How to Live Your Healthiest, Most Fulfilling Life with Dan Buettner [Episode #627]
This week’s topic is: How to Live Your Healthiest, Most Fulfilling Life with Dan Buettner
I am so excited to have my very special guest, Dan Buettner, who is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist and producer, New York Times bestselling author and Founder of the blue zones; places in the world where people live the longest. Listen in as Dan shares the impact our environment influences scarcity and hardship, why assessing your social network is important for your health, and how to create a healthier environment.
- Living in an environment of scarcity and hardship…
- The myths around your body needing meat…
- How Dan’s Blue Zones Challenge book is out of the ordinary…
- Assessing your current social network to impact your health in a positive way…
- Creating healthier environments…
- If there’s a correlation between eating meat, smoking and lung disease…

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 – dubbed blue zones hotspots – where people live the longest, healthiest lives. His new book “The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-Week Plan for a Longer Better Life” is a four-week guide and year-long sustainability program to jump-start your journey to better health, happiness, less stress, and longer life. Buettner also holds three Guinness World Records in distance cycling.
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Dan Buettner’s Interview
Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:
- Eating for Longevity with Dan Buettner
- Conscious Nutrition and Longevity with Dr. Gabriel Cousens
- Stress & Healthy Ways To Cope
- Your Lifestyle and How it Affects Your Overall Wellbeing
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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 (00:01): Hi Beauties. And welcome back to our Monday interview podcast, where we have one of my favorite repeat guests. We have the brilliant Dan Buettner, who is a national geographic fellow award, winning journalist and producer number one, New York times bestselling author and founder of the blue zones. The places in the world where people live the longest today, he is talking about a very different angle that is not ever talked about in order to live our healthiest, most fulfilling lives. And I can’t wait to get into it today. I’m going to tease it a little bit because it’s something I’ve never really, um, I’ve never heard about this angle, talked about in health books. And so Dan really gets into it. And it’s the focus of his new book. The blue zones challenge. So cannot wait for our interview today and to share it with you. But before we get into it, I want to give a shout out to our fan of the week.
Fan of the Week
Kimberly (00:58): Her name is NurseCary, and she writes life-changing, I’ve been listening to Kimberly for years, and now a part of her Solluna community. I never miss an episode. She is so smart and inspiring well NurseCary, thank you so much. My love for being part of our community. Thank you so much for your wonderful review. It truly means the world and I hope we get to meet one day in person and beauties for your chance to also be shouted out as a fan of the week. Please just take one minute out of your day, hop on over to iTunes and leave us a review. It is such an amazing, powerful way to support the show. It’s absolutely free. So thank you so much in advance. And if you screenshot your review and send it over to or views@myselena.com, we will share with you our seven self-love affirmation series, a program for helping to reshape and expand you out of your limiting beliefs.
Kimberly (01:56): Also want to announce now at the top of our show that we are in the pre-sale period of my new book, you are more than you think you are practical enlightenment for everyday life. So if you haven’t yet already checked out our presale campaign, please order your book today. You can start reading the first two chapters of the book today, and you’ll also get invited into our looped event, which is going to be an amazing community event with questions and meditation and more. And if you get two or more copies, you will also get for free an immediate access to our beyond fear, awakening, freedom to live your best life course, which is very full and has a lot of information to help elevate you past your fear, into breaking, you know, breaking through perceived limitations and barriers in order to create your most amazing life in different areas in love and prosperity in creativity and so on. All right, all that being said, let’s get right into our interview today with the amazing Dan Buettner.
Interview with Dan Buettner
Kimberly: 00:05 Dan, it’s so exciting to have you back. Thank you for coming back to talk to us again. We always love having you here.
Dan: 00:12 Well, maybe I begged beyond your podcast. What do you mean the other way around?
Kimberly: 00:17 Well, before we start talking about the, you know, the new book, I want to talk a little bit about, um, blue zones kitchen, because the last time I saw you was at the book launch, which is at crossroads, which is like right before the pandemic started, right before things started to get so weird or didn’t see anybody for like years, but you were, I think one of the last people I saw Dan,
Dan: 00:41 Well, I don’t know whether to say I’m sorry, or I’m glad, but, but it, when that was a fun night and, uh, amazing people from the plant-based community converged in, I think one of the better restaurants in, uh, in Los Angeles, if not the world, at least when it comes to eating plant-based food. No,
Kimberly: 01:01 It was, it was amazing. And I have to tell this story because, um, because you, you are one of the things I love about you, Dan, is that you’re so humble. You’re sound you’re so down to earth. So I remember talking to you and being like, how’s the book going? You’re like, I think it’s going pretty well. And then I talked to someone else, like on your team. And they were like, uh, we sold like 75,000 copies already this week. It’s number one, New York times, best seller. So I knew you would never say this about, you know, yourself and your work, but I just want to acknowledge to everybody listening, how incredible this amazing work, which is helping people live healthier and feel better and have healthier, longer lives is, is reaching so many people it’s really resonating. And it’s amazing.
