For the last 20 years, researcher and journalist, Dan Buettner has been studying the happiest, healthiest people on earth. In 2003, Dan started exploring Blue Zones— regions where people live longer than average, many living to be over 100. His work has revealed that by living in places that encourage healthy habits, living a long fruitful life is more possible than people realize.
For the last 20 years, researcher and journalist, Dan Buettner has been studying the happiest, healthiest people on earth. In 2003, Dan started exploring Blue Zones— regions where people live longer than average, many living to be over 100. His work has revealed that by living in places that encourage healthy habits, living a long fruitful life is more possible than people realize.
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Dan Buettner:
Only 20% of how long you live is your genes. So, you may have gotten some inferior genes, but that's not your destiny. 80% of your destiny is what you choose to do with your life. And 98% of people listening to us right now, that's what's out there for you.
Shelby Stanger:
For the last 20 years, researcher and journalist, Dan Buettner has been studying the happiest, healthiest people on earth. In 2003, Dan started exploring Blue Zones, which are regions where folks live longer than average, and many people lived to be 100. Dan has a Netflix series investigating these places, and he's written seven books, including the incredibly popular Blue Zones Kitchen cookbook. His work is revealed that by living in places that encourage healthy habits, living a long fruitful life is more possible than people realize.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. An REI Co-op Studios' production brought to you by Capital One. Today, in the health world, Dan Buettner is widely known as the Blue Zones' guy. His research on diet, movement and social behavior around the world has changed the way many people think about aging. But when Dan was at the beginning of his career, he had no idea that he would end up studying human longevity. Instead, he was focused on adventure and entrepreneurship.
Dan was an avid cyclist and he chased some pretty wild ideas. In the 1980s and '90s, Dan broke three Guinness World Records, including one for biking from Alaska to Argentina, and another for biking across Africa. Through these experiences, Dan learned about the business of adventure. Dan Buettner, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I am thrilled to talk to you today.
Dan Buettner:
I'm thrilled to be here.
Shelby Stanger:
What I love about your story is you've had so many wild ideas, and when I say about wild ideas is one wild idea often leads to another and another and another. And in your 20s and 30s, you set three Guinness World Records in long distance cycling. How has adventure always been part of your life? And how did you know to keep going?
Dan Buettner:
I was blessed with a father who instead of taking us kids to Disney World or some manufactured experience from age 5, would take us paddling in the boundary waters of Minnesota and Canada, where we learned self-sufficiency and how to suffer a little bit and how to be comfortable in nature and develop the appetite for outdoors and adventures. And that just carried on through.
I was a newspaper salesman as a kid, and I'd win these trips all over the world in Africa and Hawaii, the Virgin Islands and Spain. I remember being 17 and waking up, well, actually I didn't go to bed that night, but I was up all night and looking out over the Mediterranean and I said, "This is what I'm going to do with my life. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but this is what I'm going to do."
Shelby Stanger:
So, as a kid, you had a newspaper route? Or as a teenager you sold newspapers?
Dan Buettner:
Well, starting at age 15 or so, or 14, after school, a posse of us kids would go canvas neighborhoods. We got really good at selling the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. And as you well know, if you want to take on a life of adventure, you need to figure out how to share your experiences with others in meaningful way. And I hate to say it, but that just boils down to sales.
You have to be able to take what you're passionate about and somehow infuse it to whoever's listening to you, whoever might have a checkbook to sponsor you, and those door-to-door selling the newspaper, getting the door slammed in your face over and over again and just having it brush off. That was very useful. Years later, when I was selling the idea of biking from Alaska to Argentina or around the world or across Africa, it's really hard to sell your dream.
Yeah, I want to bike Alaska, Argentina. Well, people are interested in that, but mostly they're interested in, well, what comes out of that journey that's useful for me, the sponsor or exciting for me, the broadcaster.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, I want to talk about your cycling adventures really briefly. How old were you when you did them?
