5 daily habits of people who live longer | Dan Buettner

Why do some people live longer, and why do so many popular health habits fail?

In this episode, best-selling author and longevity expert Dan Buettner, explores what decades of studying the people who live the longest reveals about health and lifespan.

Instead of chasing routines or hacks, the science suggests that a longer life is shaped by everyday food, social habits, and the places people live.

Unwrap the truth about your food 👉 ⁠Get the ZOE app 

🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily 30+

*Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system

Follow ZOE on Instagram.

Transcript

Jonathan: Dan, thank you for joining me today.

Dan: It’s a total delight.

Jonathan: It’s wonderful to have you back. And Sarah, thank you for being here.

Sarah: Pleasure.

Jonathan: So Dan, hopefully you remember, we always like to kick the show off with a rapid fire Q and A with questions from our listeners. With these strict rules, yes or no, or a sentence if you have to.

Dan: Okay.

Jonathan: Can small lifestyle changes increase my chances of living to a hundred?

Dan: Yes.

Sarah: Are diet and exercise the only things you need to live a long life?

Dan: No.

Jonathan: Are the blue zones slowly disappearing?

Dan: Some of them are.

Sarah: Are people in the Blue Zones always vegetarian?

Dan: No.

Jonathan: And finally, what’s the biggest misconception that you hear about the blue Zones?

Dan: That it’s a noun. It’s actually a verb. The thing is that there, the Blue Zones are a phenomenon in time. 150 years ago, those places weren’t Blue Zones. People were dying of infectious diseases back in the 19th century. Now, as you correctly point out, as time goes on, chronic diseases, the same diseases that are beleaguering US, type two diabetes, heart disease, dementia, certain types of cancers, they’re raising the mortality rates in these places. So life expectancy and concentration of people making it to 100 are diminishing. They’re still going up. They’re just not going up as fast.

We don't buy the hype — and neither should you

Our new app reveals what the food labels won't, using data from the world's largest nutrition study run by ZOE.

Download

Jonathan: Dan, you’ve been on the show before, which was a fantastic episode for anyone who hasn’t listened to it, but for anyone who either needs a refresher or didn’t hear that episode, I’d love to start with a quick recap of basically what are the Blue zones.

Dan: I led a project for National Geographic, this goes back now over 20 years, with the idea of reverse engineering longevity. So only about 20% of how long we live as a population is dictated by our genes. 80% is something else. So I reasoned that if I could find confirmed populations where people are living measurably longer and then looked at the common denominators or the correlates, it would point me in a direction of maybe this is a formula for longevity.

We found five of these so-called Blue Zones, the longest lived men in the world in Sardinia, Italy, the longest lived women in Okinawa, Japan, the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. We have a population with the lowest rate of middle aged mortality on the island of Ikaria, Greece. People live eight years longer with virtually no dementia.

And then in the United States, it was among the Seventh Day Adventist living in and around Loma Linda, California. And so these are places where people are enjoying 10 extra good years without disease, which is a gold mine, especially when you hit a certain age. So my job and my team of scientists has been to tease out the common denominators, what they eat, what they do, how they live in their environment, and that’s been the basis now of six New York Times bestsellers and an Emmy Award-winning Netflix documentary.

Jonathan: And why are they called Blue Zones?

Dan: My colleague Gianni Pes, a Sardinian spent his entire life identifying a hundred year olds in Sardinia, and his methodology was to look at how many people reached age 100 over the past 150 years. And it's very important to look at concentration of centenarians over time. We’re in Palm Beach right now. There’s a lot of a hundred year olds. Why? Because it’s full of rich white people who are healthy enough to move down here and have great healthcare coverage. But to do it right, you have to look at centenarian concentration over time. And he meticulously did this.

And villages that had a certain threshold. In other words, it was about one standard deviation higher than you would expect to see in the developed world. He put a little blue dot near that village and there were a cluster of villages in the highlands of Sardinia with so many blue dots. He just started referring to it as the blue zone. And when I was on my Worldwide National Geographic project, I met him and we became friends, and I evolved his blue zone concept to an international one. So now what a blue zone means, it’s a statistically verified area where people live measurably longer as compared to the rest of the world.

I just took two of the top demographers, top population scientists in the world to our Blue Zones. And Blue Zones was always, I think by scientists, they never discredited us, but they didn’t quite understand it. We showed them the records in Sardinia going back to 1860, every birth and every death. And they go, oh my God, this is a gold mine. We don’t have this any place in the world. So now all of a sudden it’s drawn all these scientists to the Blue Zones who are doing academic papers. There’s three academic papers coming out, one in the Gerontologist in December. That really, this is really kind of blowing up as a source for insight on how to eat and how to live.

Sarah: And Dan, these countries are really diverse. You’ve got Japan, Italy, America, there must be so many things that are different about these countries, but what is it that they have in common that you think is responsible for this longevity?

Dan: As you point out, it’s like a Venn diagram and each of these places have things that may explain their longevity, unique to them.

For example, in Okinawa, until about 1980, about 70% of all the calories they consumed came from one food: purple sweet potatoes. And we don’t know if purple sweet potatoes are longevity food, but we do know they ate a lot of it and they lived a long time. They also ate about eight times more tofu than we eat per person in this country. So that might have something to do with it, but we did a meta-analysis, so an average of a lot of dietary studies done over the past a hundred years in all five Blue Zones averaged them out to see in general, people in Blue Zones are eating peasant food. They’re not eating, as you might guess, ultra-processed food.