Dan: 01:48 Thank you so much for saying that it’s a, well, you know, it’s, um, it’s, it’s, it’s, um, it’s my passion and, and, uh, uh, books like that are the, by-product the idea behind Blue’s own kitchen. You know, um, I started out 15 years ago to reverse engineer longevity and found these five areas where people are living the longest and discovered their common denominators, which I think point us in a really strong direction for what we might want to be doing. If we want to live longer. Of course, one of them is eating a whole plant-based diet and, um, the blue zone kitchen captures, you know, it’s, it’s equal parts, science, writing, national geographic photography and recipes. So I actually went up into the villages in blue zones, talk to 80, 90, a hundred year old women who are the keepers of this 500 year old food tradition and their great genius.
Dan: 02:43 Kimberly is taking basic hesitant food beans, grains, greens, tubers nuts, and making them taste delicious because as you well know, and I know you’re a big, uh, warrior in, uh, and, and, and evangelizing the plant-based message, but you know, a few percent of people will care about animals. A few percent of people care about the environment. A few percent of people care that eating plant based is good for their health, but if you can make plant-based food tastes as good or better than meat, cheese, and eggs, you don’t have to sell it. It comes naturally. And that’s part of the secret of crossroads. And I think that’s, that was what I was trying to achieve with blue zones, kitchen, and, you know, capture the genius, the culinary genius of blue zones and put it in a book that’s easy to use and beautiful.
Kimberly: 03:42 It certainly is beautiful. And one thing too, is that it’s very accessible. You talked about peasant food, so it’s, it’s simple. Like I don’t, you know, I get a lot of recipe books sent to me and all around and yours is in my kitchen because I can open up to any recipe and no, I don’t have to devote my whole day doing like 50 steps and getting all these different processes. It’s so amazing that this magic and, you know, using the ingredients mean these basic techniques, um, it’s accessible, which I think is key to putting this all into practice.
Dan: 04:14 Well, these people in the blue zone, they’re not fussy. They were, this is quotidian food to people eat every day. Uh, there are a few maybe Salvatore dishes in there, but most of them are take less than 20 minutes to make a lot of bean recipes. I, you know, as, as you may know, I’m the big bean evangelizer and I believe the health of America will arrive on the boat on a bicycle, Kerry and beans. And, um, the great genius of blue zones is they know how to make beans, tastes delicious and various soups and stews and salads and even main courses. And, and, um, you know, people, you know, I worked with about 50 cities in America and I get here all the time. I can’t afford to eat healthy because I can’t go to whole foods and buy organic. And the reality is if you can afford rice and beans or beans and tortilla or pasta for Jolie or some tofu, eh, man, you, you have all the protein you need most of the nutrients, probably 95% of the nutrients you need just with, with beans and a grain. And, um, you know, yes, you need greens once in a while. You need vitamin B12 as you well know, which is easy to supplement. It’s the only supplement I I’m in favor of. But, uh, once you have that, you’re, you know, you’re golden. You don’t have to remember, you don’t have to spend a bunch of money on weight Watchers. Um, yeah.
Kimberly: 05:41 And I think that, that brings up a big point because, you know, besides people saying, oh, I can’t, I can’t afford, I can’t go to whole foods. I like your, like your voice. They’re dead. Another thing that people say is it’s so confusing because there’s all these diets out there and there’s all this stuff. And it gets like very specific. If you’re trying to follow like paleo, you’re trying to do this, like, you know, 21 day program. And it goes to this and this, it gets very heady. And I think one of the reasons people connect, one of the reasons I connect so deeply to your work is it’s from the people you’re studying real people and how they live. It’s not just okay, this, you know, a bunch of like, you know, bio hackery stuff, studies that people don’t really understand. And these numbers and these charts it’s saying, no, no, no, no. Look, this culture is a group of real humans and this is what they’re eating, and this is how they’re living. And this is how they’re connecting as a community. And as people we relate to people. So that immediately cuts through this confusion of these very heady, you know, just the science.
