Eating for Longevity with Dan Buettner [Episode #427]
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Todayâs podcast topic is: Eating for Longevity with Dan Buettner
I am so excited to have a very special guest, Dan Buettner, who is a New York Times bestselling author, explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist and producer, and founder of Blue Zones.
He is a personal hero of mine. Heâs amazing. And I am very excited to announce that Dan has a new book that is out this week. It is called The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes To Live To Be 100, and itâs linked down below in the show notes! Stay tuned Beauties, for a packed interview with tips and tools to start eating for life!
- Dan defines what blue zones are and why he chose this termâŚ
- We discuss what links the five cultures living 80% longerâŚ
- Whether blue zones are being effected by electronic and mechanical conveniencesâŚ
- The most important ingredients in any longevity dietâŚ
- What the diet of the garden of Eden diet looks likeâŚ
- If family time and downtime play a part in longevityâŚ
- Rare and expensive whole superfood tinctures and if they are needed for longevityâŚ
- Thoughts on grains and longevityâŚ
- Diving into the Blue Zones book and its processesâŚ

About Dan Buettner
Dan Buettner is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist and producer, and New York Times bestselling author. He discovered the five places in the world â dubbed blue zones hotspots â where people live the longest, healthiest lives. His articles about these places in The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic are two of the most popular for both publications.
Buettner now works in partnership with municipal governments, large employers, and health insurance companies to implement Blue Zones Projects in communities, workplaces, and universities. Blue Zones Projects are well-being initiatives that apply lessons from the Blue Zones to entire communities by focusing on changes to the local environment, public policy, and social networks.
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Danâs Interview
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Transcript:
Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
Kimberly: Hi Beauties. Welcome back. I am so excited for our guest today who is a personal hero of mine. Heâs amazing. His name is Dan Buettner. Heâs a New York Times bestselling author, explorer, National Geographic fellow, and the founder of The Blue Zones. I think weâve all heard the term blue zones. And when I first met Dan at a dinner party, do you remember Dan? And he was like, oh I said, âWhat do you do?â And he talked about, âOh, I discovered the blue zones.â And I kind of laughed at him and thought, oh no, you know that kind of came out with that big New York Times article years ago and all this stuff. And he said, âYeah, I wrote that article.â So I am very excited to announce that Dan has a new book that is out this week. It is called The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes To Live To Be 100. So weâre going to link to it directly in the show notes.
Fan Of The Week
Kimberly: Beauties, Iâm so excited to get into everything with Dan. Before we dive in though, I want to give a quick shout out to our fan of the week, her or his name is Des Moines yogi and he or she writes, I enjoy listening to Kimberlyâs podcast. She inspires me to pay attention to how certain foods make me feel and to adopt health rituals to live my most content healthy life. Des Moines Yogi, thank you so much for your review and for being our fan of the week. Sending you so much love, so much gratitude. And remember beauties, for your chance to be also shouted out as the fan of the week, please just take a moment or two out of your day, leave us a review on iTunes, which is free and easy and itâs just a great way to support the show and to help the message get out there and to possibly really help benefit someone elseâs life.
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Kimberly: And another quick reminder to make sure that you subscribe to our show. That way you donât miss out on any interviews and any of the Q&A podcasts on Thursdays. So all that being said, I am so excited to have Dan on the line with us. Hi Dan.
Interview with Dan Buettner
Dan: Hey Kimberly.
Kimberly: Well, do you remember that first, it was a dinner party with Moby at his restaurant and everybody was talking about what they did. And when you told me you discovered the blue zones, I didnât believe you at first. Do you remember?
Dan: Yeah. Well, you know everybody is so extraordinary and eclectic at Little Pine I think the place was called.
Kimberly: Thatâs right. Thatâs right.
Dan: And Moby surrounds himself with extraordinary people. So you can be pretty sure whoever youâre sitting next to, theyâve done something incredible and you included.
Kimberly: Thank you. Thank you. So tell us a little bit, I know youâve told this story, you told this tale many times, but you know, youâre a National Geographic fellow. Youâve been all around the world. Dan, by the way, beauties holds three Guinness world records in distance cycling. We do. Wasnât one from like Alaska down to South America or something crazy?
