9 LIFESTYLE HABITS To Reverse Aging & Live To 120 YEARS OLD | Dan Buettner & Mark Hyman

I have four foods we should never bring in your house. And I'd like to see if you agree with me of the processed food industry marketing budget. And it's north of $15 billion a year.

I think this is just such an important conversation because most of the conversation around obesity or around chronic disease is it makes it personal. It's your fault. You got yourself into this. You get yourself out of it. Don't bother me with it. It's all about personal responsibility, which basically gives the food companies an out, right? And I hear this all the time. It's like, it's the mantra. Kelly Burchell talks about this. There's no good or bad foods. It's all about, you know, calories in, calories out. It's all about moderation. Yes, if you're, if you're, you know, eating the right amount of calories, it doesn't matter where they come from. If it's a Snickers bar or a seven up, It doesn't matter. And I think this is a message that has gotten so deep into America that people are so ashamed and so self-hating and doubtful about their selves. They don't understand this is not their fault and they don't understand that the built environment is what determines their experience and that changing that can change everything. And you might not be able to change your city, but you can change your home. Can I tell you something, Dan? Some nights I'm like, work too hard or I didn't sleep enough or whatever, I feel something happened, I'm upset about something. If there was a pint of chunky monkey ice cream in my freezer, I would frickin eat it. But if I have to get in the car and drive five miles, I'm not gonna go do that. Exactly. Right? So, there's nothing in my house that's gonna get me in trouble. There's some dark chocolate with some almonds, you know? That's my big sin. So, I think we have to think about how do we create our, for example, my living room. I have my workout stuff, like in one corner where I'm like, it's easy and I have my band set up. I have all the gear I need to do it. I have on my counter, my kitchen, my smoothie every morning I make with all these phytochemicals and adaptogens and protein that I have everything. It's a kind of a mess, but I like it because it just takes me two seconds to put together. I have my supplements in my little packets I do every week. I just make these easy for myself, you know, when I'm traveling. I don't just not plan where I'm going. I'm like, oh gee, is there gonna be food on this trip? Well, I don't know. Let me pack a day's worth of food in my backpack, which is not hard if you're packing nuts and seeds and things that are very nutrient dense, protein and fat. So, you know, what I encourage people to do is really think about how do they create the default environment. And in my book, the 10 Day Detox, which I wrote a long time ago, I really featured you because you were talking back then about how do you change that? And that's really important to think about. And it's one of the key take homes I've gotten from you. So one is really change your environment and two is cultivate community and friendships. It's the two most important things almost that you could do, right? Yeah.

Just to bring it around, last week I published the Blue Zone Challenge, which is exactly that. Instead of four weeks of a new diet, it takes you by the hand through your kitchen. Exactly what you're saying about not bringing the junk food into your house, but Most of us are on what I call a seafood diet. We eat seafood. So there's all kinds of little hacks you can do, like taking a toaster off of your counter. People who take toaster off of their counter, they weigh six pounds less after two years than people who have that prompt. Instead, I always have, I happen to have here, I'm afraid, I have like as high quality fruit bowl. And that's what I see when I walk by. Do I like potato chips? Guilty as charged. Do I like chunky monkey? You won't find it in my fridge. So I, you know, exactly. I do have a bag of chips here, but you know where they are? They're around the corner in a drawer at the bottom. So I, I don't, if I, if I'm on a clip on my counter, Every time I walk in the kitchen, I just have one or two of them here, you know, bang later. I have four foods, part of the book, four foods you should never bring in your house, and I'd like to see if you agree with me. And four foods you should always have.

Okay. Oh, I want to hear, what are they?

Never bring into your house. And by the way, I don't care if you eat it once in a while, but never bring in your house. Sugar, sweetened sodas, number one source of refined sugar in the American diet. Number two.

And obesity.

I didn't know that. You just taught me that.

Yeah.

Number two, processed meats. Put in the same category.

100%.

I'm talking your lunch meat.

That's baloney.

I'm full of baloney. No, I'm the anti-bologna.

But, you know, even hot dogs are baloney anyway.

That was very quick.

Yeah, essentially, you know, they say that's bologna. You know what it means? When they say that's bologna, it means it's not real. So actually, bologna isn't even real food.

Yeah, see, I learn something new every day.

So no, no sugar scene beverages, no processed meat. What else?

Number three, packaged sweets. So having a sweet once in a while, no problem. I just not having them home. Just the reason you don't have chunky monkey in your refrigerator.

So don't have foods with added sugar in it.

Yeah, mostly processed.

Don't have foods with added sugar.

Yeah, mostly processed. You know, if you make a batch of cookies once a month, that's no problem. It's just the packaged ones. They also tend to be full of lots of other artificial ingredients. And the other two, salty chips, which are also very highly correlated with obesity, maybe not as high as, but why don't treat yourself once in a while, wait till you're out of your house. Four foods to always have on hand. I argue is nuts. I think it's the best snack. It's associated with two extra years of life expectancy. I say beans because the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans and to invest a little bit of time to learn how to make beans taste delicious.

And, you know, I've written— Dr. Justin and then not make them mess up your stomach, which is another thing because.

That takes a minute too to figure that out. Yeah, I'm going to talk to you about that. I know you and I have a bit of a bean back and forth.

But I will tell you, I'm about beans. I like beans. I'm not against beans. I just say you have to cook them right. You have to cook them right.

You have to cook them right.

Otherwise, you won't have any friends. And then you have no community and you're lonely. You.

Have to make them taste good. By the way, people ask me all the time how you don't get gas with beans. And what I say is start slow and work up. Start with a couple teaspoons or tablespoons. work your way up to a couple over the course of a few couple weeks. What do you say?

