How To Eat Like Blue Zones In America with Dan Buettner

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

If you want to get healthier, don't try to change your behavior because that fails for almost all the people almost all the time. Shape your ecosystem, shape your environment.

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D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And you'll see the discount code in your cart. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, that's Pharmacy with an F of Place for Conversations that Matter. And if you care about living long and living healthfully as you get older, we're going to have a great conversation today with one of my favorite humans, Dan Buettner, who has introduced to us the concept of the Blue Zones, places where people live very long and very well and don't seem to die these long, painful, expensive deaths, but live long, happy and engaged, connected lives. And Dan is an amazing guy. He's a National Geographic fellow. He's an award-winning journalist, producer, New York Times bestselling author. He's discovered the five place in the world, and I've been to three of them. Thanks to Dan, who's helped me, called Blue Zones, hot spots where people live the longest, healthiest lives. His articles about these places have been in National Geographic, the New York Times, and And also his new book, which is just coming out, Blue Zones American Kitchen is amazing. In it, Dan uncovers the traditional roots of plant-forward cuisine in the United States. With wisdom from more than 50 food experts, chefs, and cooks around the country, Dan's road trip across America sheds light on some of its most under-recognized plant-forward communities as Dan shares the ingredients, recipes, and lifestyles tips that will make living to 100 both delicious and easy. Welcome, Dan.

Thank you, Mark. What a wonderful introduction. I'm kind of blushing.

Oh, well, I think you are quite a guy. You're like one of those guys who's like Indiana Jones of longevity. You kind of go wherever you need to go to figure out what needs to get figured out about how we can live better and live longer. Dan, I think the question that sort of perturbing me now and that as we talked about longevity, as more research money is going into it, as more books are being published on it, including my own coming out next year, at the same time we're seeing this interest in longevity, we're seeing this dramatic drop in life expectancy, which is pretty disturbing to me. Why is this happening?

Well, I think we can trace it to our food supply, actually. You know, you're right. Life expectancy has dropped for the first time in living history over the last couple years, and it's largely because of chronic disease. And of course, covet's part of it. But if you look at who's dying of COVID it's mostly the oldest old and the people suffering from one or more chronic diseases. And those diseases are almost all, and I would argue mostly driven by by the food we eat.

Which is?

Overwhelmingly ultra processed food with added sugar. About 70% of all products in the grocery store are processed or have added sugar. We eat about 220 pounds of meat a year, which, you know, it's not to say a little meat isn't bad for us, but that's just way too much. So about 140 pounds of sugars and added sugars. into our diet. This just isn't the way humans have evolved. And, you know, the idea behind Blue Zones was to look at the way people are actually making it to 80s, 90s, and 100 without these chronic disease, how they've eaten over time. And it's vastly different than the way we're eating today.

Yeah, it's quite different. Our diets are quite different. So, you know, our view of aging and I wrote a lot about this in my book is often anchored in what we see around us and the consequences that we see of people getting older in America, which is decrepitude, memory loss, less agile, many chronic diseases, less functional nursing homes. But these are really not necessarily necessary for aging. They're not necessarily natural consequences of aging. They're signs of disease. actually can be prevented and reversed. So, what do you think the biggest drivers of this abnormal aging that we see so much in America is? And what are the biggest factors controlling this and making it happen?

Well, I think the average maximum life expectancy of the human machine, your body, my body, everybody listening right now is about 95. And right now, there's not a lot we can do to lift that ceiling. I know there's been a handful of people who've made it into their above age 115, but your chance of making it to 100 in America right now are about 1 in 2500. So in blue zones, we found these populations who are making it into their mid-90s, not because they have better genes or better bodies, but because they're eluding the diseases that foreshorten our lives. So they suffer about 1/5 the rate of diabetes, about a quarter the rate of heart disease, and at least one of the blue zones, Ikaria, about a tenth the rate of dementia. Here we have real human populations showing that we can avoid these chronic diseases and also you and me, and that it's these chronic diseases that are lopping off about 14 years of potential life expectancy for the average American. And again, part of it is we drive a lot, part of it we're stressed, part of it we spend too much time, I believe, on our devices. I think we violently agree on these. I would say 60% of the chronic disease and therefore the unnecessary aging is due to the food we eat. And I'll go a step forward to say that if you're overweight and unhealthy living in America today, it's probably not your fault. And if you want to dive into that, I'll tell you exactly why it's not your fault.

