Chasing Life

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.

She's also author of the book, Attention Span, a groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity.

Next week on Chasing Life, I'm talking with Dr. Anthony Fauci about his new book, On Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service.

Pollan used psychedelics in the process of writing his book, How to Change Your Mind.

He is the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics, Molecular Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Dr. Hotez also wrote a book called, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism. It's a really personal account of his daughter's autism diagnosis and it lays out the overwhelming scientific evidence that it had nothing to do with vaccines.

The book was a forceful response to many in the anti-vaccine movement who falsely believe there is a connection between autism and vaccines.

when I die I don't want friends to be the first thing that's mentioned I want that helping other addicts to be the first thing that's mentioned and I'm going to live the rest of my life proving that

I would like to be remembered as somebody who lived well loved well was a seeker and his paramount thing is that he wants to help people that's what I want

He has this book called Myth of Normal, where he makes the case that our understanding of trauma is all wrong. And that many more of us than you might think are living with trauma.

He goes so far as to say that he believes trauma is the root cause of many diseases, including things like addiction in our society.

As Mat writes in The Myth of Normal, quote, the past hijacks and co-ops the present, again and again.

He basically is saying that trauma is literally making us sick.

In other words, Jack Bankstead, the newest scientist, he wrote a book called The Archaeology of the Mind.

It's the idea of somebody being trapped, like the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel and The Shining.

He's written a book called Eat to Beat Disease, which explains how certain foods can heal or harm our bodies.

What these foods do is essentially starve tiny cancers and prevent them from being able to grow larger by stopping those extra blood vessels from growing.

Stephen King has written some of my all-time favorite books. The Stand, It, Misery.

Violence and jealousies permeated their relationship.

Maddie and John both craved attention and excitement. They always needed to be the best dressed when they went out,

Tom O'Shea taught his students to love Hemingway and Wendell and Brooks and also how to deliver a good left hook.

And that's why I wrote about it in my book. I follow four patients and Maybe You Should Talk To Someone.

I follow their stories. But I put myself as the fifth patient in the book because I wanted people to see that I do the same things when I go to therapy.

George W. Bush tells a story where he read The Great Influenza and called Fran Townsend and basically says we've got to do something potentially about the risk of a pandemic.

Stephen King has written some of my all-time favorite books. The Stand, It, Misery.

In other words, Jack Bankstead, the newest scientist, he wrote a book called The Archaeology of the Mind.

She's a Stanford University lecturer and a health psychologist. She's a group fitness instructor and she's also author of the book, The Joy of Movement, how exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection and courage.

It's about joy. It's about embracing joy as not something that is frivolous or self-indulgent or out of reach until your life is perfect and free of problems. It's really about embracing the capacity for joy as something that affirms the value of life and helps us connect with others and is a way to find meaning even when life is difficult.

She's a professor of neuroscience at New York University, and she's also author of the book Good Anxiety.

I tragically I lost both my father, who was in his 80s and he had dementia. But also my 50 year old brother died of a heart attack in the middle of writing my book.

Oh, my Good Anxiety. And I thank you.

It was, of course, I stopped writing the book. I can't think of anxiety, Good Anxiety right now. I was mourning. It was it was the worst time I've ever gone through.

And I realized in going through that, that that difficult time and all of that grief and the waves of grief that came over that. The grief was so bad because the love was so strong.