I say a couple things. One, soak them overnight to cook them in a pressure cooker with kombu, which is a big, big piece of chunk of seaweed.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and then, and then when they're done, rinse them. So I think that, that usually gets rid of all the stuff that makes you, you know, have too much gas. And again, you, you need to build up because your microbiome changes in relation to what you eat and you might have more fermenting bugs in there that are like not used to seeing the beans and then they're gonna go whoopie and then they're gonna make, you know, a whoopie cushion. So, I think that you can't get around, I agree. So, those are good, those are, so.

Eat beans, nuts, and whole grain wheat, a hundred percent whole wheat bread. because we like to make sandwiches. I think a real peanut butter sandwich is a great food that everybody can afford. Real peanut butter, not jiffy crap, and real 100% whole wheat bread. And then finally, your favorite fruit. So, I don't necessarily tell people what fruit. I mean, we all know that it's berries and I would say kiwi fruit are better than bananas and grapes. But still bananas and grapes are better than most of the stuff we're ripping a package off.

Sure, of course.

And it has to be, the thing is, the important why I say the food you like, because if you're not planning on doing it for a long time, don't waste your time doing it this week or for your New Year's resolution, then going back to the Doritos. It's not going to do you any favor. So you got to think long term.

Well, I think, you know, I agree with your list, except for one part of your list. I'm just gonna push back on that a little bit, which is the whole wheat bread. I would say it depends. So most of the wheat that we eat in this country, I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole because it's grown in ways that make it problematic. Dwarf wheat, which is the predominant wheat, it's a hybridized version of wheat, not GMO, it's dwarf wheat. has a super starch called amylopectin A. So it raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. Even whole wheat bread does that. Two, it's sprayed with glyphosate often at the end of harvest to desiccate it, allow it to be harvested easier. Three, the hybridization increases all the gluten molecules in it. So there's way more gluten, which is why we see a 400% increase in celiac disease in the last 50 years. And lastly, it's preserved with calcium propionate, which is a a preservative that actually causes neurologic dysfunction, ADD behavioral issues, and even autism and animal models. When I was in Sardinia, they had, because I asked them, like, what are you making your pasta from? Well, it's Grano Cappelli, which is this ancient wheat that doesn't have all those problems grown in ancient ways that are quite different. And I think some of that's fine. I also think that, that if we should eat grains, and I think the, the breads that I like, and I'll just kind of, I would agree, if you like, want to have a bread or a sandwich, that's okay. The breads that I like are the German whole kernel breads. They're not made with flour. They're made with the actual soaked grains, like whole kernel rye and other grains. You know, you can buy in America these little cell thing packages, rectangle things. They're okay. But, like, I don't know why someone in America hasn't figured out how to make these amazing German breads. When you go to Germany, they literally have these meat slicers, you know, like in a deli for the baloney that we're not going to eat. They have meat slicers. and they literally cannot cut the bread with a knife. It's that dense. And so they need a meat slicer to cut the bread. And basically my joke for bread is if you can stand on it and it doesn't squish, you can eat it. And then the other thing is I would just make a play for some alternative breads. Like in my cookbooks, the Food, what the Heck Should I Cook, I have a couple of recipes for basically seed and nut breads. They're delicious and dense and very flavorful, hemp bread. And then there's this other company called Lin's Life. LYNN Lynn's Life, which actually has created a seed bread that's basically pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds, I think psyllium seeds, maybe not hemp, psyllium seeds, a little salt. And, you take egg whites and you.

Take.

A little bit of lemon, baking soda, and a little almond milk or something. You mix it up and you bake it for an hour and it's this fluffy light bread and it has an incredible side effect, which it makes your poops amazing. So, it's really awesome. And if you like get that Hankering for bread. So that's the only thing I'd push back on. But- How about Ezekiel bread? Those better for sure. Very, those very dense, right? Very much like they're soaked, they're made from whole grains. It's not, it's not like, 'cause even when you, if you pulverize whole wheat, even if it's whole wheat, it's still got high surface area. So it's got a much higher glycemic index. And then, you know, most whole wheat breads in this country are, Not really, they're made with high fructose corn syrup and they're made with all kinds of weird things and they're like, how about the extra ingredients?

How about making your, I make this and I learned this recipe in Sardinia. I actually snuck some of the culture back here, but I make sourdough bread.

Where.

It'S half whole wheat, half regular flour. But, you know, when you use that lactobacillus and you leaven it with the bacteria, the yeast, most of the gluten is metabolized. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I would say use air, I would agree. I would agree, you know, like Dan Barber has a chef and he's created this company called Row 7 Seeds, which is to bring flavor back into food. And flavor is a result of the nutritional quality of the food, of the phytochemicals in the food and the nutritional density of the food. so he's doing it from a culinary perspective, but it's also the same thing that correlates with a health perspective. So phytochemicals equal flavor equal medicine. And, and I think there's a lot of ancient grains that we should be bringing back to use. For example, Himalayan Tartere Buckwheat. We made Buckwheat pancakes and make incredible foods from this ancient grain that's got more phytochemicals than any food, a superfood on the planet. So there are ways of, of choosing grains. For example, lignans in, in, in ancient Rye are very healthful and help turn on genes that reverse diabetes. And so I, I'm, I'm, I think if you can get ancient strains of there's einkorn wheat, there's Kernza wheat, which is actually a newer developed wheat, but it's actually quite good in terms of its property is also great for putting roots in the ground and restoring soil. So, I would say be creative about your bread and your options there and stay away from the pulverized white flour, even whole wheat breads in America, because they're usually crap.

