Longevity Secrets (And Controversies) From The Blue Zones | Dan Buettner

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris.
Today, we're diving into the secrets and also the controversies of the so-called Blue Zones. If you haven't heard of the Blue Zones, these are the places on the planet where people apparently live the longest and healthiest lives. My guest, Dan Buettner, has been playing a huge role in exploring and publicizing and popularizing the Blue Zones.
Dan is an explorer, National Geographic fellow, and a journalist. He's written a series of best-selling books, including The Blue Zones of Happiness and The Blue Zones Kitchen. He's also the host of the Netflix show Live to 100 In this conversation, we talk about the origin story of the Blue Zones, the nine common denominators, or the power nine when it comes to longevity, the surprising information about much maligned foods such as pasta and bread, why trying to pursue good health can actually work against you, why the single most important factor in longevity is not advertised on Instagram, tips for integrating Blue Zones wisdom into your daily life, including designing a life where you move more naturally, and some of the critiques and controversies surrounding Dan's work. I should say this episode originally aired back in June of 2024, but we're bringing it back because it was an audience favorite, and there are so many actionable tips here that I think you can put to use right away. One update on the critiques I mentioned. Two of Dan's collaborators on the original Blue Zones project published a rebuttal of the criticism in December 2025 So I'm going to put a link both to the rebuttal and to the original paper that called into question some of the Blue Zones methodology. We'll get started with Dan Buettner right after this.

**Dan Buettner** (1:47)
It's a delight. Let's just say I'm even more than 10% happier being here.

**Dan Harris** (1:53)
I'm happy to hear that. We'll see how you... We'll come back to you at the end and see what the percentage is.
Let me just ask you about the origin story of the Blue Zones. How did this whole thing get started?

**Dan Buettner** (2:07)
In a previous business, I was solving two mysteries a year. I had a whole staff, 14 people. We had a big subscription base.
I was looking for a good mystery to solve. Most of our mysteries had been like, why did the ancient Maya civilization collapse? Or did Marco Polo really go to China?
We were hired by the Japanese government to find a mystery in Japan. We looked at Bronze Age cultures and so forth. It was actually my brother, Nick, who was working for me at the time, stumbled upon a report from the World Health Organization that showed that Okinawa Japan was producing the longest lived disability-free people in the world. And I said, aha, now there's a good mystery. And in 1999, we did our first expedition there. We were there for about 10 days. And I was absolutely hooked because I was meeting people in their 90s and hundreds that were functioning like, you know, 60 year olds in the United States. And I, of course, in a facile way, I was able to look at how, you know, but when I was out of that business, I sold it and went back to National Geographic with some ideas and suggested that if there are long lived people in Okinawa, there must be long lived people in Europe and Asia and maybe Latin America or even Africa. And I got an assignment back in the days when National Geographic gave you nine months to write one article. And I got funding from the National Institutes on Aging to do it right. And to do it right means you hire demographers to find places where people are truly living a long time. And then since only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes, if we found places where populations were living longer, and I'm talking eight to ten years longer than we do in the United States, we had a perfect study group to look for correlations and combinator denominators. And that is a very long answer to a simple question.

**Dan Harris** (4:21)
That was not a long answer. You can go longer if you want. Essentially, you and your team found what are now called Blue Zones, which are areas around the planet where apparently people are living longer.

**Dan Buettner** (4:35)
I would go beyond apparently. It is a mathematical fact that they have lived longer over the last century and a half.
And we working with demographers, we're able to look at swaths of the population, say 100 to 150 years ago, look at a swath of birth and follow those births for 100 years or more. And correct for immigration and emigrate and find statistically, empirically where people are living the longest and that's what Blue Zones are.