Dan Buettner: Live to 100 with secrets of the blue zones | Professor Tim Spector

if you really want to live to 100 you need in the United States for example there are neighborhoods where the life expectancy is up to 13 years higher could you just start by explaining like what a blue zone is we found five places where people are living statistically longest did you find anything that actually ties these places together people in blue zones don't well Dan's exactly right that is very surprising to hear we think it's so hard for middle-aged people but I argue the number one thing you could do to add yours to your life

is welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health I'm your host Jonathan wolf founder and CEO of Zoe today we uncover the secrets of the so-called blue zones the places where celebrating your 100th birthday is Common Place Our Guest is Dan Butner he's an Explorer a National Geographic Ric fellow and a leading blue zones researcher Dan takes us into the fascinating lives of people who have lived to be 100 in these places revealing their daily practices and habits I'm also joined by Professor Tim Spectre he's

one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists and Zoe's scientific co-founder he shares what the science says about why these habits can help us live longer today's lessons come from centuries of collective understanding and in this episode you'll learn to apply them to live a longer and healthier life Dan and Tim thank you for joining me today it's a pleasure good to be here brilliant well look we have this tradition here Dan that we always start with a quick fire round of questions and where this very strict rule you can say yes or no

or if you absolutely have to you can give us a one sentence answer are you you up for that I'm in good and Dan is a little jet lag this morning so it's particularly mean way to K it straight at the beginning but we're going to give it a go all right starting with Dan have you found the secret to longevity yes do people in the blue zones all eat the same food no could having the right friends help me to live longer yes will you tell us today how we can build our own blue

zones at home yes oh that was easy and Tim just a couple for you are there foods that can increase my lifespan yes do I have to go to the gym if I want to live a long and healthy life no thank God brilliant and then final question Dan before we get into it you you can have a whole sentence or two what's the biggest myth about living a long and healthy life that you often hear that there is a pill or a supplement or a superfood that's going to be your Panacea I think that's

brilliant place to start well look Dan for anyone who hasn't seen your recent Netflix series or read your book I strongly recommend it but let's assume that maybe some of the listeners here haven't done so and so before we start to really dissect this whole idea about blue zones could you just start by explaining like what a blue zone is and why it caught your interest you know now many years ago it's both a concept in a place so I'm a lifelong Explorer for National Geographic I I've LED about 21 scientific Expeditions but around about

20 years ago I started looking into this idea of longevity mainly as a mystery Okala Japan was producing the longest lived uh humans in the history of the world largely free of disability and I thought aha that's a great mystery and um did a fasile Expedition there but uh I got to thinking that perhaps I could in a sense reverse engineer longevity so instead of of looking for an answer in a test tube or a petri dish or in some genetic code uh find populations where people are living statistically longest and then look for the

corelates or the common denominators to see if the patterns just repeated themselves enough that you could see a signal or draw some conclusions and we found five places where people are living statistically longest longest live men in the world are Sardinia Italy longest live women Okala Japan uh the island of ikaria Greece you have a population living about eight years longer but with almost no discernable Dementia in the nioa peninsula of Costa Rica uh people enjoy about half the rate of middle-age mortality and what that means is there about three times more likely to reach

a healthy age 95 and then in the United States we found the longest live people among Christians 7th Day Adventists living in and around Lind California and then the second part of my work was using standardized methodologies to find the common denominators and thus my books and the Netflix documentary did you find anything that actually ties these places together well geographically they're all in about the 20th parallel North interestingly so you don't see people way in the north living a long time and you don't see people along the Equator maybe in a long time and

the reason I think is uh the 20th parallel is a a sweet spot of sorts is along the Equator people are dying of infectious diseases that hobble their longevity or life expectancy and in the north perhaps they spend too much time indoors and eating canned foods and you know not minding their Garden Etc I don't know but there seems to I'm feeling doomed already so we're recording this today in London and it's it's pretty gray and wintry and I thought you were going to say they don't get enough sunlight I'm like padell circuit exactly is

move further south so am I doomed not necessarily doomed but I I would say the one of the biggest findings after after 20 years of this is that uh for most people their environment drives their health more so than any um individual responsibility so where you live has a big impact in the United States for example uh within the same cities there are nebor neighborhood hoods where the life expectancy is up to 13 years higher than other neighborhoods 13 years high within the same the Boston's one of them by the way zoee has a where

I spend a lot of time in Boston where the weather is also not so great yeah where right right but you're saying it's not just where it's not really the latitude it's like what your environment is like yeah and and my research work is finding these blue zones and understanding them my daytime job is working with cities to transport the Environmental characteristics that we see driving longevity in blue zones to American cities and that's been uh fantastically successful for us and I know that one of the things you talk about particularly within the blue zones

and this idea of a centenarian could you explain what a centenarian is and maybe just could you paint a picture a bit of like how people are living in these blue zones which is something you you talk about really beautifully in in the book and and in the show a centenarian is simply a person that that's reached their 100th birthday and blue zones isn't necessarily about centenarians the we don't well we do measure centenarian concentration but that tends to be a byproduct of a population that is producing long liveed people largely without chronic disease largely

without diabetes heart disease types of cancer dementia they're not people with Better Bodies than us they don't have a genetic Advantage uh they're not more disciplined they're not smarter they're they're avoiding the diseases that foreshorten their lives and higher percentages and that's why they're living a long time I mean I wrote four books New York Times bestselling books on this topic but you know in general people in blue zones don't exercise which U is disruptive to a lot of us that is very surprising to hear you don't see anybody doing CrossFit or Pilates or or

