconsciously. I know this exercise is popular and it's sort of been a public health intervention, but I have to say in America, it's been a miserable failure. In the United States, fewer than 24% of people even get 20 minutes of physical activity a day. So all we spent $150 billion a year on the exercise industry and people don't go yet. And blue zones are moving all the time, but they spend zero money on it. And, uh, yeah, my argument is, you know, instead of trying to hound people to get up and go to the gym or pay for this gold level membership, design our streets so it's easy, safe, and aesthetically pleasing to walk to get our coffee, to walk to work, for our kids to walk to school, which we don't do anymore. When I was a kid, 50% of American

kids walked to school. We're down to 10%. 50% down to 10%. Yeah, in the United States. So we've engineered that physical activity out of our lives. And for most people, simply walking 45 minutes a day is about 90% the value of training for a marathon. And is exercise a good idea? Yes. But does it work on the population level? No. I mean, if I were a government investing in an intervention, I would not invest in exercise. I would invest in walkable streets, parks, meeting places, aesthetically pleasing outdoors. We know that works. I think it's incredibly powerful and it's interesting. I think that I now work from home.

It's worked incredibly well for the company, but it took me a while to realize that basically my level of movement had collapsed because before I used to commute and I was living in London, which like, you know, New York or Boston or something has quite good public transportation. So I would like walk to then go and take a underground train and then walk again at the other end. And then at lunch, you would go out and you'd walk somewhere to get some food. And what I realized is, you know, I was regularly doing 10,000 steps a day before that without really having to think about it. This is just what would happen. And then I was suddenly realized I'm doing like 3,000 steps. I now am trying to engineer walking into my day. So for example, I like to walk my daughter to school

because actually that just creates in a really nice way, you know, sort of 45 minutes of walking. And similarly, I really try and make sure I have some reason. I have to be out of the house. And I have to proactively create that though, Dan. And I'm just thinking a little bit about your example of these people living on their hill villages, right? Where they're presumably having to go like up and down the steps quite a lot just to do anything. What's happening in America, there's a sort of centrifugal development where

the cities are dying and people are moving out into the suburbs. So imagine you start working at home and you live in a typical middle American suburb. There's nothing to walk to. Your garage is attached to your house, so you don't even walk to your car. So you walk out your door, you get in your car, you drive to the mall, or you go to a drive-thru Starbucks and pick up your coffee, there's almost no opportunity to unconsciously move. Until we look at the elephant in the room, that you can't not keep flogging the dead horse of individual responsibility if you want to get populations healthier. You have to set up their environment so you set them up for success. You have to create cities where it's easy for people to move naturally. And we're doing the opposite.

And Dan, you are pushing on this yourself, right? That's my business. Your passion as well as your business is to try and get cities to redesign themselves. Because it works. So if you're listening to this and you're in charge of a city, then you should be following up with Dan. If you're listening to this and you're not in charge of a city, but you want to understand what's the actionable advice, so how can I do this for myself? How could you make your life more Blue Zone-like?

Without having to move to a mountainous area. Well, okay. The first thing is to shift away from the silver bullet mentality, which most of us have, to what I call a silver buckshot mentality. Silver buck means sort of a scatter pattern of little BBs instead of, you know, a little self-serving, but I wrote a book called The Blue Zone Challenge, where I aggregated about 40 or so evidence-based ways for you to set up your kitchen, your bedroom, and your home so you mindlessly move more, eat less, and eat better, and socialize more. And they tend to do, you know,

like in your kitchen, I'm a big believer that we're all on a seafood diet. We eat the food we see. So if on your counter, a lot in America, a lot of, you know, we start eating a bag of chips and we don't finish it. We put a clip on it and we put it on the counter. Bad idea. Instead, if you go out and buy yourself the most beautiful fruit bowl you can afford and put that in the middle and keep that full. So when you walk through the kitchen, the default is fruit rather than the chips. There's actually been a Cornell Food Lab did a study on toasters.

Very little of what we put in toasters produces something healthy on the back end. So taking the toaster off the counter occasions people losing about two kilos after two years as opposed to those who don't. People who have plants throughout their homes actually move more because they're watering plants. There's little things you can do to nudge yourself into moving more. And I'm a much bigger believer in setting up your home, your commute, your social life. If your three best friends are obese and unhealthy, there's 150% better chance that you'll be unhealthy yourself. So in other words, if your three best friends sit around and eat wieners and chips and watch TV, guess what you're going to be doing when you hang out with them? As opposed to friends whose idea

of recreation is biking or walking or playing tennis. And it's not a bad idea to have friends like Tim who love plant-based food. We think it's so hard for middle-aged people. But I argue the number one thing you could do to add years to your life is re-curate your immediate social circle. Those three friends who you count on when you're having a bad day or people with whom you can have a meaningful conversation, those people are going to have a measurable and long-term impact on how active you are, on what you eat.