I know there’s a lot of talk now about protein, but in Blue Zones, two thirds of their calories came from carbohydrates. It was a high-carb diet, which shocks a lot of people, which is to say they were eating mostly whole grains, greens and garden vegetables. Tubers like sweet potatoes, nuts, and the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. So, if you wanna know what a centenarian ate to live to be a hundred, I simply say, well, look at what those who’ve reached a hundred have actually eaten in mass, and it gives us a pretty good idea. The good news is it overlays very well with what ZOE tells us we should be eating. With scientists like you, it serendipitously or happily converges on the same eating pattern.

Sarah: So the one commonality was beans. Across the different countries, but otherwise they were quite different. Were they in other aspects of their diet?

Dan: Well, the type of whole grain is different. Of course. Okinawa, it’s mostly white rice, and in Costa Rica it’s mostly corn. And in the Mediterranean Blue Zone it’s mostly wheat. But in every case you have a grain and a bean. And when you put a grain and a bean together, what do you get? You get

Sarah: A balanced amino acid profile,

Dan: All the amino acids necessary for human sustenance. So even though the food stuff is slightly different, it adds up to your main point, very high in fiber, but also plenty of protein even though it’s a high-carb diet as well. When you put a grain and a bean together, you get a whole protein. And that could be pasta e fagioli, it could be beans and corn tortillas. It could be beans and rice. And every one of these cultures have their particular combination, so they are getting their protein. People think to get their protein, I need a slab of beef or a pork chop, or bacon. But that’s actually not the best place to get your protein. Your best protein is to get it from plant sources.

Sarah: And I think this is really important because there is that misconception that the only source of good protein is from meat. And yes, meat has a really great balance of amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein, but you can get amino acids from lots of plant-based sources, nuts, seeds, whole grains, pulses. But like Dan said, they have a slightly different makeup. And so what’s really important is if you are relying on plant-based sources of protein, to have a mixture to have their pulses together with the whole grains, together with the nuts, and then you’ll get the same balance as you would get with meat.

Dan: I’ll give you a quick little quiz. Which of the following foods do you think has more protein per hundred grams? Beef, pork chops, mutton, or pumpkin seeds?

Jonathan: I feel like you’re tricking me. I would’ve gone with like beef. I guess

Sarah: I’m not answering that because I’m worried I’m gonna get it wrong.

Dan: It’s pumpkin seeds.

Jonathan: Pumpkin seeds.

Dan: Pumpkin seeds have more protein. But we don’t know that because there’s not a huge pumpkin seed lobby behind it, reminding us that you need your protein. Our product is the only place to get it. But remember when you’re eating meat to get your protein. For one kilo of meat, it takes about, beef, for example, it takes 11 kilos of grain. So in America anyway, a lot of that grain is subjected to pesticides, Roundup, for example. So that animal aggregates all of those toxins 10 or 11 times for that meat. That meat is also subjected to hormones. The meat also has saturated fat, which too much of it isn’t all that good for us. When you go to a plant-based source of protein, it’s clean, and it also comes with a fiber package, which the two things that Zoe and Blue Zones violently agree on is how important fiber is, and that we simply don’t get enough of it.

Sarah: Yeah, I mean that’s a real problem in the US and the UK and so many countries. 95% of us don’t get enough fiber.

Dan: So you hear that 95% of us don’t get enough fiber. Tell people why fiber is so important.

Sarah: So fiber is the only super nutrient, if I was to say there was a super nutrient out there, it’s protective against many chronic diseases. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, for example. It’s particularly protective against colorectal cancer. It plays a really important role in modulating how we metabolize our food, modulating our cholesterol. But it also has a really important structural role. And what people don’t realize is fiber is actually cell wall material. And so it has this real important role in modulating how much of the food we absorb, how quickly we absorb it, and also where we absorb it, as well as the fact is it provides the most amazing fuel for our microbiome. And we know that if we have a happy microbiome, we have a happy person.

Dan: You see, I think people don’t realize how sexy fiber is. I mean, we kind of associate with like this woody substance or lettuce, but it’s so incredibly powerful and I just think it’s hard for people to make money off of fiber, so we don’t hear about it as much, and that’s why 95% of us don’t get enough of it.

Sarah: There’s a small trend starting called fiber maxing, and we are really hopeful that’s gonna overtake this trend at the moment, or this obsession with protein. Dan, just one more question on the diets related to the Blue Zones. I’m assuming that they have very, very little heavily processed food that it’s Whole Foods.

Dan: So most of the Blue Zones were geographically isolated until about the year 2000. So a hundred-year-old had the first 75 years of his or her life where they were eating a very traditional diet. If you’re eating a certain way for 75 years, even if a hamburger or pizza comes on the dietary scene, you don’t necessarily adopt it. So they continue to eat the patterns they established when they were children or young adults. But now the Blue Zones are increasingly looking like the UK or the United States in the sad state of their food environment.

The crunch your gut’s* been craving.

Support gut health* and energy* and enhance the flavor and crunch of your meals.

Try Daily30+

Jonathan: Imagine a version of you in six months, someone who’s made a few small changes and feels dramatically better because of it. That’s why we make this show, to give you the science and tools to get there. But to keep doing that, we need your support. If you’ve gotten value from this episode, hit subscribe. You’ll get a front row seat to the latest science and we’ll keep doing the work to bring it straight to you. Alright, now back to the show. So you are looking at all these people who live to be over a hundred and you’re understanding what’s in common across them and saying that actually despite everything that we’re hearing about protein being so central for longevity, that actually the amount of protein they had was not that high and that the protein source was primarily from this combination of whole grains and beans.

Dan: I wouldn’t say it was a low protein diet, but I would say it’s a medium protein diet. So in America, for example, the average American consumes about 110 kilograms of meat a year. That’s a bathtub full of dead animals. In the Blue Zones, it was about 10 kilograms a year.

