[Music] thank you well I have an impossible task before me right now I mean certainly following dr. Pez whose work was seminal and really illustrates all that we're doing here but then to introduce the next speaker who not only is a friend but really is one of my heroes because when you think about the work that he's done to start from the journey where dr. Pez started and what he's done to democratize this concept of wellness and to make it so that every person in our world has some access to it and understand it and
you think about this that 500 years ago Ponce de Leon came to this country and he was looking for the Fountain of Youth and what our next speaker told us was the Fountain of Youth is within all of us if we choose to write lifestyles and he's an accomplished well class cyclist he's a publisher he's a producer he's an author and he had time to study many more communities and bring us this information that expanded the ideas of Blue Zones but really democratized it so that we understand and so we owe dr PES a great
deal of admiration for his and spitefulness' and for Dan Buettner we owe him a great deal because he's really transformed this and really bought it to every home so that they understand the importance of wellness so please join me in welcoming Dan Buettner to the stage [Applause] [Music] I feel like I blundered into a very big and welcoming family reunion so thank you for the hug metaphorically speaking so I'm gonna talk about the world's longest lived people and the lessons they offer us and many of them by the way are very counterintuitive but but I'm
a big believer like dr. Garrett on that wonderful speech about the w-h-o that if you can't measure it you can't manage it so I am going to start actually by measuring each and every one of yours life expectancy and your job I'm going to ask you eight questions your job is to raise your hand for the questions that apply to you and then the hard part remember how many times you raise your hand so they start easy and they get hard raise your hand if you sleep at least seven hours a night most nights last
night doesn't count seven hours oh fairly well-rested bunch mu a raise your hand if you move at least 30 minutes a day it doesn't all have to be on Technogym but it can be walking it can be gardening all right most of you ambassadors to the industry raise your hand if you eat three honest servings of vegetables every day vegetables and french fries and ketchup do not count all right I would say two thirds you raise your hand if you have not and i underscore not had unprotected sex with a stranger I said I'm gonna
party with you guys tonight rich your hand should be up all right the other end of this back to raise your hand if you belong to a faith it could be Christian Muslim Jew it doesn't matter belong it to keep them up and keep them up if you show up at least four times a month all right there's two hands sir okay this is this is a dumb question for this crowd but I'm gonna ask it anyway raise your hand if you have at least three friends who number one you can have a meaningful conversation
with them number two you can call them on a bad day and they'll care and number three you actually like them like I said I knew it's a dumb question in this crowd raesha if you have not smoked in the last five years I mean tobacco okay a few extra hands there and raise your hand if you have the desire and you believe you have the physical capacity that lived at least age ninety desire and physical capacity okay that's actually the best predictor betters best single most predictable when you add all four of them up
assuming an age of 50 and looking around me I can tell you guys are a lot younger but assuming age 50 if you raise your hand at least twice in your a man life expectancy 75 and if your woman it's 79 if you raise your hand at least five times and your man life expectancies 82 and a woman's 86 and if you raise your hand at least seven times and your man life expectancy is 89 and for a woman it's 93 so did did anybody here raise your hand all eight times anybody really could you
guys stand up please you can do please stand up that's all over on this side can we give them a huge world health wellness round of applause you guys are now dismissed to the bar we have special martinis for you the rest of you can stay so in 2003 working with National Geographic we set out to in a sense reverse-engineer longevity something called the Danish twin study which doctor has cited established that less than about 20% of how long you live is dictated by your genes the other 80% or so is lifestyle and environment so
based on that assumption we went about finding all the demographically confirmed areas where people are living measurably longest this little exercise took me about two and a half years and then once we found these places and by the way Michele and Gianni have been my partners from the very beginning really founders of this concept along with me once we were able to identify these areas then we brought on a different team of experts to help us find the common denominators the correlates and remarkably no matter where you go in the world and you find extraordinary
longevity you see the same 9 factors happening over and over again I'm gonna tell you what those 9 factors are but first since I have the benefit of National Geographic photography I thought I'd quickly take you to each of these 9 Blue Zones areas and give you a feel for what it's like to be there so of course the first place we stopped was Sardinia not far from here about 200 miles or 200 kilometers off the coast of Italy not the entire island but just the this area where Gianni points out this is actually an