And it's a counterintuitive. Nobody can make any money off of you. But being very careful about who you let in the room. What do your studies tell us about gardening? Because there's some evidence that gardeners, well, epidemiologically are healthier and have healthier microbiomes. Do the Blue Zones tell you anything about how that might help them or is it very variable? I don't know why, but I can tell you in every Blue Zone, almost everybody who are making it into their 90s and 100s, not only garden their whole life, but continue to do so. And it might be because it's low intensity physical activity. It's a nudge. When you have a garden and you've planted something you can't wait to eat, it gives you an incentive to go out

every day and weed and water and harvest. And they're bending over. It's a range of motion. I've seen the studies that show that when you're gardening your cortisol levels or your stress hormones drop uh and it could very well be you get your hands dirty and you wipe your mouth and you're getting the microbiomes there's a little bit of dirt but i argue that gardening is probably much better than joining a gym the best longevity exercise you could do that's fascinating um The one thing I guess we haven't touched on so much is around the stress reduction. So you talked about these rituals in these blue zones, but those are rituals that sound very rooted in the culture they're in. So if someone's

listening and saying, I really like that idea, what are the rituals that I guess that you do, for example? First of all, take your TV or your computer screen out of your kitchen. I think you'll eat more intentionally with less stress. If you do that, uh, eat together as a family, as opposed to with one wheel, one hand on your steering wheel, uh, take a nap, known stress reducer, uh, belong to a faith. I'm not a hugely religious person, but people have a Sabbath, Jewish people or the Adventists, this idea of a sanctuary in time where 24 hours a day, they're putting their work aside and they're putting their busy social calendar aside and focusing on their God or focusing on

their internal life. Hanging out with low stress friends. These are all sort of ecosystem changes we can make to our lives that as opposed to remember to meditate, which I believe in. I'm a meditator, but I forget about it all the time. So the benefit of your friends is it just makes it natural and it just happens versus something like a meditation, which is a bit like going to the gym. It requires you to do something. Is that the difference that you're describing? So it's not that you're against it, but the point is it's a lot easier if it's just built into your social fabric. That's right. And that's the approach because if you look at any sort of intentional

health behavior, whether it's exercise, getting on a diet, taking supplements, there's a recidivism curve. They all last months pretty well. And only a few amount of months, three to seven months, but then it drops off precipitously. I challenge anybody to tell me about one diet in the history of the world that's worked for more than 4% of the people who get on it after two years. So it's a great business plan, great marketing vehicle. You get people on it every year, but it's a bad longevity strategy because when it comes to longevity, mark my words, other than dying, other than not dying rather, there's nothing you can do this month that's going to make you live longer in 30 years.

You have to think about things that you're going to do most days for the next few decades if you really want it to work for longevity. One last question. We talk a lot with Tim about what he eats on a regular basis. And I know that lots of listeners are going to be really curious about what your daily diet is. Could you share what you typically eat in a day? So I found the minestrone that the longest lived family in the history of the world eats. It's the Melisse family in Sardinia, nine siblings, collective age, 860 years. They make the same minestrone every day.

And it's three beans with all kinds of vegetables, carrots, celery, onions, some oregano, some red pepper, some potatoes, or else maybe some barley finished with an extra virgin olive oil. I make a huge pot of that every week. Then I store it in glass Tupperwares, glass containers I can freeze. And then every morning, it's more like a brunch. I usually eat about 11 o'clock and that's how I start my day. So in the Tim Spector way of thinking, I have this cocktail of all these fibers because it's got a grain and beans. I get my protein in there, all kinds of trace minerals, and I feel like I get a good base for my day. That's amazing. Can we get the recipe? You can get the recipe, yes. Okay. We will follow up on the recipe.

I will give you the Blue will longevity cocktail yeah we'll call it the the uh the the damn boot and minestrone and we will definitely share it because i am i'm actually just my my mouth is actually salivating never mind the longevity i would like to try and do what we always do which is a quick summary and dan and tim will you just correct me if i if i get any of this wrong? So we start off by explaining what blue zones were, which are these like particular places where people have aged healthily much more than anywhere else. And they're very small places. So it's not like Japan or Italy.

It's like these very particular sort of villages where interesting what really distinguishes them, I think, is that they're not getting sick through middle age and later, and therefore, they're ending up very old and healthy. And so, levels of dementia and cardiovascular disease and all of these things are really low. That there's a lot that's just built into the environment that is achieving this. There are no silver bullets, to use Dan's phrase. But some of the things that are in common is the sort of foods they're eating, the fact that they're having to move constantly so no one is going to the gym but they are effectively doing exercise by just what happens in in their life they all live in places where

the weather is quite good but not right in the tropics where they're going to get sort of infectious diseases um and then i think we talked about three particular um aspects and i know that there's more in in the book book and the show you talk about. We obviously talked a lot about diet. And interestingly, although they are eating very different foods, there's some real similarities. And you mentioned whole grains, you mentioned greens, tubers, nuts, and beans. And then Tim was basically saying, well, I'm not at all surprised about that, because actually what you see in common with those foods is two really important things. Lots and lots of fiber and not just one type of fiber, but all of these diverse types of fibers and lots of these polyphenols. And so Tim is saying,

well, that is what feeds their microbiome, supports all of these different bacteria that then creates all of these things that support the immune system. And your research, Tim, I think saying that like this healthy immune system seems to be really crucial for fighting aging in the long term. You then shared this rather sad fact that I had not really fully understood that these blue zones are sort of dying. I guess they're becoming red zones, Dan, and gave Okinawa as this example where even just in 20 years, you've seen that as the diet has shifted dramatically, you see that suddenly they go from being some of the healthiest to the least healthiest. You see just how important the diet is in this. Then you talked a little bit about things that people could do about diet. And