Okay, well, let's dive into that, 'cause I want to talk about your book, Blue Zones Kitchen and the American kitchen in particular, because it's out and it takes us through the landscape of America and in very surprising ways uncovers populations that have kept food ways that have promised to keep us living longer. But before we get into that and what you discovered, which is a really cool story, I want you to kind of explain what you just said and why. Why it's not our fault.

Well, if you go back 40 or 50 years back in the United States, Americans had about one-third the rate of obesity, one-fifth to one-seventh, depending on how you measure the rate of diabetes, about a fifth the rate of dementia for older people. And you start asking yourself, well, is that because people who were living in the 70s and 80s had better diets or they had better sense of individual responsibility or better discipline than we do, or they love their children more than we love our children? And the answer is none of these. The answer is our food environment has changed, and the vast majority of choices that we have on a day-to-day basis are bad choices. The number of fast food restaurants have gone up by a factor of five. Over 50% of all retail outlets, including where you get your tires changed and you pick up your diabetes medicine, have sugar sweetened beverages and candy bars and cookies and chips. So you can't escape it. And okay, as a result, we are fatter. Well, we weigh more and we're less healthy. And it's not because we lack, you know, basic goodness.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think we live in a toxic environment, both from the perspective of our food environment, sedentary lifestyle, stress, environmental toxins. I mean, the list goes on. So what's really exciting is that, you know, because of you. I got inspired to go visit some of these blue zones in Sardinia, in Ikaria. I don't know if you say Ikaria or Ikaria, I don't know, but anyway, it was a real eye-opener to me. And I got to go into the homes and harvests of these people to see what they were eating. And it was so different. And, you know, and in Ikaria, they were eating a lot of wild foods, like wild greens and wild mushrooms and wild sage tea, which has really high levels of these catechins that are found in in green tea. And, you know, clearly the diet played a huge role, but it wasn't only that. So tell us about a little bit about how you figured out what these blue zones were, you know, what they are and what are those habits of the world's healthiest longest people?

So it's a two-step process and both I did under the ages of National Geographic and with funding from the National Institutes on Aging. So you begin with the widely accepted assumption that only about 20% of how long we live is dictated by our genes, the other 80% is something else. And then we funded the demographers to parse through worldwide census data to find these areas where people are living statistically longest. And the number we most like to look at is the rate of middle age mortality. Where in the world are people our age most likely to reach a healthy age of 95? And then we found these five so-called blue zones. And then to discern what they've been eating, we did a meta-analysis. I know you know what that means, but it's essentially a big average. We found, if you wanna know what a centenarian ate to live to be 100, you can't just ask him what he's been eating lately. You have to know what he's eaten when he was a young kid and middle age. So for that, we found dietary surveys done in all five blue zones over the past 80 years. And we see very clearly exactly what they're eating. And when you average that all up, the diet is basically a whole food plant-based diet.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. I mean, I remember this woman, Julia, she was 103 months. She was like, I'm 103 months. I guess it's like when you're five, you go, I'm five and three quarters, right? And she said when she was little, they were so poor. They would eat one egg between the family of 12 and one egg and they would share it and they would.

Have a big old one.

They would have one potato, some minestrone soup. And, it was fascinating to see how honestly sparse their diet was and how struggle it was to get food and how it wasn't sort of accessible as it is now. And, I think their diet has changed quite a bit. But, there's still a lot of very old people there. I mean, even now, even them having more adapted to eating more varied diet, they really still pretty old and robust. And, it's more than just the food, that's their social connections and their activity. I remember Pietro was 95. I don't even know this guy, but he was in Sardinia and he was a shepherd and he literally just retired I think the year before and was hiking up and down these rugged mountains five miles a day. And, I'm like, God, I haven't seen a 95-year-old that in America. like that in America a long time and he had this booming voice and sang me this song, this great Italian song. So tell us more about some of these, I think you said there's like nine characteristics in these blue zones that you identified that contribute to longevity.

Yes, so they tend to have vocabulary for purpose, they know why they wake up and they're not stressed out to figure out what their place in the world is. They tend to have very strong family values, they belong to faith. We know people belong to faith, live four to 14 extra years. They have these sacred daily rituals that help unwind some of the stress of everyday living, including ancestor veneration, nap taking, prayer works, even happy hour, as you might have seen in Sardinia.

They.