Jonathan: So instead of 110 kilograms a year, it was 10 kilograms a year for these people who make it to be a hundred years old.

Dan: Yes. And by the way, these people weren’t consciously knowing. Well, meat’s bad for me. I’m not gonna eat it. They just simply didn’t have access to it. Meat was a celebratory food. It was for a wedding, or it was for a birthday or village festival. They slaughter a goat and eat it. Or on Sunday, they might have some meat, but most of the food available to them was this sort of peasant food. Very cheap, by the way. I think another big lesson Blue Zones teach us is you don’t have to be rich to eat healthy. Most of these ingredients are served at the bottom shelf of the grocery store and cost a euro or a dollar or two for a quarter kilo. And it’s very easy to eat healthy on this sort of blue zone diet, blue zone way of eating. I think that’s also an important message.

Jonathan: I think it’s really fascinating that you said that their diets had figured out how to deliver all the protein you need through this combination of plants. Because just like eating one plant was going to be unhealthy, but this combination together was giving them what they need.

Dan: As you know, almost all plants have protein and spinach is very high in protein, for example. It’s just not marketed to us, so we don’t think about it. But in general, the easy way, especially if you don’t have a lot of money and you wanna get your protein. You also want to eat healthy. We’re kind of bamboozled into thinking, I need this fancy super food or fresh greens from the expensive market. No, you get one pot, some nice herbs and spices, and you make beans and rice. It’s a staple in the southern part of the United States, or if you’re a Latino, every Latino’s gonna recognize a corn tortilla and beans. You put those two together, put some hot sauce, bam. You have all the protein you need. If you’re Asian, mung beans or tofu is a great way to get that protein. And these are inexpensive foods. And the real genius Blue Zones have harnessed is that they know how to make these simple peasant foods high in protein, high in complex carbohydrates, and fiber taste delicious. That’s the most important insight, the most important ingredient is deliciousness. Why? Because you could tell me that broccoli is the best, healthiest food in the world, or fermented tofu or sauerkraut, whatever. But if you don’t like it, you might force yourself to eat it for a couple weeks or months, but you’re not gonna eat it for long enough to make any difference. If you can figure out how to make these foods delicious, like people in the blues zone, peasant food, delicious, bam.

Jonathan: So tell me about deliciousness.

Dan: So my daytime job, I get hired by insurance companies to lower the BMI of entire cities. That thereby raises their life expectancy. And my job is to articulate in such a way that people wanna move from a standard American diet to a Blue Zone ZOE type diet. And by the way, the value proposition for a 20-year-old, for a woman, it’s about 10 extra years. So moving from a standard American diet to a largely whole food plant-based, and for a man it’s about 12 years. So it’s an enormous value proposition

Jonathan: in the US going from your standard American diet as you’re talking to these cities, you’re saying a woman can get extra 10 years of life, a man an extra 12 years.

Dan: That’s right. 20-year-old, it drops to about six years for a 60-year-old, but even an 80-year-old could get an extra three years. And those are valuable years where you’re likely to be more free of a chronic disease and feel good and feel better. So it’s one thing to know that, but how do you get people to do it? So, I’m particularly interested in harnessing the wisdom of deliciousness and putting it to work. And part of it, my first book, the Blue Zone Kitchen, my photographer from National Geographic and I went back to all the Blue Zones and we sat on a stool and we watched Old Ladies, grandmas, cook and make this fantastically delicious food, these pies made out of beans and these wonderful stews and soups. And what we were capturing there is sometimes 500 years of observed wisdom. These people like to eat delicious food just like we do, but they had very limited ingredients. They had greens and beans and tubers, etc. So I got to capture half a millennium of culinary trial and error in these recipes. And I put in the book, Blue Zone Kitchen, was a number one New York Times bestseller, number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. 'Cause we focused on deliciousness, not on hammering people over the head. This is gonna help you live longer or it avoids cruelty or it’s good for the carbon footprint. I don’t think people really give a crap about that for the most part when it actually comes to what they’re gonna eat for lunch.

Sarah: I always say that if a food’s too healthy to be enjoyed, it’s just not healthy at all.

Dan: I love that so much of longevity are these hacks, these quick fixes. Yep. And when you think about a plasma exchange or stem cells in my joints or ozempic injection in my gut, that’s not a very enjoyable way to live to a hundred. The way I like to think is an Italian grandfather who gets up and has breakfast with his friends and a cup of coffee, and then maybe spend a little time in his garden lunch, he’s back with his friends. A big, long lunch that takes three hours, comes home, takes a nap, has a glass of wine at five, another beautiful dinner over the sunset. And these guys, by the way, are living a dozen years longer than us living in the UK and the United States on average. So what routine are you gonna pick? The needle in the gut and the experimental plasma exchange or the wine with your buddies and the big, beautiful Mediterranean meal. I know what I,

Jonathan: and you’re painting a beautiful picture. I know which one I would definitely be going for. I’d love to talk a bit now about some of the behaviors you’ve seen from these people who are living to be a hundred and what we might be able to apply to ourselves. Could you tell me about how these people tend to start their day and is it similar across these completely different regions?

Dan: It turns out that none of them are consciously adopting a new healthy routine for the morning. They just live their lives. Longevity is much better if it ensues than trying to pursue it. In other words, when we try to change our behavior and our habits, it occasionally works in the short run, but fails for almost all people almost all the time. In the long run, it’s about changing your environment. That’s why I like to talk about evidence-based ways to shape your surroundings so your unconscious decisions are better. That’s the idea behind Blue Zones. But we wanna talk about morning routines because it’s buzzy morning routines of a hundred year olds. Okay, here we go.

