EPISODE #1001: Discovering Blue Zones In America – Dan Buettner

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Guys, this is Dan Buettner, the Blue Zones guy. Dan has written a really influential book by going around and saying, well, where are their pockets of long lived people and what do they do? What can we learn from that? And I just thought it was a really cool approach. So it's about time we have a conversation. So thank you, thank you, thank you for coming on the show.

I'm delighted. So if I could just put a finer point on the introduction. I write for National Geographic, it's one of the hats I wear. But for the Blue Zone project it wasn't so much about me. I led a very big team of people. The first team of experts we used were demographers. And we literally parsed through worldwide census data to identify demographically confirmed areas where people are living measurably longer. So it wasn't just sort of the hearsay Vilcabamba Valley or Huntsa Valley of Pakistan. These were real places that we, before we even began to guess at what these people are doing, we kind of confirmed their ages with a pre expedition. We found five of these Blue Zones. And then I brought another wave of experts. They're mostly epidemiologists, anthropologists, medical researchers. And the theory was because only about 20% of how long we live as a population in the developed world is dictated by genes. The other 80% is something else. Based on that assumption. Then we went to all five of these areas, and I've been doing it now for 20 years, to find the common denominators or the correlates, the things that seem to be happening in all five Blue zones. And from that distill some insights on how we might be able to live longer. And the value proposition I have, Dave, is not that, you know, I don't pretend people can live to 120. I think we're a ways from that. Theoretically I think we can. But the average maximum life expectancy of the human species at the current level of science in the developed world is about 95.

What does average max mean? Like what does that mean for 95?

That means if we did everything right and you're an average person, we should be able to make it to 95. The average person could make it to 95. Okay, but remember, you have outliers in one extreme. Or who you know will run marathons and take all the right vitamins and be dead at 50 by some weird cancer. And then you have people who can drink a fifth of liquor and smoke cigarettes and they make it to 100. But those are, you know, tiny fraction. But most of us within two standard deviations of the mean. The capacity of our human machine right now is 95. The potential, you know, and I know your work pushes those boundaries and theoretically I think it's possible, but we're not seeing it yet.

I absolutely hear what you're saying. Yeah. Today, if you just kind of do some of the stuff and you live an average life. Yeah, that's there. And I have zero evidence that 180, which is my minimum acceptable goal, is the right number. All I did is I looked at, when I look at our outliers, we've got probably 120 as the oldest living human. And by the way, is that a real number? Do you believe that one?

Yeah. Marie Kame. Yes, I do. I know there's some controversy that she may have been assuming her daughter's identity. She made it to 122 in five months and marked the, you know, outer limit. But, you know, you, you look at the number of super centenarians, the people who make 110, or it's not growing as a proportion of the population. So we, you know, we fall off, we fall off an exponential cliff.

It's somewhere around 110 or 120. And all I did is I said I want to do 50% better than our best outlier today and use a whole bunch of technology and every other learning that we have and see what happens. And, you know, there's a great chance that I'll die trying, but I'm gonna have fun doing it and hopefully learn a few things right there. There's, I didn't see a lot of downside for that kind of a goal, and there isn't.

And by the way, you can make it. And if you look at, you know, life expectancy for American men in 1900 was 40. You know, we're now up to about 75, which is almost a doubling. So, you know, if we double it again, your 180 is definitely within reach. But it's probably by a technology or intervention. We don't, we, we, we, we may be lurching towards it, but we don't know what it is yet. You know, the, the big, the big reason we're living so much longer now is because of penicillin and vaccines, you know, that created the biggest. Because what used to kill us, you know, in the, before about 1930, was infectious disease. You'd Step on a nail and you'd be dead in two weeks. Most people died in World War I. Died of infection, not of bullet wounds. And, you know, and penicillin came along and all of a sudden, boom. We had a way to deal with a lot of the infectious diseases and then antibiotics. You couldn't have foreseen that somebody would, you know, discover orange mold and the connection between that and. And increasing our immunity. Likewise, there'll probably be some genetic intervention, some CRISPR overture, which may add that. But my work, Dave, mostly focuses on, all right, these are real people living right now who are living about 10 years longer than we are, biologically younger at every decade, probably a decade younger than their chronological age. And they're suffering a fifth the rate of diabetes, of heart disease, a tenth the rate of diabetes, one in one case, about a tenth the rate of dementia. So I'm saying, okay, here are these real people. What are they doing to achieve a healthy age? 95, occasionally 100. And then, you know, if the intervention comes along in our lifetime, you'll be ready for it, you know, your body. Because the first interventions will probably just slow aging, not reverse it. So you want to be in the best shape you can right now.