Tend to have a very closely knit group of immediate friends. In Okinawa, we call this a moai, a group of friends who they can count on on a bad day. who are there to have a meaningful conversations with them and reinforce the right behavior. So friends, you know, their idea of recreation tends to be gardening or walking. You know, they already have this habit of eating mostly whole food plant-based but the big inside Mark to all these blue zones is these people don't possess better discipline than you or I. They don't have better diet plans. They don't have a better sense of individual responsibility when it comes to their health, all they do is live their life. And the insight is that if you want to get healthier, don't try to change your behavior because that fails for almost all the people almost all the time. Shape your ecosystem, shape your environment. And people in Blue Zones, the cheapest and most accessible foods are the food I write about in the Blue Zones American Kitchen. whole food plant-based.

Yeah, it's so true. And, I think, I'm curious in your travels and explorations, was there anything super surprising that you found about these communities and some of the things that you found in the blue zones that maybe we wouldn't expect?

A couple interesting coral. Mark, when I started this work in 2002, I was really sort of looking for an herb or a compound that explained longevity, and none of that's true. They don't take supplements. They don't take pills. Yeah, but interestingly, we found in Sardinia, where I think you met Julia, that there's a strong correlation between how steep your village is and your chance of making it to 100. There was a correlation between how many daughters. These guys who had five or more daughters were the most likely to make it to 100. Wow. you know, I was.

Why?

It might be because daughters take care of their aging fathers, or it might be a selection bias. If you can survive five adolescent girls, making it to 100 is no problem. But it's just a call. I don't. I can't explain why. But for me, the most really, the exciting thing, you know, I started out a very scientific hell bent to find the resveratrol or the metformin or one of these other magical compounds that we could put in a pill and sell. But what I found were that these counterintuitively simple things are vastly more powerful than we think. Waking up with a strong sense of purpose, we're eight years of life expectancy, a strong social circle around you, we're seven years of life expectancy, eating a whole food plant-based diet as opposed to the standard American diet is worth 13 years of life expectancy for a 20 year old. So these are things that aren't sexy, that you can't make a lot of money off of them, but they are so powerful. They literally hold the answer to this $3.5 trillion healthcare bill we grapple with and the pain and suffering of of more than three-quarters of a million Americans dying prematurely every day because of eating the diet we're eating.

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This week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Well, you know, I think one of the things that people think about when they think about diet is it's hard to do it right. It's hard to shop and cook and do all these things. But you, you, you, people, people really are, are, I think, disenfranchised now from their kitchens. Not, I mean, in the 50s, there were federal extension workers that went around America teaching young families and mothers how to cook and grow Gardens and you know, feed their families. And then the food industry came in and developed the Betty Crocker cookbook, which was Betty Crocker was an invention of the food industry to insinuate processed food in the American kitchen. Basically, you know, put one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup in your casserole and one, you know, row of Ritz crackers on top of your broccoli casserole. Remember that? And so we've kind of, you know, and all the, on all the ideas that cooking was drudgery and cooking was difficult and it takes too much time and it's, you know, it's, it's beneath most people. You deserve a break today. You remember all those you know, what have you found about the correlation between cooking and longevity?

Well, first of all, in all blue zones, and I'm sure you observed this, people are cooking for themselves. You know, they might go out to dinner for a wedding or a birthday, but they're cooking three meals a day so they get good at it. And, you know, once you gain the skill, it's actually very easy. Number two, every time you go out to eat in America, you consume about 300 more calories than you would if you just ate at home. and those calories tend to be laden with sodium, added sugars, added fats, and that's what's making us sick. So, you're right. And I think one of the silver linings to the pandemic, people were stuck at home and they relearned the art of cooking and the re-art of baking, and that's definitely the right direction.

And baking, I don't know. I wouldn't have that in there.

Well, yeah.

Cookies, cakes, pies, it's not definitely the longevity diet.

I'm a fan of sourdough bread though. I don't know if you taste sourdough bread in Sardinia, but it seems that people eat a true sourdough bread with a plant-based meal. They lower the glycemic load of the meal by quarters.

Yeah, it's true. Actually, I tell you a funny story. Paula and Elinor gave me as a present the when you hooked me up with in Sardinia to go around to these places, they gave me this starter jar of sourdough starter that was 150 years old, right? And I brought it home with me, but the jar broke in my suitcase.

Oh, no.

And it was all over everything, so I didn't get to use it. I have to go back. I'm actually going back next summer.

You can scrape off your underwear and bake a loaf of bread.

