Something called the Danish Twin Study
established that only about 10% of how
long the average person lives, within
certain biological limits, is dictated by
our genes. The other 90% is dictated by
our lifestyle, so the premise of Blue
Zone is if we can find the optimal
lifestyle of longevity, we can come up
with a de facto formula for longevity.
But, if you ask the average American what
the optimal formula of longevity is, they
probably couldn't tell you. They've
probably heard of the South Beach diet,
or the Atkins diet, and you have the USDA
food pyramid, there's what Oprah tells us,
there's what Dr. Oz tells us. The fact of
the matter is, there's a lot of confusion
around what really helps us live longer
better. Should you be running marathons
or doing yoga? Should you eat organic
meats or should you be eating tofu? When
it comes to supplements, should you be
taking them? How about these hormones or
resveratrol? And, does purpose play into it,
spirituality? And how about how we
socialize? Our approach to finding
longevity was to team up with National
Geographic and the National Institute on
Aging to find the four demographically
confirmed areas that are geographically
defined, and then bring a team of experts
in there to methodically go through
exactly what these people - to distill
down the cross-cultural distillation.
At the end of this, I'm going to tell you
what that distillation is but first, I'd
like to debunk some common myths when it
comes to longevity. The first myth is
if you try really hard, you can live to
be 100. False. The problem is: only about
one out of 5,000 people in America
live to be a hundred. Your chances
are very low, even though it's the
fastest growing demographic in America,
it's hard to reach 100. The problem is
that we are not programmed for longevity
We are programmed for something called
procreative success. I love that word, it
reminds me of my college days.
Biologists term procreative success to
to mean the age where you have children
and then another generation, the age when
your children have children. After that,
the effect of evolution completely
dissipates. If you're a mammal, if you're
a rat, or an elephant, or a human, or in
between, it's the same story. So, to make
it to age 100, you not only have to have
had a very good lifestyle, you also have
to have won the genetic lottery. The
second myth is there are treatments that
can help slow, reverse, or even stop aging.
False. When you think of it, there's 99
things that can age us. Deprive your
brain of oxygen for just a few minutes,
those brain cells die, they never come
back. Play tennis too hard on your knees,
ruin your cartilage, that cartilage never
comes back. Our arteries can clog, our
brands can gunk up with plaque, and we
can get Alzheimer's. There's just too
many things to go wrong. Our bodies have
35 trillion cells. Trillion with a T.
We're talking national debt numbers here.
Those cells turn themselves over once
every eight years, and every time they
turn themselves over, there's some damage,
and that damage builds up, and it builds
up exponentially. It's a little bit like
the days when we all had Beatles albums
or Eagles albums and we'd make a copy of
that on a cassette tape and then let our
friends copy that cassette tape, and
pretty soon, with successive generations,
that tape sounds like garbage.
Well, the same things happened to
ourselves. That's why a 65 year old
person is aging at a rate of about 125
times faster than a 12 year old person.
So, if there's nothing you can do to slow
your aging or stop your aging, what am I
doing here? Well, the fact of the matter
is the best science tells us that the
capacity of the human body-my body, your
body-is about 90 years, a little bit more
for a women. But, life expectancy in this
country is only 78. So, somewhere along
the line, we're leaving about 12 good
years on the table.
These are years
that we could get, and
research shows that they would
be yours largely free of chronic
disease, heart disease, cancer, and
diabetes. We think the best way to get
these missing years is to look at the
cultures around the world that are
actually experiencing them-areas where
people are living to age 100 at rates up
to 10 times greater than we are, areas
where the life expectancy is an extra
dozen years and the rate of middle-aged
mortality is a fraction of what it is in
this country. We found our first "blue
zone" about 125 miles off the coast of
Italy on the island of Sardinia-and not
the entire island, the island's about 1.4
million people-but only up in the
highlands, an area called the Nuoro
province. Here, we have this area
where men live the longest, about ten
times more centenarians than we have
here in America. This is a place
where people not only reach age 100, they
do so with extraordinary vigor, places
where 102 year olds still ride their
bike to work, chop wood, and can beat a
guy 60 years younger than them. Their
history actually goes back to about the
time of Christ, it's actually a Bronze
Age culture that's been isolated. Because
the land is so infertile, they're largely
shepherds which occasions regular low
intensity physical activity. Their diet
is mostly plant-based, accentuated with
foods that they can carry into the
fields. They came up with an unleavened
whole-wheat bread called nota música
made out of durum wheat, a type of cheese
made from grass-fed animals so it's
high in omega-3 fatty acids
instead of omega-6 fatty acids from
corn-fed animals, and a type of wine that
has three times the level of polyphenols
than any known wine in the world,
it's called Cannonau. But, the real secret
I think lies more in the way that they
organize their society, and one of the
most salient elements of the Sardinian
society is how they treat older people.
You ever notice here in America, social
equity seems to peak at about age 24?