The first big one, breakfast. It tends to be savory. They’re not having cereal and milk, or a smoothie or eggs and bacon like we have in the United States. It tends to be olives, a piece of sourdough bread and a little tiny piece of feta cheese. In Sardinia, it’s often a minestrone, which is this vegetable soup with beans that gives you about half of the fiber you need for the day. And a piece of sourdough bread, a coffee accompanies almost every breakfast. Not a macchiato, but a cup of black coffee, which I would argue is one of the better longevity beverages around. They tend to eat a large breakfast 'cause they’re off to work in the morning. So they wake up, this is traditional, it’s changing quickly now, but they go to sleep and wake up with the sun. They’ll often be a period at night where they’ll wake up. It’s often a two sleep situation where they might wake up at four and do some work and then go back to bed till sunrise. But it’s a big breakfast in Costa Rica. It’ll be beans and rice and avocado and some fruits from their gardens. And then it’s off to work. And when I say work, it’s not intensive, stress laced work. It tends to be work that requires regular low intensity physical activity.

Sarah: I think there’s a couple of points that I’d love to pick up on Jonathan, because I think these are points that could just be applied to anyone wherever they live. And one is the point you made that they have a big breakfast. And this is something that we see a big difference in the US, the UK, many of the countries that there is a big problem with obesity, type two diabetes. They tend to have the majority of their calories later in the day. And yet you see many of the European countries in the Blue Zone style countries tend to front load their calories and we know that you are metabolically healthier earlier in the day compared to later in the day. And again, we’ve seen from our own ZOE research that if you are having particularly carbohydrates or heavy meals later in the day, that’s associated with poorer metabolic health. So I think that’s really fascinating. I wasn’t aware that in the Blue Zones, particularly, they did that.

And then the other thing that was really interesting, you talked about the quality of the breakfast. These savory breakfasts tend to be higher in fiber, higher in protein, maybe healthy fats. By having these kind of breakfasts rather than a refined carbohydrate, it sets you up for a really stable day. So if you have a refined carbohydrate, you have these big peaks in circulating glucose. If you have it for breakfast, then you have these big dips.

Jonathan: And Sarah circulating glucose means

Sarah: blood sugar in simple terms. And Dan, we’ve done some lovely research at ZOE where we found that if people have these high carbohydrate breakfasts that are refined, they avoid any kind of fiber

Dan: cereal or

Sarah: Yeah, like cereals, like white bread or even

Dan: a smoothie. I’d love to hear what you think about smoothies.

Sarah: Oh, we’ve done studies on that. I’ll come to smoothies. Yeah. What’s really fascinating is we see that people, yes, they have an increase in circulating blood sugar, but what they have is they have these dips. So about two hours after they’ve had this refined carbohydrate style meal, they have a crash. And what that causes is them to consume more calories over the day. Our research shows that people that have that dip after breakfast consume 300 more calories over the day, they feel less energetic. It impacts their mood and they feel less alert. And so really simple switch people can do, add some protein, add some healthy fats, add some fiber to your breakfast. And we’ve seen, again from trials that we’ve done by doing that, you stabilize your sugar for the rest of the day, but you feel more energetic and you actually go on to eat less calories.

As for smoothies, that’s a really interesting area because that all relates to the food structure and so forth. And so top line is that if you can eat your food in the original matrix, the original structure in which it came in, if it’s an apple, eat as an apple rather than as a smoothie. Because what happens is by changing the texture of the apple, making it into a smoothie, you actually eat it five times more quickly, the same amount of calories. By eating it more quickly, then you feel less full. You tend to eat your next meal sooner, and then you have these bigger spikes, but more importantly, these bigger dips in glucose. There’s been some fascinating research published on this.

Dan: You also said something about whey protein negative or positive. Putting that scoop of protein in.

Sarah: I believe that you should be getting your protein and all of your nutrients from Whole Foods. So if you just follow a simple, basic, healthy, balanced diet, you get all the nutrients that you need, you get all the protein that you need. This obsession about protein is ridiculous, in my opinion, that there’s very few people that don’t get enough protein. Yes, if you’re older, yes, if you’re really active, then maybe then we need to think about it. We’ve done some research showing that if you have a bagel for breakfast and then the next day you add a cup of Greek yogurt to that breakfast, that you totally change your metabolic response throughout the day. You totally change how many calories you consume throughout the day for the better.

Dan: I just caveat with you, so you see yogurt in the Greek Blue Zone, you see fermented sheep’s milk in the Sardinian Blue Zone, but it’s never in these little plastic containers with fruit, which by the way, have you ever looked on the back of fruit yogurt? Almost always it has more sugar per gram than a Coke. So I'm always like, whoa, you can’t just tell people to eat yogurt, can you?

Sarah: Absolutely. When we talk about yogurt in the healthy sense, we’re talking about yogurt that doesn’t have the fruit compote with it, doesn’t have all the added sugars or sweetness. We’re talking about Greek yogurt or plain natural yogurt, or plain kefir, for example as well.

Jonathan: One thing I’m interested in listening to this is that what they’re eating for breakfast feels quite different from what I was brought up thinking a breakfast should be. Because you talked about things like beans and rice or minestrone soup and I was brought up, well that might be dinner or lunch, but it’s not breakfast. Breakfast is like this special food that you only eat for breakfast and I was definitely brought up that Kellogg’s probably made it. Is that like a common thing across the Blue Zones that you are eating for breakfast? Meals that are not special breakfast meals.