I don't know how that would taste, but I'm going back next summer, actually in April. I'm gonna go back and get some more, but yeah, I think, you know, also in Ikaria, they made this incredible bread with Philip. Remember Philip in this blue, in this oven that was outdoor wood oven, but it was a Zia wheat, which was this ancient wheat that was used by Alexander the Great to, you know, fortify him on his expeditions to conquer the world. And, you know, it's high in protein, it's low in starch, full of minerals. It's really quite interesting. Very low in gluten. And it was delicious bread. It was very different. So, yeah, it's not to say bread is bad. It's the kind of bread we're eating in America.

Yeah. And how we bake it. And, yeah. But, but, you know, getting back to this notion of cooking.

Cooking.

I mean, it's. Well, if you've ever seen somebody bake bread, you know, the kneading takes a half hour and it's, they're in there. like getting a workout, breaking a sweat. Some of these old ladies have Popeye arms from kneading bread. So in blue zones, people really aren't exercising. I think you'll remember you didn't see any gyms in Ikaria or in Sardinia. People are staying in shape because they're moving naturally. So they're still doing things by hand. So they're getting that mindless physical activity, cooking, also tends to be a social activity. Ladies baking bread together, families cooking together, and they can control the ingredients. And you know, Mark, when it comes to longevity, there's no short-term fix. There's nothing you can do today, this week, or this month that's going to make you live longer in 50 years short of not dying. So when it comes to longevity, you want to think of things that you're going to do for a long time and learning the skill of cooking. and learning how to cook with beans, I think are the greatest superfoods in the world. And the people in Blue Zones have a gift for making beans taste delicious. Getting your protein from beans soaked and well cooked, so the lectins aren't an issue, pairing them with the whole grain, adding some greens in there. Man, I'll tell you what, It's another 13 years of life expectancy.

So what I'm really excited about is your new book, which is the Blue Zones American Kitchen. So it's kind of like, wait a minute, blue zones are not in America because we're all sick and overweight and dying fast and early and it's getting worse. But you took a trip around America and you found four food traditions in America that match a longevity diet and they're kind of unexpected. I'd love you to tell us about these historical diets in various demographic groups in America and how they can help the average American live another decade or two or more.

Yes. So this, the Blue Zone Kitchen, which we talked about was number one New York and number one Wall Street Journal bestseller. And I thought, well, you know, if there's diets and longevity around the world, if you looked hard, maybe you could find diets of longevity in the United States. So we knew the dietary pattern from these other blue zones. And then I hired a researcher from NYU, Marion Nestle helped me on this. And we went deep in the archives. And it turns out that there was a researcher named Atwater, Wilbur Atwater, who between 1890 and 1930 or so sent out teams of people in America to do dietary surveys. and we found not among my ancestors, the Central Europeans and Northern Europeans, they brought their pigs and their cows and their pickles over. They weren't eating such a healthy diet. But among the African, Asian, Latino and Native Americans, according to these dietary surveys, they were eating a dietary pattern almost exactly the same way as the ones we, you and I observed in Ikaria. and Sardinia and even Costa Rica. So, National Geographic photographer David McLane and I, after identifying this dietary tradition, then we, during the pandemic, we traveled from Maine to Miami, to Minneapolis, to Maui, and we found these chef historians who either could recreate or who never stopped cooking this way. and the Blue Zone American Kitchen is 100 recipes to live to 100 from Americans, and it's the lost diet of longevity.

Amazing. So give us some examples of the traditions and what the foods were and what they're making.

So there's descendants of enslaved Americans in the Southeast known as the Gullah Geechee people. The Gullah Geechee were imported, enslaved from West Africa, largely because of their rice growing ability. And they brought a type of rice, it's not an Asian strain, but an African strain of rice and started growing it. In fact, the biggest manmade feature in the world is called the Ace Basin. And they got very good at growing this type of rice called Carolina Gold, very healthy rice. and because they were so, they were better at it than their, than their masters were. They were afforded some freedoms. They, they lived in buildings next to their rice patties, and they made friends with the Native Americans. They had European influences from their overlords, and they fused a type of, of Cuisine that includes the black-eyed peas, the Scotch bonnet peppers, the The sesame seeds, the vinegar, the okra, that West African word for okra is gumbo. And they brought that back and they made these fusions of gumbo that, you know, unlike New Orleans, which are filled with sausage, here they're filled with beans and, you know, it's a really healthy food that makes your eyes tear up with tears of joy.