And that's kind of a Ray Kurzweil approach. What Ray's perspective is that, you know, singularity is here. You just have to last long enough. And, you know, there's a bunch of people on that kind of a train. You know, you're going to upload yourself to the Internet and live forever that way. And do you think that's a kind of life extension? Are you into that? Not really going to freeze your head when you die?

I think I'll do that, actually.

You are on the list. Is that like a necklace for the head freezers?

I haven't noticed. This is a necklace for a coin I found in Jerusalem.

Oh, cool.

But it's. Well, we. I mean, I think the best chance that, you know, you can be reincarnated is to freeze yourself. Much better chance than I think, you know, cremation or, you know, having the worms take you over. So that's kind of a fun way to do. I have several friends who are doing that right now. I feel like I'm far away enough, far enough away from death that I haven't really started making arrangements yet, but who knows?

That is so interesting. It's a rare treat to be able to talk with another radical long term life thinker and to be able to go deep on stuff like that.

You know, I Wrote a cover story for National Geographic also on happiness, and a book called the Blue Zones of Happiness where I took a data based approach to what drives happiness and most of what brings true happiness. What people think bring true happiness is misguided or just plain wrong. But one of the happy coincidences of the blue zones, longest of women are in Okinawa, longest of men are in the highlands of Sardinia, the island of Icaria, Greece, off the coast of Turkey, the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. And among the Seventh Day Adventists, those places are in the top quintile of the happiest places. So unlike sort of, you know, these Silicon Valley billionaires who are, you know, super busy and spending all their money on these heroic interventions and metformin and testosterone and none of which by the way have proven to stop slow or reverse aging. And there's some controversy, the methods that or the insights that I've harvested from blue zones are not only getting these people an extra 10 years, but they're also happy. And so you know, in the same way that you're taking this sort of 180 year approach to or afterlife approach, that also makes you happier right now we share that, I guess, parallel philosophy.

We do. And happiness matters so much that most people, if you were to say do you want 90 happy years or a hundred shitty years? They're going to say I want 90 happy years. So it's almost the opposite of the Amazon selling strategy. It's about quality over quantity. But if you can get both, you'd like both. But buying a whole bunch of cheap crap doesn't actually it's not a very good strategy for the environment or for your house or for anything else. And that's why I think there's a rebellion against cheap plastic disposable crap. You don't want a cheap plastic disposable life either. And so I love it that you're studying what they're doing.

Go ahead. Well, I'm just saying that longevity and happiness right now are so interlaced you can't pull the two apart. Really. The same things that are driving longevity also drive happiness. Getting enough sleep, having a sense of purpose, being socially connected, having low stress. These things, they go hand in hand. In fact, we know that if you can manage your life to be in the top quintile of the highest levels of subjective well being or life satisfaction, it's worth about six years of life expectancy over being in that bottom six. Though one of the best longevity tomonics is happiness. And there are lots of things we Know that you can do that, stack your, your deck in favor of happiness.

In fact, one of the, the best definitions of hell you could have is to say an unhappy, very long life, right? Like why, why would you want that? So you make a great point about happiness. Have you ever done work with Dean Ornish? Like the super low fat guy?

He's a good friend of mine.

So when he did his original work, he said, well guys, we're going to do lifestyle and meditation interventions and a diet. But then he talks about the diet as having caused the changes. Even though it looks like lifestyle, meditation and other studies had the same changes he was describing to the diet. He had the, the mix of those two so intermingled that statistically it was hard to prove that eating, you know, a very high starch, high sugar, low fat diet was, was causative for that. In your happiness books or happiness research, how do you break apart the value of community, strong social structure, getting enough sleep from all the other variables like the sunshine, angle of sun, minerals in the water. I mean it could be anything. That's a conundrum for all anti aging research.

