Author Dan Buettner who is the founder of Blue Zones and host of Netflix’s Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, joins me to share how you can live to 100 through eating a plant-based diet on The Plantbased Business Hour.
Specifically we discuss
1. how to live longer and healthier,
2. the American health crisis.
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: I am recording today from the gorgeous and beautiful Santa Barbara Four Seasons. We’re back with Dan Buettner, founder of Blue Zones.
Dan Buettner: We’ve flattened off and we’re headed towards a country where fifty percent of us are obese and that’s because of what we eat. The capacity of the human machine- so everybody listening out there right now, if you do everything right and you have an average set of genes, you should make it into your mid-nineties. And life expectancy here is more like eighty so we’re leaving thirteen to fourteen years of life expectancy on the table that we could be getting. And those would be good years.
A lot of people say, “well I don’t want to live that long,” but the reality is that the longer you’ve lived, the healthier you’ve been. I can put that another way too. The cohort of people who die in their sixties suffer about eight or nine years of disability called morbidity. The cohort of people who die at one hundred only suffer about nine months of morbidity.
Elysabeth: So that was going to be another question I was going to ask you because the Blue Zones Kitchen is a hundred recipes to live to one hundred and originally before talking to Dan I said, “do I really want to live to one hundred?” Is that your goal, Dan? You want to live to a hundred?
Dan Buettner: I wouldn’t say it’s a goal but I probably am on a path. So right now, as I said before, the best you can expect given an average set of genes is about ninety three for a male and maybe ninety five for a female. But since 1840 life expectancy for humans has gone up two years per decade. So given that I’m middle-aged I should have four more decades left. I should get eight bonus years on top of my ninety two so making it to a hundred I think is realistic.
Elysabeth: Okay, this is the goal. You’re talking like an athlete. You’re in the range. You’re shooting for it.
Dan Buettner: Yeah, I guess I am.
Elysabeth: Well, okay, let’s not keep people waiting. When you started looking into the blue zones there were already three established cities I think that were living the longest around the world and were sort of established blue zones and you went ahead and found two more. Is that right?
Dan Buettner: Well actually when I started there were no established blue zones. There was a paper in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology that referenced an area in Sardinia that scientists were calling this one area a blue zone. Nobody knew about it. I had the idea of taking the term and applying it. I went into the scientific literature and I found this place, Okinawa, that had the highest concentration of women over sixty that made it to a hundred. And then Loma Linda, California among the adventists where people are living about seven or eight years longer and I basically named them as a blue zone and wrote a cover story for National Geographic about those three places.
The idea was to find the common denominators that explain longevity in those three places. That book was a big hit. The magazine article was a big hit. So then I hired demographers to go out and look for more blue zones and we found Costa Rica near the Nicoya Peninsula and then finally the island of Icaria, Greece. And in all of those places people are not only living a long time but they’re staying healthy into their nineties and even hundreds in some cases. And remarkably in Icaria, they suffer about one tenth the rate of dementia that we do here in the United States. So their bodies are not only healthy but their minds stay sharp until the end which is what we want.
Elysabeth: Yeah and this is a huge concern for people as Dr. Ornish has talked about, perhaps reversing Alzheimer’s, this is very new research, not well established yet, with a plant-based diet. But there’s more and more Alzheimer’s, as I understand it, coming to us at an earlier age even and I know it’s a big concern for people. So you’re saying that people are living not just physically healthier but mentally they are staying sharp.
Dan Buettner: In blue zones. Meanwhile in the United States in the last twenty years or so, the rate of dementia has almost doubled. And it’s just so clear that heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, many types of cancer especially cancers of the digestive tract, diabetes, dementia, they all have a root cause in what we’re eating: Ultra processed foods, meaty, sweet, crappy food. As we eat more and more of it we get sicker and sicker but we don’t want to acknowledge it.
Elysabeth: And the frustrating thing here is that it’s totally within our control. You know a lot of people say, “well it’s genetics” or “these things just happen and we don’t know how.” But actually we really do and it’s all in our control and we have the ability to reverse it.
Dan Buettner: Yes, I mean theoretically it’s in our control. For enlightened people like you and the guests on your program, but if you’re a single mother living in Iowa and you’re supposed to go into the community and make the healthy choice for your family, if you haven’t been educated- ninety seven out of a hundred choices that you’re confronted with are bad. They have convenience stores and ShopCo and Burger King and Pizza Hut and Godfathers and it’s almost impossible to find healthy plant-based food that’s not ultra processed too. This is going to be disruptive, but if you’re overweight in this country it’s probably not your fault.
Elysabeth: Yes, I know what you’re saying, that there is a social injustice component to it that you have been marketed to to such an extreme that there’s no way out of it for you if you are in certain parts of the country. Would you say that this is intentional from the government?
Dan Buettner: No, it is a byproduct of overinnovation. Until 1960 there weren’t enough calories to feed every American. Earl Butz who was Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, he’s the guy who created this system that favors corn and wheat and soybeans and sugar beets and the sort of distribution system to make those cheap and ubiquitous. And then it’s marketing companies. It’s American ingenuity that take those cheap inputs. They turn them into Frosted Flakes or feed them to animals to turn them into wieners and hamburgers and then they spend marketing dollars and they create a huge profit.
It’s not a conspiracy but it’s more like that old experiment if you throw a frog into boiling water it will leap out. If you throw a frog into lukewarm water and turn up the water one degree at a time it will just become complacent and die. That’s what’s happening to us in America. In 1980 there was a third of the rate of obesity that we have right now. There was about a seventh the rate of diabetes. And that’s not because people were more enlightened back then or they had more discipline or they had better diet plans. It’s because the food environment was very different then.
Elysabeth: Right, and exercise was different as well? I think people were moving around more?
Dan Buettner: Perhaps. I think it’s mostly food.
Elysabeth: You think it’s just straight diet. Okay so let’s talk about the diet habits of those in the blue zones countries, those that live the longest. I was surprised to find that there’s some alcohol there.
Dan Buettner: Rats!
Elysabeth: Or it’s good, you never know. And coffee was in there. I was surprised about that one as well. So of course I knew that meat wouldn’t be in it and dairy wouldn’t be in it, but let’s talk about the list.
Dan Buettner: Yes, so the idea behind the Blue Zone Kitchen was to find an average of what people were eating for the last hundred years in all five blue zones. And to do that we had to find dietary surveys that went back to the twenties because if you want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be a hundred you have to know what she was eating when she was a little girl and a teenager and newly married and middle-aged and newly retired. You can’t just ask a one-hundred-year old, “what are you eating?” because they don’t remember.
So on the average, people are eating ninety to ninety-five percent plant-based. The five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains. This sort of shocks the anti-gluten crowd because you clearly see wheat in the Mediterranean blue zones, corn in the Latin American blue zones, and rice in the Asian blue zones. Greens of all kinds. Greens that we would weed wack from our backyard, they’re making beautiful salads and pies out of them. Tubers, potatoes but especially sweet potatoes.
Elysabeth: And the skins of sweet potatoes.
Dan Buettner: Yes, purple sweet potatoes in Okinawa known as imo which was about sixty percent of their dietary intake until about 1970. And then nuts. Nuts of every kind. And then the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. If you’re eating about a cup of beans a day it’s probably worth about four extra years of life expectancy.
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