We make about two hundred and twenty food decisions a day, only ten percent of them are conscious. If you're unhealthy and overweight, it's probably not your fault, and I'll tell you why.
New York Times best selling author, award winning journalists Dan.
You these five areas where people are living measurably longer. Not only is there plenty of evidence that these approaches work, but also it offers a path to longevity that's enjoyable.
Before we jump into this episode, I'd like to invite you to join this community to hear more interviews that will help you become happier, healthier, and more healed. All I want you to do is click on the subscribe button. I love your support. It's incredible to see all your comments, and we're just getting started. I can't wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to me, the best selling author in the host the number one health and well in this.
Podcast, Purpose with Jay Sheetty.
Hey everyone, and welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Now. I love sitting down with people who have deeply studied, obsessed, and excavated insights and ideas for us. People who have focused deeply on mining the world, traveling the world and finding wisdom, finding tenets of ideas and concepts that can transform the
way we live in the modern world. And today's guest is someone I've had on the show before, but I am so excited to see him again after around four or five years it's been since we were last together. I'm speaking about Dan Buttner, an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award winning journalist and producer, and New York Times best selling author. Dan discovered the five places in the world dubbed Blue Zones hotspots where people live the longest, healthiest lives.
New book that I have right now, The Blue Zone Secrets for Living Longer Lessons from the Healthiest Places on Earth. Dan talks about his travels and journeys of living and learning from people all over the world that will dive into today. I want you to grab a copy of this book. It beautifully synthesizes and summarizes really complex and difficult ideas and really really simple and beautiful ones In a way that you can practice them and bring them
to life in yours and the people you love. Welcome to the show, Dan, butener Dan, thank you for being.
You're such a master. It's a complete joy to see you again and to be here in your studio.
Yeah, and congratulations on your documentary too on Netflix. I mean, it's been received exceptionally well. If anyone hasn't seen it yet, make sure you go and see that and get the book at the same time. It's so beautiful because when we met you'd been dedicated to this work for so long already, and the fact that it's now having another resurgence, and you know, it's becoming even more mainstream, which I love because I think these ideas need to be mainstream.
Talk to us just about how long you've been fascinated and obsessed about this journey and how amazing it is. You just said a moment ago outside to me, you said, you know, I thought the work had had its course, but here it is again. It's timeless.
Nineteen ninety nine, I did a read a study in the World Health Organization finding that Oki now Japan, produces the longest live disability free lives in the world.
I thought, ah, that's a.
Great mystery, and it did a very quick expedition there and became personally on fire about the topic. And then in two thousand and four I got an assignment from National Geographic and a grant from the National Institutes on Aging and wrote a cover story for National Geographic, and the idea here Jay, was, you know so many it's very hot in Silicon Valley right now to search for longevity hacks or anti aging, no storms and so forth.
And instead of looking for secret to longevity test tube or some sort of genetic code, we've very methodically found these five areas where people are living measurably longer. And then, because only about twenty percent of how long we live is dictated by our genes, eighty percent of something else, then we took teams of scientists to find the common
denominators and the correlits. And I think the reason the Netflix series is resonating so much right now is because, in our fast paced world, where we're constantly looking for answers and technology, we've overlooked this wonderful repository of time honorn wisdom that if we stop pay attention, you can see not only is there plenty of evidence that these approaches work, but also it offers a path to longevity that's.
Enjoyable, absolutely, and I'm so happy that you are shining a light on that because I think it's so interesting how obsessed we can get and even how stressed we can get about health and almost when you go back to these very grossroots ways and methods and approaches, it's so much more natural and organic. But we'll come through that. You said twenty percent is genes. What's the other eighty percent?
Maybe ten percent is healthcare? You know how good your insurance is, how much access do you have to hospitals and doctors. But the other seventy percent or so, I argue it is largely your environment. We spent over one hundred and fifty billion dollars a year on diets and exercise programs. But if you look at the duration of how long those lasts, it's measured in months and maybe a year and a half or so. And when it comes to longevity, there's no short term fix, there's no pill,
there's no supplement. It is the sum of lots of small improvements to your life's aggregated over decades. That's what works, and I've been shown nothing else that can work in the in the in the short runs. So that seventy percent is how you set up your environments so that you are unconsciously nudged to do things that favor longevity and nudged away from the things that we know take away from health and vitality. That's kind of the general idea.
And I love that idea about environment. I think the challenge is today that a lot of us would find that environments we grow up in, or environments we live and work in, are almost set up against longevity. Yes, would you agree with that? And what are some of the ways in which we almost have to not fight, but we have to almost defend, protect and create environments to grow and be abundant in.
So we're in Los Angeles right now, I happen to know that the average Angelino spends forty seven hours a year not just in traffic, stopped in traffic, in places that are walkable, where there are bike lanes, where there are nice wide sidewalks with trees so they're esthetically pleasing, cleaned up playground. The physical activity level of the entire
community is twenty percent higher. So we live in a nature nation where freer than twenty four percent of people get the minimum amount of physical activity, which is only about twenty minutes. So just by living in a walkable neighborhood, you're probably going to get more physical activity over the long term than you are signing up for a gym. The other problems are food environment. You know, we evolved with genetic hardwiring to favor salt, favor sugar, urn for fat,
and take rest whenever we can. That served us very well in an environment of scarcity and difficulty like we evolved in. But now we live in this environment where we're never more than five steps away from a salty snack or soda or hamburger pizza, and you know, our genes lusts for that, and we can try to deploy discipline or presence of mind to overcome it three or four times, but the sixth times you're confronted by it in a day, you know that discipline muscle wears out.