You look for correlations the way that the happiness research, which is done worldwide largely by gal, but also Latino Barometer and the Eurobarometer, they ask people to imagine themselves on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being their best imaginable life and 1 being their worst. And then they ask them 75 other questions about how often they socialize and the level of their health, their bmi, their religion, their income level, their sex, their age, et cetera, et cetera. And then through regression analysis, which I'm sure you're familiar with, you can find out exactly what things most strongly correlate with people reporting a very high level of happiness. And when you do that at a worldwide level, you get a pretty strong correlation. And I don't try to draw a causative relationship between these two. I like to for phrase it in, in stacking the deck. So that's something that's very highly correlated with high life satisfaction. If you do it, there's no downside to it, but stacks it puts more aces in your, your life's blackjack deck. And that you know, you too will will you know. And some of those things we know that work are having five good friends you can count on on a bad day. You know, the quality of your social interactions and connections, the number one driver by a margin of how happy you are. So when you say to yourself, well I want to be happy, should I go out and read a bunch of positive psychology books or should I take a Tony Robbins class or should I work my ass off and make another $100,000 this year knowing that none of those will significantly add to your long term happiness starts to drive you towards maybe things that do, like, you know, being generous and remembering your friend's birthday and really nurturing friendships. I mean that, that's the stuff that really works. And it's you. It's not, I can't sell you anything, you know, and marketers don't necessarily seize that because there's not, not a lot of money in it. But, but we know statistically speaking it's one of the strongest things you can do.

Right? Just having those connections. And it's funny when you're looking at kind of I don't have isolated pockets is the right word, but in your research you came across intact communities that kind of had defined boundaries. So you could find where the super centenarians are like these very.

I want to stop you there because I get in trouble with the. We don't assert there are more super centenarians there. We found areas that has the lowest rate of middle age mortality. In other words, they're hitting age healthy age 95 without chronic disease, you know, a fifth the rate of chronic disease that we suffer. And necessarily because more people are hitting that 95 there, there's also more people bleeding into their hundreds. So I'm not saying that these people have a greater physical capacity or greater genes than us. They're living a longer time because they're avoiding the diseases that foreshorten our lives.

Now, some of the, some of the. In fact, almost everything that I've heard about you from the research I've done just over the years has been that you were sort of targeting people who lived a long time. But so from the beginning the target was just to find like a higher health standard in middle age, but it wasn't to find people who are living longer. That's just kind of sensationalism from the press.

Well, I mean the outpaces that live it, these people live 10 years longer. But it's not an obsession with centenarians. And some.

That wasn't the target.

That wasn't the target. But you know, not coincidentally, in Okinawa you have a population of. It's especially the women, not the men in Okinawa. But for women over 60, that cohort, you'll find about 30 times more of them reach age 100 than a similar cohort in the United States and in Sardinia they have about 10 times more male centenarians per thousand people or per hundred thousand than you would expect to see in a similar population in the United States. But that's just because they're not dying younger. They're not prematurely dying of heart disease, diabetes, certain types of cancer and dementia.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense for our listeners. What did you find? What are these people doing to live longer? You don't think it's genetic because you have multiple pockets around the world. So is it 50% diet, 50% happiness? Is it 70, 30? What's the secret formula?

Well, I'll talk about diet in a minute. I have this new book, the Blue Zone American Kitchen, which I'd like to.

Talk about, but oh yeah, in fact, I've got it. I should grab my copy. It's right over there. I unpacked it. I found it.