How about ones you make yourself? Do you start with whole wheat flour?

Yeah, for sure. but get, but where are you getting your flour from?

Right.

Because if it's holy flour from dwarf wheat, that's the problem. What's the strain of wheat? Right. It's, what's the breed of wheat? And I think that that's really important because you start with the seed. The seed determines everything. And, and so, yes, certain forms of wheat are frying. There's the ancient wheats out there that, you know, you know, when you, when you look at the, the, what are that, that long Amber fields of grain or whatever that's in one of our songs in America. I mean, that was this tall billowing wheat fields. Now we have like these really shrimpy little wheat, which is great for growing tons of starch in a very short time in a harsher environments and they're more drought resilient and they're better for a lot of reasons, but they have this downside. So, I'd be careful of that. Shrimpy wheat, think of that. So, Dan, you know, I talked to you earlier in the summer, and we're just chit-chatting about this and that. And we did an Instagram live, and he's like, well, I'm like, Hey, I'm going to Sardinia. And yeah, I'm like, I'd love to check out the Blue Zones. He's like, yeah, you should check out this friend of mine there who takes people on his tours. And I did, Dan, I went, and it just blew my socks off and was one of the most special trips I've ever taken. So thank you for that. And I began to understand the power of your work and how these people live and watching them and interviewing them, and, I met with this woman, Julia, who's 100, and she's like, I'm 103 months. You know, like I'm five and three quarters. She's like, I'm 103 months. And I said, what's your secret? She says, Never getting married. I'm like, okay. I think that's actually true. Women live longer if they're unmarried, but men don't. But I don't know how good that stands.

But it is. Being married gives you a longevity bump no matter what, anywhere two to two to four years. But women are better for men than men are for women. But it's still better for both to be in a relationship.

Yeah. It's so true. So, I think a lot of us think of aging as we see it, right? We see aging in this culture and we see decrepitude, frailty, disease, a loss of the ability to do the things you love, and your work has really challenged that notion of that being normal aging. I mean, I was in Sardinia and I met with this guy, Pietro, I don't know if you know him, but he was this shepherd who was like 95 years old, both upright, clear-eyed, tons of energy. And I'm like, well, you know, how are you doing? He was like, well, you know, I'm, Great. I just kind of stopped doing my shepherding last year, but every day we walked five miles. I ate all the food that we made and created here on the land for ourselves. I have my friends and community. And he was sitting there chit chatting with his friends on the bench who were his younger friends, I think, in their 70s or 80s. But he was like 95 years old and he sat there and sang me this beautiful song. I don't know what it meant in Italian. And I'm like, God, this guy's so vibrant. And 95 years old, and he's, you know, he's just, he's not bent over, he's not frail, he's strong, he's, you know, vibrant. And I'm like, geez, this is a very different way of growing older. So how, how did you, when you came across these cultures, you know, how did you distinguish, you know, the things that they were doing differently from what we're doing in America and the Western world that leads to all this disease and decrepitude and, and Frailty as we get older?

Well, the first step was working with demographers to verify that these indeed are places where people are living longer. It's just because you see a bunch of old people doesn't mean it's necessarily a lot of old people.

I'm 175, but where's my birth certificate?

Florida's full of old people.

So.

I did it under the aegis of National Geographic and we hired demographers Michelle Poulin and Gianni Pess locally. And then once you identify these places, we went looking for the common denominator. So, you know, as I was writing for National Geographic and I was approaching it like a mystery, a medical mystery. And you know enough about these longevity hotspots, it's not one silver bullet. The friends you were making in Sardinia were living a long time, not because they were taking, you know, supplement or eating a superfood once in a while. It's this mutually supporting web of factors that, and I'm sure you experienced, part of the reason you were so moved by it wasn't because they're eating some magical diet. It's this pastiche of having very strong families, a very strong community. These people are have a very strong sense of purpose. They live in environments where they're nudged into movement all the time. They, they, most of them, by the way, are, are Christian Catholic. You know, they have a strong faith. I don't know if you wandered into a church on Sunday, but they're packed in the blue zone generally. So in all these things, if you look at all these factors and you look at the academic literature under them, you can see in every case that these things favor longevity. So it's not a silver bullet, it's a silver buckshot. It's this cluster of small things. And by the way, you see the same, I know you're going to go to Costa Rica and I think you've been to a few of the other Blue Zones or maybe you're going, but you'll start to see the same pattern in all places that are producing statistically long-lived places and you just can't ignore it. Yeah.

Well, you talk about this sort of buckshot approach and you break it down to these Blue Zones Power Nine. of the world's healthiest, longest lived people, the nine lifestyle habits that actually help determine their longevity. Can you break those down for us?

Sure. Well, I'll bet you $100 you didn't see one CrossFit or one stationary bike or Peloton in the blue.

They were all doing Vinyasa Power Yoga. What do you mean? Come on. It was soul cycle in every corner.

So, you know, the big insight here is we've been sold the idea that exercise is gonna be the answer, and then we ignore the rest of our environment, and fewer than 15% of Americans get the minimum amount of physical activity, which is only 150 minutes a week, 22 minutes a day of walking. So in blue zones, they're getting it, and power nine is what we call move naturally. So they live in environments where every time they go to work or a friend's house or to their garden and occasions of walk, they have a garden. Their houses aren't full of mechanical conveniences. So it's thinking about physical activity in terms of shaping your environment so you're nudged into moving unconsciously as opposed to, oh, I gotta remember on Tuesdays at 9 30 to 10 30 I have my soul cycle and then you have time you don't make it. It doesn't make up for the 12 hours you're sitting at your desk. Number two, they have sacred daily rituals that help reverse the inflammation of everyday living. You're a real doctor. You know how corrosive chronic inflammation comes. So they're having dinner with their family. They're going to church. They're meeting in the village. At Okinawa, they have ancestor veneration. They take a nap. These are all things we know kind of reverse that inflammation that comes with the human condition.