The next thing you're you know, eating that snickers or digging into that bag of chips. And it's hard to wake your finger at Americans and say it's your responsibility to eat healthy when ninety seven out of one hundred choices out there for most people aren't healthy.
I want to dive into all the lessons and the insights that we can make shifts. How have you found people being able to apply the Blue zones work in their modern lives in these big cities, in places when ninety seven out of one hundred options are unhealthy or toxic or whatever they may be. What examples have you seen? What have you learned about people actually making changes and transformations in their life?
So I have two answers, and I'll first, I'll take it at the community level. So my daytime job for most the last thirteen years has been working with cities were publicly endorsed but privately funded, so we don't get
involved with people worried about spending tax hours. We've gone into cities like Fort Worth, Texas, Naples, Florida, Jacksonville, the whole state of Hawaii, and instead of trying to get people to convince people to eat mostly a plant based diet and to get physical activity, we work with city council to help them identify policies that favor healthy food over junk food, that favor the pedestrian over the motors, that favor the non smoke over the smoker. And we
don't come in telling cities what to do. Nobody wants to be told what to do. We bring them menus and then we go through every item on that policy menu and assess it for number one, effective to people in this room from the public and private sector, think it to be effective in this city? And two is it feasible? Is there enough sort of political equity to
get these things done? And in every city, we're able to find a half a dozen to a dozen policies that float to the top and my team could get implemented. And that's the biggest According to the CDC, the most powerful lever we have to create a healthier America is policy.
It's the most cost effective. But then we also have a Blue Zone certification program for restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces in schools, and over five years we can usually get thirty to forty percent of those places to agree to optimize their designs and their policies so people mindlessly move more, eat better. Cafeterias are healthier with healthier choices, socialize more. We all know loneliness kills and then no one live
their purpose. And it only works when you're comprehensive, and from the time people wake up till the time they go to bed, they are nudged unconsciously nudged into slightly better behaviors. Over the period of decades, and in every city we worked in and Gallop measures this, we've seen the obesity rate go down, life satisfaction go up, and healthcare go down a lot. And in a country where we're spending four point four trillion dollars on healthcare, that's an important consideration.
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean it's incredible to have these very I love how you're approaching it almost from a very macro level, like in the sense if it's not just about micro habit changes, it's about redesigning entire cities or reformatting entire cities, which which I was fascinated when we first met and you walked me through the models, and I remember you showing us how you were thinking parks and spaces could be redesigned, and how schools and homes
and how they all need to be close to each other, and I was thinking, wow, this is it's such a practical but macro level. I want to dive into some of these areas because I want to give people a small tour of this beautiful book that you've created, and of course highly recommend that everyone grabs the book for
all the full details. But the blue zones are Sardinya and Nkoya, Lomlinda, Ikaria, Okinawa and Singapore, and so they're not necessarily the most they're not predictable, and they're not places that you'd go, oh yeah, I know that place, like of course, those people live a long time and I've only been to I've been to Sardinia before and I remember going and meeting with some of the people. Then I was totally blown away. I've been to Singapore
before and I met some local individuals. But I wanted to dive into a couple of areas that I highlight, So I wanted to talk a little bit about a few things that may sound counterintuitive to people. One of these. One of these ones was the plant based diet, because I think a lot of people right now there's a lot of debate over plant based versus meat based diet, but this was something that you saw across the board as quite a strong indicator of longevity.
I think people should eat what makes them feel the best, and I'm not here to tell people what to eat, but I'm also right for National Geographic and my feet are held to the fire. So if I want to talk about a diet of longevity, our process was to aggregate dietary surveys in all five Blue Zones universities go
out and find what the population is eating. And we did that for over the past eighty years, so one hundred and fifty five dietary surveys over eighty years, so we know what a centenarian was eating when they were twenty and what they're eating when they were newly retired and recently. I had over side from Harbor to do what's called a meta analysis. And if you really want to know what a centenarian has eaten most of his or her life, it is about ninety to ninety five
percent whole plant based food. Contrary to sort of the popular keto diets and so forth. It's very high in carbohydrates, but complex carbohydes carbohydrates. Both jelly beans and lentil beans are carbohydrates. And obviously you know in a way carbohydrates is the worst word in the nutritional dictionary, because I would argue simple carbohydrates like jelly beans are the most toxic components of our diet, whereas beans is the most healthy. The five pillars of every longevity diet in the world
are whole grains, greens, and other garden vegetables. It's all seasonal tubers like sweet potatoes. In Okinawa, until nineteen seventy, about sixty five to seventy percent of all the calories consumed were from purple sweet potatoes nuts as a snack. And then the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. And if you're eating a couple of beans a day, it's probably worth about four years of
extra life expectancy. They do eat meat, and I readily acknowledge that the Adventists don't all eat meat, but in all Blue zones, on average, they were eating meat about five times per month. Average American eats about two hundred and twenty pounds of meat a year, which is just too much. I think there's plenty of evidence to show that that level of meat consumptions highly associate it with about a doubling or tripling of your chances of cardiovascular
disease and even type two diabetes. In blue zones, they might be consuming twenty pounds of meat a year, and it's a celebratory food. It's usually from an animal that's had a pretty decent life. Not to say that justifies killing it, but it's just a whole different way of consuming meat and much lower quantities. So is there room for meat people's diet, Probably, but a lot less. I think we're me.