area where a Bronze Age culture lived and they were pushed up there by the Romans about 2,000 years ago so not like the coast esmeralda and Gianni was really the first to identify extraordinary longevity a great inspiration and great friend I would argue one of the best longevity experts in the world and I'm not just saying that because he's my friend but because he's made an original finding and he's better prepared it has a better sort of all-encompassing understanding of centenarians that anyone I've met in the last 20 years studying longevity so that's not Gianni
so so as Gianni pointed out this is the area where you have the highest concentration of male centenarians in the world so guys this is where you might want to retire women on the other hand might want to go to the other side of the planet about 1200 kilometres south of Tokyo on the archipelago of Okinawa you find the world's longest live women so among cohorts of women over 60 you see about 30 times more centenarians than you would expect to see among a similar United States population so this is extraordinary long-term though the islands
in fact have the longest disability free life expectancy in the world what does that mean they live the longest and they avoid chronic diseases that are for shortening our lives and costing our world trillions of dollars they live a long time they stay sharpened to the very end why do they do it well certainly part of it their diet about 60% of their dietary intake until about 1960 came from one food alone anyone want to guess what that food was fish seaweed I heard rice I'm gonna shock you all it's actually purple sweet potatoes called
emo and the reason they ate them because they were it was a typhoon proof plant so these Thai foods could go through wipe out everything else and the sweet potatoes remain turns out they're extraordinarily healthy food add to that the tofu they have one of the highest consumption rates of tofu in the world about eight times more than we have in the West liberal use of tumeric I'm not a big believer in supplements but two American teas and food probably has an anti-inflammatory anti-cancer effect it's not been proven among these people but there's a nice
correlation but more important than I believe than their diet are some of the cultural aspects so I asked you that question if you have three good friends you can count on on a bad day that's a real question it's the question the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation uses to determine loneliness if you're lonely in America anyway it's probably most of the developed world you don't have three good friends you can count on it shaves about eight years off of your life expectancy loneliness is as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and it's grossly
under appreciated in the longevity culture where I come from the United States we're not automatically born with those three friends we have to work to get them in Okinawa you're sort of born with something called a moai a committed social network of friends who support them each other throughout their entire life and the reason I'm showing this picture here is that these five girls have belonged to the same moai for the past 97 years their average age is 102 they get together every night gossip drink sake argue about who that hot guy liked best back
in 1941 what they really have each other's back it's really I would say a smaller version of this of this conference but they get together every night if one doesn't show up to the nightly lately tea and and sake the other ones they're checking in on them also the Okinawan dialect have no word for retirement and stay there's none of this artificial punctuation between your useful life and your life of repose in Okinawa the word is a key guy the reason for which I wake up in the in the morning and imbues their entire adult
life I had this great conversation with my new best friend su Harmsworth I got it right so she told me she bought sold three companies and she said if she wants to get busy she announces her retirement so the the the prime example I think of iki guy but here it's found in passing down at martial arts it's continuing to stay active in your profession or in the case of Kumada saw a hundred and three-year-old spiritual leader it's found in her great-great-great granddaughter these two girls are separated in an age by one hundred one and
a half years so my editor at National Geographic a very clever editor been there around forever Peter Miller he said you have to find the Blue Zone in the United States and we had to look hard but we came across some very interesting data at the National Institutes on Aging that pointed to a very unusual subculture after off the San Bernardino freeway near Los Angeles and place called Loma Linda California I remember after being in exotic Sardinia I'm all of a sudden getting off an exit ramp to America's Blue Zone the first thing I saw
was a Del Taco and a Wiener Hut I'm like what's going on here well it turns out Loma Linda California is home to the highest concentration of seventh-day just in the world Adventists are conservative Methodists who distinguished himself from other Christians in that they celebrate their Sabbath on Saturday and they evangelize with health but really there's something pretty extraordinary going on here life expectancy for American women is 80 but for Adventist women that's 89 and for men the difference is even more remarkable so think about it for a second here is a population of Americans