Love is anti-inflammatory.

As our buddy, Dean Ornish, will tell you, yes, one of the greatest prescriptions you can get is a love prescription from that special somebody. But they have a strong sense of purpose and it's different from place to place. In Sardinia, they're almost a fanatic zeal for the family. People don't search for their purpose in their career or some sort of financial success. They search for it in, they have it right at home with their loved ones. The diet's changed a lot. I know the diet that you observed is going to be different than the diet, but there's been at least three dietary changes in the Blue Zone. It was pretty unhealthy before 1960. They were eating mostly bread and cheese. It was the majority of their dietary intake, believe it or not. Those shepherds, your buddy.

But, you know, it was Grano Capelli, which is an ancient grain. And, there was the cheese was from these sheep and goats that were eating all these wild plants that were full of phytochemicals. Yeah, very different.

I think you remember Pecorino.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, very fermented product, so it's good for your gut and so forth.

But there was that cheese with all the worms in it. It's supposed to be like a natural Viagra. I didn't have.

Yeah, which is like outlawed. So if you look, you know, one of the, I wrote another book called Blue Zone Solution, but it's also distilled in this Blue Zone Challenge. You know, if you want to know what a 100 year old ate to live to be 100, you have to know what they're eating as a little kid and an adult. Yes. And really retired.

Yes.

So we did that exercise. We gathered all the available dietary surveys done in all blue zones over the last 80 years. I did it with Walter Willett from Harvard.

Oh yeah.

So, we tried to put some academic rigor. And if you average that 100 years, they're eating mostly a peasant diet, whole food, plant-based. Mostly they're eating grains. You saw a lot of that in Sardinia. They're eating a ton of greens. Nuts, not so much in Sardinia, but tubers like sweet potatoes and then beans. Beans are big. They do eat meat, but traditionally only five times per month, a celebratory food in Sardinia after church on Sunday or a wedding. They just didn't have the money, even the refrigeration till about 1980 in a lot of these villages.

And.

Not, I don't know if you noticed that almost nobody ate fish. You can look at the ocean.

Yeah, there wasn't much fish. I was like, it's an island. It's an island. Where's the fish?

Traditionally, they had to walk down that hill, you know, which was 15 miles away. They didn't have a car and they had to catch a fish. And then by the time they had it brought it back, it stunk. So they didn't really develop a fishing culture, which shocked some people. But, and then water, coffee, tea, and wine. And as you know, the wine in the blue zone there, the Konkan, very high in polyphenols, homemade.

I drank my share of that.

Yeah, yeah.

I drank my share of that wine. But like, like lunch, I'm like, God, I can't drink wine at lunch. It's just like, I'm wasted. I want to just take a nap in the afternoon.

Yeah, my own personal approach is I never drank it till five, but then I make up for it.

That's good. Yeah, it was quite a debauched scene there.

The last three things, they tend to put their family first. Old people in Sardinia are not warehoused in retirement homes.

They stay with family.

I'm sure you have felt that. Where they're, by the way, they're put to work. So instead of sitting around watching reruns and leave it to Beaver, They're making the wine and running the garden and take care of the kids and doing the cooking. And that transmission of wisdom favors the health and mortality of younger generations. They tend to belong to a faith in all blue zones, a variety of different faiths, and their social circles tend to be healthy. So their unconscious decisions about what they eat and what they do are somewhat governed by their social connections. and that's a really big idea because it's very hard to remember, your doctor's pharmacy is a great place for information, but once you know the information, then how do you put it to work for long enough so you don't develop a chronic disease? And that's really the $10,000 question.

Dan, what's really remarkable about your work is that it points to something that most of us don't think about when it comes to health, which is the reason these people were able to exercise and eat whole foods and have community and have the meaning and purpose they have was because it was automatic. It was the default in their environment.

That's right.

The easy choice was the healthy choice. In America, the easy choice is the bad choice. You know, it's all the processed food. I mean, good luck trying to drive through America and find a healthy place to eat. It's very tough out there. It's hunting and gathering in the desert. and so the idea of creating an environment for yourself that actually makes the healthy choices, the default and easy choices is a really critical part of your work. And it's what you did in the original study you did in, I think it was in Minnesota in the small community. And it was fascinating when you just, you change, for example, and then this, they've done this in other countries now, I know maybe model after your work where they've changed what's at the checkout counters in grocery stores. They change the size of the plates. You change the size of the plates instead of like a big plate, they have a 10 ounce plate. you changed basic things that put in walkways and just made the environment easier to default into the right things. And that's something we don't really think about. And it's such a key part of your work.

Yeah, we've kind of let our living environment to be completely toxic. That 97 out of 100 decisions are bad decisions. It's very hard to walk places in many cities because they're driving communities. And the whole idea, you know, I made a business by helping cities change their environment so they're, it's a healthy swarm of defaults, of good defaults. And the whole idea behind this Blue Zone Challenge is to distill it down for individuals. So I have about 30 evidence-based ways where you could set up your kitchen, your home life, your work life, and your social life. So the unconscious decisions, the 80 to 90% of the decisions we actually make in a day, food decisions, for example, are unconscious so that those are engineered to be better so you don't have to try to remember to do the right things, which is almost impossible to do. It always bugs me these politicians who wag their finger at us and say it's your individual responsibility to make healthy choices and then they let the environment go to shit, you know, where it's a force of fast food, and junk food and chips and sodas. And now go make healthy choices there rather than address the 900-pound gorilla in the room, which is we need to be shaping our environment to set Americans up for success in health and not right now we're set up for failure.