Dan Buettner:
I was 26 years old when I biked from Alaska at Argentina, Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego. And at the time, it was a world record. And then, I was 30 when I bicycled around the world, and that record included the Soviet Union. So, nobody's going to break that record because the Soviet Union collapsed a year after I finished it. I like to say, it wasn't my fault, but I don't know.
And then, I was 33 when I set the record for biking from the top of Africa to the bottom of Africa, Bizerte, Tunisia to Cape Agulhas, South Africa. And that also included a zig and a zag, because we were skirting wars at that time. And so, we had to go from Western Africa to Eastern Africa along the equator through Zaire, which is now called the Congo, and it was just really to avoid a war and goal at that time, but... So, all of those were about 10 months long and they formed a really good base for adventure.
Shelby Stanger:
A good base like the biggest base, I can only imagine. Do you have one story that really sticks with you that you love to repeat and tell at the bar or wherever, about one of these amazing trips?
Dan Buettner:
I remember, in the middle of Africa, there's a great holy shrine that some holy man set up and he endowed it with enough money so that anybody traveling across the Sahara can have a free meal of couscous. So, you get these Bedouins and these Tuareg and these Gun Runners, and all you have to do is show up at the shrine bike or walk or drive around it counterclockwise three times and you're invited to dinner.
And, of course, we've been surviving off of dates and dried milk and crappy water for about three and a half weeks. And all of a sudden, the prospect of a hot meal was very exciting. And we duck into this adobe structure in the middle of the Sahara and it's feebly lit by kerosene light. And in there was 12 Bedouin women and 12 Bedouin men all wearing djellabas, these hooded shawls. It smells like human sweat and kerosene inside.
And there's this vast, this huge maybe 4-foot diameter pan of couscous. And in the middle of it, there's one piece of mutton, a piece of mutton, probably about the size of a tablespoon of meat, but it was glistening. Everybody's hungry, everybody wants to eat that little piece of meat. But first, all the women sat down and they ate from the edge, they ate with spoons, and they got out halfway through the pan.
And then, the men sat down and we all kind of looked at each other quietly and we all ate towards that piece of mutton in the middle. And at the very end, everybody looked at each other, put their spoons down, got up, and that wonderful piece of mutton just sat there at the end. I just always thought that that was a gesture of respect at the end of the day.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, that sounds really beautiful. And you're young when you had this experience and relatively young, how did you fund these trips? I know that today would be different than what you did in the '80s and '90s, but I'm just curious because a lot of our listeners want to go pursue these wild ideas and money's like a big deterrent, especially when they're young.
Dan Buettner:
Well, I still have enduring gratitude to REI. On that very first trip, they gave us like, I don't know, some $500 grant, which was huge at that time to buy equipment for Alaska and Argentina. That was almost 40 years ago, so. But the first thing you want to do is be able to describe the benefits that your trip offers other people.
At that time, the biggest benefit, because we were setting a Guinness World Record, we could set up media commitments. So, I got CNN and the Chicago Tribune and Outside Magazine to all agree to let me write stories or to cover the trips. Once I had a dozen or so media commitments, I could then go to a sponsor and say, "Look, we could use whatever, $5,000 or $10,000 and I can get you more exposure in earned media than you can get with that same money in buying advertising." So, it was easy for them.
Shelby Stanger:
As Dan grew as an adventurer, he also evolved as an entrepreneur. He figured out how to build entire marketing campaigns around his trips, partnering with brands like Rolex, Apple and Target. Ultimately, Dan wanted to make a sustainable career out of adventuring, but there was no guidebook to follow. I'm guessing he ran into some dead ends or heard no a few times.
Dan Buettner:
Yeah. Well, like I said, I had a lot of doors slammed in my face when I was 15, so I was pretty immune to that, and I always thought of it as rolling 10 boulders up a hill, and I knew before I even started rolling the first one that seven of those boulders are going to roll down. They're going to fail. Two of them, I'm going to get most of the way up, but enough that they pay off a little, but one of them is going to get to the top.