That'S quite amazing. You know, I actually just watched an amazing movie called Gather. I don't know if you've seen it, but it was a movie about reclaiming Native American food ways and the ways in which they were able to sort of draw from the land these extraordinary foods that actually were far healthier. And I remember this one woman, and it was teaching her niece actually how to find and get the mice. You know, they were eating mice. Not my thing. But she's like, we, we kind of look at where the, the plants are around where the mice are living, and we can tell how healthy that's going to be from the medicinal plants that the mouse eats that actually get in their system that we then benefit from. It was quite amazing. And, you know, I was recently reading about a Sioux Chef who has a restaurant in Minneapolis where you're from the Ah, I don't know how to say this o a oa Mini restaurant and is is a Lakota, um, chef who's gone and actually create a restaurant where they cook only foods that are from America that were here before, that were the, you know, delicious foods that were wild or that they cultivated, and they were quite quite amazing and delicious foods. So I mean, you know, a lot of these these cultural ancestral foods have been colonized. In other words, they've been displaced. And, and a lot of these people are reclaiming them, whether it's, it's the, you know, chokeberries they're eating or the various kinds of, you know, native foods that they find growing wild or even, you know, the, the bison that they grow. It, this is incredible in terms of their, their their cultural food programs that they're now reclaiming. And I wonder what else you found in some of the Native American explorations of their diets. And because a lot of these populations are extremely overweight, extremely obese, and have diabetes at rates far exceeding us, and up to 80% of some Native American populations are diabetic by the time they're 30. And that's compared to one in 10 of the rest of us, which is still a lot. So what did you learn around their foods and their food ways?

So, the chef that you were talking about is Sean Sherman, Sioux Chef. He's from Minneapolis. He actually, as part of this book, he contributed three recipes. And, as he'll point out to you, chickens and beef and pork were never part of the Native American diet, either was refined sugar. So, they've been victims of this food environment imposed upon them. Originally, you know, where I'm from Minnesota, they ate a lot of wild rice. You know, they had some wild game, but they were mostly hunting and gathering on the East Coast. Interestingly, part of this book, we found a Wampanoag Native American who lives up near Plymouth Rock and a modern day pilgrim named Paul Marcol. She's a historian, and they recreated a Thanksgiving, original Thanksgiving dinner. In other words, a meal that might have been served in the early 17th century. And contrary to what most of us believe, there was probably no turkey at the original Thanksgiving. There was no pumpkin pie. They didn't have flour, they didn't have eggs, they didn't have sugar. So, what were they eating? Well, they were eating foods that these native Wampanoag people were providing. And it was probably foods like succotash, which is a stew made from beans, corns, and squash. Also, tamales, but maybe stuffed with hazelnuts, with squash stuffed with dried blueberries and maple syrup, which were all available. So, not at all the foods we think were at the original Thanksgiving. But all in all, it was a very healthy diet until processed food came on the scene.

Yeah, I mean, I read an article that Sean wrote in Time Magazine about you know, some of the native foods that they are using, like wild mushrooms, like chanterelles, morels, ramp, wild ginger, chokeberries, wild plums, crab apples, cactus fruit, manzanita berries, you know, wild rice, you know, rose hips, hickory, acorns, walnuts, really quite amazing. And corn, obviously, some of them used, but it was very ancient varieties of corn that are quite different than what we have. So they had, you know, smoked salmon and wild teas and native squash. It's quite a different diet and those foods are so medicinal. We know that, and this is what sort of struck me about, I don't know if you really noticed this, but how much wild food they ate as part of their normal diet. And, you know, as a doctor, I know that studying phytochemicals in the food, that wild foods are far richer in phytochemicals than conventionally raised and obviously, you know, organic is a little better, but still wild foods are the most nutritionally dense. So it was kind of, you know, very interesting to sort of observe that in Ikaria. And I think, you know, we look at the Native Americans, there was no obesity, diabetes, heart disease, none of the diseases that we see today that are just crippling these populations.

So, to your point about wild foods in Ikaria, I don't know if you noticed, they use about 80 types of wild greens. You know, are you even go to whole foods, you might see spinach and kale and collard greens, but you know, they're using fennel tops and dandelions and the kind of, you know, shit we weed out of our backyard, they're making delicious salad out of them and cooking them into pies. And a lot of these greens have 10 times the antioxidants of that in a glass of red wine. So, but, you know, this once again goes back to, you know, the 1970s when Nixon told his agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, we need more food at all cost.

And lower cost.