Yeah, And I love how you've connected, And I mean the amount of analysis that's been done is truly remarkable, and obviously the amount of years. The fact that you know what someone was eating at twenty years old and what they've eating for their whole life is pretty phenomenal. One of these ones that you had here was laughing with friends, and you know, I think laughter is laughter
and crying both as such underestimated emotions and expressions. And I almost feel like I wonder if every one of us who's listening and watching right now did a personal audit on how much we laughed per week. Oh yeah, I would be intrigued to see how many of us, And I would love that everyone who's listening and watching just for the next seven days. It sounds like a stupid activity and maybe this makes you laugh, and that's great, right, down how many times you truly laugh, not just like
ha ha ha, but like truly laughed every day. What did you discover about the importance of laughter? Because that sounds like such a subtle, soft, small thing, but you put in the book.
Well, it's hard to quantify, quite honestly, but where that comes from. The word sardonic, which is a type of kind of slightly biting but good natured humor, comes from Sardinia, and it very much pervades the culture. There's a lot of sort of ribbing, good natured ribbing, of each other, and that's sort of a social currency. So when they get together at the end of the day for their glass of wine or two, it's usually they're not sitting around griping about politics or what the left is doing
or what the right is doing. They're poking fun of each other or the shepherd over the hill. And so that's an anecdotal observation, but it just seemed to be one of the propellants of a very hearty and healthy social life. I wrote the cover story for National Geograph
in two thousand and five. I don't think anybody was connecting social the quality of your social relations with health or longevity until my first articles and books were And I think there's a general realization that transcends blue zones. That you know, if you could put the health full properties of a good social life in a tablet, it would be a billion dollar blockbuster drug. Being Having at least three friends who you can laugh with, who care about you on a bad day is worth about eight
years of life expectancy over being alone. And I don't know of any other supplement or pill that will give you anywhere near that.
We inherently know that. Like when someone hears that, they sound, yeah, I have three friends. But I think, like you said, it's the topic of conversation, it's the energetic exchange. It's the vulnerability and the depth of that relationship that seems to be stifled. Like you're saying, like we're all searching for the magic pill, but you're saying, actually, just having three friends that you can call on a bad day is actually going to increase your life expectancy greater than
any pill you could take. Which just to think about that for a second, Like you make it sound so easy, but that's a really powerful point. But we maybe don't engage as effectively with three people in our life. Where have we gone wrong in that social space? What did you kind of come across?
There's this great Harvard researcher named Robert Putnam. He wrote a book called Bowling Alone, and when he first read it wrote it in the late eighties, he calculated that the average American has three friends. He now calculates we're down to under two. So we may think that we're socially connected, but as a nation, we're getting less and less socially connected. And I think part of it is
this thing right here. We're using this as a proxy for the face to face conversations like we're having right now, which isn't nearly as good. Part of it's our environment. We spent about twice as much time in our cars than we did in nineteen eighty. If were't our cars, we're not out walking interacting with people and having those
serendipitous social interactions that can lead to friendships. We spend four and a half hours a day at least interacting with our screens, yet again, another time taken away from social interaction. And we are humans. The reason why we're successful over other simions is that we have this capacity to feel empathy for each other, to cooperate with each other.
And at the end of the.
Day, most things that feel good favor our health and our longevity. That's why we get hungry and it feels good to eat, or you know, we get that little urgent, it feels good to have sex. These are all things that sort of favor the thriving of our species.
Yeah, I want to pick up a few things that really resonated with me there. First is you spoke about serendipitous moments, and I think that that's such a Again, it's become so random or rare now to bump into someone at a grocery store and start a conversation. We're in a line at anywhere, whether it's the doctors, whether it's a store, whatever it may be, and everyone's on their phone, and it would be rare or actually we'd
see it as weird. If someone said hello to us, we'd kind of look around, going like are you okay? Like what do you need? It would be uncomfortable. And I actually think that when those synchronous or serendibitous moments happen where you kind of have a moment of surprise or delight, or you bump into someone that feels familiar. I had this happen to me through a work thing last week. We were going on a work project. One person on the team hadn't come to an event yet.
We hit it off immediately and it felt like serendibity, and it was through work, and I was just like, I want to build a relationship with this person. And I often feel that way. And because I moved country and I moved city, so I moved from London to New York to now La, I've had the positive pressure of having to rebuild community. And I remember when I moved to New York and then moved to LA. I said to my wife, I was like, we're not just
I'm not just trying to build my career. I want to build community at the same time, because you can't really have one without the other. I could have an amazing career here, but if I don't have community, how meaningful is my career going to feel? And so they were both pursuits and efforts, and I remember having this really and I still do it today and I'm thirty
six years old, and I'm not shy about it. If I connect with someone or if I enjoy someone's company, I'll just say, hey, do you want to come over for dinner? Let's hang out. And I try and avoid going out for dinner, and I try and avoid going to bars and restaurants because I find them to be loud, I find them to be impersonal, and I find them also to be short, Like you've got for dinner for an hour and a half and then everyone look at
their phone and leave. And I almost think that if there's someone that I deeply want to connect with, I'd rather meet them one on one and if they can come over to my apartment or my home or whatever it may be, that intimate time and ordering food in kind of creates more time. You're now going to spend three hours with someone, it's likely that you're going to extend that period of time. And another thing that's been massive in helping me is I think often we hide
in groups. So we go out with big groups. We go out with twenty people, we go out with thirty people, and you then end up having or you go up with six people and you end up having five shallow conversations as opposed to one or two deeper ones. Now I'm not saying I don't hang out in groups. I do, and I enjoy it, and my wife and I throw regular game nights and we love that kind of stuff.