Yeah. So, okay, bottom line, in none of these blue zones do people try to live a long time. None of them are pursuing diets. There's not gyms, there's not exercise programs. They're not calling 800 numbers to buy supplements. They just live their lives. But the big insight is they don't pursue health and longevity, but rather it ensues. Their micro decisions on a day to day, hour to hour basis are marginally better. So they're nudged into moving every 20 minutes or so because they live in environments where every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat at occasions of walking, they have gardens out back like I know you do. You know, I was watching your great kale ornament video today. They have their houses aren't full of mechanical conveniences, so they're still doing housework by hand and kitchen work by hand and yard work by hand. The option to be lonely isn't there because if you're not showing up to church or the local party, somebody's pounding on your door. The cheapest, most accessible and most socially accepted food over time and by the way, the most delicious has been whole food, plant based. I'll unpack the diet a little bit more. But that's mostly what we've been eating. And purpose comes with mother's milk. There's vocabulary for purpose. So you were talking about the corrosive nature of stress. For a lot of Americans, it wakes up. It comes from waking up every morning and, you know, not knowing what you're going to do with your life or if there's somebody going to take care of you. This isn't an issue in blue zones because you have a strong sense of purpose and you're surrounded by a family that's going to take care of you till you're 105. And then so, you know, these are the things that I assert we can learn from and we ought to be paying attention to. Not only if you have a family and you want your family to thrive, but also if you're a government and you're interested in lowering healthcare costs and raising the general well being of the people who voted you into office.

And as I mentioned before we started rolling, I just moved to Austin. I've been in this house for like six days. So my laptop stand is a cardboard box. My backdrop is a white wall. But I do have your book.

Oh, thank you.

Which is the Blue Zones American Kitchen, which is cool. And just as a fellow author, congrats. It's always like giving birth to write a new book. There's just so much that goes into it, which is really cool. So 100 recipes to live to 100. So tell me your dietary philosophy. You mentioned whole foods, plant based. I'm going to want you to define that a little bit more.

Yeah. And then I'll connect it to the book you're holding there. So, you know, as part of a National Geographic project, we did a meta analysis. So if you not want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be a hundred, you can't just say, what have you been eating? Because they don't even know, Jay. They don't remember. You know, if I asked you what you ate a week ago Tuesday for lunch, you might not be able to tell me. In order to ascertain that, we found 155 dietary surveys that done in all five blue zones over the past 85 years. And then we did a meta analysis or sort of a worldwide averaging. So if you look at the traditional diets, they're eating mostly whole food, plant based, about 65% complex carbohydrates, not simple carbohydrates. And the five pillars of every Blue zone diet are whole grains, greens, tubers, like sweet potatoes, nuts, and then beans. And if you're eating a cup of beans a day, that's associated with about four extra years of life expectancy. They did eat meat, but only about five times per month on average. So my philosophy begins and stops with, all right here, here are the manifestly longest of people. Here's the way they've been eating. This might be something you want to pay attention to. And I don't get involved with sort of the micronutrients or trying to deconstruct the nutrients in each of those general food categories. But I do, you know, over 20 years of seeing these people and eating with them, I'm of the strong opinion that's directionally correct as a way to eat.

I, I ended up writing my big diet book like a dozen years ago and I found out that legumes beans were causative and so were nightshade vegetables or causative problems for me. And I wrote about lectins. And then later Dr. Gundry who you probably have met because he worked with lo in Loma Linda with one of the blue zones but he also came out like me saying I think beans, even though the fiber is good in them, the anti nutrients are so strong that they're causing problems in the population he worked with. And so I'm genuinely scratching my head going all right Dan, I hear what you're saying. When I try and do it, it destroys my quality of life.

Quit.

What could be going on there?

Well, two things. You're an N of one and secondly these I don't know if you know, if you cook beans and then rinse them you get rid of the vast majority of lectins if you, you know, if you eat kidney beans and crunch them. So, so I don't, I don't necessarily buy the, the lectin argument. I but really I'll just stop and end with if it is indisputable that the longest lived populations are eating lots of beans throughout their lives and, and, and, and producing much better health income outcomes than we are in America. I cannot tell you if it's, it's because the beans for sure. I can't tell you if, if there's something else in their diet that's explaining their longevity but I can tell you a major every diet of longevity including by the way Loma Linda. So I'm not sure you know, if, if Gundry looked at the Adventist health study which followed 103,000 Adventists for 30 years, he would see a ton of beans in their diet. So I'm not sure how he, he discerned that you know, beans were somehow bad for the people living in Loma Linda. But, but you know, I, I don't like drawing a causative. I can't say beans cause a long life but I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt people are living a long time, have eaten a lot of beans throughout their lives.