I thought one of them, which I'd never heard before, is redesign your kitchen. So how do you have like all this beautiful, healthy food on display, like fruit? I was immediately thinking you could have the nut ball there, but remove the toaster, which is I think really interesting way to redesign. And then you said you have the magic minestrone. So there are no silver bullets, but everybody listening to this now wants that minestrone recipe. We will follow up. So if you're signed up for a Zoe email, we will make sure that we share the minestrone recipe. Then we talked a bit about stress and you said, one of the things that's really interesting is there are sort of daily rituals that everybody has across these different,

um, blue zones. And so they were very different in different areas, but all of them are somehow very mindful and whether it was like a prayer or like having a nap at a particular time or, you know, happy hour, it created this. And that in almost all of this case, there's very close community. So this is like with your, not just your immediate family, but sort of extended family. And therefore, if you want to think about how you can do that at home, get rid of the things that get in the way. Take the TV out of your kitchen, eat as a family. If you can, then actually belonging to a faith is really powerful because creating this sort of sanctuary,

as your word, which I loved. And the thing that you said that really stuck with me is like, go out with your friends, but re-curate your three best friends. So if your three best friends are not supporting all of this, who is the other friend that maybe you could be spending more time with who, like Tim, is going to pull you into eating better food, is going to take you out and do something physical? And I guess that brings us to the last point about exercise.

These people are all moving all the time. But you basically think this whole push to go to the gym has failed, right? We've been saying this in the West, whether it's the States or the UK or anywhere for decades, but actually nobody is moving. So think about how you design your life to move. How do you design your kids' life so that they move? And I think the example that you both spoke about right at the end, which was really interesting, is can you have a garden? That actually, if you have a garden, you're doing something actively that creates this movement and this outside. So again, rather than thinking about exercises, this little spot that you do a few times a week, how would you just get this movement that you're seeing in the blue zones throughout? First of all, the brilliant summation,

I can't believe you've gathered all that, remembered it all, and were able to so articulately repeat it. But a couple refinements. First of all, exercise programs do work for some people. The very discipline and people can, the presence of mind, and there is a subset. I just say as a population intervention, it's not a very good return on the investment we put at. And then the central idea I like people to take away is in blue zones, people don't pursue health or longevity. It ensues and it ensues from the right environment. And what we ought to be thinking about is not so much New Year's starting a new diet, which we know is going to fail for almost everybody almost all the time, but how can we set up our lives and our ecosystem so the right behavior is more unconscious, and therein lies the long-term possibilities for longevity. I love that. And I think that one you know, one of the stories I think

that I've taken from the last, you know, 18 months of doing this podcast is the way in which as a society, we've sort of been sleepwalking into this really unhealthy place. And in fact, mostly that hasn't been some evil plan by the government or whatever. I mean, in fact, often it's come from really good things, right? Like new discoveries, like you can have a car or antibiotics saving so many lives. But then it turns out that it's changed our lives and there's been these sort of unexpected negative impacts. And so somehow we need to design the world that we live in in a way which is just better

suited to our human bodies. We spent most of human history uncomfortable and hungry. And quite rightly, we've innovated recently. And we now live in this environment of abundance and ease and a glut of food. And we're genetically hardwired to crave fat, crave sugar, crave salt, and take rest whenever we can. And that works really well in this environment of scarcity. But in our environment of overabundance, it's a big negative. We're not going to change our genes. We're not going to change our genetic predisposition anytime soon. So we need to re-engineer our environment so that we still have the acceptable level of comfort, but that the healthy choice is easier, cheaper, and more appealing than the unhealthy choice. And I think if anyone is listening to this right now and would like to redesign their town or city, wherever it is in the world, let us know.

We'll put you in touch with Dan because that is sort of your life mission, isn't it? To try and to make that better. And you're doing that in 70 cities. 72 American cities so far. Yes, it's worked. Dan, Tim, thank you so much. I really enjoyed that. Pleasure.

An honor. Thank you. Thank you for joining me on Zoe Science and Nutrition Today. Today's conversation about the blue zones has once again highlighted the critical importance of diet in supporting us to live a long and healthy life. And the story of Okinawa is another depressing example of how rapidly a switch to a modern Western diet can damage our health. If you're interested in getting personalized advice on the right food to eat for your body to help you feel better now

and enjoy many more healthy years to come, then you can learn more about becoming a Zoe member by going to zoe.com slash podcast. You can also get 10% off your membership on this link. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yellow Hewins Martin, Richard Willen, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time.