So, I never got too bothered about rejection and about failures because... And also, by the way, a true entrepreneur or I think a true explorer is never risking at all. I know we tend to glorify people who risk it all, but I don't believe in risking at all. I would never take a risk that I could lose my life on. And similarly, I would never mortgage my house to do an expedition or something like that. I always just took enough time, knocked on enough doors, I think was strategic enough that I would get the funding ahead of time, and then I'd go do it. I don't know.
I was never in too much of a hurry to get these things done and they always eventually happen. And the journey to do the expedition was also pleasant. I put together really great teams and I took the time to do the preparatory reading and research, and I was really ready when I left. And, by the way, when I came back, I usually wrote a book and I lived the journey a second time by writing the book about it.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm really curious how long after you were chasing these cycling records that you then became an author, a filmmaker, a researcher?
Dan Buettner:
Well, in a sense, I was always a researcher. I always wrote, and like you, I have a journalism degree. And journalism is just research at the end of the day, but I always picked National Geographic these stories, they were never interested in my bike rides. I learned later not because they didn't like the adventure, but because the photography wasn't strong enough. And I also had an editor tell me that, "Expeditions of the future need to add to the body of knowledge or illuminate the human condition."
Shelby Stanger:
With this feedback in mind, Dan started approaching his expeditions through a new lens. He spent more time researching and thinking about the purpose of these trips. He also started brainstorming how he could build a business around these adventures. A friend gave him an idea to create a platform for kids to follow along on his expeditions in real time. Now, Dan just needed a compelling story that would attract young people's attention.
Dan Buettner:
It turns out that in the late 1990s, the collapse of the Maya civilization was the hottest archaeological topic out there. So, we had this written history that was coming to light in real time, and I got to thinking, "What if I could put an expedition together that led an online audience or a digital audience of mostly kids, direct teams of experts via satellites to solve a great mystery?" And thus, was born, Maya Quest.
Shelby Stanger:
Maya Quest was a new kind of online interactive experience that brought real world research to over a million young people. To make this happen, Dan first organized an archaeological expedition to Central America. He put together a team to investigate sites connected to the disappearance of Mayan civilization. The researchers updated a webpage every day with pictures and notes. Kids could then log on and virtually explore the Mayan ruins that Dan and his team were uncovering.
Dan Buettner:
For the first time, it gave kids the power to use their critical thinking and cooperative learning abilities to help actually solve a real mystery. And that launch actually a series of 15 of these what we called quests to solve mysteries around the world. For me, it was a new chapter in the book of exploration and it led me to doing Blue Zones, and my career now at National Geographic.
Shelby Stanger:
Dan was able to turn these international discovery quests into a successful business. The experience of building out these expeditions led him to his next wild idea. When we come back, Dan talks about discovering Blue Zones, what he's learned from centenarians around the world and how people like you and I can increase our longevity.
Researcher author and entrepreneur, Dan Buettner is best known for discovering what he calls Blue Zones, communities around the world where people live the longest sometimes into their 100s. Dan first came across one of these regions when he was working on a project for his Mystery Quest business. At that time, his client was the Japanese government. So, Dan and a researcher were looking for a mystery based in Japan.
Dan Buettner:
The researcher at that time who happened to be my brother Nick Buettner, he stumbled upon a World Health Organization report that showed that Okinawa Japan produced the longest-lived disability-free population in the world. So, what does that mean? That means they're living the longest, healthiest life on the planet. And I said, "Aha, that's a good mystery."