Dan: By the way, Kellogg’s, which makes cereals, has famously funded the studies discovering that children need cereal for breakfast. So there’s a little bit of self-interest there in what we’ve grown up to believe. But in all the Blue Zones, traditionally speaking, they’re eating a whole food, largely plant-based savory breakfast. It’s delicious. The advent and the timing of it. In Costa Rica, for example, it’s right at sunrise, which will be six or seven. But in Loma Linda a common popular meal pattern is a giant breakfast at 10, which is more like a brunch and then what they often call a light, halfway between lunch and dinner at 4:00 PM and that’ll be it in the western world here. I think that’s about the healthiest pattern we could adjust that up or down an hour either way.

Jonathan: And so Dan, when you are talking about breakfast, and Sarah, you’re talking about it as well, you’re not saying I have to have breakfast at 7:00 AM the first thing that I wake up. Even if you are saying that this is a big meal and setting me up well.

Dan: The debate is ongoing, whether or not we should be intermittent fasting or restricting our calories, but I think most of the data would suggest that 12 hours is a minimum. So in other words, if you finish dinner at eight, you don’t wanna start eating till eight o’clock in the morning. Other evidence suggests you should wait 14 hours. So that would mean if you’re finished eating dinner at eight the next morning at 10, you’re eating your first meal. Evolution often provides us a good source for insight. You can imagine our caveman ancestors didn’t stroll over to their refrigerator and make a smoothie or have eggs and bacon. They had to get up and find food or hunt food or at least kind of repurpose the dinner from the night before so they’re not getting up and eating right away.

Our new app gives you the power to see beyond the marketing

Make smarter, science-backed food choices in seconds. Scan. Score. Reveal the truth.

Download

There’s a great scientist from the National Institutes on Health named Mark Matson, also a Johns Hopkins professor, who asserts that actually if you look at evolutionarily speaking, it’s much better not to have your breakfast until about noon, which is probably the pattern of our ancient humans. And by not eating first thing in the morning, sharper the brain, we have more endurance. And of course, you’re gonna burn up that visceral fat after about 12 hours. For most of us.

Sarah: Yeah. Something we advocate for at Zoe is having a 12 or 14 hour fast period. We wouldn’t advocate for the extremes. And I know there’s lots of people that do these six hour eating, 18 hour fast periods. We don’t think that that’s necessary. And we’ve done a big study called the Big Intermittent Fasting Study where we looked in hundreds of thousands of people. We asked them to fast, but just for 14 hours. So we said, eat in a 10 hour window. Exactly in the way that you’d said, you’re having your last meal of the day, maybe at eight, and then you have your breakfast at 10. And we found in as little as two weeks, people reported a reduction in body weight, but more importantly they felt better, they had better mood. Wow. They had less hunger, they were more energetic. And that was just after two weeks. And so you don’t have to do it to extremes. So it’s really interesting hearing that this is what naturally is happening in many of these blue zones as well.

Dan: That’s right. They tend to have an early dinner. It tends to be the smallest meal. It’s usually leftover lunch. And the other thing I noticed in Blue Zones: people don’t snack.

Sarah: That’s interesting.

Dan: They’re not going for the handful of chips or the super food crunch or whatever the hell is marketed to us. But they eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner and they’re done.

Jonathan: And Dan, when you look at those, because obviously these five very different periods, are they normally having about that sort of 12 to 14 hours, as in, is that the pattern?

Dan: Yeah. Sun is down by seven and they’ve already done eating and yeah, it’s 12 to 14 hours. Okinawans might have a very small dinner at four in the afternoon and then it’s not till they wake up the next morning that their breakfast is likely to be traditionally speaking, a miso soup full of root vegetables or some of the herbs growing.

Sarah: And I think this is really interesting beause our research at ZOE has shown from our Predict studies that people who are eating after nine o’clock in the evening tend to have poorer metabolic health, tend to have higher propensity to obesity, type two diabetes and so forth. And so this is something we often say to people, just try not to eat after eight or nine.

Dan: I love that. That’s so simple.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s nice to hear the research underpins it. And I’m guessing nine isn’t the magic hour.

Sarah: No, that’s for the sake of our analysis. I mean, we looked at eight o’clock, nine o’clock is those eating after nine? We found that there was a particularly heightened increased risk of poor metabolic health. But ideally you eat in tune with your body clock. So ideally not eating after eight, nine or so forth would be better for you than snacking away through the night.

Dan: I used to be on a what I called a seafood diet. I’d see food and I’d eat it. It took a while to get off of it.

Jonathan: I think we were all brought up. I feel like this is what the food industry is teaching us. And we’re surrounded, I assume that part of the not snacking in these environments is you’re not always within 60 seconds of someone selling you food.

Dan: If you bring in the snacks and the ice cream and the chips and the cookies and the sodas, the temptation’s gonna overwhelm you. The key is to shape your environment, to rid them of the temptations. The decision points should be at the grocery store where you just don’t buy it.

Jonathan: I understand from the research team that there might be a couple of real people that we might be able to talk about, about sort of their routines, and I was told we might be able to start with Don Ramirez in Costa Rica.

Dan: Amazing guy. A hundred years old, he looks like he’s about 70. He has got this perfect smooth skin still. He wears blue jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid shirt and a cowboy hat. He has always got his knife on his belt. He’s in Nicoya, Costa Rica. He wakes up every morning and he’s got cattle and he’s got a horse and he leads his cattle through town to where they pasture in the morning. At first I didn’t believe it beause I’ve seen 500, a hundred year olds and I know what a hundred year old looks like. This guy doesn’t look like a hundred, but we checked his age. Now the guy’s probably 102. But anyway, the funny part about his morning routine is he’s single, he’s a widower, but he still likes pretty girls. So every single morning he rides his horse with all his cows in tow past a house where he knows there’s a pretty girl sitting on the porch and he waves at her. And most people in the Blue Zone, and this is just anecdotal, but it comes from interviewing 500 or so a hundred year olds: grumpy people don’t make it.