you know an elliptical in their basement but they do live in places where every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat it occasions a walk uh they always have Gardens out back uh and typically two or three growing Seasons a year their houses aren't full of the mechanized conveniences to do their work for them they're they're doing their own housework and their own yard work and kneading bread by hand so my Team figures that they're moving every 20 minutes or so but uncons consciously probably keeping their metabolisms burning higher

and and probably burning more calories than somebody who you know works at their desk all day long and then you know thinks they're going to the gym at the end of the day first of all most people don't go to the gym at the end of the day as they think they're going to do but secondly um it's not as good as spreading out the physical activity throughout the day um if you want to know what a 100-year old AE to live to be 100 you can't just go ask them because the people don't remember

so to get at that we found dietary surveys done in all five blue zones over the last 100 years or so 155 dietary surveys and Tim as you know dietary surveys are perfect but they they're directionally correct and when you when you meta analyze them you start to get a very clear signal or you see the same patterns um so we did that and what people who make it up to 100 on average they're eating about 90% Whole Food plant-based the five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains wheat corn and

rice greens and of course garden vegetables they all garden vegetables tubers interestingly and okanawa about 70% of their caloric intake until 1970 came from one tuber known as Emo or the purple sweet potato nuts and the Cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans and if you're eating a cup of beans a day it's probably associated with about four extra years of life expectancy over less healthy sources of protein the other facet sort of fall into two categories one is living your life on purpose which seems soft and spongy to you know real

scientists but there's a pretty clear evidence that if you wake up in the morning with meaning you're living about eight years longer than people who are rudderless in life and and the Really the found Foundation of blue zones is their social connectedness they tend to prioritize family they tend to belong to a faith believe it or not and they're very careful about their immediate Social Circle and and you don't hear much about these things because marketers can't sell you anything but really how you connect drives your behavior for the long run in powerful and measurable

ways and we like to talk a lot about how we connect in the blue zones there's a lot to unpack there I think this being like Zoe science and nutrition I feel like food is probably the place to um start and I definitely want to pull Tim in as well as we we talk a bit more about what you found out like looking at the diets of what people are eating across these areas and um you know the first thing I'm struck is like I've been to Italy quite often I've been to Japan once or

twice and it strikes me that those diets seem like almost as far apart as I can imagine um but what's interesting is you're talking about actually how there's sort of commonality across um these blue zones so like what am I what am I missing I guess that actually is is linking them more closely than I had um had realized in general you know we're constantly Market at these superfoods whenever I see a superfood I basically just mentally throw it in the trash B um what usually when there's a a health claim on the on the

uh package you can be pretty sure it's not healthy and uh real foods for longevity tend to be peasant Foods the cheap stuff everybody can afford you know in America we hear all the time you need fresh fruits and vegetables that's the long way to start especially in the inner city when there are poor people for two reasons one people can't afford it and it creates an immediate barrier and number two people don't know what to do with it but you give African-Americans or Latin Americans or you know the Italians beans and a grain they

know exactly what to do it Africans the beans and rice uh the U Latin Americans beans and corn tortilla um the the um Italians pasta fol you know pasta and and beans and you have a complex carbohydrates fiber you have all the amino acids necessary for human sustenance so so the big common denominator is peasants food made to taste delicious and that last part uh that's the most important ingredient taste is the most important ingredient and these blue zones they know how to make this this very simple food absolutely sing plus a bit of diversity

I think as well I mean when I've gone to visit Japan and Italy and uh Mediterranean countries you do see some similarities actually I mean you know their noodles are the C of spaghetti but it's it's what else they put on the no noodles it's it's the fact that they have all these different speciality restaurants in Japan that will you know use all kinds of different ingredients and you know hundreds of different kinds of mushrooms and onions and and all these beans and bean sprouts and all these little pickles and fermented foods and the equivalent

you know so people think of it of Japan as just Sushi and rice it's not when you actually go there it's very very different to the sort of the westernized version of what Japanese food is and it it varies a lot between the islands and uh regions just like it does in Italy and so I think I for me it's that diversity of the foods the fact that um there's great food culture so people will make all this stuff in their homes that may have had peasant Origins but is still carrying on and they'll mix

stuff together in Rich soups and uh casseroles all the time and they're having fermented foods as well I think that's the other thing that we don't really discuss enough is that you know in the Mediterranean countries lots of goats cheese and yogurts and other Dairy ferments and in Japan of course you've got all the misos and the fermented soy products that are eaten regularly so you've got this diversity and the fermented foods and this food culture that is all about you know passing on your grandm mother taught you to the Next Generation I think they're

also very binding things that that identify the these very healthy groups hi I hope you're feeling inspired by the lessons we're learning from how these centenarians have lived their lives now I'd like to ask you a favor in return it turns out that 63% of people who watch this podcast haven't hit the Subscribe button and 11% haven't yet hit the Bell to turn notifications on so if you've ever enjoyed this podcast please hit the Subscribe button and turn notifications on doing us this small favor will really help us to reach more people with life-changing health

information thank you and on with the show and Tim I heard Dan mention like whole grains like greens chew birs nuts beans um what are your thoughts as Dan saying this is like what I've pulled across from observing across those um these blue zones like what what ises latest science tell us about about those those foods and well tell us that Dan's exactly right those foods are that's good and and up to recently we didn't know why they were good really we sort of because we've had this rather reductionist view of foods that you know

reductionist meaning meaning that we take the hundreds of chemicals in any one food and we talk about one of them so it might been carotene in carrots or it might be vitamin C in lemon and we ignore all the 800 others there and this is where we we thought about what you know what's good about beans and we just thought about one thing in beans uh it turns out it's the entirety it's that diversity not only of the food but the chemicals within each food and the different fibers there might be there and there's a

lot of fiber in the foods that Dan was talking about is that the thing that really carries them together yeah it's really a combination of uh high fiber foods which feed our microbes but also polyphenols which are these chemicals within them that used to be called antioxidants that are also fuel for our gut microbes and these polyphenols have lots of properties on their own uh as as health-giving properties but I think the main action is by improving our gut health and that's how we get all these Universal effects and I I'd imagine my research on