And we did a quest and it was very successful. But then, like you, I sold the Quest to a company and I was off doing something new. A few years later, I was at National Geographic pitching stories. And the story I really wanted to write, my editor was looking at his watch and tapping his pencil and I could tell he was bored with the idea. And then, out of desperation, I said, "But also, I found this area at Okinawa where people live the longest, and I'm pretty sure there's other longevity hotspots in the world that I'd like to explore." And he stopped tapping his pencil and he looked at me and he said, "Now, there's an idea with hair on it." And I went and developed the Blue Zone idea and it was off and running.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So, this was the moment where you were like, "Aha, I'm going to go for it. I'm going to dive deep into this."
Dan Buettner:
I more kind of slouch into things. They're not really... You start talking about it, read about it. I maybe start calling some people and doing some interviews and it's like, I guess a snowball rolling down a hill. It's probably the metaphor, but it doesn't start with a bang. It starts with a kind of a kernel of an idea, and then gains speed and mass over time.
So, there's this really famous study called The Seven Country Study by a University of Minnesota researcher named Ancel Keys, and that study led to the discovery of the Mediterranean diet. Everybody knows the Mediterranean diet now. And when I had this idea to find areas in the world where people live the longest and really study them in a way that the result was meaningful, not just Dan Buettner going to these places, making a bunch of facile observations and slap it together in an article. I wanted to do a real world-class study.
So, I called Ancel Keys, the discoverer of the Mediterranean diet. He was 99 years old and he happened to live down the street from me, and he listened to me for a while and he said, "I can't really hear you but fax it to me." So, I typed up this idea, and I discovered that only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes. The other 80% is something else.
So, I reasoned that if I could find demographically confirmed areas where people are living the longest and find their common denominators, I'd have a pretty good formula for longevity or at least 80% of our longevity. And I faxed it off to Ancel Keys and he says, "I like it. I'm too old." But he put me in contact with the head of Long Term Care and Aging at the University of Minnesota, and they got a number of University of Minnesota faculty helping me create the architecture of the study.
They connected me with the National Institutes on Aging, so I got a big grant. And then, I went back to National Geographic with this whole idea baked and underpinned with real science. They bought it in a minute. And I think they spent about a quarter of a million dollars on letting me write that first article. This is in the heyday of National Geographic, but it became one of their best-selling issues in history and has really launched a movement.
Shelby Stanger:
In order to locate the Blue Zones, Dan and his research team culled through mountains of data points and records from communities around the world. They needed to find both the highest concentrations of centenarians and the lowest rates of middle-aged mortality.
From there, Dan and Demographers would travel to these places and double-check the local birth and death records. It took two years for them to get through this process, and eventually they found the five original Blue Zones, Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Nicoya, Costa, Rica, Icaria, Greece and Loma, Linda, California. Each of these communities fostered environments that helped residents live fulfilling lives. It wasn't necessarily that people were trying to be super healthy, but they all had similar diets, move their bodies often and socialized regularly.
I'm guessing everybody's pretty much heard of the Blue Zones in your work, but if they haven't, can you just tell us some of the things that really surprised you about these areas and that really stuck out? You were like, "Wow. This is why..." And that you discovered this is why they're living so long.
Dan Buettner:
We like to find this extraordinary thing that explains longevity and it's just not there. It's all hyperbole. The reality is that, first of all, everybody listening to us right now could live about 10 to 15 extra years than their living people in Blue Zones, their life expectancy is 10 years longer than ours is. And it's not because of one thing. It's not because of this amazing supplement or some magical diet or some compound or their water. It's the sum of a number of small, meaningful things that add up to an extra 10 years.
And the big revelation is that people who live a long time do so not because they have a better sense of individual responsibility or they don't have greater discipline than we do. They don't have some incredible secret. The only reason they live longer is because they live in environments which make the healthy choice day-to-day, moment-to-moment easier for the long run.
And the insight there is if you want to live longer, whether you're an individual, you're the head of a household, you run a community or you run a country, the secret is shaping people's environments, so they unconsciously make better decisions rather than telling them they have to conjure the discipline or presence of mind to eat a certain way or get this number of steps in every day or take these supplements or these superfoods, none of that crap works. We keep trying it over and over and over again. Meanwhile, 75% of Americans are obese or overweight. There's a very robust $250 billion diet and exercise industry that keeps selling us hope but doesn't deliver.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you tell us specifically in some of these communities what they're doing and not doing that is increasing their longevity?