Just look at the advertisements. Here in
Sardinia, the older you get, the more
equity you have, the more wisdom you're
celebrated for. You go into the bars in
Sardinia and instead of seeing the Sports
Illustrated swimsuit calendar, you see
the centenarian of the month calendar.
This, as it turns out, is not only good
for your aging parents, to keep them
close to the family, it imparts about
four to six years of extra life
expectancy. Research shows it's also good
for the children of those families who
have lower rates of mortality and lower
rates of disease. That's called the
grandmother effect. We found our second
Blue Zone on the other side of the
planet about eight hundred miles south
of Tokyo on the archipelago of Okinawa.
Okinawa is actually 161 small islands,
and in the northern part of the main
island, this is ground zero for world
longevity. This is the place where the
oldest living female population is found.
It's a place where people have the
longest disability-free life expectancy
in the world. They have what we want. They
live a long time and tend to die in
their sleep very quickly, and often, I can
tell you, after sex. They live about seven
good years longer than the average
American five, times as many centenarians
as we have in America, 1/5 the rate
of colon and breast cancer-big killers
here in America-and 1/6 the rate of
cardiovascular disease. The fact that
this culture has yielded these numbers
suggests strongly they have something to
teach us. What do they do? Once again, a
plant-based diet full of vegetables with
lots of color in them, and they eat about
eight times as much tofu as Americans do.
More significant than what they eat is
how they eat it. They have all kinds of
little strategies to keep from
overeating which, as you know, is a big
problem here in America. A few of the
strategies we observe: they eat off of
smaller plates, they tend to eat fewer
calories at every sitting, instead of
serving family style where you can sort
of mindlessly eat as you're talking, they
serve at the counter, put the food away,
and then bring it to the table. They also
have a 3,000 year old adage
which I think is the greatest
diet suggestion ever invented, it was
invented by Confucius, and that diet is
known as the Hara Hachi bu diet. It's
simply a little saying these people say
before
to remind them to stop eating when their
stomach is 80 percent full. It takes
about a half hour for that full feeling
to travel from your belly to your
brain, and by remembering to stop at 80
percent, it helps keep you from doing
that very thing. But, like Sardinia,
Okinawa has a few social constructs that
we can associate with longevity. We know
that isolation kills. 15 years ago, the
average American had three good friends.
We're down to one and a half right now.
If you were lucky enough to be born in
Okinawa, you were born into a system
where you automatically have a half a
dozen friends with whom you travel
through life. They call it a moai, and if
you're in a moai, you're expected to share
the bounty if you encounter luck,
and if things go bad-a child gets sick, a
parent dies-you always have somebody who
has your back. This particular moai, these
five ladies have been together for
97 years. Their average age is
102. Typically in America,
we've divided our adult life up into two
sections.
There's our work life, where we're
productive, and then one day, boom, we
retire. And typically that has meant
retiring to the easy chair or going down
to Arizona to play golf. In the Okinawan
language, there's not even a word for
retirement. Instead, there's one word that
imbues your entire life, and that word is
ikigai. Roughly translated, it means
"the reason for which you wake up in the
morning." For this 102 year-old karate
master, his ikigai was carrying forth
this martial art. For this 100 year old
fisherman, it was continuing to catch
fish for his family three times a week.
And this is a question- the National
Institute on Aging actually gave us a
questionnaire to give these centenarians,
and one of the questions-they were very
culturally astute to people with the
questionnaire-one of the questions was
"What is your ikigai?" They instantly knew why
they woke up in the morning. For this
102 year old woman, her ikigai
was simply her great-great-great
granddaughter,
two girls separated an age by 101.5
years, and I asked her
what it felt like
to hold a great-great-great
granddaughter, and she put her head back
and she said it feels like leaping into
heaven. I thought that was a wonderful
thought. My editor at Geographic wanted
me to find America's Blue Zone, and for a
while, we looked on the prairies of
Minnesota where actually, there's a very
high proportion of centenarians, but
that's because all the young people left.
So we turned to the data again and we
found America's longest-lived population
among the seventh-day adventists
concentrated in and around Loma Linda,
California. Adventists are conservative
Methodists. They celebrate their Sabbath
from sunset on Friday till sunset on
Saturday, a 24-hour sanctuary in time, they
call it. They follow five little
habits that convey some extraordinary
longevity, comparatively speaking. In
America, life expectancy for the
average woman is 80, but for an Adventist
woman, their life expectancy is 89, and
the difference is even more pronounced
among men, who are expected to live about
11 years longer than their American
counterparts. Now, this is a study that
followed about 70,000 people for 30
years, it's a
sterling study, and I think it
supremely illustrates the premise of
this Blue Zone project. This is a
heterogeneous community, it's white, black,
Hispanic, Asian. The only thing they have
in common
are a set of very small lifestyle habits
that they follow ritualistically for
most of their lives. They take their diet
directly from the Bible: Genesis chapter
1 verse 26, where God talks about legumes
and seeds, and on one more stands about
green plants, ostensibly missing is meat.