But I also crave deep, intimate, valuable conversation as well, and I know my friends do, and so to me, I've tried really, really hard, and sometimes you know, you wear your heart and your sleep and you say to someone, hey, do you want to hang out and they're like no, And it's okay because I feel like if I do feel that with someone and someone feels it back with me, that's the beginning of a beautiful friendship as an adult.
And I feel like we make less friends as adults than obviously we did as kids, and especially for men especially. Oh yeah, interesting, go ahead, Sorry, No, I'd.
Actually like explore this side. There's a positive pressure to socialize. I think there are a lot of Americans who would love more social interaction. It's just hard, and I'm wondering what you like if you're a middle age American living in Iowa in a small town, how would you use this positive pressure and actually start to build network or build meaningful relationships.
I find places of equal value, and that could be a bar, a restaurant, a pool, bar, adarts place, I don't know. I'm thinking places that people in England definitely go to connect, like you know, I think sports to me, finding this has happened recently to me here, it's like and I know this isn't Iowa, but the idea of I have melmos and I haven't made I have made so many new friends simply playing pickleball. So pickleball is taken over the nation. I go to a local park,
like literally ten minutes down the road. I go there and I play, and if we've lost the doubles partner or whatever, we'll go up to someone random or someone will come up to us and say, hey, you guys looking for another pairent. We're like, yeah, sure, And all of a sudden you're on a text thread and you're all friends and you're playing pickleball together twice a week. And so I found that sports places of equal value. I think charities and give back opportunities are amazing places.
I think there are so many social networks inside a city that we're not even aware of. Obviously, people's schools and your children's schools and communities. I think there are just so many opportunities to meet like minded people. And I think if we go there wanting to connect and find people of equal value, I think it's possible. And
so I don't know. I've never been to Iowa, so I can't speak specifically for their but I definitely feel like getting into places of yeah, finding tangents to connect. And I don't think you're going to bump into someone at a grocery store. I don't think you're going to bump into someone on the street anymore. It doesn't work like that. But you will bump into someone if you went to a class, a course, a program, an event.
I went on a world tour this year. We went to nearly forty cities across the world, and I had people who turned up to my show single alone, came by themselves, and left with a group of friends, right, And that I think that's possible. But because you're going to a place where you feel safe and they.
Share interests you share, exploring what you're in probably sharing values exactly. Yeah, It's just that you know, we're sort of relentlessly marketed that the path to health is through this diet program or this exercise program, or these supplements or a longevity hack, and the realization that quality social interaction is probably better for your health than any of those things. Just marketers can't make money off of it,
so you don't hear about it. To your point about Pickaball, I think it is the most important social innovation that America has seen in the last three decades. I'm also pickaball financially.
I love it.
Yeah, And we have this place where I'll just show up at nine o'clock in the morning alone and within ten minutes I'm playing a game and often because there's so much kind of talking back and forth. By the end of it, I have the seeds of three new friendships, and after three months it's a community. I think it's a wonderful thing. A few other things that have worked for me This past summer, I visited Minnesota some I
want to expand my social circle, so I started. I just went through my own context, just one by one and thought, yeah, that's a person who's a healthy and I'm interested in and I'd like to get to know. And I just made Tuesday and Thursday afternoons lunch days because it was a low bar, you know, for me to ask somebody to come to lunch with me. I'll pay, you know, and instead of investing in a diet program
or something or you know some supplements. I you know, had eight lunches, and out of that eight lunches, three of those people are you know, more of a I would say in my media social circle now, so there's ways to do that.
Yeah, that's brilliant, super practical. Another one that stuck out, and I want to go into so many more. But this one kind of on that community element and again potentially more anecdotol, but really powerful and a big part of how we lived in the monastery and how I
was raised celebrating elders. And I love that idea because my wife's one of my wife's favorite people in the world, or her favorite person in the world is her grandmother, who's thankfully still with us, and she loves celebrating her. She loves spending time with her, she loves learning from her. She a few years ago, she sat down and interviewed her just for herself so she'd have those memories to
hold on to her grandma's experiences. She went in asked her grandmother to share with her, like old photos and all of this kind of stuff. When I think about my monk teachers who are twice my age, and celebrating them and being present with them and learning from them. I think celebrating elders is such a part of society that's completely been lost, but especially in Sardinia, that stood out. Walk us through what you saw there.
It's very easy to map respect of elders as a long gravity strategy for a community. So you go into these sort of old man bars up in the mountains and instead of seeing the sports illustrate it swimsuit of the month, you know, you would see the Senate Tenarian of the month and they actually have that. Yeah. Yes, in Bonnay, it's called in the cluster of the blue zone. I mean that's just an outward manifestation. But in Sardinia, it would shame the family to put your aging parent
in a retirement home. So they all stay nearby or usually living in the home. And they're not just recipients of care. I think a lot of people are afraid of that. They're expected to participate. So the women are helping with childcare. They are the keepers of the food tradition. The men, you know, they're still advising when to plant when they're sold. They know how to make that wonderful blue Zone's wine which has the very high levels of antioxidants.