Dan: North America to the bottom of South America.
Kimberly: Wow.
Dan: I was in 536 miles. It sounds, but it was all downhill.
Kimberly: Which can be even more scary sometimes I think.
Dan: I just rode the brakes the whole time. And then I
Kimberly: Oh my gosh.
Dan: You know, itâs sort of bootcamp getting ready for National Geographic. Thatâs what I always dreamed of doing is being a National Geographic explorer. And I learned a long time that exploration that at least in the modern world here has to add to the body of knowledge or improve the human condition, not just go to the top of Mount Everest again or first and come back. Itâs really important that you discover something meaningful for people. And blue zones was that.
Dan defines what blue zones are and why he chose this term
Kimberly: So youâre exploring all around the world, youâre biking. And then did you just start ⌠well, first of all, can we define what blue zones are for people and why did you pick the term blue zones in the first place?
Dan: Well, between biking and blue zones, I started a company and a technique for exploration that led an online audience, direct a team of experts. So I had Harvard archeologists and MIT biologists and National Geographic photographers to solve a mystery. So five years. But what I did for business was go out and find great ancient mysteries. And in 1999, I stumbled across a very interesting study from the World Health Organization that found that Okinawa Japan was producing the longest lived women in the history of the world. And what this means is theyâre living a long time without chronic diseases. Diseases that are for short in our lives. And I said, âAha, thatâs a good mystery.â And I got funding from the National Institute on Aging to hire demographers.
Dan: These are people who can confirm the ages of population because so many of these places that were supposedly long lived, like the Vilcabamba Valley of Ecuador, the Caucuses in Soviet Georgia or Hunter Valley have all been debunked. So I was pretty good at corralling hard science around ancient mystery and I figured this mystery of longevity, how are entire populations making it to age 100 and living a decade longer than the rest of us? And I thought, if thereâs one in Okinawa, there must be more of them around the world. And I pitched National Geographic on the story and my editor, Peter Miller said to me, âNow thereâs an idea with hair on it.â And I got a year long assignment to go track these places down. And really when I say tracking, people think yeah I put my pith helmet on and my short crocodile Dundee pants and I go out to the world.
Dan: No, most of what you do the first three years is just marinating in data before we zero in on these areas. And hereâs the idea, Kimberly, and then I know you asked me the origin of blue zone, Iâm getting to it. So only about 20% of how long you live is dictated by genes. The other 80% is lifestyle and environment. So the academic argument here is if youâre finding populations that are achieving the outcome most of us want, which is to say, making it to a healthy age, 80 or 90, without disease. If you can find the populations and then reverse engineer
Kimberly: So which one of the other ones besides the Okinawans that were legitimate and were not debunked?
Dan: Yes. So Sardinia, Italy, that was the second one we found. And itâs not the whole island. Sardinians off the coast of Italy, about 200 miles in the Mediterranean. And up in the highlands, and area called the Nuoro province, there are six villages, about 80,000 people. Originally a bronze age culture. So not like the rest of the people pushed up there about the time of Christ. And theyâd been isolated for 2000 years ago to about 1960. And they incubated this very interesting lifestyle. And this is where the longest of men in the world and my colleague, Dr Gianni Pes, who has been studying this population for a long time, he actually coined the phrase blue zone to apply it to Sardinia. And then Iâve evolved it since then, developed it into this worldwide term that applies to any statistically longest lived area.
Dan: I identified a third blue zone in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. Maybe a lot of your audiences has heard of Nosara, which is kind of a Yogi vortex there. Well thatâs really close to the blue zone there. And whatâs extraordinary about that place is people, theyâre very poor people. They have one fifth the GDP of the United States, but they have a threefold better chance of reaching a healthy age 90 than Americans do.
Kimberly: Wow.
Dan: And Kimberly, they do it spending one fifteenth the amount we do on healthcare. So this whole notion that you have to be rich to be healthy, this place
Kimberly: Jeez.