Yeah, right, at lower cost. But the sort of monoculture began that subsidized corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat, and sugar beets. And farmers actually get penalized when they grow a greater diversity. In fact, you can't get the subsidies if your farm is growing specialty crops, which are some of these more sort of, you know, Arcane wild like.

Well, specialty crops are fruits and vegetables. They're not even these wild, they're not even just wild greens. They're like just fruits and vegetables. It's crazy. Yeah. The it's nuts. I mean, you know, we we we support the growing of foods that are killing us and not the growing of foods that are going to heal us. So it's kind of all backwards. You also found you know, Latin American cuisine, which I think is, is, we typically think of as a lot of starchy stuff. And, but, but you found sort of sources of it that were actually very helpful and, and more sort of traditional. Can you talk about some of those foods in your Blue Zones American kitchen?

Yeah, I argue that the best diet the human species has ever invented are the three sisters. It goes back about 7, 000 years in Mesoamerica. and it's three simple ingredients, beans, corn, often ground up into a tortilla and squash. And you combine those three foods, you have complex carbohydrates, you have all the amino acids necessary for human sustenance, i.e. a whole protein, high in folate acid, niacin, and Latin Americans, you know, we see this in the Ocoee, but also the food tradition I captured in the Blue Zone American Kitchen. they're still using those foods. But, you know, one of the chefs pointed out, when all you're doing is frying meat or adding oil and sugar, it takes no creativity. But when you're using these simple plant-based products, it forces a creativity that evolves over the centuries. So, you know, there's Diego Tosini, he's an Argentinian here in Miami, his Love Life Cafe, which takes these basic Latin American foodstuffs. It's the hottest restaurant in Miami right now. The mayor eats there all the time. The Glitterati is there. I think the Latin Americans among us, we have this Adon Medrano we met in Houston. You know, we tend to think of Tex-Mex fare as steak fajitas or slathering cheese on enchiladas. But he actually went back and found that the original Texas, Mexico, Texas, Mexican cuisine is full of amaranth and pecans and walnuts and molasses and peppers and, you know, once again, corn and beans. But he's brought back this nuanced flavor and these highly nutritional food ingredients and created a cuisine. He was just honored by the city of Houston. He's been written up in the New York Times. And there's all these gems, these under-celebrated people who are wildly gifted, but they're, you know, cooking in relative isolation. And for the Blue Zone American Kitchen, I tried to capture these chefs who are recreating the diet of longevity.

It's quite amazing. And the book is really beautiful and it's sort of inspiring to think about how right here in America we have a lot of the kind of secrets to our own blue zones if we reclaim some of these old food ways that we've disrupted through our colonized food system. And the Three Sisters thing is quite interesting too from an agricultural point of view because they grew the corn stalks and the beans grew up around the corn. as a pole, as they don't need bean poles. And the squash they used in between the plants as a cover crop. In other words, it kept the moisture in the soil so they didn't need to water it. So it was this brilliant intercropping system. And the beans put nitrogen in the soil as fertilizer for the corn. So it's just this incredibly beautiful synergistic system. They didn't probably know about nitrogen. They didn't know about fertilizer. They know about all this stuff. but sort of it just, they knew that it created much more delicious food. And I think historically we were always going for flavor in our food and our flavor comes from the phytochemical richness of the food, which comes from how we grow it and the kind of the natural qualities of the food. And I was sort of fascinated when I went to Korea about the honey because there they have all these different areas where they grow honey throughout the island at different elevations and different microclimates. and with different plants that all have different medicinal properties. Right. So it's kind of fascinating. Even they kind of knew without really knowing, you know what I mean? Like, it was like they kind of had this sort of indigenous knowledge that we completely lost. And our diet has become so depleted, even if you go to Whole Foods or what you think is healthy food, unless you go to a farmer's market where there really are growing foods that are kind of weird, I call weird foods, you know, they kind of don't find in the supermarket, that are more heirloom foods that are grown in regenerative ways that you're going to get some of these, these kind of plant-rich diets that are incredibly helpful.

I would like to inject a note of optimism there. I mean, you're quite right about the scarcity of these phytonutrient scarcity of these foods. But, if you are a mom living in Iowa or Fort Worth, Texas, and my daytime job, I'm hired by cities to lower the obesity rate of these entire cities. People, mom say, I can't afford to eat healthy. I can't afford to go out and buy organic foods. And, she's right. But on the other hand, what she probably doesn't realize, that a 25-pound bag of pinto beans from Costco and another bag of brown rice, 25-pound bag of brown rice will set you back about $30. And then with the combination of, you know, a little bit of oil, olive oil or some other healthy fat, with some herbs, some salt, some spices, you can get about 90% the way there. At least it's a diet absent a lot of the things we know will kill you, like high fructose corn syrup, which is in so many products. Added sugars, these highly refined grains in ultra-processed foods. So is it the Ikarian supergreens no, but we have to give Americans a place to start and making tasty, delicious beans with a grain makes a whole protein, you're well on your way.