So it's this beautiful virtuous circle where older people are told they matter, they're they're given a reason to get up in the morning, to take their meds, to stay physically fit, to eat right, so they're living longer. And then there's something called the grandmother effect that shows that a household with a grandmother living in it, or at least nearby grandfather or grandmother, those children have lower rates
of mortality and lower rates of disease. So this circle is what sort of think of it, an upward ratcheting of the life expectancy of the whole community.
And that becomes harder, like even for us, like we've moved away, we're not close to us our own parents and of course our grandparents getting older as well, And it's harder when the world is growing in the world is getting bigger and you're moving and traveling more. Is there a way of keeping that connection through phones, through facetimes, through visits, like does it? Can it still have a similar impact to.
Us or even more immediate have a surrogate grandparent. There's a Yale researcher named Becca Levy, who found that just having a positive attitude towards aging lowers your mortality by about forty percent. And part of that is having older people in your life and learning from their wisdom and honoring it. Not forcing them to retire, but finding a way for their wisdom to put work, even though they might not have as much fluid intelligence as they had when they were thirty.
Yeah. Absolutely, yeah, No, I have a lot of That makes me feel really good. I'm really happy you brought that up as such a research point. I definitely have people in LA that I see as those elders in my life and in my world that can replace those people that I don't always have access to. That's really powerful. A couple of things that I want to surprise people with because this was huge. A couple of fun ones. This ideal to drink seven cups of green tea a day.
I think this is on your TikTok seven cups of green tea tooke me through that. That sounds like a lot hard to do.
I was just in Kyoto last week with the researcher who actually very clearly mapped it to frailty. Seven is ideal, but as little as three cups of green tea to day is associate with about four extra years of healthy life expectancy. And we don't know why. I mean, you can you can guess. It's probably the antioxic oxidants or the catchickins they call but it or there's there's probably
fifteen hundred compounds in green tea. We don't know for sure, but green tea has been around for a long time and it's consumed daily and volume by at least two of these blue zones. And you know, it's one of these things that you know, rather than turn to the super food or the super beverage, why not drink what we learn from our ancestors who've achieved the outcomes we want, which is a long, healthy life.
Yeah. Absolutely, My wife and I created this sparkling adaptogenic tequo June and we put one cup of green tea in there, and so that's one of the seven At least, I'm doing this for my long chovity. It's got zero grams of sugar and it's delicious, thank you. It's got zero grams of sugar in only five calories. Rely it's old natural products. It's you know, it was part of that like how do you create something that's fun and healthy at the same time.
And that's right, yes, and that competes with the sugar sweet and beverages and much much better off grabbing a junie than a pepsi.
Yeah you said no, but no, but that was the goal. It was like, I think it's about what you're doing here as well. It's about how do we make alternatives accessible and how.
Do we makes you hit the nail on the head and easy, yeah, and you remove the friction of price.
Correct you know, I was.
I named Singapore a blue zone two point zero and the reason is in one lifetime, life expectancy has jumped twenty years. They now have the highest health adjusted life expectancy in the world, so the the longest, healthiest life. It's not some coincidence from some ancient culture. They very deliberately went went about making unhealthy food more expensive and harder to get. So, for example, they taxed sugar. We
all know sugar is not good for us. If a coke in Singapore has twenty percent less sugar than the same coke in America, so they've they've mandated it it has to be less sugar. Meanwhile, they they subsidize things we know are good for us, like brown rice. They know that driving, especially in traffic, is bad for the air, it's bad for you know, kids get killed in accidents. You don't get much physical activity when you're sitting in
the car. So they've made car driving incredibly expensive, one hundred thousand dollars just to have the right to drive a car, three hundred percent tax on top of that. Therefore, eighty nine percent of people in Singapore walk, but they take yeah, the on eleven percent people own cars in Singapore. But what that means is that there's all this tax revenue that they're able to sink into a fast, efficient, clean,
air conditioned, wonderful public transport system. And nobody's more than about three hundred meters away from fast, much faster than driving public transportation.
You know.
With the side of benefit of that is everybody takes about seventy five hundred steps a day without even thinking about it. So they're already ahead of seventy five percent of Americans just getting to work in the morning, or going out to see their friends or going out to eat because they're walking to the subway.
Wow, that's the.
Way American policy makers need to start thinking if we really want a healthier America.
Are you working on the policy shifts too? Is that a big part of your focus or is that well, yeah, you have to work on local pots.
I'm working with one of my favorite congressman's, Dean Phillips, about a Design for Healthier America bill that would provide block grants for cities to do this kind of work. So designing for us setting Americans up for health right now, we're set up for ill health in this country, I
need to say it. So it's just instead of the four point four trillion dollars a year we spend cleaning up America's health mess, getting ahead of it, which is a much better investment, and it also avoids lots of suffering and lots of premature death.
Absolutely. I mean speaking on that, you know, one of the things I wanted to ask you is what are things that Americans do currently that is seen as healthy but are actually causing us to gain weight and live a shorter life. Are they certain things that you think a marketed promoted to focused on for us to become healthier than having the opposite impact.
