5 daily habits of people who live longer | Dan Buettner

**Jonathan Wolf** (0:00)
Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.
Would you like to stay healthy until you're 100? For most of us, the answer is of course, yes. But is it achievable? Do you need to become a biohacker or take 43 expensive supplements every morning? Perhaps a meat-only diet or a weekly celery juice cleanse will do the trick. While there's a lot of conflicting information on social media, it's worth noting that longevity influences are never anywhere near 100 years old. So does anyone have any real answers? The answer is yes. Today, I'm joined by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow, best-selling author and founder of the Blue Zones Project. He has spent decades studying regions where people routinely live beyond 100 without a biohacking influencer in sight. So how do they do it? We're also joined by Professor Sarah Berry, a world leader in large-scale human nutritional studies, a professor in nutrition at King's College London and chief scientist at ZOE. In this episode, we'll learn about the morning routines of genuine centenarians, the name for people who actually have lived for more than 100 years. And by the end of the episode, we'll have some simple tips to help you start your day like you live in a Blue Zone and increase your chances of living healthily to 100 Dan, thank you for joining me today.

**Dan Buettner** (1:38)
It's a total delight.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:40)
It's wonderful to have you back. And Sarah, thank you for being here.

**Sarah Berry** (1:43)
Pleasure.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:44)
So, Dan, hopefully you remember, we always like to kick this show off with a rapid fire Q&A with questions from our listeners. With the strict rules, yes or no or a sentence if you have to.

**Dan Buettner** (1:56)
Okay.

**Jonathan Wolf** (1:57)
Can small lifestyle changes increase my chances of living to 100?

**Dan Buettner** (2:02)
Yes.

**Sarah Berry** (2:03)
Are diet and exercise the only things you need to live a long life?

**Dan Buettner** (2:07)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:08)
Are the Blue Zones slowly disappearing?

**Dan Buettner** (2:11)
Some of them are.

**Sarah Berry** (2:13)
Are people in the Blue Zones always vegetarian?

**Dan Buettner** (2:16)
No.

**Jonathan Wolf** (2:17)
And finally, what's the biggest misconception that you hear about the Blue Zones?

**Dan Buettner** (2:22)
That it's a noun. It's actually a verb. The thing is that 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 2 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.

**Jonathan Wolf** (3:00)
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 Buettner** (3:14)
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 percent of how long we live as a population is dictated by our genes, 80 percent 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. So we found five of these so-called Blue Zones, the longest-lived men in the world in Sardinia, Italy, the longest-lived women, Okinawa, Japan, in the Nakoya 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 Adventists living in and around Loma Linda, California. And so these are places where people are enjoying ten extra good years, 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, their environment. And that's been the basis now of six New York Times bestsellers and an Emmy Award-winning Netflix documentary.

**Jonathan Wolf** (4:38)
And why are they called Blue Zones?

**Dan Buettner** (4:40)