How to live to be 100+ - Dan Buettner

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.