They take the sanctuary in time very
serious. For 24 hours every week, no
matter how busy they are, how stressed
out they are at work, where the kids need
to be driven, they stop everything and
they focus on their, God their social
network, and then
hardwired right in the religion are
nature walks. The power of this is
not that it's done occasionally, the
power is it's done every week for a
lifetime. None of it's hard,
none of it costs money. Adventists also
tend to hang out with other Adventists,
so if you go to an Adventist party, you
don't see people swallowing Jim Beam or
rolling a joint, instead, they are talking
about their next nature walk, exchanging
recipes, and yes, they pray, but they
influence each other in profound and
measurable ways. This is a culture that
has yielded Ellsworth Wareham.
Ellsworth Wareham is 97 years old. He's a
multi-millionaire, yet when a contractor
wanted six thousand dollars to build a
privacy fence, he said, "for that kind of
money, I'll do it myself." So, for the next
three days, he was out shoveling cement
and hauling poles around and predictably
perhaps, on the fourth day, he ended up in
the operating room, but not as the guy on
the table, the guy doing open-heart
surgery. At 97, he still does 20
open-heart surgeries every month.
Ed Rawlings, 103 years old now, an active
cowboy, starts his morning with a swim,
and on the weekends, he likes to put onto
boards,
throw up rooster tails. And then Marge
Detange is 104, her
grandson actually lives in the Twin
Cities here. She starts her day with
lifting weights, she rides her bicycle,
and then she gets in a rootbeer-colored
1994 Cadillac Seville and tears down the
San Bernardino freeway, where she still
volunteers for seven different
organizations. I've been on 19 hardcore
expeditions. I'm probably the only person
you'll ever meet who rode his bicycle
across the Sahara Desert without
sunscreen, but I'll tell you there was no
adventure more harrowing than riding
shotgun with Marge Detange. "A stranger's a
friend I haven't met yet," she'd say to me.
So, what are the common denominators in
these in these three cultures? What are
the things that they all do? We
managed to boil it down to
nine. In fact, we've done two more blue zone
expeditions since this, and these common
denominators hold true. The first
one, and I'm about to utter a heresy here:
none of them exercise, at least the way
we think of exercise. Instead, they set up
their lives so that they're constantly
nudged into physical activity. These
100 year old Okinawan women are
getting up and down off the ground-they
sit on the floor 30 or 40 times a day.
Sardinians live in vertical houses-up
and down the stairs. Every trip to the
store or to church or to a friend's
house occasions a walk. They don't have
any conveniences. There's not a button to
push to do yard work or house work. If
they want to mix up a cake, they're doing
it by hand. That's physical activity, that
burns calories just as much as going
on the treadmill does. When they do
do intentional physical activity, it's
things they enjoy. They tend to walk -the
only proven way to stave off cognitive
decline, and they all tend to have a
garden. They know how to set up their
life in the right way so they have the
right outlook. Each of these cultures
take time to downshift. The Sardinians
pray, the seventh-day adventists pray, the
Okinawans have this ancestor veneration.
But, when you're in a hurry or stressed
out, that triggers something called the
inflammatory response, which is
associated with everything from
Alzheimer's disease to
cardiovascular disease. When you slow
down for 15 minutes a day, you turn that
inflammatory state into a more
anti-inflammatory state. They have
vocabulary for sense of purpose. Ikigai,
like the Okinawans. The two
most dangerous years in your life are
the year you're born, because of infant
mortality, and the year you retire. If
people know their sense of purpose and
they activate it in their life, that's
worth about seven years of extra life
expectancy.
There's no longevity diet, instead these
people drink a little bit every day-not
a hard sell to the American population.
They tend to eat a plant-based diet.
Doesn't mean they don't eat meat, but
lots of beans and nuts. And, they have
strategies to keep from overeating-
little things that nudge them away from
the table at the right time. And then, the
foundation of all this is how they
connect.
They put their families first, take care
of their children and their aging
parents. They all tend to belong to a
faith-based community, which is worth
between four and fourteen extra years of
life expectancy if you do it four times
a month. And, the biggest thing here is
they also belong to the right tribe. They
were either born into or they
proactively surrounded themselves with
the right people. We know from the
Framingham studies that if your three
best friends are obese, there's a 50%
better chance that you'll be overweight.
So, if you hang out with unhealthy people,
that's going to have a measurable impact
over time. Instead, if your
friends' idea of recreation is physical
activity: bowling or playing hockey or
biking or gardening. If your friends drink a
little but not too much and they eat
right and they're engaged and they're
trusting and trustworthy, that is going
to have the biggest impact over time.
Diets don't work. No diet in the history
of the world has ever worked for more
than 2% of the population. Exercise
programs usually start in January,
they're usually done by October. When it
comes to longevity,
there is no short-term fix, a pill, or
anything else. But, when you think about
it, your friends are long-term adventures,
and therefore, perhaps the most
significant thing you can do to add more
years to your life and life to your
years. Thank you very much.