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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #186:

An interview with "Blue Zones" author Dan Buettner

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Dan Buettner is the author of The Blue Zones American Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100. The new book captures an alternate “Standard American Diet,” which mimics the a worldwide diet of longevity. He features recipes, chefs, and cooks from five food cultures: 1) Indigenous, Native, and Early American 2) African American 3) Latin American 4) Asian American 5) Regional and Contemporary American. A dominant theme running through these food cultures is the presence of whole plant-based foods. Earlier this week, it was the #2 bestselling book on all of Amazon.

The Blue Zones American Kitchen is the latest installment in a series of books by Buettner that highlight the path to healthy living via the lifestyle practices of the world’s longest-living people. Buettner calls the places where these people live “Blue Zones.”

In the Q&A with Food and Health Facts that follows, he describes the diets of people living in the Blue Zones as well as the backstory of his new book.

What is the story of the Blue Zones?  

For the past 20 years writing for National Geographic, I have identified the world’s longest-lived areas (Blue Zones) and studied the patterns and lifestyles that seem to explain their populations’ longevity. These places—Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and the Seventh Day Adventist community in Loma Linda, California—produce populations with the highest centenarian rate and the highest middle-age life expectancy.

People in these places suffer, in some cases, a fifth the rate of heart disease, a sixth the rate of dementia, and a sixth the rate of certain cancers compared with Americans. Until very recently, the obesity and diabetes rates in each were under 5 percent. The people in the Blue Zones live up to a decade longer than average Americans and spend a fraction of what most the rest of us do on health care.

How have these communities achieved this extraordinary longevity?  

It’s never one thing but rather a cluster of mutually supporting factors that keep people doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things for long enough not to develop chronic diseases. Essentially, they live in environments that make healthy choices unavoidable. As a result, they’re not developing heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, dementia, certain cancers, and other diseases that would otherwise shorten their lives.

They live in places where every time they go to work, to a friend’s house, or out to eat, getting there involves a walk. Their lives are underpinned with purpose, so they’re not experiencing existential stress or waking up wondering what the day holds. Loneliness—a life-shortening condition (as bad as smoking 10 cigarettes daily) that affects some 25 percent of Americans—isn’t an option in Blue Zones: Streets are full of walking neighbors, village festivals are regularly attended, and religious services are full.

They also eat a special diet. In my book The Blue Zones Solution, I explored a legitimate diet of longevity. Working under the guidance of Dr. Walter Willett, I aggregated more than 150 dietary surveys capturing the daily eating habits of people in the Blue Zones over the past 80 years. When we “averaged” those diets over time, we discovered that long-lived people eat remarkably similarly all over the world.

How much longer can you live if you eat a Blue Zones diet?  

Up to 10.7 years for women and 13 for men in the United States, according to a recent study.

What is the diet?

Ninety to 100 percent of their calories come from whole food, plant-based sources. In a word, they eat a high-carbohydrate diet. The term carbohydrate is probably the worst dietary term ever coined, as it encompasses everything from jelly beans to lentil beans. Simple carbohydrates like chips, white flour, and sweets are probably the most toxic foods in our diet, while complex carbohydrates like whole grains, tubers, and beans are probably the healthiest foods we eat.

In Blue Zones, 65 percent of the dietary intake comes from those healthy complex carbs; in fact, whole grains, greens, tubers, nuts, and beans are the five pillars of a longevity diet on four continents. In the Blue Zones, long-lived people eat very little fish and eggs. Meat is a celebratory food, consumed only five times a month. And though they enjoy small amounts of sheep and goat cheese, dairy from cows is almost completely absent from the diet.

People in the Blue Zones also eat an impressive variety of garden vegetables and leafy greens (especially spinach, kale, beet and turnip tops, chard, and collards) when they are in season; they pickle or dry the surplus to enjoy during the off-season. Beans, greens, sweet potatoes, whole grains, fruits, nuts, and seeds dominate Blue Zones meals all year long. Olive oil is also a staple in the Blue Zones. Evidence shows that olive oil consumption increases good cholesterol and lowers bad cholesterol. In Ikaria, for example, we found that for middle-aged people, about six tablespoons of olive oil daily seemed to cut the risk of premature mortality in half.

Sugar doesn’t figure much into their diets either, except as honey for drinks or desserts and occasionally in baked goods for festivals. In all, people of the Blue Zones consume about seven teaspoons of sugar a day, about a third of the 22 or so teaspoons the average American consumes daily.

Can you say more about beans?  

Beans reign supreme in the Blue Zones and are the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world: black beans in Nicoya; lentils, garbanzo, and white beans in the Mediterranean; and soybeans in Okinawa. People in the Blue Zones eat at least four times as many beans as Americans do on average—at least a half cup per day—and so should you. Why? Beans are packed with more nutrients per gram than any other food on Earth. On average, they are made up of 21 percent protein, 77 percent complex carbohydrates, and only a few percent fat. Because they are fiber rich and satisfying, they’ll likely help to push less-healthy foods out of your diet.

Can you say more about meat consumption?  