Aging really is sort of pointed to the immune Sy system being pretty critical here because if you can have a healthy immune system then that immune system is is repairing your body continuously it's it's fighting early cancer it's repairing the cells it's uh making sure that you you do live to an old age by picking up problems early and if that's in perfect condition and it's not fighting inflammation it's not trying to do not dealing with obesity it's you know it's really focused on its main job that is how most of us uh who do

succeed to live a long time are going to do it so foods that are good for your gut are going to be good for your immune system and everything we've talked about it's Whole Foods and it's not they're not poisoning their system with alran processed foods as well and I think it's interesting Dan was telling me that some of these places have lost their veneer um that they had because meaning that the um places like uh Okawa um have now been exposed to ultr processed food and they're they're not doing as well as the diet

has changed jior is that what you're saying down their diet has gone moved from this sort of 100% whole food diets to increasing percentage of ultra processed foods with chemicals and lower fiber intake and starting to see an effect on this and just to make sure that um that that I'd UND understood this um right I think what you're saying is if you look across the sort of set of foods that Dan was talking about what you really see is foods that not only have all these polyphenols which are all these sort of magic complex

chemicals but they have a lot of fiber and that critically what you're saying is fiber isn't one thing which I think is how I always thought about it and I suspect most listeners think about it right you see it on the back of the packet and says fiber actually I think you're saying there's like a thousand different sorts of fiber and that we think that the individual bacteria our guy actually eats specific fibers so it's almost like and that is that right they're very picky yeah they're very specialized and very picky so that's why the

diversity of foods you know whether it's even different beans different colored beans is going to produce a different set of gut microbes inside you that are going to produce different chemicals that might enhance your immune system even more and help you live longer but I will say uh just a couple refinements on what on what you've said about the blue zones um the blue zones are actually subsets of the countries we're talking about like Sardinia the Blue Zone in Sardinia is very different than Italy the Blue Zone in Sardinia uh is actually only six Villages

and they're descendant from a Bronze Age culture they're matriarchal like the rest of the Mediterranean patriarchal and they have a a quite different diet same thing with okanawa until 1917 okanawa wasn't even part of Japan it was called the rukus kingdom and their diet is completely different we tend to think of Japanese as fish heavy but the okan didn't eat very much fish at all they tended to eat this emo as I mentioned tons of tofu and basically what grew in their garden and um both of these blue zones did not have huge access to

a or a tradition where there was a vast variety of food they were poor and they tended to have to eat what was available what was growing That season of course there were there were herbs and there were spices you know often they had a kitchen Garden um but if if you look at the patterns typically they only had 20 or 30 re uh ingredients at any given time that sort of rolled with the season so as you went from summer garden to Winter Garden those ingredients but I mean I think it makes it actually

less discouraging for people because you don't have to think about having a 100 ingredients um these people stayed very healthy for a long time and Dan I was just thinking like people are quite familiar with uh Italian food there'll be a lot more more people say I don't really know Japanese at all could you could you elaborate a little bit I guess on the difference between what these people in this V these five villages in Sardinia are eating versus maybe sort of our traditional idea of what Italian food is because I think most of us

are like oh I eat nothing but Italian food pizza and pasta so is that if that's a secret to my long and healthy life I'm feeling really good about it yeah so so the diet of longevity in Sardinia is more a verb than a noun because there were at least three phases okay until about 1960 believe it or not most of what they ate was bread and cheese these Shepherds had several different kinds of bread sourdough usually but also a flat bed called Kusa uh they were shepherds so these men would go into their into

their pastures olive oil I wouldn't I olive oil but not as much as you think there the the highlands of uh Sardinia um the the terrain is very rugged and not and not uh conducive to the olive grows like you would see uh actually more mastic oil believe it or not in the 40s and 50s but to your point olive oil is now ubiquitous uh in Sardinia in about 1960s roads came in and remember centenarians were alive they were middle-aged in 1960s amazing their diet shift um they were still poor people and they relied very

heavily on huge Gardens and um pasta started to come in but there's more noi than there is pasta a lot of dishes made with fava beans and um um of course their celebratory food was was pork never beef very little chicken but on average uh about five times a month they would eat pork the family Pig five times a month so this is a very very low level of meat eating you're describing very low level the average americ guess if they're in the mountains they're not eating a lot of fish either No in fact you

can see the ocean from the Blue Zone of Sardinia but I met several centenarians that first time they ate fish in their life when there was when they're 20 okay uh and that's because it took a day to get to the Sea they didn't have a fishing culture but maybe they get some fish but by the time they got it back up to their Village it stunk you know so you'd see this sort of dried Cod once in a while bakala they called it and they you know reconstitute that but it wasn't you know we

