Want to Live to 100? Dan Buettner Tells You How | Amanpour and Company

Therefore, tenderness towards the body and mind could also be the secret to living to be one hundred years old. According to Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow and founder of the Blue Zones Project, our wellness initiative launched in more than 40 cities in the United States, also inspired a cookbook called Blue Zones Cooking based on the diet of the people who

live

in these areas and who

live

long, healthy lives and you tell our hari Sreenivasan what exactly makes these places so special, then you have made a career of discovering What is the fundamental characteristic that makes us lead healthy lives?

Long lives to explain the blue zones. What are they? Well, the idea behind blue zones was, in a sense, to reverse engineer longevity. Something called the Danish twin study established that only about 20% of the time we live is dictated by our genes the other 80% is something else lifestyle environment what happens with funding from the National Institutes on Aging and a National Geographic assignment I hired demographers to examine global census data and identify places where people have the highest centenarian rate or have the highest middle-aged life expectancy—in fact, right now, mortality infantile and so on, and then once identified, these places brought another team of experts there to try to analyze, try to find the correlations. or the common denominators of longevity in these disparate parts of the world, so between Okinawa, Sardinia and Loma Linda, California, what do all these people have in common?

Number one. I just finished a book on this topic doing a meta-analysis of your diet. The four pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains, sometimes corn, rice, wheat, vegetables, most of the vegetables that we overlook in the United States, but vegetables that, like You know, we would pull from our backyard, they make delicious salads and pies. of them root vegetables and sweet potatoes, and then I would say that the most important longevity food in the world is beans or beans, the beans of all the caipirinhas, about a cup of beans a day will probably add three or four more years to their life expectancy, so other than the food going into their bodies, there is no specific magical exercise, they are not watching the same Richard Simmons video, that's me, no, it's surprising and by the way, I would say that exercise has been an absolute public health failure mmm, less than 20%. of Americans get enough exercise, but in the blue zones less and some of them less than 1% of people were ever obese here in the United States, 70% or are so overweight that they don't do it intentionally, but do it they do it every time they do it. they go to work or to a friend's house or go out to eat, occasionally they go for a walk, they have a garden in the back, so every day, until they are 80, 90 and hundreds of years old, they move gently, weeding, watering or harvesting .

They do not have all the mechanical comforts. who have eliminated physical activity from our lives there is no one button to press for gardening and another button to press for housework and another button to press for cooking or they are still kneading bread by hand and making things by hand and it's With this idea of ​​moving naturally throughout the day, my team estimates that they're pushed to move every 20 minutes, so they're burning calories, they're just not going to the gym to do it, they're burning more calories than they would in thirty minutes. the gym, but the most important thing is that the metabolism is kept at a higher rate because they move all the time you said in your office for more than an hour and a half, your metabolism falls into a state of hibernation by the way, on average , people go even people say they go to the gym, they go less than twice a week and then what about this kind of social aspect?

In my book Blue Zones, I actually identified nine common denominators and they essentially fall into four categories, they move naturally and are sacred on a daily basis. Rituals to reverse the stress of everyday life A stress triggers something called inflammation and if you are always stressed it becomes chronic inflammation which is the root of all major age-related diseases, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, even dementia , so the inhabitants of Okinawa have veneration for their ancestors. They take a few moments to remember where the Acadians come from and Korea is another of the Blue Zones and the Costa Ricans Nicoya are taking a nap the Adventists are praying they start each meal with prayer they wake up and and In Sardinia there is only happy hour, but anyway So there's a moment every day where you just slow down and let the stress reverse course a little, so do they and for an hour they argue that this is the most important thing they connect with and not necessarily intentionally.

You live in communities where you gather in social spaces, so the option to implode at home on your device doesn't really exist if you don't show up to church for the town festival, someone is knocking on your door, they answer. To put family first, and interestingly enough, in almost all Blue Zones, when you see people get to a hundred, they have a committed, solid, very focused social circle of three to five friends. In some places like Okinawa, it is culturally determined that they are called mo sage mo. It's smarter for them to make these commitments early in their lives than I am, so when you're traditionally five or so your parents take you to the village, you meet four or five other people, the ceremony happens and that's what you're supposed to do.

You're supposed to travel through life together when things are going well, a good harvest or a raise, you're supposed to share it in the same way, oh wow, things are going bad, yeah, and we hear a lot about these social determinants of health. and it's already 15 years after I wrote the book, but they are so important that loneliness, if you don't have at least three friends that you can turn to on a bad day, reduces your life expectancy by eight years, it's so bad like smoking, so these things that I've overlooked because they seem too subtle to make a difference, really come to the fore when you study longevity populations, so you're talking about almost the opposite of 5,000 friends on Facebook .

I have three real friends II in call or who have the ability to support you emotionally, that's right, in fact, with National Geographic we created a happiness questionnaire called the true happiness test, which lasts about five minutes, but we asked the question about satisfaction with life and then how much time people spend. spending on social media and you see it's a very clear curve, people who are not on social media at all are not optimally happy until about 45 minutes seems to be the sweet spot and after a day suggesting that people who are using maybe just for a bit of brain break or to connect with some friends so they can meet up later in real life, but it's very clear after two hours of social media use, happiness falls off a cliff and the less happy people are there eight hours a day, so let's talk a little bit about how you're taking all this knowledge that you've learned through these explorations through these blue zone books and now you're applying it to different American cities that are willing and interested in trying to almost hack their results so let's talk about how that happened.

I'm going to tell you something now that it took me eight out of eight years to figure it out in populations where people live a long time, it's never because they tried, they never pursued any of the nonsense that we try to know that they don't follow diets or exercise programs, supplements, the longevity occurred. These centenarians have no more idea of ​​how they got to be a hundred years old than a tall man knows how he got to be tall, so they are simply products of his environment. They live in places where making healthy choices is not just easier or inevitable, so this idea that longevity ensues became the organizing principle in 2009.