Averaging out consumption across the Blue Zones, we found that people ate about two ounces or less of meat about five times per month. The Adventist Health Study 2, which has been following 96,000 Americans since 2002, has determined that the people who lived the longest were vegans or pesco-vegetarians who ate a small amount of fish. Vegetarian Adventists will likely outlive their meat-eating counterparts by as many as eight years. While you may want to celebrate from time to time with meat, we don’t recommend it as part of a Blue Zones diet. Okinawans probably offer the best meat substitute: extra firm tofu, which is high in protein and cancer-fighting phytoestrogens.

What about fish? 

If you must eat fish, consume fewer than three ounces up to three times weekly. In most Blue Zones, people eat small amounts of fish, up to three small servings a week. Usually, the fish that they eat are small, relatively inexpensive varieties like sardines, anchovies, and cod—middle-of-the-food-chain species that are not exposed to the high levels of mercury or other chemicals that pollute our gourmet fish supply today. Again, fish is not a necessary part of a longevity diet, but if you must eat it, select varieties that are common and not threatened by overfishing.

What do you recommend for a snack? 

Eat two handfuls of nuts per day. A handful weighs about two ounces, the average amount that Blue Zones centenarians consume: almonds in Ikaria and Sardinia, pistachios in Nicoya, and all varieties of nuts with the Adventists. The Adventist Health Study 2 found that nut eaters outlive non–nut eaters by an average of two to three years. So try to snack on a couple handfuls of almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, walnuts, and/or peanuts every day.

What about beverages?  

The people of Blue Zones drink water, teas of all kinds, black coffee, and wine, including a garnet-red Cannonau in Sardinia that is rich in heart-healthy antioxidants like resveratrol and flavonoids like procyanidins.

If possible, strive to avoid soft drinks (including diet soda). With very few exceptions, people in Blue Zones drink only coffee, tea, water, and wine. Here’s why:

Water: Adventists recommend seven glasses of water daily. They point to studies showing that being hydrated facilitates blood flow and lessens the chance of a blood clot.

Coffee: Sardinians, Ikarians, and Nicoyans all drink coffee. Research associates coffee drinking with lower rates of dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Tea: People in every Blue Sone drink tea. Okinawans prefer green varieties, which have been shown to lower the risk of heart disease and several cancers. Ikarians drink brews of rosemary, wild sage, and dandelion—all herbs known to have anti-inflammatory properties.

Red wine: People who drink—in moderation—tend to outlive those who don’t. (This doesn’t mean you should start drinking if you don’t drink now.) People in most Blue Zones drink one to three small glasses of red wine per day, often with a meal and with friends.

Any other general guidance?  

Strive to eat foods that are recognizable. People in the Blue Zones traditionally eat whole foods, which are made from a single ingredient—raw, cooked, ground, or fermented—and are not highly processed. Residents eat raw fruits and vegetables; they grind whole grains themselves and then cook them slowly. They use fermentation—an ancient way to make nutrients bioavailable—in the tofu, sourdough bread, wine, and pickled vegetables they eat. And they rarely ingest artificial preservatives. Blue Zones dishes typically contain a half dozen or so ingredients, simply blended together.

Can you talk about how America’s food environment has evolved?

America’s food environment progressively deteriorated as the 20th century unfolded. Before World War II, food processing was relatively simple and mechanical—for example, breaking down wheat kernels into still identifiable flour, germ, and chaff, and vacuum-sealing vegetables in tin cans. But after the war, food technologists began to go much further, breaking raw grains down to their basic molecular structure and reassembling them into foods that bore no resemblance to the raw materials out of which they were fabricated.

As unhealthy calories got cheaper, they also got harder to escape. The number of fast food establishments grew significantly—from 58,000 in 1970 to more than 253,000 in 2015. More than 50 percent of all retail outlets, including tire repair shops, car washes, and pharmacies (which sell diabetes medicine) force us to shop through a gauntlet of sugar-sweetened beverages, snacks, and candies. We are hardwired to crave sugar, fat, and salt from our evolution in an environment of hardship and scarcity.

Now we live in an environment of overabundance and ease. We’re told to muster discipline and self-control all day every day. But discipline is like a muscle, and muscles fatigue. Our food supply today provides about 4,000 calories daily per person, twice the average need.

What is the story of your new book?  

James Edward Malin, a food studies researcher and an engineering and science librarian at the Cooper Union in New York, and I exhumed more than 60 oral histories, scientific reports, and academic papers to reconstruct several traditional American diets. The mother lode, however, came from the work of an agricultural chemist named Wilbur Olin Atwater.

In 1887, he and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Experimental Stations launched the first “dietaries” in various communities. For this project, field researchers went directly into households and recorded every bit of food the families ate over a period of several weeks. The resulting reports provide a remarkably data-driven representation of exactly what people were eating more than a century ago.

The scope of his work was ethnically and racially diverse, precisely capturing the diets of Mexican, Asian, and African Americans. His data from the late 1880s to the early 1930s shows that Mexican American and Asian American diets were 84 percent and 88 percent plant-based, respectively.

Ultimately, this book is a celebration of a uniquely American but largely overlooked American diet. Its more than 100 recipes showcase the ingenuity of our Indigenous people and our immigrants who brought their time-honored cooking techniques from the Old World and blended New World ingredients to produce ingenious food that just may help you live to 100.