tend to think fish is associated with longevity but not a lot of fish in the blue zones I think a lot of people will be surprised by that because there's such a lot of talk about protein um today and this idea that we're all short of protein and you can find if you walk into the grocery store right enormous number of things saying high in protein which suggests oh my God I'm like low on protein yeah you probably know this but a CDC Center for Disease controls in America they tell us that the average American

gets about twice the amount of protein they need so we we're we're getting way more protein than than we need and people don't realize you can get all the protein you need out of plant-based sources so you don't need meat to be healthy meat tastes good but and this low level of eating like Meat and Fish is that common across the blue zones all yes all blue zones there's a subset of Adventists who eat no meat at all uh the highest meat consumption in the blue zones I would say is in Costa Rica but and

it's not that they don't like it it's not that they're you know more virtuous and they care about the environment they care about animal suffering they just could afford it um and as as soon as as you were beginning to mention as soon as roads come in and they start adopting a more western or American way of life their meat consumption has skyrocketed their processed food consumption is Skyrocket at the same time diabetes is skyrocketed heart disease and in one of the blue zones Okinawa It produced the longest lived healthiest people in the history of

the world and now now they're the least healthy uh prefecture in all of Japan largely because of the fast food restaurants period basically that since I started studying been 20 years inred people on the planet to the least healthy people in Japan largely because of the American food culture I'm very sorry and of course as as soon as you start getting cheap meat on the plate it's not so much the effect of that meat the fact it displaces all those healthy beans and other vegetables that they were eat before so I think people have got

this idea about a dichotomous view of meat as it's either healthy or unhealthy rather than the fact that okay if we take away ultr processed Meats which are nearly everyone agrees are unhealthy you know natural well cooked meat is fine but it displaces there's just no room on your plate if you're having meat every day you can't have the same level of other vegetables legumes Etc that kept these populations so healthy so this is I think one reason and also we talked about this a lot in nutrition Sarah always talk about it's instead of what

you know we take it it's not just one thing in it it has to be in context so as you said okanawa you know they've displaced a lot of the good stuff with the bad stuff and it's so some of it is the bad stuff coming in but a lot of it is they're no longer having the good stuff because there's you know their mines and plates are full of other stuff one one of your other guests Walter Willet uh famously said about meat it's a lot like radiation we know a lot will kill you

but we don't quite know the safe level and if you look at Blue zones the suggestion of five times per month seems to be Associated or it doesn't seem to be getting in the way of them living long largely chronic disease free lives and it's interesting about the fish also because I think most people listening to this will be there will be some exception lot of people like yeah okay I sort of know the red meat it's not um good for me but a lot of people and I think Sarah might be here also talking

about the positive benefits of of of fish so it's quite interesting that that is not something I know you're not saying it but you're not saying it's interesting that that hasn't been an essential component to be a Blue Zone cuz I might have expected that to have been like you know oh they will definitely be eating quite a lot of fish in their diet um as a compliment so you maybe not a huge total amount of um calories but that was a really important nutrient but it sounds like you're saying that actually fish eating is

not essential to being one of these UMES for sure it's not but you have to realize as I said before the diet's a verb it's changed dramatically especially in the last 20 years and and they're almost caught up with the rest of Italy in the case of Sardinia or exceeded Japan and the co case of okanawa at embracing this Ultra processed meat heavy diet of so you're basically telling a story that the blue zones are disappearing going to hell is that a is that is that really the sort of well which is quite sad because

we're all reading everything about how our climate is being destroyed and the world is falling apart and you have been seen almost in your own lifetime the way in which these patterns that were so healthy are falling away that's right but yes and hard to be isolated though isn't it I mean that's the other thing is get contaminated by cultures and pressures and marketing that's Global and so it's very hard for these say Mountain Villages you know around the world to stay isolated in the in their bubble and I think that's that's the other thing

we're seeing it's like you know you used to only be if you had to live on the coast to eat fish now it's frozen and you know everyone can get it in their freezer I guess the other thing that's really interesting is um it tells you that this is a bit by chance is what you're saying it's not like um these people in these zones were like this is my absolute fa favorite food and I'm choosing to eat it because it's my favorite food and it's making me healthy actually it was sort of they were

quite poor this was like what was available and that they could support where they are and then when we've suddenly been offered all of this meat and candy and all the rest of it you're saying they weren't like um I don't want any of that actually they're like oh okay that tast sounds tasty and unexpectedly this is then affecting their health is that the there's a generational shift the diets of the blue zones I wrote it about them in a the Blue Zone kitchen um there's a lot of Ingenuity and intentionality in creating these recipes

It's usually the older the women who maintain the food tradition and they are genius at taking these very simple inexpensive peasant foods and making them taste delicious delicious and they have a taste for them so the so the cohort of people over 60 in Oka for example still have the highest concentration of centenarians in the world it's the 20-year-olds who uh who started eating the burgers and the Kentucky Fried Chicken and their taste buds have been napalmed and they're now used for the Richer fattier you know enhanced flavored you immediately play straight into my guilt

as a parent about the fact that I'm not bringing my children up well enough to like appreciate the sort of food that I know is good for their health they were exposed to all of this like very easy to eat food which tastes really sugary fast and lots of meat and all the rest of it and if you get that you know you're saying I think that because they've been exposed to that early it's like well that's delicious and this is of course why I would choose over this other food which is also probably harder

to prepare being a parent is really hard particularly I think being a mother in most cases is still today Primary Care like it's it's really hard to juggle all of this so I think that in the reality of the food that's around and available I think there's enough guilt uh around around um parenting so I think that is a bit the reality of the environment we're in and the question is how could we make it it easier and so I think yeah I agree it's lack of Education it's not I don't it's anyone's fault you