Dan: So something these people Ikaria are doing are allowing them to not only live long, but to stay sharp until the end. And thatâs really important. And then in America here we found the blue zone among the Seventh-day Adventists of Loma Linda, California. And theyâre conservative Methodists that evangelize with health and take their diet directly from the Bible. And we can talk about that in a minute, but theyâre living up to 10 years longer than their North American counterparts are. So point being here that thereâs a way to get a lot more in life than the average American is getting. And not only more time, but more quality. And thatâs what blue zones distills and conveys and puts in books and so forth.
Kimberly: So longevity, quality. But why the term blue as in blue zones? I know you said your colleague mentioned that. Yeah.
Dan: So the exercise of ⌠Gianni Pas was in Sardinia was literally finding centenary, centenaryâs a 100 year old, centenary and bi-centenarian and finding where they live by going through the census data. And every time heâd find a centenarian in the books, heâd put a blue check mark on a map. And these six villages in the Nuoro province, they had so many check marks, so many, he was using blue ink, right? They had so many check marks that this area just looked like a blue blur. So that is the, he called it the blue zone. And thank God he wasnât using red ink because would be the red zone or black ink would be the black zone, which doesnât work nearly as well as blue zone.
Kimberly: No itâs a wonderful phrase.
Dan: Yeah, it just happened to be the right color. And he wrote an article in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology, circulation about 20 people worldwide about these zones. But his article was really just about the math necessary to identify concentrations of longevity and not this term like the way we use it today, which is a concept really.
We discuss what links the five cultures that are living a quality life and living 80% longer
Kimberly: So when you talk about 80% of this longevity and quality of life is lifestyle based, of course most of us think about, well, your diet must be a huge part of that, which I want to get into in a moment because your latest book, your book thatâs out this week is a recipe, is essentially a beautiful recipe book with all this information. And you mentioned to me you shot at editorial style. Itâs National Geographic quality. Itâs incredible, incredible book. But what percentage, I mean, I guess itâs hard to maybe or maybe not in your work find how much of that is diet based. What would you say, Dan and some other factors that you found linked these five cultures all around the world that had them live so long and had that quality of life?
Dan: Yeah, so actually I donât believe diets work at all. And even the diet in blue zones by itself, I donât think is very effective. But I think the key insight that blue zones offers the rest of us is that longevity is not something that is successfully pursued. It ensues and it ensues from the right environment. So, in other words, if you look at the life expectancy of a diet or the recidivism of the relapse of people get on diets, of the best diets, if you get 100 people to start today, you only have three left on average at the end of two years. The key insight when it comes to longevity, thereâs no short term fix.
Dan: I donât believe in any of these supplements or hormones or super food Hocus Pocus. Thereâs nothing you can do today thatâs going to guarantee youâre going to live any longer a year from now. When you think of longevity, you have to think, this is something Iâm going to do, not for just a few months while Iâm excited about something, but years or decades or lifetime. And thatâs whatâs people in blue zones are doing. People in blue zones, they have the same genetic constitution as you and me and everybody else listening out there. They donât have better discipline. They donât have better individual responsibility. Theyâre not vegans. Theyâre not ethical vegans or any of that weâd like to see them be. But the bottom line is they live in an environment where the healthy choice is the easy choice and the inexpensive choice and the cultural or the sort of the socially acceptable choice.
Dan: So in addition what they eat, they tend to have a strong sense of purpose. They donât exercise, which is another shocking thing. And by the way, I argue that exercise has been an unmitigated failure in the United States because fewer than 15% of Americans get the recommended minimum amount of âexercise.â People in blue zones, every time they go to work, to a friendâs house or out to eat at occasions walk. They have a garden out back that theyâre working year around.
Kimberly: Yeah, theyâre just active.
Dan: Yeah. And they donât have these electronic or mechanical contrivances to do all of their work. They do yard work by hand and housework by hand and kitchen work by hand. And the key insight there, Kimberly, is that people are nudged into movement in blue zones every 20 minutes or so. So, first of all, those little 20 minute bursts, if you add the of caloric expenditure over the day, theyâre burning a lot more calories than we would sitting in our office all day and going to the gym at the end of the day. But the extra bonus is their metabolisms are operating at a higher level all day long. So theyâre burning more calories with more energy and itâs the result of an environment. Itâs not a result of Iâm going to join CrossFit and Iâll run a marathon, all these sort of strategies that Americans occasionally pursue with success in the short run, but universally fail in the long run for the vast majority of people.