Jonathan: Is that true?

Dan: I mean, there’s a handful of them, but for the most part, the people are making it to a hundred. They’re interesting, they’re interested. They attract people to them. They enjoy telling their stories. They’re generous. I remember I met this 108 year old woman named Ponta, also in Costa Rica, descendant from the Chorotega indigenous people. And she still cooks on something called a fogón, which is this giant adobe kind of oven stove type thing. We had cameras and we asked her if she’d cook her dinner so we can give some context. And she patted tortillas and cooked up her beans and she had chased down a chicken and got an egg and put an egg in it, made this beautiful meal and then put it down. And this woman is stick thin. I say, well, can we watch you eat it? And she goes, no, that’s for you. And we, no, no, no, we’re not gonna eat your food and absolutely iron resolve. You eat that.

And so it was this generosity. This woman doesn’t have much, by the way. We made sure she got a big, huge gift she wasn’t expecting. So it wasn’t like we’re taking the food out of her mouth. But it was just that act of generosity that gives you insight to the bigger ecosystem of the Blue Zone. We tend to get down to the nutrient and the fiber, but the bigger magic in the Blue Zone happens in the matrix of social and psychological characteristics that are in place that I’d say reduce stress and make for a stronger, safer, more supportive society. And there’s a generosity where people look out for each other. They’re not about a bunch of selfish people shooting up GLP-1s and eating super foods.

Jonathan: That’s really fascinating. We’ve had some podcasts with researchers who’ve done these really big studies, looking at how much social interaction affects your health in older age and that basically having much more sociability apparently is one of the big things that means you’d live longer than otherwise. And it sounds like this is something you are seeing for real with people all the way up to a hundred years old.

Dan: Yes. Julia, who I met on set with this Lived to 100 Netflix documentary series. A hundred years old, never got married, but she stayed in the village of her family, no kids of her own. But she has a dozen nieces and nephews and she’s got a separate room in her place. And these nieces and nephews take turns staying at her house. They actually stay 24 hours that she doesn’t need a nurse. By the way, this Julia is wonderful and she laughs. She tells dirty jokes. She goes outside and you actually wanna hang out with her. And the difference between being a lonely spinster and having this regular social interaction with the nieces that stay overnight and take her out and so forth, it’s about eight years of life expectancy.

Jonathan: So it’s interesting. It feels like there’s almost two things you’re talking about here. One is just having social interaction is really important. We’re also talking, I think about maybe these people having a more positive attitude and being quite sociable.

Dan: Yeah. You know, people who sort of turn the same research. Yeah, you should be social or yeah, you should have a sense of purpose or yeah, you should shed stress. That’s why I come back to the core premise of Blue Zones. Don't try to change your behavior. Don't say, okay, I'm gonna be more social now, change your environment. The best example, imagine somebody living in a cul-de-sac in a suburb of London or a suburb of United States here, where every time you want to see somebody new, you gotta get in your car and drive to a shopping mall and everybody's on their phone looking down as opposed to a small town where you have a walkable downtown. You move to a place like that and you walk to the place to get the coffee every morning. And every morning you bump into half a dozen people you say hi to. And eventually one of those people, you get into a conversation and pretty soon they become a friend.

And people who live in Blue Zones, they, well, first of all, they tend to live in extended families. That’s a big important idea. So right there, they have that sort of social network baked in. And number two, they tend to live in places where they’re nudged into bumping into each other, to talking to each other, to needing each other. And so much of our health is a function of our environment. And social is right up at the top of that list.

Sarah: I think you can have this in cities. When I think about where I live, I live in London. My sister lives a hundred yards up the road. My in-laws live within five minute walk. My kids go to my old school. When I walk my kids to school, I see all my old school friends. And so I have what I feel is that kind of community you do, even though I live in London, but I still have that at the weekend. People are constantly in and out of our house. Old school friends, family, we eat in that social way. And so I think that we shouldn’t disillusion people that just beause they’re living in a city. I think you can still have all of that, even if you are from New York or London.

Dan: Well, we have the suburbanization here in the United States where cities are sprawling and that’s an environmental direction that’s gonna breed loneliness. It’s not just an opinion, it’s a fact.

Jonathan: That makes sense. We’re in Florida right now and it’s hard to get anywhere without getting in the car and driving a long way to be somewhere else. And so clearly these cities have been built for cars first rather than humans first.

I did wanna pick up on one other story because we’ve spoken a lot about people living in environments I think are very different from the ones that we’re used to in the West, but actually one of your Blue Zones is in California. Could you tell us a bit about Marge?

Dan: Marge Jetton. Marge 105 years old, wakes up every morning at 6:00 AM. Reads her bible—people are almost always religious or they belong to a faith-based community. Then she has her breakfast and she’s very prescriptive about her breakfast. She has slow cooked oatmeal, not the quick oats with dates, walnuts, topped with soy milk, followed by what she calls a prune juice shooter. Now, in America, prune juice is a kind of a laxative, so you can kind of get the shooter end of that.

But then she goes and she’s busy. At 105, she still volunteered for seven organizations. She was in charge of a recycling program, a tape copying effort at her church. She adopted a 78-year-old woman, and she'd get in her 1994 Cadillac, barrel down the San Bernardino Freeway in Los Angeles where she would volunteer for these organizations, including the Loma Linda Senior Center. Where she’d go help out the old folks who of course are like 40 years younger than she is. But for me, she was the personification of purpose. And what’s purpose, this is something we often don’t think deeply enough about. True purpose almost always has an altruistic element to it. It’s not just, I love to knit, or I love collecting cars. It’s knowing what their values are, what their passions are, and what they’re good at, what they like to do. And then the most important is an outlet. If you don’t have an outlet, it ain't purpose. And she had seven outlets and she got out of bed in the morning, jumped out of bed, and she didn’t wake up with the existential stress of 105. I’m no good to anybody anymore? No, these seven organizations need me. It kept her active, it kept her brain engaged. It’s not a coincidence. She’s 105 and healthy.