What is a whole foods plant based diet mean? Like how do I know if it's A whole food, because I know that I take the shell off my walnut, for instance, so, like, that's already processed to a certain point. How do I know? Like, do I eat the skin of the edamame or do I just eat the inside? Like, what does whole food mean, the way you use it?

Well, it's a single ingredient food. I guess that's a good place to start. If you read the label and there's only one ingredient. I mean, there's nuances there, but it grows and it's taken out of the ground or it's plucked off a tree or a plant. But it avoids the. It doesn't have added sugar, I think is a really important component to. Doesn't have ingredients you can't pronounce. It doesn't have emulsifiers or, you know. You know, to your point, it's not ground down too much. Like, if you over grind even whole wheat, it's. It's not as healthy as if you grind it less. Your smoothie is healthier if you don't over blend it. And it's still a little bit chunky because your glycemic load is. You know, I took a lesson from the Sardinian blue zone. I start my day every day with a really, really chunky minestrone. And it's very, very low glycemic. So it absorbs very slowly. Your, your microbiome loves it because there's about 40 different species of fiber in there. You know, you have about a thousand species of bacteria. They like a variation of fiber full of vitamins, full soluble, soluble fiber, and the chunky stuff. So I don't get a spike like I would if I started my day with cereal. I don't get bogged down like I would if I ache. And bacon and eggs for breakfast. That's how I start my day. And it's all, it's all whole foods just happen to be cooked together. And it's delicious, by the way.

It sounds delicious. I'm just thinking that if I ate that, I would have a food baby. I would have arthritis for a week because of the nightshades. And I am nightshade sensitive. And about a quarter of people appear to be like 28% of rheumatoid arthritis is caused by the nightshade family. And I'd be farting all the time. And I'm sort of. And I'd be radically hungry after I ate that. Like, I would just be like, my body wants me to eat sugar right now to help deal with the load of Inflammation. It just got.

I. You know, I think the pursuit of finding what works for you and your considerable contribution to that body work is very important. So by no means would I say, you know, eat this way because it's worked for centenarians around the world. It has to work for you. But I will say, when it comes to microbiome, you know, usually the best way, you know, if you're feeding your microbiome, the 100 trillion or so bacteria in your gut, meat, cheese and eggs, a certain type of bacteria blooms and it dominates. And then the next day, if they've been eating ribeye every day, if they've been fed ribeye every day, and then all of a sudden you eat a cup of beans, yeah, you might get farty. But, you know, the way to train it is to start with a teaspoon or tablespoon of beans and day one, and then two tablespoons and then wake, work your way up to a cup. But.

You'Ll get less party that way. It didn't stop the joint issues for me, but it did stop the farty issues. I mean, I love refreshing beans. I used to eat a lot when I was younger, but I don't because of just kind of dialing in the personal precision. So thank you for sharing that tidbit. You put something else in your book I wanted to compliment you on. This is a page that says regional and contemporary American. You actually, like, drove through the country, went on a road trip, and you talk about Appalachian food, coastal food, you know, Persian, Japanese. It's pretty cool that you're teasing out what's happening in the real world that's still based on eating real food. That's single ingredient, which I. I like a lot about your approach there. It is a way more natural approach than, you know, the pop tarts diet.