know they're told your kid will only have processed uh Apple puree from a little can that's got a baby picture on it well really actually they they can pretty much eat anything and in that two-year window they are really inquisitive and they will eat all kinds of stuff that they won't eat when they're through and so you have that very narrow time to really expand their and no one is telling parents this we spent a lot of time talking about food I would love to pick up on a couple of other areas Dan before we

talk about what listeners could actually do um I thought one of the things that was really interesting actually that um I had never thought about to do with this blue Zs was stress um and I guess the obvious um starting point I think is many people listening will assume that these cenarius have lived a life without any stress and that that is why they've lived so long is that correct people in the blue zones are exactly like us they they could be one of the three of us sitting here or anybody listening right now they

worry about their health they worry about their kids they worry about their work they get stressed in their lives uh they have a couple things that we don't have or have forgotten number one they have these sacred daily rituals that help release the or Tamp down the stress of everyday life the Okana aans have this ancestor veneration in their homes there's there's always a shrine of um remembrances of their their parents and their grandparents and their great great grandparents and they'll always begin their day with 15 minutes remembering where they came from and to a

certain extent being able to relinquish their day up to these ancestors who they believe are still looking over that in fact you often see up along the the the uh ceiling angled down at you the portraits of all their ancestors sort of looking down at you and I think that helps the Adventists are big prayers they wake up in the morning and they they relinquish their day to their God they say a prayer before a meal so they kind of slow down and probably lower the cortisol level of that meal the Costa Ricans and the

Ians are big Nappers believe it or not taking a nap is a great way to lower cortisol levels lower stress the other big point they live in environments that lower stress one of the easiest ways to lower stress is to go out with your friends to not be alone with your problems and stew on them so every time they walk out their door they're bumping into their friends they tend to keep live an extended family so there tends to often be a grandparent who has uh eight or nine or 10 decades of accumulated wisdom and

resiliency that he or she can can uh transmit to a grandchild who's having a tough time um they tend to be close to Nature they walk out their door and down the street and they're in a um they look at the sea or they're they're in the forest so so much about lowering stress is the environment they live in but I absolutely agree that stress is a a very important component to to manage if you want to live longer a lot of these groups have communal eating and drinking don't they so I've often thought that

when I going to Mediterranean countries the fact that people are having a drink you see o old folk you know Gathering every evening to have a glass of wine uh together and they just have one glass of wine that lasts in two hours yeah yeah I've often thought the sum of the advantages of say red wine might be the fact that actually it's it's doing something social and uh it might be the same if it was kombucha or or or or a non-alcoholic drink but it got them out it it was a reason for people

to bond and I think societies you know that are sort of anti-alcohol or uh you don't have that similar bond which is a sort of cultural one as much as anything it's not like they're all alcoholics it's just a a cultural mix does allow them to communicate and relieve stress and talk to others and I think they're all sort of interl so it's quite interesting how you know the the idea of the apparative hour uh it's like you were saying about nutrients you can't pull the nutrio out and draw a conclusion it's the package and

and you can you can uh pan out even further of the package that comes with eating a meal or the package with drinking a glass of wine it's yeah and the fact that these people are spending two or three times longer than the average American on a meal I mean I think you know the importance of that ticks all the boxes from a you know digestion to communication to uh destressing to you know to making these other contacts so just the act of a communal meal sort of ticks all these boxes that we now know

are really important for longevity and is there real science behind this idea that um stress can reduce your life expectancy or that like being able to relieve your stress can affect this because you know I think people talk about it but is there actually is is there reality behind that let's take a quick break I want to tell you about something new we've made for you a free guide that will Kickstart your journey to better gut health now if you're a regular listener of this podcast you're no doubt already aware of how important the gut

microbiome is it impacts our digestion it helps support our immune system and it even impacts our mental well-being now as we've heard many times on this show and as our members know through using Zoe we feed our gut microbiome through the variety of foods we eat and in return our microbes give us this wealth of health benefits so how can you nurture your gut in the best way which food swaps can you try to feed those good bacteria what does a high fiber Shopping List look like well our free gut health guide will tell you

all of that and more it's jam-packed with actionable tips designed to put you in control of your gut health to get yours for free simply go to zoe.com gut di well there's certainly lots of animal data to suggest that's true that uh stress increases inflammation levels so you know mental stress has physical effects on the body which uh it will make those animals die earlier U that's certainly true it's hard to do those same experiments in humans obviously no one wants to be particularly stressed there's one stud there correlations but done among PE caretakers people

taking care of someone with a disease and they measure tiir the longer your te mirors the younger you are biologically and they follow with control group and tiir are just the ends of chromosomes that like there's a plastic bed on a shoelace that over time erodes and is a is a way of uh estimating your your lifespan in a way right and you want long tires so a control group who just lived a normal life and then uh caretakers of sick people presumably under a lot of stress over five years they had shorter teares than

people who didn't have the stress so there's pretty good evidence there is some epidemiological evidence when they followed up there's a whole study back a few decades ago of civil servants and they had all all the civil servants records in the UK in the UK when when they uh worked out when when they died and they adjusted for all fact s like weight and social class and education and one of the big factors determining when they like to die was what they call the Locust of control how many people were their boss and if you