Sarah: So, Dan, what’s your morning routine?

Dan: My morning routine. Well, I travel a lot these days beause I’m still working for National Geographic. But typically it’s a cup of coffee in the morning, which I believe is a longevity beverage. And I live in Miami and the first thing I do is I walk down to the beach and I get a huge eye full of sun rises over the Atlantic where I am, and then I walk up to my favorite coffee shop and have a cup of coffee and read the papers. And I know a bunch of people I always bump into. And then at noon I come home to my place and I go swimming in the ocean. I would say three days out of five, a couple days it’s too turbulent. But I live in a very walkable, bikeable neighborhood and I hardly ever get in a car.

Sarah: And what do you typically have for breakfast?

Dan: So I fast more like 16 hours, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily the right thing for people, but I tend to fast. So I have my breakfast at about 11, and I make a huge pot of Sardinian minestrone. The recipe, by the way, is on my website, danbuettner.com or in my Blue Zone kitchen books. I make it in a big Instapot and then I store seven servings of it for the whole week in glass Pyrex. I don’t like the plastic. And then I can just take the top off and that’s my lunch. And I’ll often put avocado on top of it. So my minestrone's got three beans, eight or so other vegetables. Extra virgin olive oil, put herbs and red pepper in there.

Jonathan: Sounds brilliant and you’ve pre-prepared it.

Dan: Takes three minutes in the microwave and it’s piping hot.

Sarah: Can I ask you one last question to do with the way that people in the Blue Zones eat? Because it’s something that I’m really interested in ZOE: how fast they eat their foods. So they’re eating in a social setting, which we know slows down the rate. But we know in the US and the UK people are eating their food so fast, which we know is a big problem. I’m really curious beause I think it’s something that’s a really easy actionable thing for people to take away.

Dan: So breakfast might be a little fast, but lunch is a to-do, lunch is their main meal usually, and it happens a little later in the afternoon. The whole family sits down. In all places there is some prayer or some phrase, people say Hara Hachi Bu, for example, in Okinawa, which means "Stop. My stomach is 80% full." Or the Lord’s Prayer. It’s some punctuation between whatever the heck they were doing before and now: "oh thank you for this food, this food is special. I’m gonna honor it. Let’s slow down and now we’ll eat." And these bigger dinners are always with family.

I was just in Sardinia a couple weeks ago. Met the mayor and he had to cut off my interview at two beause he had to go home and he told me he has a two hour lunch on a school day. And his whole family. And it’s not just his family, it’s his brother and his brother’s family. So there’s 10 people sit down to lunch every day. And they talk and they unpack the day. And they’re not just eating to their favorite TV show or wolfing it down so they can run back to the office. It’s a ritual. It’s a celebration. And to your point, I think they’re consuming those calories more slowly over the course of time.

Sarah: I think it’s really good for you, and I think we have a problem in many countries, US, UK particularly, that we are consuming our lunch in about 20 minutes. We are consuming our dinners similarly in about 30 minutes. And so by eating so fast, you’re not allowing the fullness signals to get to your brain. You are having bigger metabolic responses and we know, again from our own research, that this is associated with poor metabolic health, increased levels of obesity, type two diabetes and so forth. And there’s been research showing if you just slow down the rate that you are eating by 20%, you subconsciously reduce your calorie intake by 15%. And in addition, you get these metabolic effects. And I think that’s what’s so lovely when you hear about the blue zones and this social way of eating that naturally ensures that you slow down anyway because you’re talking. I mean, Jonathan doesn’t have that problem beause he talks so much.

Dan: I have to admit, when I have my minestrone alone, I’m probably done in 10 minutes. How do you slow down practically?

Sarah: So there isn’t an optimum time practically. There’s different ways you can do it. You can have smaller spoons, smaller bowl.

Dan: All right.

Sarah: The biggest, simplest way to do it is to be in a social setting. That’s why I think as well in these blue zones where all of the eating is done, or most of it’s done in that social setting, you are naturally slowing it down. Studies show that if you eat in front of the TV, you eat about 50% more quickly.

Dan: Okay. So recapping. I would say three things. Express gratitude for your food. This is something we saw in Kyoto, that there’s this whole manner of eating where before the first bite people take stock, and all the people who brought the food to their table: the farmer, the person who delivered the food, the person who prepared the food, the person who cooked the food, the person who served the food. And that takes a minute. Sit down with people and make it a social event. If you can, bring food out in stages, the first plate, the second plate, and third plate. And then I like this idea that we don’t have a TV on or we’re not looking at a screen. When we sit down to eat, we just eat and try to taste the food and ponder a second before you go into your second bite.

Gutsy by nature. Smart by science.

Get the deliciously crunchy gut* supplement.

Try Daily30+

Jonathan: Are the old Blue Zones still as healthy as they’ve always been?

Dan: No, they’re under siege. As soon as the American way of eating—convenience, ultra processed food—you see immediately their rates of heart disease and type two diabetes and obesity begin to skyrocket, and you get a commensurate drop in life expectancy. The life expectancy is still going up, but it’s decelerating. And what the scientists are finding is the Blue Zones are kind of the canary in the coal mine. Being able to study them gives us an advanced glimpse of what’s gonna happen to us. Things are happening quicker there. I’d say the corruption of the food environment, because they were isolated until 2000 or 2010, and now it’s hitting hard. Cars are arriving, mechanized convenience is hitting there, and it’s hitting there faster for the young people. Young people want the same thing that kids in America or kids in the UK do, but the older people are hanging on.