Yeah, no, it's really great advice. And, I think eating healthy doesn't have to be expensive. You might not be getting a heirloom variety, this or that, but you can get really delicious real whole foods at reasonable costs. I mean, Walmart's the biggest organic grocery store in the world, right? So you can get stuff at fairly inexpensive prices if you pick smartly and wisely and use the right foods. And I saw this when I was down in Easley, South Carolina, one of the worst food deserts in America. And this family I took care of there, as part of this movie fed up, they were family of five living in a trailer. they had food stamps and disability only. The, the father was 42 already on dialysis from this toxic American diet from diabetes at 42 years old. The mother was huge. The son was 50 body fat, you know, and diabetic at 16, almost diabetic. And I, I said, look, rather than, like, actually tell them, you know, eat this, do this, do that. I went to their kitchen. I went shopping. I got some real ingredients, simple things, really simple. We made a chili with lots of beans, little ground turkey salad. We made We made stir fried vegetables. We made roasted sweet potatoes. I mean, they never cooked in their kitchen before. Never. Like they just never, everything was from a box, a can, a package, frozen this or that, microwaved. And they loved the food. It was really delicious. And I gave them a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget, which was how to eat well for you and the planet in your wallet. And they did it. And they lost 200 pounds as a family. They were able to do this again in one of the worst food deserts. So, within a very limited budget. So I think it's possible. I think it may take a little education, a little training, a little support, and that goes to the whole conversation that you really created about community. And I want to sort of talk before we close about some of the work you're doing in communities around America because you didn't just go to the Blue Zones and have a good time and write these books and do talks and all that, but you got serious and you went into really difficult places in America, which needed help, and you actually recreated in a sense, American Blue Zones by constructing environments for people that made the easy choice, the healthy choice instead of the easy choice, the unhealthy choice, which is what we have now. So can you talk about some of the work you've done there and some of the outcomes? It's pretty dramatic, you know, dropping healthcare costs and how you did it and what you're doing in that way.

So the key insight I drew from 15 years of studying Blue Zones is it's not, they don't, they don't have better behavior or better discipline. They live in environments where the easy choice is the healthy choice is the easy choice. So beginning with a small city called Albert Lea, Minnesota, we developed a process. It requires a full-time team of people working for five years called the Blue Zone Project. It's funded by hospital systems and insurance companies. And we work with city council. We have a policy bundle that favors Healthy food over junk food and junk food marketing favors the pedestrian over the motorist. So we help over a five year period, help the city council pick politically feasible and effective policies that are gonna work in that community. And that really has a huge impact. Then we have a Blue Zone Certification Program for schools, restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces and churches. and over a five-year period, we can usually get 50% of all those places certified, which means that they've changed their policies and designs to favor unconsciously healthier choices when it comes to food and movement. And then a third squad within these teams works, gets 15% of the adult population to become Blue Zones ambassadors and optimize their homes and their social circles. So they're mindlessly making better choices. And our biggest city, Fort Worth, Texas, over five years, we saw a 3% drop in the obesity rate, which may not sound dramatic, but the rest of Texas got heavier. And the city itself figures that it saved them about a quarter of a billion dollars a year in healthcare costs and will continue to do so for every year in the foreseeable future because.

We made- that's a lot of change. their environment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Quarter billion dollars is not jump change, you know? So that's huge. I mean, it. Yeah, this is. No, this is something should be done in every city, town, state in America. It's so clear to me that, that we have to kind of reimagine our communities and the, you know, it wasn't, like, hard stuff. You're like, oh, we're gonna get rid of all the crap at the checkout counters, or we're gonna, you know, change people's plates in their home to tenant. 10 inches instead of like 12 inches. And just simple little nudges like that have profound benefits.