Anytime anybody markets you as super food, you can be pretty sure it's not many, if not most of them have added sugars or processed ingredients will are to all that good for you. Basically, any packaged food that that trumpets some health benefit, it's probably all not all that good for you. In blue zones, the foods they eat have one ingredient, you know, the high as it comes
out of the ground. For the most part, it's combined in wonderfully delicious ways, but it's not processed, and it's seasonal too, right, it's often seasonal, but several of the blue zones only have two growing seasons, so they still have to get through winter. The cornerstone of all these longevity diets are beans and grains, which store beautifully for years at a time, and those sort of get people
through the times where their gardens aren't producing. By the way, you know, we put enormous burden on ourselves trying to tell Americans that they need to eat fresh fruits and vegetables. You go into the inner city, a lot of people don't know what to do with fresh fruits and vegetables. They don't have a taste for them. A much greater, easier solution is beans and rice. Beans and corn, tortilla
beans and pasta pasta pajoli. Whenever you have a bean and a grain and you put them together, you have a whole protein. They're cheap. Almost every ethnicity knows how to cook them and make them taste delicious. They're usually fast to combine and cook. We would serve Americans much better if we sent the message to eat healthy. To start your journey to perhaps live a new one hundred, eat beans and rice.
What's really hard is I'm listening to you, and I see this as the challenge too. It's like, it almost seems like all of our bad decisions, whether it's what we eat, whether we walk, whether we work out, are primarily based on high levels of stress. So when we're stressed, you're going to reach for unhealthy food because it makes you feel better. When you're stressed, you're more likely to reach for sugar. When you're stressed, you're more likely to sleep in or try to sleep in, or have bad sleep,
and then you don't have energy to work out. You're more likely to skip a workout or skip walking because you feel stressed, you want to rush home in your car and just get in front of the TV, and so so much of our choices are all based on a lot of stress. And obviously in the blue zones they don't have a stressful life.
I imagine you're right fundamentally that stress drives poor decisions. And also, if we're eating a meal, we're stressed, you're mixing, you're interrupting the digestion process with cortisol, which is not good for not good for you. But people in blue zone suffer stress just like we do. They worry about their kids, they worry about their finances, they worry about their health. If you're unhealthy and overweight in America, it's probably not your fault. And I'll tell you why. In
nineteen eighty about fifteen percent of Americans were obese. Now it's forty two, going to forty three percent. Of its almost tripling of the OBC rate. There's seven times as many people are suffering from type two diabetes or pre diabetes. That's not because thirty five years ago people had more discipline or better diet programs, or they were better people, or they were exposed to less stresses. What has changed
is our environment. I mentioned before, we're driving more, but also the number of fast food restaurants has gone up exponentially over fifty percent of all retail outlets, including the place you get your tires changed, in the place you pick up your diabetes medicine, force you through a gauntlet of sugar, sweeten, beverages, chips, and sodas. We make about two hundred and twenty food decisions a day. Only ten
percent of them are conscious. The other two hundred or so I have been orchestrated by marketing and by proximity and convenience and really mindless decisions. And two point some of those bad, mindless decisions are because of stress, but most of it is because of our unhealthy environment.
Yeah. I've always said that being plant based has saved me from those gauntlets because I can't eat any of it. Yeah, it has some tot of dairrea, some sort of animal in it. And it's like, that's the only reason. Me and my wife talk about that all the time. Whenever we walk past donuts, we was doughnuts and pastries and we're just like, oh gosh, if I wasn't plant based, I would be because I have a massive sweet tooth. I grew up being a ton of sugar. I was. I was exposed to it since I was a kid,
and so it's taken me years to curb that. But the thing that saves me the most from exactly what you're talking about right now, the doughnut shop, that the pizza shop or whatever, and plant based and that's the only thing that saves me.
I hate to tell you there are plant based donuts.
Oh no, there are, yeah, I know luckily I live.
So that's called all rounded meal.
No, so I'm gonna put I'm gonna put it out. There is an amazing if you live in La there is an amazing plant based donut place called Doughnut Friend. It is unbelievable. And I am so lucky that I live like over thirty minutes away from so thinking about driving for thirty minutes then thirty minutes back to get a donut they don't deliver it to where I live is like that saves me. Again. Van Lewin is too close though that's not taken ice cream.
Just imagine if there were you you walk went came out your driveway. Every time you came out your driveway, there was a there was a special little donut vendor right there. Totally, and that's what most Americans are confronted with that, the convenience stores, it's hard no matter where you shop, you're tempted by this stuff. And yeah, we're set up for really a tough time.
Yeah. One of the things you mentioned again on your TikTok was you've said that you believe the best weight loss tool is the scale. I want to ask you about that because I think for a lot of people, getting on a scale is stressful. It's like anxiety inducing. They look at it and it makes them more aware of a number, and now they get focused on a number, and if they don't make that number, they judge themselves and criticize themselves, or they call themselves fat or ugly
or name, you know, whatever it may be. So how what were you trying to get at when you were showing.
You're right there is a minority of people who obsess about it and it's in anxiety inducing. But for the aggregate, people who step on a scale every day and confront their weight. And by the way, you know, if your weight goes up, yeah you're gonn feel att kick in the pants, But if your weight goes down, there's a little endorphinserge. It's a little reward and setting up that system putting a bathroom scale in your way. People who self weigh every day after two years weigh about eight
pounds less than people who never self weigh well. I actually have one of my little social groups from Los Angeles here I used to live here. I still have four people, and I hardly know I've seen them once in my life, but every day we email each other our weight, and it kind of keeps us doing it. We were accountable to somebody and every one of us. Our weight has gone down a little bit over the last decade or so, and for the average American male, in ten years, you can expect to gain an extra
ten years. So we've been among my little focus group, we've been. It's worked really quite well.