I could just say, you know, the idea behind that blue zone American kitchen. So well, from what I discerned from the longest of populations, I did come up with a dietary pattern. Then I worked with an NYU researcher to find subcultures in America that followed this same dietary pattern. And we found it among the African, Asian, Latin, and Native Americans living around 1900, 1920. And then I found during the pandemic, while other people were locking down, it took a National Geographic photographer and a sprinter van, and we went from Maine to Miami to Maui and then up to Minnesota, and we found 55, I would say, heritage chefs who've cooked, who either are bringing back this traditional way of eating. It's usually immigrants, by the way. Fusing the way they did things in the old country and new country influences. And then who could recreate these? An important thing to remember, Dave, is we evolved as a species eating this kind of food. So by the way, in Blue Zones, they're not vegan, except for some Adventists. They love meat. And by the way, if they're given all the meat they want, they'll eat it all the time. In fact, we're seeing this in Sardinia and not coincidentally, and they're also eating a lot more processed food. And almost every Blue zone is disappearing as their dietary pattern starts to mimic, you know, the standard American diet. So what we, I think we can both agree on is the standard American diet. The way we're eating right now is killing us, probably. I, you know, I wrote an essay in the front of that book, Blue Zone, American Kitchen, which will also appear in January's issue of National Geographic. But According to the CDC, about 680,000Americans will die this year prematurely because of the way we eat. And it doesn't have to be like that. You know, way more people had died eating the standard American diet than have died In World War I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam War combined. Yet we don't spend nearly as much effort and time trying to fix that as we do, you know, with the Veterans Administration, of course, know, people who give their life for our country, they need to be recognized. I'm just saying is, you know, we ought to be focusing on this other big problem, killing more of us.

Completely agree. I mean, look at our reaction over the last couple years to something that is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what's happening every year from preventable problems driven by nutrition. Some stuff has come out around.

From.

Oxford saying that in the US you can predict that there's going to be extreme longevity when there's an absence of vital registration. In other words, if they didn't have birth certificates, there's magically a lot more older people.

Yes, I know that.

Yeah, I'm sure you've come across the research. I'm going to explain it just a little bit for listeners and just like, tell me what's going on with this, because I think you're a smart guy. I think your heart's in the right place. I think you're doing the right thing. And it looks like from this paper, and there's a couple others, they're saying poverty, old age, poverty, material deprivation, low income, high crime, remote region of birth, worse health in the general population, and fewer and other things like that predicted remarkable longevity. You're saying you're not looking at remarkable longevity, but what these guys are finding is that the areas, a lot of the areas that you've looked at, they have weird distributions of people where it looks like some people might have faked their birth certificates to avoid inheritance taxes. So you must have thought about this. You must have read the papers. Tell me your take on all this.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. We have. When there's not birth certificates, there's always age exaggeration. I write for National Geographic, where the fact checkers occupy the corner office. And before we even publish one word, we spent three years in every one of the blue zones checking birth certificates. So there's a birth certificate. And not only checking the birth certificates, in many cases, verifying it by looking at the baptismal record. And a demographer named Michel Poulon did that work. So we have a very firm base on all blue zones, very good birth records. In fact, better birth records in Costa Rica, for example, than the United States. We're all, you know, make it very easy. In Costa Rica, when you're born, you're given a sequential number. So it's kind of impossible to, you know, lie about your age. Because you're born, you're given this, this, you know, an ID number. That is, the guy was born five minutes before you gets a lower number, and the guy born five minutes after you gets a higher number. So you can't all of a sudden say, what was. So what was the other. What was the other problem? Or whatever. Okay, right, right, poverty. So two things. First of all, in every one of the blue zones, they're kind of. They're deteriorating. The way people are living today was not the way they were living in the year 2000, even, or even 2010. And my work was mostly synthesizing studies that have been done in these blue zones up to about the year 2000, because then things changed. And so if you look at Okinawa of today, Okinawa in the year 2000 had the longest lived population in the history of the world. That was, according to the World Health Organization published paper in 2020. They have the highest rates of obesity and diabetes and actually the lowest health of any prefecture in Japan. So if a demographer or if one of these people writing the paper goes to Okinawa today and looks at them, of course they're going to draw what the hell. These blue zones are a bunch of bs. But we captured a population that lived longer than any other human and then captured what was done in a human lifetime in those populations. So that's where most of my work is done in Sardinia and Costa Rica. The blue zones persist as they do among the Seventh Day Adventists.

So you're saying that you did adequate work to validate the birth certificates of the people you were looking at and just having known your work from afar and your reputation amongst people who know you personally, because the number of people who are doing longevity work is not that large like real hardcore longevity work. You have a stellar reputation, your motivations are exactly in the right place and I greatly respect that. And so I'm willing to believe you where you say, okay, we validated this to the extent possible and there's a whole bunch of people who've gone back and all this and there's actually a whole group of a tribe that behaves kind of like the people who do the editing on Wikipedia. It's a group of insular kind of arguing to see who's right sort of things, who will go in and try and validate stuff like that. So you went down the path with your populations and you came up with these results. And I'm mystified because I didn't come up with these results when I look at it mechanistically. But I'm still intrigued by your work and your perspective on it. So thanks for answering the question. How long are you going to live?