Yeah, I mean, that's such an important point. I know people don't realize it. I think people feel bad about themselves. They blame themselves. We certainly have a fat-shaming culture. We have the government. We have all the professional health associations, nutrition and dietetic associations, all promoting the same message, which is it's all about calories in, calories out. Just moderation, don't be a pig, don't be so lazy, and you'll be fine. And that puts all the responsibility on the individual and absolves the government, absolves corporations, absolves the food companies, the ad companies. I'm actually creating an environment that defaults people into health. And that's why we have a disease creating culture. And it's why these blue zones don't, because all their defaults are the right defaults.

You know, you look at, you know, I started out with the blue zone challenge as if you're unhealthy and overweight in America, it's probably not your fault. And people raise their, what do you mean? No, it's, yeah. But if you look at the big, In 1980, you and I were both alive in 1980 and, you know, 15% of Americans were obese. Now today, 45% of Americans are obese. Now, why is that? Is that because all of a sudden 330 million Americans had this degeneration of moral character? Did they lose their discipline? Do diets better in 1980 than they are now? Are we less educated? No. Whoa. So, what's changed? Well, there are literally 20 times more fast food restaurants.

Yes.

Over 50% of all retail outlets. From the place you get your tires changed to where you pick up your obesity medicine, forces through a gauntlet of sugared snacks and sodas and chips. And we're, by the way, genetically hardwired to crave that food. But we can't escape it. And eventually, you know, discipline is going to wear out and, you know, we reach for the Snickers or the bag of chips. Yeah, yeah.

Can't beat that. Yeah, that's, that was in my whole book, the Food Fix, was about this whole idea of a degenerated food environment and an agricultural system that's basically creating toxic food system. And that's what's really driving all our chronic disease pandemic. And, you know, I've talked about it before on the podcast, but it's really the reason America is so overburdened with COVID cases and deaths far more than every other country in the world because we are the sickest and the fattest country. And that's because of our diet. And I think it's just not getting enough airtime and press. But I think it's important to think about. You know, what I'd love to sort of, you know, hear from you is some of the stories because I think, you know, I just had so many eye-opening experiences of what it's like to age differently. And, you know, one moment when I was with my Guides, we went in this little town and we were driving out of the town and this car was in front of us and it kind of pulled over and sort of parked and kind of signaled to us to pull over. And this older guy got out and he went and sat on the side of the stone wall and just sat there and we're like, oh, okay, well let's go over and talk to him. And I just wanted to talk to all the people there. So we started talking to him. and he just wanted to chat. He saw us there, he just wanted to chat. It's like, people just don't do that. And then he took us on a journey of where he was born, which is this village that had been actually abandoned on purpose because it was apparently going to be a mudslide and they moved it a little bit away. And so it was still, the buildings were still there and he was born there and he showed us where he was born. And then his farm was still there and his family had. And he took us down, he showed us all these hundreds of fruit trees, all the chickens and the pigs he was growing and the sheep and and all the food he was growing in his gardens. And I'm like, who takes care of this? Like, well, I do by myself because no one else wants to do it. And I'm like, wow. And I literally, Dan, he was running up the hill because it was on the side of a hill. He was running on the side. I'm like, I'm trying to catch him. And he's like 85 years old. And I'm like a pretty fit guy. I'm not like a slouch. And I was like, holy cow, this guy is amazing. And he just, He just loved to do it and he just gave the food away. He didn't necessarily need it all himself. It was just this beautiful way of living. And so, you know, what are the things that you saw there that kind of were surprising that you kind of took home with you these stories that actually inspired you to do what you're doing and keep going with it?

You know, most of the things that people in the Blue Zones do to live a long time are also things that make you happy. You know, I did another cover story for National Geographic Unhappiness. So, the fact that they're so social that they make time for people, for face-to-face conversations, long lunches. And they live in villages where they bump into each other in the streets. And every day at five o'clock, they pour out into the streets and the little bars and that, and they make time for each other. And that feels good. We are a species that evolves socially connecting. and now we know very clearly that people who are well connected live eight years longer than people who are lonely, for example.

Yeah.

And it's just natural there. You also probably noticed that people haven't imploded in their devices yet. And, you know, people do have cell phones there, but they're not on them all the time. And they haven't, they haven't drank that poisonous Kool-Aid yet. You know, that there are still shepherds. The real longevity phenomena in Sardinia is mostly among the males, you know, even though females live longer, but the males are the really the longest lived people, longest lived men on earth are in right where you visited in Sardinia. So you start looking at their life. And, you know, even though it's Mediterranean, this is where you went in the Blue Zones, actually a Bronze Age culture. This is a group of people who broke away from what is today the boss country, made their way through what is today South France, Corsica, and set up shop 11,000 years ago. So they're not the same as Spain and France and the rest of Italy. It's a Bronze Age culture. And most Mediterranean cultures, the men are the sit at the head of the table when it's male dominated. But I don't know if you know, in Sardinia it's female dominated. So women are running the household and they're taking care of finances and up fixing the roof and by the way, they're the ones that carry the guns. They probably never busted one out, but we saw these women busted out there because they're in charge of civil patrol. So, you know, one of the things that really surprised me that where men live the longest, Women are in charge.