living next to the Wiener Hut and living a decade longer and what that really means is they're avoiding the diseases at for short in their lives is it something genetic no if you look at a Adventist population they're from European extraction they're Hispanics they're Asian there's African Americans it's a heterogeneous population so what's happening here well I embedded I took about 15 trips there over the last 15 years and you see very clearly from Friday night at sunset until Saturday night at sunset no matter how busy they are no matter what the job is screaming
at them to do no matter where the kids need to be driven no matter what the social schedule is dictating they stopped everything Friday know at night they focus on their families Saturday morning they do their their church Saturday afternoon its plant-based potlucks and Saturday afternoon hardwired right in their religion is a nature walk the definite of definition of which has evolved over the decades but nevertheless not not just during the sort of wellness program at work they're doing it every year every decade of their life Adventists tend to hang out with other Adventists they
take their diet directly from the Bible I'm not a big Bible reader but I read it for this story and you see very clearly in Genesis chapter 1 verse 27 through 29 God prescribes very clearly the diet for the Garden of Eden every plant that bears seeds so that's nuts and grains and bee and pulses and then every tree that bears fruit and one stanza later God talks about green plants so the Adventists actually follow that the healthiest Americans are actually vegan Adventists or Adventists who are Adam maybe a little bit of fish but they
actually follow this Genesis diet we now know that health behaviors are as contagious as catching a cold Adventists tend to hang out with other Adventists produced men like Ellsworth Wareham a multi-millionaire yet when a contractor wanted $6,000 to build a privacy fence at age 94 he says well I'll build it myself for that kind of money for the next four days our photographer followed him around in the blistering heat as he shoveled cement and hauled timbers and on the fourth day predictably enough he ends up in the operating room but that's not Ellsworth Wareham getting
open-heart surgery that's Ellsworth wearing doing open-heart surgery it's the guy in the left [Applause] and somehow see rich Carmona doing something like this or this a hundred and six year old cowboy who starts his day with a swim and on the weekends he puts on the boards or my favorite Marge Jetton 105 wakes up every morning reads her Bible for a half hour eats her breakfast and she's very prescriptive about her breakfast slow cooked oatmeal nuts soy milk raisins and then followed by what she calls a prune juice shooter imagine that and move it right
on out and then she pumps iron gets on her bike a rides down the San Bernardino freeway 105 where she helps out with the Loma Linda Senior Center you guys don't know this about me but I've actually led a 17 fairly hardcore expeditions for National Geographic coding crossing Siberian blogs across the Sahara without sunscreen but I can honestly tell you the most harrowing adventure I've ever had was riding shotgun with Marge Jetton stranger is a friend of me so I wrote up these three cultures for National Geographic it was one of the best-selling issues in
the history of the magazine and like a good Explorer I never had any money before doing this I all of a sudden made some money I wrote the first Blue Zones book which by the way it's not really a geographic term as much as it is a lifestyle embodies the common denominators of its sometimes uses geography but we try to make it a bigger more embracing idea hired the demographers to go out and find other Blue Zones we found a fourth blue zone and the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica not along the beach sadly but
inland here people have the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality in the world they have a very I would argue the best diet humans have ever invented because it's so simple and delicious made of three simple ingredients which is ground into these beautiful tortillas a variety of beans which are made delicious and then a type of squash and when you combine these three foods you have complex carbohydrates trace minerals and all the amino acids necessary for human sustenance they spend one fifteenth the amount we do on health care and they get more people to a healthy
age ninety than anyplace else in the world a great example for policymakers to pay attention to and finally our last Blue Zone on the island of ikaria Greece not far from Turkey actually a week from today I'm going to be in a very interesting aspiring blue zone called camel ayah just a few miles from here but this one was a very isolated place largely overlooked by Western civilization it produces a population with eight extra years of life expectancy half the rate of cardiovascular disease and most interesting about one-fifth the rate of dementia as you'd expect
to see among a similar population part of the reason I argue with the the most strict version of the Mediterranean diet in the world several herbs that lower inflammation and serve as diuretics and like every blue zone people grow their own food I like to tell the story this guy here the short little guy to the right his name is Stu mightiest more ëitís he moved to America hard worker got a job as a painter married a greek-american bought a house in the suburbs bought a Chevrolet but at age 66 he started getting sick he