Well, you know, if you look at the trends, life expectancy since about 1840 is going up two years per decade. And I think I do all the right things. You know, I get enough physical activity, I'm socially active, I don't have a lot of stress in my life. I don't smoke. You know, I believe a whole food plant based diet with very little animal products is the way to go. I eat that way. So, you know, if you look at the, if you look at the life tables, for me, my life expectancy should be about 92. But I'm, I'm in my 60s right now and if I get that extra two years per decade that we've seen historically, I should hit 100. And yeah, and you know, I may be around for one of the, you know, some heroic intervention that you're closer to than I am that may just come along and you know, extend my life another, you know, I don't know, 100 years.

Do you run like anti aging or age measurement lab tests? Do you know your true age? Have you had stem cells? Any of the, the.

No, I don't. I think there's more danger in those things than There are actually, I especially stem cells. Mike Roizen just wrote a great book called the Great Age Reboot, and he's a respect Cleveland Clinic, and he wrote a great book about those interventions and really outlines the dangers of them as well as the promise. So there's some danger with those interventions.

It's really interesting because some of the things, some of the things that. That are strongest in favor of a very low meat diet comes down to a couple amino acids. And you don't get into the mechanistics, but I do. And if you're eating animal proteins, specifically methionine, which is an amino acid that's more common in animal protein, protein and tryptophan, these things will raise a compound called mtor. And the theory goes that if you have more of those, then mtor, which causes growth in tissues, would be higher and therefore your cancer risk would be higher. And that's one of the reasons intermittent fasting seems to be important. And I think you'll also find a fasting practice that is common in a lot of your blue zones as well.

It's not a practice. It's. It was an involuntary.

Okay, fasting.

Yeah. Okay. They did real fasting. Every one of the blue zones, I'd say, suffered a fast. But you're right, fasting was part of their, Their, their history.

So it's like, it's this interesting puzzle. It's like a big Rubik's cube. I don't know if we're ever going to solve it all for everyone because there's probably individual stuff here. There are some people where, like, Dave, I tried it, I don't feel good. And there are many other people say, yes, I tried it, I feel good. It's not going to be the same for everyone. But the principles of fewer toxins. Don't eat ultra processed foods. I think we're in very firm agreement on that one, Dan.

Yes, I violently agree. Processed food is at the core and probably sugar, refined sugars. I think those two things are the number one and number two scoundrels in our diet. And the other stuff is fine, too.

What about seed oils like canola and soy and corn? Are those better than sugar or worse than sugar in terms of your.

It's hard to say, but they're not good. Yeah, I only use olive oil. Yep.

One of the things that blew me away as I was going through your recipes in here, you had a crust. Of course it had gluten in it that I'm not a fan of. You had a crust that was made out of tallow.

I think you probably found the only animal product in there. And I had the, you know, I try to be journalistically honest about these things. You know, this was a food archeologist recreating a Thanksgiving. Well, an early 17th century meal. Yeah. And yeah, those, they didn't, they didn't have coconut oil there. That's why I put coconut oil as the alternative. People in blue zones did eat meat, they did eat cheese, they did eat some butter. Well, not really butter. Not cows, more sheep and, and I.

Guess the sheep and goat because sheep and goat are cheaper. Those are more poverty animals than.

Yeah, yeah. Almost no cows in any blue zones. But you know my main work, Dave, I get hired by insurance companies. I have a company of 200 people and we go into cities and we help change the environment rather than changing people's behaviors. And when you're dealing with talking to whole populations of people, you can't, you can't be. It's hard to be nuanced. You have to be very simple. And for the Blue Zone brand, I've made the decision that we only promote whole food plant based. We know people are going to get meat in their everyday life. But when eating sort of a blue zones way, we put forth the whole food plant base, knowing that people might slip some cheese or some butter or some meat in these recipes, but the base recipes taste maniacally delicious. And they're 100% whole food plant based. They take less than a half hour to make. And you know, they are the core of the longevity diets from around the world.