Women are in charge. That's a good lesson. I think that's probably a good lesson. If women were in charge, this would be a very different world.

100%. I think quite honestly, I think we'd all be better off.

I think you're right, Dan. I think you're right.

I believe it.

No, no, I agree. So, I think you touched on something earlier, which is this whole idea of community and loneliness. And loneliness is among the biggest risk factors for death and for disease and social isolation. we know from animal experiments that if you give all the same inputs, food, water, light, whatever, to an animal like a monkey, but you don't give it a mother, as opposed to the monkey that gets the mother, they age rapidly. They look decrepit. Their immune systems don't work. I mean, it's extraordinary when you see the graphic representation in some of these studies. And I think we see that increasingly here. We've all become an individualistic culture. I mean, there's a lot to be said for self-expression, for autonomy, for self-realization, for individualism, but not at the expense of connection and community. And I think a lot of us have lived our lives going for that holy grail of success in whatever way you define it. And along the way, the debris of our life is the lost friendships, the lack of attention to the people that matter in our life, lack of being present and connected. And that catches up with us and that is actually a disease causing phenomena that literally affects our genes, our epigenetics, all of it is driven through our social network. And it, you know, our social threads that connect us are more important than the genetic threads in determining our longevity and our health. And that really is powerful. So, you know, how do you help people and what does the Blue Zones Challenge say about building this? Because especially with COVID increasing isolation and people getting locked down. And I just, it's just hard. I mean, I'm finding, you know, one of the biggest challenges for me, which is, you know, not a big challenge, but I just, I'm really having trouble with the masks. Not because I don't think they're necessary or we should be using masks to reduce the spread of viral particles and so forth. But I don't see people's faces anymore. I don't see that human expression. I don't see smiles. You know, like, went to shop and get something today. I told the joke to the lady at the cashier, and I could see her kind of eyes a little bit, but, like, I didn't know if she laughed. I didn't. I just. All that natural sort of juice we get from interacting with humans, you know, even that we're not close to this part of our community, is such an important nutrient for our souls, for our health, for our well-being how do we start to bring that back into our culture? What have you. What have you found works? And what do you. What do you. help guide people to in the Blue Zones Challenge?

I'm going to answer that on a macro and a micro level, and they're both important.

Okay.

I'm sure you've seen this study that the casual social interactions throughout the day, the more you have as a bigger predictor of longevity than diet and exercise. And I mean, just as you're saying, the interaction with the woman at the grocery store, your postman or your barista, very important. And I argue that that's very much a function of your environment. again, if you live in a city like Tampa, where you have to drive everywhere, you just don't have, you don't bump into people on the street. You're not seeing your postmates out. Where if you live in a neighborhood like Boulder, Colorado, or Santa Barbara, or even where I live in Minneapolis or in where I live in Miami, I'm out in the streets all the time and I just have get more FaceTime and a lot of social. is a function of being in the presence of other humans. So that's the macro answer. The micro answer, which I addressed in Blue Zone Solution, I'm sorry, Blue Zone Challenge, is that your immediate social circle, those four or five people who you spend the most time with, have a profound impact on your health. If your three best friends are obese, there's 150% better chance you're going to be overweight. alcohol use, drug use, unhappiness, and even loneliness is measurably contagious. That's actually Nicholas Christakis' work, not mine, but it underpins an important observation in the blue zones, especially in places like Okinawa with this notion of moai. People pay attention to who they're spending time with, and their immediate friends tend to be eating the same healthy diet. They tend to be walking places. They tend to care about you on a bad day. They tend to people you can have meaningful conversations with. In the Blue Zone Challenge, this is the time of year people start making resolutions. As we all know, resolutions have a half-life of about a week and they're gone in four weeks. Instead of getting on the new fad diet, I take people through a process of A, identifying the type of people who are going to favor your health and longevity, and B, give them a strategy to actually bring them in their circle. And because when it comes to longevity, there's no short-term fix other than not dying. There's nothing you can do this month or this year even that's going to really favor your life expectancy in 30 years. So if you want to live a long, if you want to do things that will help you live longer, you have to think in terms of decades or lifetime. What am I going to do? that's going to constantly influence me to eat better, move more, socialize more, live and express my sense of purpose and building that immediate social circle, that three or four friends who care about you on a bad day, that's about the most powerful, lasting thing you can do.

Yeah, that's really important. I think you mentioned it and I think we don't really cultivate that and prioritize that in our culture, in our life. and you know, how many people, I think I've seen them date on this, but how many people can actually say that they have someone in their life that they can call up and tell anything to?

And, you know, this is Robert Putnam, a Harvard researcher. He wrote Bowling Alone. And in Bowling Alone, and it was written in the late 1980s, he calculated that we, each American, have about three good friends or friends you can count on on a bad day. I keep bringing this up. What that means is you've just broken up with your partner and you're crying your eyes out. You know, we all have backslab buddies, you know, who sure they'll have a free beer with you on a good day, but I mean, friends who will listen to you weep and, you know, if you need to actually borrow money or you just need to pour your heart out, those are the kind of friends I'm talking about. So with three people in the 1980s, we're now down to an under to friends like that. And I still again, I believe it boils down to this thing.

More friends on Facebook, but no actual friends.

No friends like Mark Hyman and Dan Buettner.