So Okinawa is now the least healthy prefecture in Japan. Produced the highest healthy life expectancy in the history of the world, and now it’s the least healthy. But for people over 60, they’re still the healthiest cohort. They’re still the highest concentration of female centenarians in the world. It’s still in Okinawa. Why? Because they still eat the same way. They’re still eating tofu in Goya champurū, their stir fry. They’re still eating sweet potatoes.

Jonathan: And so what’s happened to the younger people?

Dan: They’re drinking Coke and they’re going to McDonald’s and Burger King and KFC. Their habits, their way of eating isn’t solidified. They’re online and they’re getting pushed marketing messages, where the older people don’t have an iPhone. They’re getting together with their Moai and having sake and gossiping together.

Jonathan: And so, Dan, for you, really the introduction of Western processed food is a huge part of that. Moving from the healthiest people to the least healthy people in Japan.

Dan: I’d say it’s 50%, but here’s the cluster. People are constantly looking for the silver bullet and there’s no silver bullet. You have to think a silver buckshot. And there’s essentially five mutually supporting interconnected features to blue zone life.

They’re eating mostly a whole food, plant-based diet. They’re moving naturally. They’re not exercising, but they live in environments where every trip occasions a walk, they have gardens out back, they don’t have mechanical conveniences. They’re getting the equivalent of 10 to 12,000 steps a day without thinking about it.

Number three, their life is underpinned with purpose. They know why they wake up in the morning, and that makes it easier for them to stick to staying active and staying socially and mentally engaged.

They surround themselves with the right people. They’re around people who care about them on a bad day, and they tend to share values. So they reinforce the right diet, they reinforce the downshifting, they reinforce being part of a spiritual community.

And finally, they live in places where the healthy choice is the easy choice. That is the big insight that we miss over and over and over again. It’s a harder way to go about where it’s like on this mouse wheel of we’re gonna adopt this new diet or this new exercise program or supplement or longevity hack. And even if they worked—and they might—we don’t do them for long enough to make a difference. In Blue Zones, again, it’s about the environment. It’s about these five interconnected, mutually supporting facets of their life that keep people doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things for long enough so they don’t develop type two diabetes or cardiovascular disease or 40% of cancers or most of dementia. That’s the secret.

Jonathan: I would like to try and do a little summary and we covered a lot of ground, so hopefully I’ll pick out the key things. The thing that’s most on my mind actually is grumpy people don’t make it to a hundred. I absolutely love that. You said they’re interesting and interested. That if you implement change from the standard American diet, which is a standard western diet to the Blue Zone style diet that you’re talking about, if you’re 20 years old, you can add 10 to 12 years, but even if you’re 80 years old, you can add another three years. This impact is never late.

You’re talking about that when you look at these five blue zones that you’ve been studying now for so long, these people on average had 10 extra years that they were living and this amazing number of people living to a hundred with a quality of life. When you really dig into what they’re doing, there’s a lot of things that are very different from the way in which we are living in the western world. But this being ZOE, I guess I’m focusing particularly on nutrition.

You get this amazing statistic, the average American is eating 110 kilograms of meat and they were on average eating 10. So it’s not that they were vegetarian, but it’s much, much less. And despite all this obsession of getting as much protein and added protein, they weren’t getting this a lot from meat. They are, however, getting it from plants and they all have this diet where they’ve got this combination of plants, which is really effective for getting you all the mix of these amino acids, this healthy protein, and that it’s a grain in a bean, very, very high in whole grains. Actually a lot of the food is coming from these carbohydrates, but very high in fiber and all the polyphenols and everything. Basically no processed foods because they lived before this big food industry had arrived in these places.

They have a lifestyle where they’re tending to go to sleep with the sun and waking up in the sun, and that is having an impact also on their eating duration. So that in general, it’s not like they’re only eating for six hours in the day, but they are generally having 12 to 14 hours when they’re not eating. They’re not snacking. Basically they’re having regular meals in patterns that are quite different between the blue zones. So it’s not like there’s just one magic pattern that everyone has, but they’re living this pattern with other people.

And interesting in almost all of these cases, when they do eat, it’s actually quite a large breakfast. It is not like the one that Kellogg’s taught me I should be having for breakfast. Quite opposite, sounds often like lunch and dinner. And this is your own meal now, this minestrone soup for your breakfast at 11:00 AM. Sarah was explaining that actually doing that is really efficient beause your body can cope with this meal better if you’re having this big meal early rather than later. Even if you start at midday, it’s effect, it’s your first meal, and they’re very much whole foods. So not processed, plant-based, whether it’s beans and rice or minestrone soup.

And the contrast I understood from Sarah is the western diet we eat: you fill yourself up with this thing that’s very processed, your blood sugar spikes through the roof, then collapses, and then of course you’re hungry a few hours later, so you have your snack beforehand. And you wrap all of that up, this is the food in an environment where these things are really social. So instead of "I’m all off eating on my own and I’m living on my own," you gave us these beautiful stories of these centenarians and what was really striking is how sociable they are. I’m gonna remember the cowboy taking his cows out every morning in order to doff his hat to the pretty girl. You are still involved in life.

Dan: There’s a lot of encoded wisdom in the traditional ways of doing things. There’s a reason for it and there’s a reason people have done the same things for centuries or millennia that we ought to pay attention to. I know AI is the great white hope for the infinitely better future, but there’s a lot of value in looking back as well.