were at the bottom of that food chain right the idea was that person had very little idea they were in control of their life whereas people at the top of the food chain did feel at top of it and they would Live Twice as long as the people on the bottom when you're justif for all these other factors and they've done similar studies in I think it's um uh gorillas and various other primates so the amount of stress you perceive um is definitely linked to longevity and so as you're listening to Dan talking about like

these ways that could d-stress like that sounds a plausible element yeah because you may not be able to change your position in a company or a job or a family but if the way you react to it can be dissipated um uh then then this is how you need to do it and and if you're in that sort of community you're much less like to feel th those effects than if you're perhaps on your own or in a you know a sort of Northern uh Western type Community where everyone fends themselves yeah I mean you

haven't touched on it but you know sitting here in uh in a Northern climate in November I'm also thinking that the sun is shining quite a lot in these environments as you talk uh about it as well and therefore your ability to like be outside side and sort of take pleasure is presumably quite high is that is that right yeah we don't know if it's sun exposure it might be in the vitamin D that comes from sun exposure or you're more likely to be physically active or you're more likely to have a garden or my

like or meet your friends or beet yeah yeah I mean that's the other all L it'sing rain yeah you don't want to go Outdoors but you know I'll add to that sort of stress conversation in blue zones uh people tend to have a vocabul for purpose plita in in Costa ricao or ikigai in Okinawa U people tend to have a very clear idea of why they wake up in the morning and I believe that's also a big a stress shutter uh because for people wake up and you know what what's my place in life what

should I do today you get this sort of existential stress uh the unemployed I think have it as well whereas people in blue zones don't have that they know they have a responsibility to their family or their communities and ask the average American what their sense of purpose they don't I got to go to work but in blue in okina you ask people their eeky they can off the top of their head they'll know why uh why they're waking up in the morning their purpose and I think that also uh relieves a lot of stress

of The Human Condition it's amazing I'd like to touch quickly on something that that we mentioned right at the beginning which is physical activity um before talking about um you know what someone listening might do um and I just want to pick up on something you said earlier which is sort of none of these people are doing exercise what are they doing they're moving naturally throughout their day they're they're moving all day long but unconsciously you know I know this exercise is popular and it's sort of been a public health uh intervention but it's I

have to say in America it's been a miserable failure uh in the United States fewer than 24% of people even get 20 minutes of physical activity a day so all we spent $1 150 billion dollar a year on the exercise industry and people don't go yeah and blue zones are moving all the time they spend zero money on it and uh my argument is you know instead of trying to H people to get up and go to the gym or you know pay for this gold level membership um design our streets so it's easy safe

and aesthetically pleasing uh to walk to get our coffee to walk to work for our kids to walk to school which we don't do anymore when I was a kid 50% of American kids walk to school were down to 10% 50% down to 10% yeah in the United States so we've engineered that physical activity out of our lives and for most people uh simply walking uh 45 minutes a day is about 90% the value of training for a marathon and um is exercise a goodidea IDE yes but does it work on the population level no

I mean if if if I were invested if I were a government investing in an intervention I would not invest in exercise I would invest in walkable streets Parks meeting places aesthetically pleasing Outdoors that's we know that works I think it's incredibly powerful and it's interesting I think the um I now work from home it's worked incredibly well for the company but it took me a while to realize is that basically my level of movement um had collapsed because before I used to commute and um I was living in London which like you know New

York or or Boston or something has quite good um public transportation so I would like walk to then go and take a underground train and then walk again at the other end and then at lunch you would go out and you'd walk somewhere to get some some food and what I realized is you know I was regularly doing 10,000 steps a day before that without really having to think about it this is just what would happen and then I was suddenly realized I'm doing like 3,000 steps I now am trying to engineer walking into my

day so for example I like to um walk U my daughter to school because actually that just creates in a really nice way um you know sort of 45 minutes of of walking and similarly I really try and make sure I have some reason I have to be out of the um out of the house and I have to proactively create that though Dan and I'm just thinking a little bit about your example of these people living on their Hill Villages right where they presumbly having to go like up and down the steps quite a

lot just to uh you know to do anything what's happening in America there's a sort of centrifugal development where the cities are dying and people are moving out into the suburbs so imagine you start working at home and you live in a typical middle American suburb there's nothing to walk to your garage is attached to your house so you don't even walk to your car so you walk out your door you get in your car you drive to the mall or you go to a drive-thru Starbucks and pick up your coffee there's almost no opportunity

to unconsciously move until we look at that the elephant in the room that you canot keep flogging the dead horse of individual responsibility if you want to get populations healthier you have to set up their environment so you set them up for Success you have to create cities where it's easy for people to move naturally and we're doing the opposite said and Dan you are pushing on this yourself right this your your passion as well as your business is to try and get cities to redesign themselves because it works so if you're listening to this

and you're in charge of a city then you should be following up with Dan if you're listening to this and you're not in charge of a city but you want to understand like what's the actionable advice so how can I do this for myself how could you make your life more Blue Zone like without having to move to a mountainous area well okay the first thing is to shift away from the Silver Bullet mentality which most of us have to what I call a silver Buckshot mentality silver Buck means sort of a scatter pattern of

of little bbb's instead of um I you know little self- sering but I wrote a book called The Blue Zone challenge where I aggregated about 40 or so evidence-based ways for you to set up your kitchen your bedroom and your home so you mindlessly move more eat less and eat better and socialize more and they tend to do you know like in your kitchen I'm a big believer that we're all in a seafood diet we eat the food we see so if if on your counter a lot in America a lot of you know we