Competition and collaboration together are really fascinating. Really yeah, yeah, powerful, Yeah, It's why pickabull works for me. It's also why I think I have so many people I know do ten thousand step challenges within their family, and most of those people are walking way over ten thousand steps simply because
they're trying to beat someone in their family. And then everyone's average is growing up, and so I think that making something competitive and collaborative is the genius of the social network, the fitness, the fun in life like, so much of it comes from that. I think we've lost that.
One of the strategies we deploy in our cities. It's an idea we took from Okinawa, the notion of a moi, a committed social circle. And we'll get four or five hundred people to show up to a gym. We'll have them circle up according to what neighborhood they live in. We ask them a bunch of questions about, you know, are they religious, what their favorite food is, what they listen for music, and have them look at each other as these questions are being answered, and then we have
them self select in groups of five people. And a lot of these people are completely lonely. And once they self select in these clusters we call the moai's, We have them give themselves a name, and then we organize them around walking together. Everybody can walk together, and then we offer a little prize at the end of ten weeks.
What happens during that ten weeks is not only are these people walking a lot more than they normally would, they're creating a social network or social circle around walking that in many cases about sixty percent are still around four years later, so as you were starting to latch onto it's the power of collaboration. But creating a social circle around a healthy behavior, that's what's going to last and that's what's going to matter over time.
Absolutely, I wanted to quickly jump back to diet and food because there's this great technique that you have and you method mentioned and this was popular in parts of India that we're teaching it from this perspective as well.
That the method you spoke about was being eight out of ten full when you're eating, and when we were trained about that, when we'd hear about it from an Eastern or Vadic perspective, the idea of how breath is part of feeling full and so food is not the only thing that your stomach is full on was how I was introduced to that idea of being seven tenthsful or eight tenths full and the rest would be covered
by breath. Of course, there's water as well. Walk us through that idea of how we can all stop eating at eight tenthsful, because I think most of us wait till ten ten or twelve ten, Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So it has its roots in a Confucius. The Okinawans have this saying hatahachibou, which is a reminder to stop eating when their stomachs are eighty percent full. And they'll say that like a prayer before a meal, so instead of saying grace or whatever, it's a reminder, I believe, though much of it is actually done at the table. They tend to preplate their foods and put the leftovers away at the beginning of the meal instead of the end,
when you might be minds leading. They don't have a TV, so they're not mindlessly eating to their favorite television show. They're sitting around with friends, slowing the meal down. It takes about twenty minutes from the full feeling to travel from your belly to your brain. And if you're wolfing your food down, if you're not breathing like you say, not drinking water, there's a pretty good chance you're going to overeat before you know it.
It's so fascinating how how have they been able to in these places hold onto these traditions, like even you saying they I won't say it like you said. It's the repetition, even the reminder of hey, let's stay eight tents full at this meal. How have they managed to hold onto these very old traditions and ideas and concepts in places that I'm sure of being you know, commercialized, gentrified, and all the rest of it. Like, how have they managed to hold onto it?
Well? It worked until about the year two thousand or two thousand and five because there haven't been outside influences. But in all these blue zones, the American food culture and the onslaught of ubiquitous media is starting to hit. It's legged by ten or twenty years because these are remote areas. But you know, as soon as the American food culture walks in the front door, longevity walks out the back, and all of these blue zones sadly are disappearing,
they'll be gone. I figure in about half a generation. Okinawa is already no longer a blue zone. So yeah, sadly they're making the same mistakes that we're making.
You think in our lifetime that blue zones.
Will probably gone in about a decade and a half. The Nicoya blue zone has shrunk to about one fifth of size. The Okanawan blue zone is gone except for people ninety and over, you still have a blue zone in that demographic Sardinia. You're starting to see fast food
restaurants show up. Greece. I CUTI is doing a good job, and I'll tell you why, because the recognition they're getting as a blue zone has created an awareness of the incredible treasures that the older people are and younger people in their twenties and thirties are bringing back these traditions and they're celebrating this diet that is producing longevity. And I have real hope for the Ikuti in blue zone.
Do you think that might be the last standing one?
I think it'll be the last of the of the blue zone one point zero. Yeah, the Singapore is I think there are more, and my current project is to track down more of these areas where governments have been successful at manufacturing blue zones, and so I think those are going to be the most relevant lessons because hey, let's face it, we live, you know, in twenty twenty three, and there are modern forces that we have to contend with, and the lifestyle that evolved beginning in fifteen hundred isn't
as useful. It provides lessons and we can use it to I think, model new environments and new policies, but it's not exactly an apples to apple.
Yeah, at a government level, at a decision making level, what is making people care or not care? Because I think that's something people always think about, right, Like, all of this makes so much sense. If I was in charge, I'd say, this is how we should be wanting to help people and support people, and let's make it easier. Because my job on a day to day basis is so much about empowering the individual to make better choices, to find healthier options, to build discipline, to almost deal
with the onslaugh and the gauntlet of everything. That's kind of my day job, right, That's what I'm focused on here. But if I was in charge at state levels, I would want to see the changes you're making. What is incentivizing and infusing people at that level to say, let's build Singapore two point zero and more blue zones two point zero versus what people going That's all right? Like GDP is great, Like what is that?
