The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer Lessons From the Healthiest Places on Earth

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Blue Zones have been very influential in the nutrition and lifestyle medicine space. So the idea behind Blue Zones is that these are sort of pockets around the world where people have an unusually long lifespan compared to others.

Dan Buettner is a person who became famous for effectively riding their bicycle lots of interesting places and founding a company, a marketing company off the back of that.

And so he's gone out and found Loma Linda. I should add, the CDC measures Loma Linda for life expectancy, and it's pretty average.

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In 2008, published his book called Secrets of the Blue Zones or something like that, with these kind of instructions around eating beans and drinking red wine.

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Do you ever see Life in the Blue Zones? I don't know. What is that?

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In Dan's new book that I have right now, The Blue Zone Secrets for Living Longer, Lessons from the Healthiest Places on Earth, Dan talks about his travels and journeys of living and learning from people all over the world that we'll dive into today.

I want you to grab a copy of this book. It beautifully synthesizes and summarizes really complex and difficult ideas and really, really simple and beautiful ones in a way that you can practice them and bring them to life in yours and the people you love.

It's so beautiful because when we met, you'd been dedicated to this work for so long already. The fact that it's now having another resurgence and it's becoming even more mainstream, which I love because I think these ideas need to be mainstream.

I want to dive into some of these areas because I want to give people a small tour of this beautiful book that you've created.

The book is called The Blue Zone, Secrets for Living Longer, Lessons from the Healthiest Places on Earth. Dan Buettner, this is the book. Make sure you go grab a copy.

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Ben's wife, Liz Lito, Ben couldn't sleep one night and she had my book Blue Zones.

And Ben reads my book Blue Zones.

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Liz says to Ben, here, read this is a good book.

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You know, in Blue Zones, nobody exercises. There's no CrossFit, there's no yoga class, no Pilates class, nobody's running the... there's no Blue Zone marathon. But they live in communities where every time they go to work, a friend's house, or out to eat, it occasions a walk. They're taking about 8,000 steps a day without even thinking about it.

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bestselling author of The Blue Zones.

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He studies longevity and he coined the term blue zones to help describe places where people live the healthiest and longest lives.

One of those places is the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.

Well, first of all, they're eating a Mesoamerican staple diet or they have for most of their life, which consists of three foods.

I argue it's the best diets humans have ever invented. Corn, beans and squash. You bring those three foods together, anybody can afford them.

A lot of tropical fruits. Everybody had a garden around their homes full of papaya and mango and pipayan.

And year round they were eating tropical fruits.

None of these centenarians have driven.

They've walked their whole lives. They have an outsized sense of family, outsized sense of religion.

Most of them are very religious, which gives them a sense of purpose, but also a healthy community to rally around.

And I think increasingly we're realizing that we need to look at preventing, looking upstream and preventing disease in the first place.

And that's what, you know, people in blue zones are living a long time because they're not getting the diseases that foreshorten our lives like diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, cancers of the GI tract.

And now we're even finding much lower rates of dementia.

So we ought to be paying attention to these places who manifestly are doing it better than America at a fraction of the cost that we spend trying to stay healthy.

Whole foods, exercise, community, gratitude.