start eating a bag of chips we don't finish it we put a clip on it we put it on the counter bad idea uh instead if you put a bowl you go out and buy yourself a fan the most beautiful B fruit bowl you can afford and put that in the middle and keep that full so when you walk through the kitchen the default is fruit rather than the chips uh there's actually been a Cornell Food Lab did a study on toasters very little of what we put in toasters produces something healthy on the back

end so taking the toaster off the uh counter occasions people losing about two kilos after two years as opposed to those who don't people who have uh plants throughout their homes actually move more um because they're watering plants uh um there's little things you can do to nudge yourself into moving more and I'm a much bigger believer in setting up your home your commute um your social life if your three best friends are obese and unhealthy there's 150% better chance that you'll be unhealthy yourself so another words if your three best friends sit around and

eat weeners and chips and watch TV guess what you're going to be doing when you hang out with them as opposed to friends whose idea of recreation is biking or walking or playing tennis and uh it's not a bad idea to have friends like Tim who you know love plant-based food we think it's so hard for middle-aged people but I argue the number one thing you could do to add yours to your life is recur your immediate Social Circle those three friends who you count on when you're you're having a bad day or with people

with whom you can have a meaningful conversation those people are going to have a measurable and long-term impact on how active you are on what you eat and uh it's a counterintuitive nobody can make any money off of you uh but being very careful about who you let in your in the room what do your studies tell us about gardening because there's some evidence that gardeners well epidemiologically are healthier and have healthier microbiomes um the blue zones tell you anything about how that might help them or is it very variable I don't know why but

I can tell you in every Blue Zone almost everybody who are making it into their 90s and hundreds not only guarding their whole life but continue to do so and it might be because the it's low intensity physical activity it's a nudge when you have a garden and you've planted something you can't wait to eat it gives you an incentive to go out every day and weed and water and harvest and you know they're bending over it's a range of motion I've seen the studies that show that when you're gardening your cortisol levels or your

stress hormones drop uh and it could very well be you get your hands dirty and you wipe your mouth and you're getting the microbiomes there's a little bit of dirt but I argue that gardy is probably much better than joining a gym the best longevity exercise you could do that's fascinating um the one thing I guess we haven't touched on uh so much is around the stress reduction so you talked about these rituals in these blue zones but those are rituals that sound very uh rooted in the culture they're they're in so if someone's listening

and saying I really like that idea um what are the rituals that I guess you know that you do for example first of all take your TV or your computer screen out of your kitchen I think you'll eat more intentionally with less stress if you do that uh eat together as a family as opposed to with one wheel one hand on your steering wheel take a nap known stress reducer uh belong to a faith I'm I'm not a hugely religious person but um people have a Sabbath um Jewish people or the Adventists they this idea

of a a a sanctuary in time where 24 hours a day they're putting their work aside and they're putting their busy social calendar aside and focusing on their God or focusing on their internal life um hanging out with low stress friends um these are all sort of ecosystem changes we can make to our lives that as opposed to remember to meditate which I believe in I'm a meditator but I forget about it all the time so the benefit of your friends is it just makes it natural and it just happens versus something like meditation which

is a bit like going to the gym it's requires you to sort of do something is that the difference that you're describe so it's not that you're against it but the point is it's a lot easier if it's just built into your social fabric that's right that's the approach because um if you look at any sort of intentional behavior health behavior whether it's exercise uh getting on a diet uh taking supplements there's a recidivism curve they all last months pretty well in only a few amount of months three to seven months but then it drops

off precipitously uh I challenge anybody to tell me about one diet in the history of the world that's worked for more than 4% of the people who get on it after two years so it's a great business plan great marketing vehicle you get people on it every year uh but it's a bad longevity strategy because when it comes to longevity mark my words other than dying other than not dying rather there's nothing you can do this month that's going to make you live longer in 30 years you have to think about things that you're going

to do most days for the next Deca few decades if you really want it to work for longevity one last question we talk a lot with Tim about what he eats on a regular basis and I know that lots of listeners are going to be really curious about what your daily daily diet is could you share what you typically eat in a day so I found the ministr that the longest lived family in the history of the world eats it's the mise family in Sardinia nine siblings Collective age 860 years they make the same Minon

every day and it's three beans with all kinds of vegetables carrots celery onions um some oregano some red pepper um some potatoes or else maybe some barley finished with an extra virgin olive oil I make a huge pot of that every week then I stored in glass Tupperware glass containers I can freeze and then every morning my it's more like a brunch I usually eat about 11 o'clock and that's that's how I start my day so in the Tim Spectre way of thinking I I I have this cocktail of of all these fibers because it's

got a grain and Bean I get my my protein in there all kinds of trace minerals and I feel like I get a good base for my day that's amazing can we get the recipe you can get the recipe yes okay we will follow up on the recipe and weone Longevity cocktail we call it the the the dam boa ministr and we will definitely share it because I am I'm actually just my my mouth is actually salivated never mind the longevity I would like to try and do what we always do which is a quick

sum and Dan and Tim will you just correct me if I if I get any of this wrong so we start off by explaining what blue zones were which are these like particular places where um people have aged healthily much more than anywhere else and they're very small places it's not like Japan or Italy it's like these very particular sort of villages where interesting what really distinguishes them I think is that they're not getting sick through middle age and later and therefore they're ending up very old and healthy and so levels of dementia and cardiovascular

disease and all of these things are are really low that there's a lot that's just built into the environment that is achieving this there are no silver bullets uh to use Dan's um phrase um but some of the things that are in common is the sort of foods they're eating the fact that they're having to move constantly so no one is going to the gym but they are effectively doing exercise by just what happens in in their life they all live in places where the weather is quite good but not right in the tropics where