Yeah, Singapore realized a long time ago that it's most important resources. It's people. It's not some industry or not some commodity, like a lot of places, and it has gone about in a very disciplined way of looking at each policy through the lens of does this increase the well being of people or not? And they don't have the voice of a lobbyist speaking loudly in their ear, some sort of fundraising incentive to favor some you know, some big business. I think it really starts with electing
leaders who care about who put well being first. Thomas Jefferson, in fact, I believe, was the worst first American to say that the charge of any leader is the health and happiness of the people. And I think if we're able to you know, I don't know, we can't do much about Washington, but we can do a lot in our own communities about the type of mayor and city councils that we elect. A lot of the best government in America right now is being done at the municipal level,
not the federal level. And you can get a lot done in a hurry in a city or even at the county level.
If someone wants to be involved or help with support and help the community in town become more of a blue zone, where would you suggest they stop.
Well, if you go to the blue Zones website, there is a blue zones dot Com. There's a button about my community and you can see how other cities have done it, and there's lots of good ideas, but honestly, Jay, it requires an orchestra straighted effort comprehensively. So many have been sort of half baked ideas or they're not comprehensive enough, and they get people really excited about it and sponsorship
as money is spent, and then not much happens. So inconveniently, unless it's comprehensive, a four or five year effort staffed by people know what they're doing with enough intensity, it's probably not.
Going to work. It. Yeah, it's good to have that clarity. I think a lot of people would want to see this change. I can imagine, you know, wanting to back this change, and I'm sure a lot of those people are already doing it in their own lives, but they'd love to see it extended out to.
I do have one one suggestion that most cities can consider. There's something called a complete Streets policy bundle. Every street is redone on average every seven years, and that provides an opportunity to make that street constructed not just for cars, as most streets and roadways in America are, but for
humans too. So in other words, they have to be considered for narrower range, which calms trafficked, for bike lanes, for wider sidewalks, for trees, for safe crosswalks, and if a city council that adopts complete streets, it creates an onus for them to make a more walkable, livable community. And any city in America can do that. And there's by the way, there's great example. Santa Barbara, California has done a fantastic job. Boulder, Colorado, fantastic job Madison, Wisconsin.
These are places that are not only walkable, but they're economically thriving and people report the highest levels of well being. They have some of the lowest rates of obesity in America. So that's a great place to start for most American cities.
I want to make sure everyone knows when you get the book, you're going to hear about sleeps, naps, fausting sunlight. I mean, there are so many other topics that I don't want to go over here because I want you to go and read the book and dive into the depth of just how much research, how much store, how much work has gone into this over the last couple of decades. From Dan and his team. But Dan, I have to ask you about purpose. We're on on Purpose
and you talk about purpose in the book. I remember speaking to you about it last time as being such a key attribute of a successful centenarian was purpose? How did they define or view purpose or contributing to the greater good? Like, what does that look like for someone in a blue zone?
Well, I have a few things to say about purpose. So it begins in blue zones with vocabulary for purpose. In Costa Rica it's Plan Deevida. In Okinawa it's Ekey Guy. So it's imbued in their in their culture, but it's manifested. Purpose in blue zones is rarely an individual pursuit. It's like my purpose is stamp collecting or something, or butterflies. It always has a social component or of philanthropic giving back to the community, supporting the family, supporting my group
component to it, a service component to it. And you know, I do a lot of thinking about it. In our Blue Zone work, we have this purpose workshop And you'd be shocked how many Americans wake up every morning tired. They pull the breakfast together for their kids, get them off to school, rush to work, wait work eight to nine hours muscle through traffic, back home, get dinner, back together, and the stress just never goes away. And only about
thirty percent of Americans have purpose in their work. That's according to a Gallup poll that surveyed about two million Americans. I think purpose is the intersection between having clarity on what your values are, knowing what you love to do, knowing what you're good at, and then studying those three lists for an outlet for them. That's true purpose. I
think that's available to all of us. But the founding director of the National Institutes on Aging, doctor Robert Butler, found that people who could articulate their sense of purpose over time, we're living about eight years longer than people are rudderless. So there's a real health benefit. But more so than a health benefit, it's just an enjoyable, rich
way to live your life. And anything you can do to get more purpose in your life, including I might add listening to this podcast twice a week every week of your life is time well spent.
Dan, Thank you so much. The book it's called The Blue Zone Secrets for Living Longer Lessons from the Healthiest Places on Earth, Dan, Bututnah, this is the book. Make sure you go grab a copy. Like I said, we didn't even scratch as surface. There are so many things I could talk to down about, but I want you to go grab the book. I want you to read it.
I want you to study it. I want you to see these beautiful summary pages that are absolutely fantastic that talk about the key learnings from each of the blue zones that Dan been to and studied. Because it makes it really easy to just pick it up reflect have
a discussion about it. I hope that, I hope that you're going to reach out to a group of people that should listen to this podcast, that are going to be part of that try, part of that squad, part of that social circle for you all, whether it's a book club, whether it's a pickleball team, whatever it may be. I really hope that that social part is not underestimated and undervalued. And Dana, thank you again for coming all
the way. You just flew in an hour before this literally landed, came from the airport, stepped in the sea, gave a beautiful interview with all your energy, passion, and it's truly remarkable and I'm really grateful for your work. So thank you so much.
An hour and a pleasure.
Jay, Thank you, Thank You've always been a fan and continued we'll see you when you're one hundred. Yes, thank you. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr Gabor Matte on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past. Everything in nature goes on where it's vulnerable.
So a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it.
It goes where it's soft and green and vulnerable.