So if the populations in these areas ate as much meat as they could get, they just didn't have very much meat. And they were eating it five times a month on average. And probably some months during, you know, the end of the season when you're going to harvest an animal or something, they eat more than. Because.

Correct.

It was, it was done seasonally with all of that stuff. Are you a little concerned that that which would have been a precious food to them is just missing from a whole food plant based diet?

Well, their meat consumption has quintupled and at the same time their, their chronic disease rates have skyrocketed and their life expectancy has plummeted. Now again, that's just a correlation. And also what's also entered their diet is a lot more processed foods.

So they got jugs of corn oil at the same time they got more meat is. That's always the confounding.

That's correct. That's Correct. But it's hard to know what you know. We do know that the standard American diet, which is includes about 140 pounds of meat per person per year and about, I'm sorry, 220 pounds, 140 pounds of sugar per person per year and these inflammatory oils, we know it's killing us, we know it's driving about true trillion. It's hard to know which of those components are doing the most damage. If you look at the Adventist health study again, followed 103,000Americans for 30 years, you see pretty clearly the people who are either 100% plant based or eating some fish. The pescatarians, they have, they're living the longest with the lowest rates of disease and they also have the healthiest weight, they weigh about 20 pounds less. So there's probably some epidemiology study that shows that people eat a lot of meat, are healthier. I'm not aware of it, but you know, I'm you, you know your specialty and you're a lot better at it than me, is knowing these sort of micronutrients and how they interact with our genes and our bodies. And I don't know that science as well as I know the population science. So I generally speak and you know, here's what these populations do. I think we both agree that it's smarter to try, you know, different foods that work best for us. But you know, pay attention from both camps of research and draw your own conclusions because it's your life.

You're totally right, it is your life. And I've run the gamut because I very much have tried all these different diets to find what worked. And I would have rather not written a diet book except I just realized, I thought I, and I still believe that I found some gaps in our understandings that we could take advantage of around certain buttons that get pushed for certain people. And I'm always tormented because I'll see one paper that says one thing and I'll see another paper that says the opposite thing.

Yeah.

And so many people listening are so confused right now. Right. And the end of the day is you can tease out on some papers, you know, if it's funded by an animal rights terrorist group, then maybe they didn't have health, they had manipulation of your behavior as part of their agenda. Or if it's funded by the American Meat and Dairy association. Assuming there is.

Yeah, the Cattlemen's Association.

Right. And so you can look at funding and then at the end of the day you can read through the papers if you have the knowledge and understanding to do that. And what I just found was for me to survive and even to thrive, I had to do that and I was willing to do it. And I still see confounding papers and then I look for, okay, was there a mistake? And then sometimes there's pockets of populations. There's so much we don't know. The fear of making a mistake nutritionally keeps a lot of people from stepping up. And what I want to say here is you look like you're reasonably healthy. You haven't run the anti aging panels where we can compare numbers. And even if we did, you're an N of 1, I'm an N of 1. We're small studies, but everyone listening is a small study. Like, it's totally fine. Go eat a whole bunch of beans.

And see how it works and use a good recipe because I don't want to turn you off to them.

That's a fair point. Make sure that you don't just toss them in a pan, boil them and eat them. And the same thing with rice. Like, you rinse it, you steam it. So there's nothing wrong with preparing foods to make them more nutrient available and less toxic for us. And like, that's a core part of human behavior forever. Knowing how to do that well for beans would be really in your interests. Right. I really appreciate your time, Dan. It was fantastic finally connecting with you.

Thank you.

Thank you for the work you're doing and to tease out what works for people. Have a wonderful day. And guys, Blue Zones, American Kitchens, this new book.

Thank you very much, David. I look forward to meeting you in Austin.

Yes.

You come to Miami. Mi casa is tu casa.

Ah, thank you. I'll come on over. As long as you don't mind a little meat in the corner of your fridge, we'll be good.

Sorry, we'll cordon off of section. Really a joy to meet you and thank you for the lively conversation.

Thanks, my brother. All right, have a great day. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.