You know, it's true. It's true. I find, you know, I actually COVID and, you know, went through a divorce and it was rough. And I called my circle together. And, you know, I have a lot of guys I've known for a long time, really close friends who do men's work together. we know each other for 30, 40 years and we see each other periodically. So I invited these friends to be part of the circle every week and we do a Zoom hangout with seven of us who've known each other 30, 40 years. And it's really about being transparent and honest and holding a container for each of us to be seen and heard, supported, loved. Sometimes we give each other advice and we just listen. And I mean, I don't even know how it would have gotten through the last year without it. and I feel so blessed. I mean, just so beyond blessed to think about that. And I think it, you know, the part of, part of my, my early, my early Evolution was really understanding the importance of community. And so I've spent a lot of time in my own life cultivating and nurturing and watering those friendships. So, you know, after 40 years, I can call them up and go, hey, I need you. And, and what was amazing was that I thought, oh, you know, I'm just going through a hard time, and you know, they're gonna do it for me. But then I was like, well, can we do it maybe every other week for an hour? They're like, no, no, no. Let's do it every week for two hours. And I'm like, okay. Okay. And then, like, they all were so in. And I was like, wow, we all need this. We all want this. So I encourage you to think about how do you start to cultivate that and find those people and develop those relationships? And it really is the, it's the medicine that we're missing in our society.

I would, I would argue that that investment is way more important than trying to get on a diet or a supplement or, you know, training for a marathon or all these other deep fall, you know, the thing.

I can go eat my chunky monkey ice cream now.

A little bit of that. But, but you start asking yourself why. You look at the budget of the, of the, processed food industry marketing budget, and it's north of $15 billion a year. So, and then the beverage association, another $10 billion a year.

And then the exercise- what is the broccoli about? That broccoli is $100 billion, right? Broccoli advertising?

I think it's $100. But also the exercise industry, another $120 billion. So we are constantly marketed these ideas of what make us healthy. There's no money in creating a men's group. Nobody makes money off of that. Nobody makes money off of you knowing your sense of purpose and living it. Nobody makes money off of you putting your family first or investing in relationships beyond just the back and forth commerce of it. So it takes people like you with you have a powerful mouthpiece here to not even tell people about it, but I mean you also know the underpinning science and you're a doctor. You have MD after your name so people listen to you and that's powerful. I also think it's, you know, for 40 years we've looked for the answer of better life in technology and I think technology can help a little bit but when you look back in places like the Blue Zones, those people are doing things a certain way that has evolved over 11,000 years. And they're still at work today in people's life because they are working. And to pay attention to this idea of a guy will stop in the middle of the day and just talk to you or they feel a certain way. And those practices are around because of a certain social evolution. that they've worked and we ought to be paying more attention to that, my opinion.

Yeah, I think those are really important insights because, you know, the idea that loneliness is the biggest killer. I mean, we're talking about diet, exercise, supplements, longevity, but, you know, this idea of community is, is just so underappreciated. A friend of mine, Rada Aghajani, wrote a book called belong, which is about how to build Community. I encourage people to think about getting that book. She's been on the podcast as well. And I want to move on to sort of talk about the thing that I see happening. And it was amplified during COVID but for the last three million years, our life expectancy has been going up. And it went up pretty dramatically over the last century with the advent of public health and hygiene and sanitation and vaccinations. which was all great. And the development of antibiotics and the scourge of infectious disease, which killed a lot of people young. And yet now with COVID this was happening before COVID but we're seeing data that shows our life expectancy is going down. And with COVID it went down three years for African American Hispanic populations, I think about a year and a half for caucasian populations, but it's staggering. And yet, we have the most advanced medical system in the world. So, how do we address this? And how do we understand the cause of this decrease in life expectancy? And how do we then sort of shift that around to create a formula for longevity?

Well, by the way, it was dropping.

Even before COVID largely because- yeah, that's what I said. Yeah.

Yeah, before, you know, and it's largely because of a diabetes, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, some types of cancer, even dementia, all of which are mostly avoidable, if not almost completely avoidable, like type 2 diabetes. And, you know, I've sounded like a broken record here. We have to stop beating the dead horse of individual responsibility and thinking that we're somehow going to muster the discipline and presence of mind for the next 50, 60 years of our life to override this horrible food environment. So it's going to take the realization that we need to shape the way our food is made, shape the way our streets are designed, the advertising environment, what is permitted. We've realized that People died prematurely because of smoking. And we use three levers to bring smoking down from 50% to, you know, in some places 10%. And it's education. So it's knowing the real, the truth about cigarettes. We need to tell the truth about processed foods. And I would argue we eat way too much meat, cheese and eggs. We need to secondly, use taxation. There's this idea of externality, you know, that it costs you and I about $10,000 a year to pay for obese people. Well, these people aren't obese because it's their fault. They're obese because of what they're eating. We should be charging the manufacturers of that food driving disease to pay for the externality of their costs. And then the last one is, Regulation, you know, when I work with these blue zone cities, one of the solutions I offer them is limit the number of fast food restaurants. We know that if you live in a neighborhood mark with more than six fast food restaurants in a half a mile radius from your house, you're 30% more likely to be obese than if there are fewer than three fast food restaurants. So me, the simple answer here is, limit the number of fast food restaurants, but nobody, oh my God, that's zoning. But these are freedoms to do unhealthy crap that we shouldn't be doing.

My father used to say, my freedom ends where your nose begins. I think that's a great metaphor for the consequences of harm that are being caused by people's actions that should not be free. I mean, you're right. The Rockefeller Foundation came out with a report that showed essentially it's three times what we actually spend at the grocery store. That's the real cost of food in terms of its consequences on our health, on the environment, on social justice issues, on, you know, just a whole catalog of things. And I encourage you to check that out. And that's staggering. So it should be, you know, three times the cost of the food to pay for all these consequences.