Living in an environment of scarcity and hardship
Dan: 06:47 Well, I’m coming to you now from south beach, you know, and right up the street, they have the south beach diet, which is basically, um, which I don’t believe in by the way, but, but, um, a lot of these diets are developed and in the offices of doctors or, or marketeers and, and, um, uh, or as a result of, of, of trying to, uh, promote certain nutrients. And I think we start getting in trouble when you low fat or high protein, no carb, no carb. And that’s not the way we evolved. We evolved humans have been on this planet for about 25,000 generations, 99 and a half percent of them. Uh, we were living in an environment of scarcity and hardship and there people didn’t, our ancestors didn’t pull wrapper off of food. It wasn’t processed. Uh, if they ate meat, it was rare. It was a celebratory food, or it was a necessity.
Dan: 07:52 Most of what fueled our ancestors were, uh, when did it well, roots and tubers and things you could gather, uh, until about 11,000 years ago. And then the very first cultivated crops were lentils out of the fertile Crescent in Turkey. What is today? Turkey, lentils, and wheat grain. And that is, that is how we evolved the last 11,000 years. And, you know, we, we, if you want a pretty good idea of what you ought to be doing, look at what our ancestors have done for thousands of years and that, you know, you can kind of forget the rest
Kimberly: 08:33 Well. And what would you say to those, you know, the, the paleo people that talk about, you know, the, the, the tools and the hunting, the animals, and eating mostly, or eating a lot of meat. I know this is probably something that a lot,
Dan: 08:46 If you, if you look at the paleolithic time humans, we’re not eating a lot of meat, that they were eating mostly tubers and seeds and nuts and berries and things that they could forage, uh, maybe, maybe some insects, uh, occasionally there was a hunter and a kill, um, but they didn’t have refrigeration. So that meat had to be consumed there right then and there. So they may have, they may have gorged on meat, you know, after a kill, but th the next few days they weren’t sitting around eating meat. And, um, most of the, the, the, uh, dietary studies I’ve done, uh, uh, I’ve seen a pivotal that the times they’re overwhelmingly eating, plant-based still, yes.
Kimberly: 09:33 And there’s so much research that shows that. So again, it just shows to like that the marketing of, of taking something and sort of fitting it into, into a diet, into something that, um, you know, it gets picked up by the media, and then it gets misinterpreted. When in actuality, it’s not really the way it was in those environments. In that time,
Dan: 09:53 We average American think about this w uh, consumes about 260 pounds of meat a year. That is an absurd amount of meat. Nobody never maybe king Henry, the eighth, who is obese and, and, uh, uh, had goiters. And maybe he, uh, maybe he ate that much meat, but that’s not never been something done in human history. Uh, we consume about 24, uh, uh, extra teaspoons of sugar of added sugar every day. Uh, that’s not how humans evolve. We may be found honey occasionally, or, or, you know, in these blue zones, there may be eating seven teaspoons of added sugar, most, mostly, uh, because, and celebratory times they’ll, they’ll enjoy some cake or something like that. And dairy dairy is just absurd. I mean, dairy wasn’t part of the human experience until about 10,000 years ago. And some, uh, some people have developed, uh, the, um, uh, enzymes necessary to digest. A lot of most people, a lot of people can’t even digest. We’re not, we’re not meant to suck on the, the glands of other species and metabolize their baby’s milk. And, uh, it’s not good for us. It’s not something that we see in any of the blue zones, an insignificant amount. And, um, it’s Americans consume about 400 pounds of dairy a year, which is also absurd where we’ve been duped into thinking it’s good for us, and it’s not.
Kimberly: 11:24 And one thing about the blue zones that I love as well is how, um, they’re spread across the world. So I love that they know it’s between Japan and Costa Rica and Europe and California. And so, you know, what would you say to somebody, Dan? Cause I get this question too, when someone says, oh, well, I tried to be plant-based. And I just think my by my body type needs some meat, you know, everybody’s, body’s different. I think I have a body type where I actually need meat. What’d he say to that?
The myths around your body needing meat
Dan: 11:54 Well, I’ve heard alcoholics say they, they need, uh, they need a beer. You know, it’s just not true. I mean, it may taste good going down and they may be, feel better for an hour or two. But, um, if they’re, if they’re eating mostly a animal-based diet, uh, their gut is not getting enough fiber, which means their immune system is an optimally fine too. They’re probably dealing with system-wide inflammation. They probably don’t digestive system isn’t moving through with regularity. Their mortality rate is there. Their chances of dying in any given year is probably 20% greater chance of heart disease. It’s just, it’s just the myth. It’s a myth to justify eating what tastes good to them.