Dan Buettner:
Again, they're not doing anything consciously. They're just living their lives. But they live in places where every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat it in occasions to walk, they need to supplement their diet. They all have gardens, and they continue to work in their gardens until their 90s or 100. Mechanized conveniences just arriving now. But traditionally, they haven't been around.
So, they do their own yard work by hand, their own kitchen work by hand, instead of calling online on Amazon and getting your bread delivered. Once a week, 10 women get together in a little tiny bakery and they bake sourdough bread together, and they're in there kneading the dough. I don't know if you've ever kneaded bread dough, but it's like a workout. You want to put Popeye arms. And they're talking about their problems. And they emerge from this not only with a bit of a workout with some social connection, but also with a really healthy bread. And I guess that's something that has just evolved over years.
They do have vocabulary for purpose, so they know why they wake up in the morning. I think you reference the post-expedition blues, it's because we're so suffused with purpose when we're on an expedition, whether it's to climb a mountain or bike across a continent or any pursuit, and all of a sudden that's done and that whole surge of purpose is gone, and it leaves kind of a hangover. And these people, they're not episodically seeking and getting purpose. It pervades their entire life. They know why they wake up. And it usually has to do with an increased emphasis on family and increased emphasis on immediate community and the identity and responsibility that comes with being a member of that community.
So, almost everybody is pitching in and village festivals and public work projects, cleaning up the streets, cleaning up parks, taking care of a family that's come under hard times. And when you have a constant flow of this altruism and purpose and motion that you see in Blue Zones, people don't get blue or they're less likely to get depressed.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, one of the things that I really liked is this notion of just volunteering like, go, just spend your time with someone else. Help them. It seems like you've discovered that in these zones.
Dan Buettner:
It's way more powerful than people realize. We know that people volunteer and you only have to volunteer about two or three times a month. They have lower BMI, they have lower rates of depression, they have lower incidences of cardiovascular disease. So, yes, one of the best ways to feel better and live longer is to volunteer.
Shelby Stanger:
In Dan's books, he highlights several other activities that people do in these Blue Zones. Elderly people read books to kids, community members eat meals together, and it's common for people to have their own gardens that they work in and eat from. Food is an important aspect of life in these communities. Their diets often include food that they've grown themselves, a lot of beans and limited amounts of red meat.
Since discovering the original Blue Zones in 2004, Dan has also published the Blue Zones Kitchen, a cookbook, which 20 years later is still one of the most sold books in America. It features easy, nutritious recipes that Dan was introduced to while traveling to these places. If someone wants to eat in a way that's more aligned with Blue Zones, what are just a few changes that they could make?
Dan Buettner:
Well, first of all, to realize that the healthiest foods are usually the cheapest. Beans, a cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. If you can figure out how to get a cup of beans into your diet, it's worth about four extra years of life expectancy. I'm a big fan of nuts. I always have four or five kind of nuts around my house, a handful of nuts a day is associated with about two extra years of life expectancy, and it goes up to three years if you're eating walnuts.
And, once again, it's a function of convenience. If there's nuts around your house as opposed to a bag of chips and you get hungry mid-afternoon and all that's there are my nuts. That's what you're going to eat. Whole grains, whole grains are emerging to be one of the most important overlooked components of our diet, largely because of the word carbohydrate. People are scared to death of carbohydrates. Well, yes, jelly beans are horrible carbohydrates, but lentil beans are fantastic carbohydrates.
So, about 65% of every longevity diet in the world is complex carbohydrates, not the simple carbs. So, getting more complex carbs into your diet, the whole grains, tubers like sweet potatoes. The longest-lived women in the history of the world, Okinawans, 70% of their dietary intake came from purple sweet potatoes.