Whether blue zones are staying pretty traditional, lifestyle-wise, or if electronic and mechanical conveniences are changing this healthy landscape
Kimberly: Do you see it changing now that thereâs more TVs and more ways for them to sit or do you think in some of these blue zones it still has stayed pretty traditional as far as what youâre describing lifestyle-wise?
Dan: In blue zones Iâm sad to report, theyâre almost all disappearing.
Kimberly: Because of modern technology.
Dan: Even worse than technology, itâs because of the American food culture that are descending upon these places like a blight and these fast food joints and chips and sodas and all the crap thatâs making Americans fat, unhealthy are doing the same thing in blue zones. So really the point of Blue Zones Kitchen was to go back before this dietary tradition disappears and really capture like an anthropologist would. So we were up with 80, 90, 100 year old women. Women are the keepers of the tradition. And I asked them to cook for me the recipes that theyâve cooked their whole lives for their families. Because if you want to diet of longevity you have to look at what people, not what people are eating today, you have to know what 100 year old was eating when she was five or teenager and newly married and working and newly retired.
Dan: So the first step was to find dietary surveys over the last hundred years. So you get the ingredients. And then once you know the ingredients, then we went out and found ladies who knew how to make these recipes. And you know Kimberly, Iâm going to actually be interactive here. Guess what the most important ingredient is in any longevity diet in the world.
Kimberly: Okay. This is a guess-
Dan:
Kimberly: Root vegetables.
Dan: Okay. I would say that root vegetables is one of the five pillars.
Kimberly: Really? Oh my gosh. Because yeah, because I feel like ⌠yeah. Anyways, I have my reasons, but thatâs the first thing that popped into my head even though I initially think, oh, green vegetables, like dah, dah, dah. But I was thinking how hardy and what a staple they are in all around the world. Interesting.
Dan: Well, so the longest of women in Okinawa until about 1970, over 70% of all their calories came from one root vegetable. And that was the purple sweet potato called the emo.
Kimberly: Oh my God. I love that. Itâs so sweet. Itâs so good.
Dan: Oh, theyâre delicious. You put a little ⌠I love just a little bit of coconut milk and I mash them up. Itâs to die for. But if you had, if you were stuck on a desert island and you could only have one natural whole food, youâd be wise to pick the sweet potato, purple sweet potatoes because they provide so many nutrients and even some protein.
Kimberly: Dan, sorry to interrupt you, but donât you think itâs funny when youâre looking at all this historical, archeological, sociological, all this evidence and all these people now with the fat diets are scared of eating carbs. Theyâre scared of potatoes, theyâre scared of grains. Not to go on this tangent too much, but what would you say to those people?
Dan: You know, I generally donât ⌠people try to lure me in these dietary arguments, but hereâs what I say. The longest lived people, all I can tell you is that the longest lived people in the world living on four different continents, 95 to 100% of what they eat are the following, whole grains, wheat, oats and rice, greens, hundreds of kinds, well, Iâd say dozens of kinds of greens, tubers, roots. And I would say the longevity all star is beans,
Kimberly: So 95% vegan, basically.
Dan: Yes, yes. Now they do eat a little meat, but on average only five times a month, a celebratory food. And these places tend to be very barren. You look at them and see how people survive and they had goats, theyâre usually goats with the name that lived good lives until the very end or a family pig. And we donât know if they lived a long time because of the little bit of meat or despite the meat. They might even live longer if they were vegans. But the truth of the matter is the carrying capacity of their land would not have fed them if they didnât have these poor little animals aggregating calories for them. They ate a little bit of fish. Hereâs what is interesting. No cowâs dairy. No significant cowâs dairy in any of the five blue zones. So-
Kimberly: Wow.
Some of the most important ingredients in any longevity diet
Dan: And a little bit of sheep or goat, but itâs not a lot. Most of what t
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