Yeah. So, we're always looking for the silver bullet. And the answer lies in Silver Buckshot. So, we have about 120 small inventions like the ones you just mentioned. And our team endeavors, you know, we're gonna try all 120. We're gonna fail at 40 of them. but the 80 or so that remain in place, they exert a positive influence on people's unconscious decision. And therein lies the power. You know, for example, I'll give you one big macro example, billboard signs. We know that neighborhoods that were there are billboards that are advertising, you know, sodas and McDonald's and so forth. those neighborhoods, the BMI are between 10 and 15% higher than the exact same neighborhood with no billboard signs. So I'm not gonna go in that neighborhood and beg everybody in the neighborhood to start eating healthier food. I'm gonna talk to city council, I'm gonna show them the data, I'm gonna ask who benefits from those billboards and ask them if, well, maybe people won't miss those billboards and sure enough, when the billboards go out, you see the obesity rate drop. We've seen it in Vermont, we've seen it in Boulder, Colorado. So why not aggregate interventions like that and put them to work rather than, you know, hoping that the our food system is going to change or that we're all going to start eating like people in Ikaria again. It's never going to happen until there is a focused effort at comprehensive comprehensively changing the environment.

Yeah, I like that because, you know, you could, I'm working on the federal level, which is challenging, and there's a lot of obstacles. But you work on a local level and you work with local people and local communities, and people who live in those communities care more about their communities. And I think they're more willing to make those changes. And people in city governments and, and sort of local governments and town governments actually are more incentivized to do the right thing sometimes.

But you can get done. It could take a decade to change major policy in Washington. It could change in three months in a small city. A mayor, you know, government happens at the local level and the mayors and the city councilmen and women are way more powerful at exerting a healthy influence on people in their city than anybody in Washington.

It's so true. I can see it's such a smarter play. I think you're doing amazing work with that, Dan. And I want to sort of close by having you talk about the last group of the four that we didn't talk about, which is the Asian Americans population, because we don't think of that as an indigenous American population. I mean, slavery, yes, that brought people a long time ago, and they really have brought their indigenous ways from Africa, and Native Americans have been here, and Latin America, Central and South America are clearly, you know, Americans. But Asian Americans, you don't think of us as originating here, but how has their foodways helped us to sort of live long?

Yeah, so what, you know, it's not necessarily indigenous people that I was focusing on. I was looking at immigrants, people who've come here and the fusion of their homeland cuisines with American influences. So Asians came here, Asians taught us how to eat greens. you see these wet markets or these vegetable markets still in New York City where there are literally dozens and dozens of kinds of greens. And I would say Asians, Korean Americans, Japanese American, Chinese American, you look at what they ate around the turn of the century and it was fewer than 15% animal products. So they got really good at making plant-based food taste delicious. and really have excelled in it. So we spent a lot of time in Hawaii where I think the most interesting Asian fusion is taking place because they've had strong influence from the Filipinos, the Japanese, the Koreans, a lot of it in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles area. We spent a lot of time in Minnesota with the Hmong populations. In all cases, it was sort of an austerity that has forced creativity and innovation. And we captured about 20 of their best recipes that are really American inventions.

Like? Give me some examples of the recipes in your book. I'm like, it sounds like they're just full of these really unusual but incredibly delicious recipes. Yes.

So like these Vietnamese tacos, which or.

A.

This is not going to sound Asian, but it's a tofu that's made to taste like feta. On top of that is tomatoes and cherries and sort of a sweet umami flavor on top of that. So it's 100% plant-based. It's mainly taking these original recipes you'd expect to see in these countries, but then using the available American ingredients to prepare the final dish.

I can't wait to get my copy, Dan. I'm going to start cooking them.

I'll send them to you.

Dan, you've really done some amazing work. I mean, your work has touched so many people, not just obviously the stuff you've done in communities, but just the inspiration to understand how we can start to reimagine creating our lives in ways that make it easier to be healthy and live longer by changing the way we eat, by building community, by naturally moving, by taking time to be and hang and just enjoy life, which I know you do so well. So, Dan, thank you so much for your work. Everybody, make sure you go out and get this book right now, the Blue Zones American Kitchen. You can get anywhere you get books on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, wherever. And, I hope you enjoy it as much as, as much as I know I will because I'm gonna get it right now and go check out some of those recipes because I think those, those are, are important to include in our diet and start to reclaim these, these old food ways that are so embedded with natural food is medicine principles. So, Dan, thanks for doing the hard work and making it happen. Love seeing you as always, and keep up the good work. Anyway, if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family. Leave a comment. How have you actually used foods that are a little unusual, maybe from your ancient traditions of your family and history? I know mine's Vegas on locks, which is definitely not good for me, but I think, I think I've got excited to sort of see what we hear from you and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

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