went to a doctor three doctors all gave him the same diagnosis terminal lung cancer he'll be dead in six months so instead of dying in the US he moves back to it Korea moves in with his parents stars breathing the air drinking the wine eating the diet reconnecting with his friends reconnect with his religion after six months he's actually feeling pretty good any plants an orchard a grape grape vines and he says himself I'm never gonna be alive to see these but my wife will and when she picks these grapes she'll think of me and
remember me want to make a long story medium 34 years later when I met him he was producing 200 liters of wine from that little vineyard all of which he drank some beer to go journals of course I asked my niece what is your secret to longevity and I was pretty sure it was not his ability to match plaids and he said I don't know I guess I just forgot to die which sounds flippant but here comes the counterintuitive part he actually hit the nail on the head no matter where you go in the world
and you see long live people whether it's in Sardinia or in Korea or Okinawa it's not because they tried they never said at age 50 won't go darn it I'm gonna get on that longevity diet live another 50 years they didn't join the Wellness Program at work they didn't call up an 800 number and start ordering supplements the big epiphany here was that longevity is not something that is successfully pursued it ensues it is the product of a right the right environment the environment that makes the Healthy Choice the easy choice so no matter where
you going the world and you see long live people number one they're not exercising it's sadly they don't have techno gyms and by the way I think techno gyms are the best gyms in the world I use them all the time but fewer than 20% of Americans get enough exercise in Blue Zones every time people go to work to a friend's house when their kids go to school it occasions a walk they have Gardens their houses are not full mechanical conveniences they are nudged into movement every 20 minutes so they keep their metallic metallic eye
they burn more calories they suffer the same stresses that we do what they have sacred daily rituals to reverse that stress and inflammation through prayer or naps or happy hour they have vocabulary for purpose which adds about 8x to years of life expectancy they they do drink a little bit I wrote another book called the blue zone solution which you can see out in the lobby there but we spend three years to do a meta-analysis of what people in blue zones really eat and if you average up 155 dies Terry surveys and all blue zones
you see the same thing ninety to a hundred percent plant-based and very high carbohydrate diets complex carbohydrates grains greens tubers nuts and beans are the five pillars of every Blue Zone diet in the world if you're eating a cup of beans a day it's probably adding about four years to your life expectancy they do eat meat but fewer than five times a month less fish than you might think no cow's dairy and when they comes to drinking its water tea coffee and a little bit of wine very Italian in that they don't focus on what
they eat butts different strategies to keep from overeating aid a large breakfast medium sized lunch they eat with their family there's no electronics in their kitchen and then the foundation of every blue zone in the world is they keep their family nearby keep their aging parents invest in their kids and their spouses they tend to be religious and probably the biggest thing and the biggest takeaway is they surround themselves with the right kind of people we now know that if your three best friends are obese and unhealthy there's a hundred and fifty percent better chance
that you'll be overweight so what your grandmother maybe used to tell you that show me your friends and I'll tell your future no place is it more apparent in blue zones around the world we spent a lot of money in this country trying to prevent disease diet supplements exercise programs but the problem with all of them is they occasionally work in the short run but they almost always fail in the long in the long run diets exercise programs we tend to start them with a lot of enthusiasm after the holidays and usually run out of
gas by by September and even if we'd found a pill in the Blue Zone guaranteed to reverse longevity Americans wouldn't take it long enough to make a difference and I hate to tell you this but when it comes to longevity there is no pill there's no supplement there's no magical serum you can raise rub on your face that's going to reverse stop or slow aging the best shot is doing what people in the blue zones do it's shifting the focus from trying to change people's behaviors and changing their environment people in blue zones they eat
wisely and they move naturally but because they're underpinned by purpose they hang out with the right people and they live in a community where the unhealthy choice is impossible so over the past 10 years I've been taking this model and applying it to 26 cities today at 4 o'clock I'm going to show you how you can actually apply this model and make it work measurably for populations and with that I'm going to say thank you very much and as the Sardinian say econo said I'll see you at 100 thank you [Applause] [Music]