The most important additional features of a longevity diet are, one, taste. If you don't make these foods taste good, people are going to quit eating them. And the second thing is cook it at home. Every time we go out to eat, we consume about 300 more calories than we would if we ate at home. So, learning how to cook at home.
I bought one of these Instapots about five years ago, and I live off of those things. I make a minestrone every single week, big, huge pot of minestrone, and I feed off of that. And it has 20 or so different plants in it. You should eat 20 to 30 plants a week, by the way, for optimal gut health. It has about half the fiber I need for the day, 80% of Americans don't get enough fiber. And also, has a cup of beans.
So, that's what I have for breakfast. And I got about half my dietary needs covered before noon because of that. I can't go out and buy that. I don't know any place in the country where I could buy that meal that I could make for $100 serving in less than 20 minutes in my own home.
Shelby Stanger:
Last thing, coffee. Apparently, it is not bad for you.
Dan Buettner:
One of the great indulgences you can enjoy with impunity, the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet is black coffee, which is probably more commentary on the American diet than it is on coffee. But yeah, two, three cups before noon. Statistically, it'll lower your chances for Parkinson, lower your chances of Type 2 diabetes. It'll make you more alert. You'll get antioxidants out of it, other nutrients, I'm all for it.
Shelby Stanger:
A lot of our listeners, they get outside, they love nature. How can connecting with nature increase our longevity?
Dan Buettner:
All I can tell you is that people in Blue Zones are regularly interacted with nature. I can't measure it. I do know that people who are out in nature report higher levels of life satisfaction. But when we go outside, we tend to breathe better air. We tend to be active. We tend to lower stress hormones. All of those add up to more good life.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, I love that. But also, gardening, it sounds like is a really easy way to get outside for many of these people. And then, they grow their own food and then they eat it, and then it's healthy.
Dan Buettner:
If you've ever garden for about 15 minutes, you're out of breath. It's range of motion. And you're getting your hands dirty. You might eat a little piece of lettuce that's really good, that dirt, it's good for your microbiome. We know that gardeners have lower stress hormones, lower cortisol... Drops in cortisol when they go out into the garden. All of that's good.
Shelby Stanger:
In addition to his seven books, Dan has also turned his research into a Netflix series called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. On the show, you see elderly people engaging with nature in different ways. They might not be going for intense hikes or summiting mountains, but they are joyfully moving their bodies outside, whether that's going for a walk or dancing in a courtyard. In Dan's Netflix series, he says, "I think what Blue Zones teach us is that longevity can be joyous. It doesn't have to be a chore." Any advice for listeners wanting to live wildly, chasing their wild ideas, not just settling for the status quo?
Dan Buettner:
Curate a group of four or five friends who are going to accelerate your idea and care about you on a bad day. You see that in Okinawa. They have this concept of moai, which is a committed social circle. And I've spent many days with usually women who've been friends for 97 years in one case, who still get together every night and drink Sake and gossip and laugh and care about each other, and they're there for each other in hard times and good times. And in a subtly powerful way, you feel like you're witnessing longevity in real time.
Shelby Stanger:
Dan is working on a new book. In it, he talks about three new Blue Zones he has found. He also came across some surprising research about how singing with others can contribute to longevity. Find out more by following Dan on Instagram @danbuettner. That's D-A-N B-U-E-T-T-N-E-R. Dan personally reads all of his direct messages. You can also check out his website at danbuettner.com.
You can find Dan's books wherever you buy books. We'll also link the minestrone soup recipe that Dan mentioned in the show notes for this episode. But if you don't feel like cooking tonight, you can also find new Blue Zones Kitchen meals in the freezer at your local Whole Foods.
To learn more about what people like you and I are doing to live wildly as they age, check out our episode with the San Diego Boogie Board Wave Chasers, a group of women aged 60 to 95 who Boogie Board together weekly here in San Diego.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love when you follow the show. Take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.