I've seen calculations that the cost of a burger, the social cost, the economic cost, and the health cost is about $30 a burger. Now, if burgers were priced according to the damage they cause, we wouldn't have this problem because burgers would be a once a week. You know, it's no problem if somebody, you know, you look in the blue zones or eating five times a month. If we were eating meat, cheese, and eggs five times a month or junk food, it'd be no problem. You know, we all get to But it's this bacon for breakfast, bologna sandwich for lunch, and a pork chop for dinner. That's when we start getting into trouble. And snacking with packaged foods, which I think you've written about the sort of toxicity of all these artificial ingredients.

For sure. So, what are the other things that you found that we were talking, we were going to go through?

If you live in a neighborhood that allows billboard advertising, the BMI or the obesity rate is about 10% higher than a control neighborhood or the same neighborhood with the same profile that doesn't allow billboard advertising. The reason is billboard advertising often prompts us, you hungry? McDonald's right around the corner to pick up a six pack of Coke. So when we go into a city, we don't tell a city to do anything. But we do show them the evidence. So here are some that have worked elsewhere to bring the obesity rate and junk food consumption down, healthy food consumption up, people walking instead of driving, better air quality, and then smoking less. And then we asked them to adopt it. Another thing that worked very well for us in Fort Worth, Texas, this is a place where the obesity rate dropped about 6% in the six years.

Wow, that's a lot.

It was huge. It doesn't sound like a lot, but.

It was a lot.

It came in about a quarter of a billion dollars a year of healthcare savings. So we managed to help raise enough money to put coolers in bodegas, in food deserts. So we couldn't build a Whole Foods in the middle of the food desert. But we made it easy for these owners to be able to offer fresh fruits and vegetables. And they discovered two things. Number one, it wasn't that hard. And number two, people actually wanted it. These fruits and vegetables sell out and they have a nice profit margin for them. And because we subsidized it a little bit. So that really worked. Then in the beach cities, we got the city to create an ordinance that allowed that prohibited all junk trucks, you know, I hate trucks, food trucks, you know, they often have delicious food, but it isn't all that good.

Yeah. Yeah.

A thousand mile, a thousand foot no-go zone around schools, because they put all this money into creating the school lunch better. But then these trucks would pull up and all the kids from the high school would run out and they'd go buy the pork taco, you know, or the quesadilla. so they put that in, so that seemed to work as well. About the best thing you can do, I argue the best investment for a city is what we call a complete streets policy, where every new street has to be planned for a bike lane, a wide sidewalk, trees which draws pedestrians, narrower lanes which slow traffic down and then lower speed limits. And it turns out that does a bunch of stuff. First of all, the number of deaths and accidents drop dramatically when you do that. You could save hundreds of children's life per year in a city of 150,000 by adopting number two, the air quality goes up. So the rate of asthma drops. And number three, we see A little level of self-reported physical activity going up by about 20%. Now this is, you know, we're not giving them gym memberships or yoga classes or any of this other stuff that we use. We just make build streets for human beings and you do it over time because the street has to be redone every seven years or so. So we don't come in and say rip up the whole city. We say no, the next time your city where your street wears out, Here's the way to build a street for a human being, not just a car.

Well, then, you know, what I don't hear is you're going there and say, eat this, don't eat that, run 10 miles, meditate, do yoga. I don't hear any of that. I hear a very coherent, brilliant strategy of how to redesign the built environment to support health as a default so people are nudged to do the right thing and they don't even know that they're being manipulated in a way. In a good way. They don't know that they're being gently encouraged to do the right thing or inspired to do the right thing because something's pretty or nice or good. You want to know my secret for living a long and happy and healthy life? Well, all I have to do is check out my weekly newsletter, Mark's Picks, where I share my favorite tips for health, longevity, well-being, and lots more. Check it out and link below. So, Dan, I want you to take us through as we close the Blue Zones Challenge. You know, what are the key elements of the Blue Zones Challenge? A four-week plan for a longer, better life. It's available now on Amazon, everywhere you get your books. Check it out for sure. I learned a lot from it. But tell us in a nutshell, what are the take-homes that are provided in that four-week guide to give you a reboot on your health?

Yeah. So instead of trying to change your behavior, which we do every beginning of every new year and it fails by February, I ask you to change your environment. So over the course of the four weeks, I take you through your kitchen, your bedroom, the rest of your house, your workplace, your social network, and we give you evidence-based ways to set up your life, thereby engineering your unconscious choices. and the other thing we asked you to do during that four weeks is to go as cold turkey to try a whole food plant-based diet and to get the processed foods out of your diet for just four weeks and see how you feel. We just had 1,100 people from the Adventist Health System employees do the Blue Zone Challenge. This isn't a weight loss program. But they reported clearer skin, they reported losing 4.4 pounds. You know, there's a big focus on how you connect socially. So I take people through your middle age, how do you make friends in America? So we take them through the process of identifying the right friends and making those friends and committing to it. And it's a different way to think about your health journey, but it's distill right from what both you and I experienced in Sardinia and, you know, I've had 11 years of putting these ideas to work in cities, and this is sort of the my opus in trying to distill it for individuals. And, and it was. Yes.

Well, that is just so brilliant. That is so brilliant, Dan. I can't thank you enough for doing that because, you know, I, I've always said that, that it's our social networks that determine our health, and, and what I mean by that is our social environment and, and, and our built environment and and we are trying to fix people one by one by one, but we're talking about a cultural shift to create a more loving, connected society that makes it easier to be healthy. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.

What we started doing was asking people when they eat. And as you know, nighttime eating is common.

Yes.

But that's a real problem. And when we got delved into the science, and it's really new science, we found out.