Living longer and with a healthy mind and body is pretty much the goal of every human being. But that aspiration is one that many of us find difficult to reach, living in big cities like Los Angeles and struggling to find the time to eat balanced meals and exercise regularly, let alone find the calm and bliss that keeps stress at a minimum.
Enter the “blue zones” concept, first coined about 20 years ago by journalist Dan Buettner. In conjunction with National Geographic and a team of scientists and researchers, he began studying the places around the globe where longevity and high quality of life are thriving.
They identified five places where the residents share lifestyle habits that combine to help many of them live well toward 100 years, while aging with both healthy bodies – and minds as well. Some of those habits are moving naturally every day, having a sense of daily purpose, intentionally shedding stress, eating vegetables over meat and stopping when 80% full, drinking wine with meals and friends and forming social circles that reinforce healthy actions and bring emotional happiness.
“Instead of looking for answers in a test tube or a petri dish, we found real populations where people are living measurably longer,” Buettner tells ETA in an enlightening conversation.
“We really focused on making sure that these places were true longevity hotspots, and then with another team of experts, we did the correlations on the common denominators and what comes up is not at all what people think when it comes to longevity.”
He explains their community successes by pointing out the key differences in blue zone places. “These people aren’t taking any pills or supplements, they’re not on diets and they don’t do exercise in gyms. Instead, it’s a holistic approach to longevity that focuses on not trying to change your behavior, but on shaping your environment, so your unconscious decisions are better on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis for the long term.”
THE FIRST FIVE BLUE ZONES, PLUS NEW HOTSPOTS
Those first five blue zones have stood the test of time, remaining locales where the inherent environment creates something special, an area where Buettner says people are “statistically living up to a decade longer than the rest of us.” They are all across the planet, from Loma Linda in San Bernardino County to Ikaria, a Greek island, and on to another island, Italy’s Sardinia, Japan’s Okinawa archipelago and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.
Meanwhile, as the years have passed, Buettner and his Blue Zones company have helped shift American communities into thinking like the original five. Designing programs to help empower locations to change the actual environment of a city is the goal, and it seems to be working.
“We go to a place, we certify restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, schools and faith-based communities who all agree to change their designs and their policies so that they nudge people into moving more, eating less, eating better, socializing more,” Buettner says. Those initiatives include the beach cities of L.A.’s South Bay, including Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, who collectively got an environmental makeover via Buettner’s Blue Zone Project program starting in 2010.
“Instead of looking for answers in a test tube or a petri dish, we found real populations where people are living measurably longer.”
— Dan Buettner
“Those beach cities in California give us credit for lowering their obesity rates by 20 to 30% and lowering smoking by 36%. And we did it not by hounding everybody – those 125,000 people in the beach cities – but by helping the cities adopt policies that favor the nonsmoker over the smoker, that favor the pedestrian and bicyclists over the motorist, that favor healthy food over junk food and junk food marketing,” he continues, elaborating on how changing the environment of a place fundamentally changes the health and longevity of its citizens. The idea is to make “the healthy choice unconscious, which then raises your life expectancy.”
Other U.S. cities that have benefitted from this approach include Spencer, Iowa; Albert Lea, Minnesota; Klamath Falls, Oregon and Fort Worth, Texas, all reshaping the city itself to create a built-in shift toward wellness.
Buettner suggests that those bigger changes are helped by small ones in your life and inside your home. “It’s really about looking at the environment that you live with from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed at night and engineering them with some defaults and nudges that are going to make you unconsciously make better decisions,” he posits.
It isn’t very complicated, either, to take small steps toward wellness in your life. “Find the ways to set up your home, your workplace, your commute, your social circle, so that the healthy choice is easy. For example, Cornell Food Lab found that you can engineer about 200 calories out of your day by setting up your kitchen by establishing an out-of-the-way junk food drawer, as opposed to putting food on the counter,” he asserts.