they're going to get sort of infectious diseases um and and I think we talked about three particular um aspects and I know that there's more in in the book and and the show you talk about we obviously talked a lot about diet um and interesting although they are eating very different foods there's there's some real similarities and and you mentioned whole grains you mentioned greens tubers nuts and beans and then Tim was basically saying well I'm not at all surprised about that because actually what you see in common with with those Foods is two really

important things lots and lots of fiber and not just one to type of fiber but all of these diverse types of fibers and lots of these polyphenols and so Tim is saying well that is what feeds their microbiome supports all of these different bacteria that then creates all of these things that support the immune system and your research Tim I think is saying that like this healthy immune system seems to be really crucial for for fighting agent in in the long term you then shared this rather sad fact that I had not really fully understood

that these blue zones are sort of dying I guess they're becoming red zones down um and gave it canaa is this example where even just in 20 years you've seen that as the diet has shifted dramatically you see that suddenly they go from being some of the healthiest to the least healthy you see just how important the um the diet is uh in this then you talked a little bit about things that people could do about um diet and I thought one of them which I'd never heard before is redesign your kitchen so how do

you have like all this beautiful healthy food on display like uh fruit I was immediately thinking you can have the nut ball there but remove the toast which is I think really interesting way to redesign and then you said you have the magic Minon so there are no silver bullets but everybody on the listening to this now wants that Minon recipe we will follow up so if you're signed up for a Zoe email we will make sure that we share the uh the minerone recipe then we talked a bit about stress and you said one

of the things that's really interesting is there are sort of daily rituals that everybody has across these different um blue zones and so they were very different in different areas but all of them are somehow very ful and whether it was like a prayer or like having a nap at a particular time or you know happy hour it created this and that in almost all of this case there's very close community so this is like with your not just your immediate family but sort of extended family and therefore if you want to think about how

you can do that at home get rid of the things that get in the way so you know take the TV out of your kitchen eat as a family if you can then actually belonging to a faith is really powerful because it's creating seen this sort of sanctuary as your word which I loved um and the thing you that that you said that that really stck with me is like go out with your friends but recur your three best friends so um if your three best friends are not supporting all of this who is the

other friend that maybe you could be spending more time with who like Tim is going to pull you into eating you know the better food it's going to take you out and do something physical and I guess that brings us to the last point about exercise these people are all moving all the time but you basically think this whole push to go to the gym has failed right we've been saying this in the west whether it's the states or the UK or anywhere for decades but actually nobody is moving so think about how you design

your life to move how do you design your kids life so that they move and I think the example that that you both spoke about right at the end which was really interesting is can you have a garden that actually if you have a garden you're doing something actively that creates this movement and this outside so again rather than thinking about exercises this little spot that you do a few times a uh a week how would you just get this movement you're seeing in the blue zones throughout but first of all a brilliant summation I

can't believe you've gathered all that remembered it all we're able to to so articulately repeat it but um ju a couple refinements first of all do exercise programs do work for some people the very disciplined and people who can presence of mine and there is a subset I just say as as a population intervention it's not a very not very good return on the investment we put at and then the central idea I like people to take away I is in blue zones people don't pursue health or longevity it ensues and it ensues from the

right environment and what we ought to be thinking about is not so much uh New Year's starting a new diet which we know it's going to fail for almost everybody almost all the time but how can we set up our lives and our ecosystem so the right behavior is more unconscious and therein lies the long-term possibilities for longevity I love that and I think that um you know one of the stories I think that I've taken from the last um you know 18 months of doing this podcast is the way in which as a society

we've sort of been sleepwalking into this really unhealthy place and in fact mostly that has been some evil plan by you like the government or whatever I in fact often it's come from really good things right like new discoveries like you can have a car um or you know antibiotics saving so many lives but then it turns out that it's changed our lives and there' been these sort of unexpected um negative impacts and so somehow we we need to design the world that we live in in a way which is just better suited to our

human bodies we spent most of human history uncomfortable and hungry and uh quite rightly we've innovated you know recently and we've um we we now you know live in this environment of abundance and ease and and a glut of food and we have a a uh just we're genetically hardwired to Crave fat crave sugar crave salt and take rest whenever we can and that works really well in this environment of scarcity but in our environment of overabundance it's a big negative we're not going to change our genes we're not going to change our genetic predisposition

anytime soon um so we need to re-engineer our environment um so that we still have uh you know the acceptable level of comfort but that the healthy choice is easier cheaper and more appealing than the unhealthy choice and I think if anyone is listen to this right now and would like to redesign their town or city wherever it is in the world let us know we'll put you in touch with Dan because that is sort of your life mission isn't it to try and uh to make that better and you're doing that in 70 cities

is that right 72 American cities so far yesing brilliant Dan Tim thank you so much I really enjoyed that pleasure and honor thank you thank you for joining me on Zoe science and nutrition today today's conversation about the blue zones has once again highlighted the critical importance of diet in supporting us to live a long and healthy life and the story of a Nawa is another depressing example of how rapidly a switch to a modern Western diet can damage our health if you're interested in getting personalized advice on the right food to eat for your

body to help you feel better now and enjoy many more healthy years to come then you can learn more about becoming a Zoe member by going to zoe.com podcast you can also get 10% off your membership on this link as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and nutrition is produced by huin Martin Richard Willen and Tilly fford see you next [Music] time