I got funding from AARP and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health to try to make an American Blue. Zone and the idea here is not to try to convince an entire city of individuals to change behavior at which you will fail; It has never happened in the history of the world that you get an entire population to follow the same diet or exercise program, but we work to optimize city policy, we certify restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces in schools and we get a critical mass of people receive it to optimize their home and social network, but in all cases these are permanent or semi-permanent changes in the living environment, so people do not think about anything. pushed towards better behavior throughout the day and works fabulously.

Oh, give me some examples, let's go through that list here. One was how business communities change, but let's focus on the workplace where everyone spends eight or ten hours a day. It is a huge task. part of how they perceive happiness in their life so how do you certify a business that is going to contribute to someone's greater longevity or happiness? To start, think about how you get to work. We know that someone who takes public transportation or walks is about eleven percent less likely to die from heart disease than someone who drives their car every day, so in a Blue Zone-certified workplace, such You may pay for your own parking, but you will receive a subsidy if you take a bus, and in some blue zones.

In the workplace, they actually pay their employees to walk or bike five dollars a day, which is better than going to the gym, since we talked about food environments when you're eating at work, are there some Plant-based options or is it all pieces? hamburgers, so we help them change the defaults and then, very important, the biggest determinant of whether or not an employee is happy at work is yes or no, how much to pay him now, how much you promote him, but if or she has a best friend at work, so we have these techniques to bring employees together, organize them around their interest in their values, and then challenge them to walk and eat plant-based meals together, it works fantastically well, so if an employer does That, we give it to you.

However, it is important to realize that you cannot rely on the microenvironment alone, but rather you have to think about orchestrating the perfect storm of policies, places and people for at least five to ten years and changing that entire rate of life of the entire that city. comprehensively with enough intensity before you start to see a difference, so let's say, for example, that in that

company

, if you are encouraging people to take public transportation, there has to be public transportation options in that city there yourself or if you are encouraging them. bike to work, hopefully, there are bike lanes in that city, so how do you change all those policies or encourage all those policies to work with cities and we're not working with 50 cities, including Fort Worth Texas, Orlando Florida and Austin Texas?

They see the City Council in the mayor with policy packages, they are essentially menus. We've learned that the quickest way to get shown out of town is to try to tell people what to do, but when you resign from city council, there are 25 different tests. ways based on changing that city so that the active option is the easy option to move to, it turns out that seven or eight of them are feasible and effective and our team is really good at driving that type of consensus by identifying the low-cost cities. hanging fruits seven or eight policies and then my team is responsible for making sure those policies are implemented.

A couple of really good examples in the United States, each street is redone every seven years on average, so you can have really wide lanes, high speed limits, traffic lights. far away or you can build wide sidewalks a bike lane you can narrow traffic lanes that slow down traffic less accidents less less pollution in the air and begin to favor the streets for human beings favor the human being instead of only favoring the car and if it favors to the human being, the human being comes and you can raise the physical activity level of an entire city by up to 30 percent just by optimizing the built environment, yeah, and then when you think about this for the type of climate of the counters beans, you're the treasurer of a city or you're the CFO of a

company

, all of these things make a cost difference when people are healthier or happier, is it less expensive in the long run?

So look at the macro picture: We spend $3.7 trillion a year on largely preventable diseases in the United States, which is 18% of GDP, and that number continues to rise, making it unsustainable. In Fort Worth, Texas, our work led to an approximately six percent drop in the obesity rate, approximatelya three percent drop in smoking and Gao up, we don't measure ourselves. Gallup Measurements. Gallup estimates that, on average, every year we've been there for the last two years, we've saved the city about a quarter of a billion dollars in projected health care costs, but that took us five years to get there, but now he is paying.

For an employer like General Motors, their second largest item, behind steel, is their healthcare costs, so an employer loves the idea that healthcare costs can be reduced by optimizing the environment. How can you help people figure out how? Do I make a sustainable change in my life that contributes to my happiness or longevity? So when it comes to happiness, to put it simply, if happiness were a cake recipe and some of the ingredients are: you need food, you need shelter, you need medical care. you need some mobility you need some education you know about a university in less than a university education you

want

to associate with the right person it is very important you need a sense of purpose or meaning in your life and a feeling of giving back, but the variable with the greatest variability, in other words, the most important ingredient in that cake recipe is where you live.

What I

want

to say here is that if you are not happy with where you live, the most effective thing you can do is move to a happier place and we know this because when you follow immigrants from unhappy places like Moldova moving to happy Denmark or to unhappy places in Africa and moved to a relatively happy Canada within a year, their happiness increases to the level of their adopted home their sex does not change their age does not change much their sexual preference their education or religion none of the fundamentals of their life really changed except they moved so the point here again is if you want to get healthier or happier, don't try to change your behavior, that will almost always fail for almost all people.

Ultimately, it changes your environment, and there are many statistically supported ways to optimize your environment to support both longevity and happiness, even if you can't move. You can still change your environment, yes, my grandmother used to tell me, show me your friends, I will tell you your future, so if your three best friends are obese and overweight, there is a 150 percent greater chance that you will be overweight too , smoking is contagious, drug use. junk food is contagious Edie is contagious unhappiness is contagious so proactively surround yourself with three or four friends whose idea of ​​recreation is playing tennis or walking or biking some friends who are vegetarians you're not always eating hamburgers and ribs and at least one couple of friends who worry about you on a bad day, that is the litmus test when you feel bad and have said goodbye.

Can you call this person and they will come to see you or lend you money when you don't have money, so taking care of that social environment is very important. Okay, Dan Buettner. Thank you very much for joining us. It was a pleasure.