“I could tell you, ‘Don’t eat chips, and develop a habit not to eat chips.’ Or I could tell you, ‘Find a drawer that is around the corner in a pantry, or that you have to stoop for or reach up for and put your junk food there, and your consumption is going to go down.’ We’re talking probably single digit percentages with these things, but that adds up enormously over time.”
EXPLORING THE ORIGINAL BLUE ZONES
Loma Linda, California’s blue zone city, is a community known for its medical school and predominated by Seventh-day Adventist followers whose longevity is related to their vegetarianism and devotion to regular exercise. They do not smoke nor drink alcohol and tend to live at least 10 years longer than the average American. This small city also has numerous parks and a large nature preserve, but otherwise doesn’t seem substantially different from other communities found along the 10 freeway about an hour east of Los Angeles, except for the faith-based lifestyle its citizens choose to live by.
Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, on the other hand, is an alluring destination that has leaned heavily into its blue zone designation. This beautiful tropical Pacific Coast region has seen modern development (think paved roads and beachfront resorts) over the 20 years since being named a blue zone, allowing more tourists to come and discover this once-remote part of Central America’s most welcoming country and its blue zone center.
Consider Hotel Nantipa, a little boutique beach hotel found in the small town of Santa Teresa at the very southern tip of the peninsula. There, the focus is on “individualized ‘blue’ wellness journeys,” designed to encourage visitors to explore and engage with the surrounding community. This is exactly the way Dan Buettner says people should visit blue zones, rather than as what he calls a “luxury tourist” who remains in a resort’s cocoon for the whole visit.
“If you go and see these places with an inquisitive mind, as an inquisitive person, really interested in the cultures of the blue zones, you can observe those subtle but powerful environmental components that, when you live in this environment for decades, produces longevity,” he explained.
Buettner is adamant in saying that vacationing in blue zone regions is only valuable if visitors immerse themselves in the local culture, in their rhythm of life. “You’ll get a glimpse of it, you’ll get a glimpse of the social interaction, of the diet. You’ll get a glimpse of the way they move naturally and get physical activity without even thinking about it, because a journey in any direction is a walk uphill or down. Your recreation is going to be walking down to a beach and taking a swim or walking up in the hills. You’re going to eat corn tortillas and beans, drink local wine, stay up late at night, listen to music and maybe dance with locals. That’s a real blue zone.”
Wellness in Okinawa.
A visit to Okinawa might entail three nights overlooking the ocean at Hoshinoya Okinawa, a resort that embraces the area’s blue zone elements, connecting visitors throughout that time in a program that features an immersion in local customs that includes music, weaving, nature walks and dining on plant-based foods.
Or journeying to Ikaria, Greece’s small island in the North Aegean Sea, means finding one of the tiny hotels in small fishing villages that dot the shoreline. Settle in and discover that a perfect day alongside the long-lived locals involves an ocean swim, a Mediterranean-style meal with conversation among friends and a nap. It’s impossible to be here and not embrace their style of living.
Sardinia, also a Mediterranean island (this one under the jurisdiction of Italy) was the first identified blue zone. While there is a genetic quirk in the population (a marker that grants longer life, undiluted by Sardinia’s isolation) the population has also stuck to a traditional, balanced diet made of natural ingredients and foraged, fished or hunted food. Along with a vegetable-heavy diet, and one to two glasses of wine daily, visitors to the island will find that its infrastructure encourages walking very often, making it a perfect balance of blue zone qualities. Sardina ZonaBlu tours promise small visitor groups (no more than eight) access to “ancient wisdom and life rhythms that can only be experienced through mingling with the locals.”
But as Buettner emphasizes, returning home and forgetting the blue zone lessons learned is counterproductive to the goal of living longer while maintaining both physical and mental clarity.
“The average person, if they’re an American, can live somewhere between 10 and 15 extra years. Your body has the capacity to go an extra 10 to 15 years,” he said.
“You deserve those years, and looking for answers in the blue zone, among real people who achieve the outcomes that we all want, is the best place to find those answers and a realistic key to longevity. And remember, it’s about changing your own environment, reshaping our environment so that the healthy choice is unconscious, which then raises your life expectancy.”
- Jenny Peters