Kimberly: 12:44 Exactly. And again, taking it back to the people, taking it back to your work, which is looking at these communities all around the world. You know, they say, oh, that people have different body types and different continents or whatever, but there is this through-line of eating these natural foods, this peasant food, these plant foods. So if that were true, that different body types needed a certain amount of meat to thrive. Then we would see that in the, in the, you know, the long-term cultural research, I imagine.
Dan: 13:11 Uh, so, you know, I mean, uh, journalistic integrity, they do eat some meat in blue sharks, but on average, no five times a month. So maybe once a week, maybe a little bit more than once a week. And, and, and a piece of meat, the size of a deck of cards it’s used as a condiment. And, you know, these people were living in areas where they, they had a hard time aggregating enough calories to survive, and their goats, sheep sometimes did that for them. Um, but it wasn’t this wholesale industrial slaughter, uh, cruelty that, that, um, goes on in our country. And, um, you know, I mean, if all Americans ate meat five times a month, we, uh, instead of what we do 260 pounds a year, we probably wouldn’t have a problem. Um, there’d be a heck of a lot less cruelty. The, the, um, our carbon footprint from, from animal based agriculture contributes about 37% of all greenhouse gases. So, uh, you know, most of that would go away. And, um, you know, I look at meat as a lot like radiation, we know a lot will kill you. That’s manifest, uh, we don’t know the safe level, but probably a little bit exposure doesn’t hurt you. And by the way, we don’t know if people in the blue zones lived a long time because of the meat or in spite of the meat thing. We just don’t know
Kimberly: 14:42
How Dan’s Blue Zones Challenge book is out of the ordinary
Dan: 15:10 I opened the book by saying, if you, if you are overweight and unhealthy in America, it’s probably not your fault. And the reason I say that is because if you look at, uh, the data from 1980, uh, many of us were alive then, um, the re that we had about one third, the rate of obesity, and about one seventh, the rate of diabetes. Now let’s think about that for a moment, is that because people in 1980 had better diets or because they were more disciplined or because they had better sense of individual responsibility or they’re better people, no, what’s changed. Well, what’s changed is we have about 25 times more fast food restaurants now than we do. Then over 50% of all retail outlets in this country sell junk food. You cannot, uh, get a prescription filled or, or, uh, get your tires changed without being round to route it by a gauntlet of sugary snacks are slim Jims or, or, um, salty snacks or soda pops.
Dan: 16:18 So the core tenant in blue zones and places where people are making it to age 100 at 10 times, the rate we are with a fraction of the rate of chronic disease. It’s not because they try, it’s not because they have better diets, a better discipline. Uh it’s simply because they live in an environment where the healthy choices, the easy choice, they’re not expected to always remember the right thing to eat or think about, you know, the food and the Blue’s own kitchen is what people eat every day, because whole plant-based food is cheapest. It’s most accessible. Their kitchens are set up, so it’s easy to make, and they have time on a recipes to make it taste delicious. So the whole blue zone challenge, um, takes the blueprint of a blue zone and transfers it to your home and your life. So we do challenge people to go whole food plant-based for four weeks.
Dan: 17:18 And by the way, if you succeed at that within one day, you’ll feel more energetic within three days, you’ll sleep better within about a week. Your digestive system will work better. You know, food will flow through you with greater, um, uh, regularity, as it were within three weeks. Your mortality rate drops by 10%, no dry drops by 10%. So does your chance of a heart disease, uh, and many cancers of the GI by 10% in just three weeks, you’re more productive. Your mind is clear and within four weeks you should lose between five and eight pounds. Wow. Trying, uh, and that should, there’s a good research behind that, but just going whole food plant based. But rather than trying to tell people, you know, you gotta remember to do this or, or, um, find the discipline. Um, we show people how to set up their social network, their home, their kitchen, their workplace, and to a certain extent, their internal environment, so that the healthy choices mindless. So we’re setting people up for success rather than expecting them to have superhero powers.
Kimberly: 18:31 Well, I have to say, this is the first time that I’ve seen a book laid out this way. That’s taking the environment part, because usually, usually I loved blue zone kitchens, as you know, I have copies all over the place, but it is a set of recipes. And so it kind of leaves it to that person to, you know, do this sometimes and do this versus blue zones challenges as practical as it gets. And I think sometimes we get so busy, we need to be told what to do and how to set things up in order to create that, um, that pathway forward, it’s like setting up a med
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