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
is vera and does purpose plan to it
spirituality and how about how we
socialize what our approach to finding
longevity was to team up with National
Geographic and the National Institute on
Aging to find the for 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 and
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 and 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 are
live to be a hundred year 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 be 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 deprived 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 the 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 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
the
are yours that we could get and they
research shows that they could that they
would be yours largely free of chronic
disease heart a heart disease cancer and
diabetes we think the best way to get
these missing yours 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 eye on the islands about 1.4
million people but only up in the
highlands an area called the Norrell
province and here we have this area
where men live the longest about ten
times more centenarians than we have
here in America and 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 in 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 hot
the cheeses 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 Cana now 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 advertisement here in
Sardinia the older you get the more
equity you have the more wisdom you’re
celebrated for you go into the bar
sardinia 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 a 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 one-fifth the rate
of colon and breast cancer big killers
here in America and 1/6 the rate of
cardiovascular disease and the fact that
this culture has yielded these numbers
suggest 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 it’s
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 city 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 three thousand-year-old addicts
which i think is the greatest sort of
diet suggestion ever invented is
invented by Confucius and that diet is
known as the Hara Hachi Bou diet it’s
simply a little saying these people say
before
to remind them to stop eating when their
stomach is 20 percent full it takes
about a half hour for that full feeling
to go 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 as 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 my you’re expected to share
the bounty if you 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
ninety seven years their average age is
a hundred and two 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 is 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
iki guy and roughly translated it means
the reason for which you wake up in the
morning and for this 102 year-old Crotty
master his iki guy 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 with the National
Institute on Aging actually gave us a
questionnaire to give these centenarians
and one of the questions they were very
culturally astute two people put the
questionnaire one of the questions was
what is your iki guy instantly knew why
they woke up in the morning for this
hundred and two year old woman or iki
guy was simply her great-great-great
granddaughter
two girls separated an age by a hundred
and one and a half 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 24-hour sanctuary and time they
call it and they follow five little
habits that convey some extraordinary
longevity comparatively speaking in
America here 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
sterling study and I think it’s
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
our 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 his 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 your social
network and then
hardwired right in the religion our
nature walks and the power of this is
not that it’s done occasionally the
power is it’s done every week for a
lifetime none of its hard
none of it cost money Adventists also
tend to hang out with other Adventists
so if you go to an Adventist party you
don’t see people swollen 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 healed and 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 severed 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 and
Rawlings 103 years old now an active
cowboy starts this morning with the swim
and on the weekends he likes to put onto
boards
throw up rooster tails and then Marge
dat on marge is a hundred and for her
grandson actually lives in the Twin
Cities here she starts your 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 Jetton a stranger’s a
friend I haven’t met yet you’d say to me
so what are the common denominators in
these in these three cultures what are
the things that they all do and we
managed to boil it down to
nine fact we’ve done two more blues on
expeditions since this and these combin
in denominators hold true and 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
hundred-year-old Okinawa and 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 the 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 war 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
down 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 down 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 all
higher 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 a key
guy like the Okinawans you know 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 of here if your
friends idea of recreation is physical
activity bowling or playing hockey or
biking or garni 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 two percent of population exercise
programs usually start in January
they’re usually done by October when it
comes to longevity
there is no short-term fix and a pill or
anything else but when you think about
it your friends our 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
you