September 15, 2025 • 39 mins
Your eating habits could be cutting years off the end of your life. But there's a simple solution - eat like the people who live happily and healthily into their 80s, 90s and beyond. Dan Buettner studies the inhabitants of so-called "Blue Zones" - where people live long lives. Food and eating culture seem to play an important role this longevity.
Dan talks to Dr Laurie about Blue Zones and explains the idea behind his cookbook One Pot Meals: 100 Recipes to Live to 100
And to hear more from Dan check out The Dan Buettner Podcast.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, the standard American diet is killing us.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
That's a stark line from the book I want to
tell you about in this episode, which is a bit
different from the other works I'll be sharing in this
season on my favorite books of twenty twenty five. My
other choices are mostly science y type books related to
the study of happiness, but today's pick is a bit different.
It's a cookbook entitled One Pot Meals, one hundred Recipes
to Live Till one hundred and the author of One
(00:45):
Pot Meals is someone you may remember if you're a
fan of the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
My name is Dan Buttener. I am a New York
Times bestselling writer, a national geographic explorer, and most significantly,
I'm a guest of Lori Santos, which is my proudest accolade.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
He's most well known for his work on what are
called blue zones, the places around the world where people
live the longest and happiest lives. Dan's research has shown
that there are lots of cultural factors that promote health
and happiness, but he's also found that food seems to
be an important factor.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Too, Hence a cookbook. The premise behind One.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Pot Meals is that America is definitely not a blue
zone when it comes to what we eat. As Dan
explains in his book, Americans are suffering from chronic illnesses
like diabetes and heart disease at higher rates than ever.
He also shared the scary statistic that Americans are dying
on average, about twelve years earlier than we should be.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yikes.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
But in One Pot Meals, Dan shares a whole host
of tasty recipes that use the kinds of ingredients that
people eat in blue zones across the globe. The dishes
that result are low in sugar, salt, and other processed stuff,
and high and whole grains and plants.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Plus they're really cheap.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I really love Dan's Blue zone work, so I was
excited to get my hands on One Pot Meals.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
But there was another reason I was excited to talk
to Dan.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
You see, I recently celebrated one of those big birthdays
with a zero.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I just turned fifty.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Join the half a century club.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
It is a time when you start thinking about longevity
a really different way. Forty was like, oh, yeah, I'm
getting old, but fifty's like, hey, you know this this matters.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Yeah. I just saw a study from the World Bank
that showed that fifty four year olds in two thousand
have the same cognitive level as a seventy one year
old today. So in this world of bad news, seventy
one is the new fifty four, you know, so turning fifty,
you're probably about thirty eight.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I'll take it.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I'll take whatever I can get. Even if fifty is
the new thirty eight.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Dan still thinks I could benefit from trying to emulate
what people do differently in blue zones. So I asked
Dan to start at the beginning. What sparked his blue
zone research in the first place.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Graduating from university at a time when most people are
launching into careers of productive and useful things, I went
and rode my bike. I bike from Alaska, Argentina, top
to bottom of Africa and around the world. That took
eight years, set three world records. But it sure did
help me understand the world in a way. You know,
somebody taken a Delta one flight doesn't absorb. And then
(03:13):
I've been wanting to work for National Geographic for a
long time, and I had a very clever editor there
who said, you know, my expeditions were interesting, but the
expeditions they're looking for at the National Geographic Society are
ones that add to the body of knowledge. You know,
we've been to the top of Everest four thousand times,
and those are sort of stunts these days. So it
got me thinking, could I devise a strategy for exploration
(03:38):
that actually added to the body of knowledge? And I
came up with these quests that let an online audience
direct a team of experts to solve mystery, thereby harnessing
the wisdom of the crowd and letting the audience actually
vote to decide where our expedition team went to gather clues,
and we did five expeditions to help solve why the
(03:58):
Maya civilization collapse. We did an expedition to illuminate human origins,
the origins of Western civilization. Many people think that's Greece,
but actually it's probably more Turkey. And got very good
at networking with top scientists and reading academic papers. As
you well know, reading academic papers is like learning a
(04:19):
second language. But once you get good at it, it
opens up this whole world of insights you don't have
when you're reading secondhand interpretations of those papers. And then
that led me eventually to Blue zones.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
You just use that term blue zone. So what is
a blue zone? What does that mean?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
A blue zone is a demographically confirmed, geographically confined area
where people live the longest. But now it's grown into
a movement. It's sort of a way of life that
focuses on setting up your surroundings so you're more likely
to live longer in a happier life.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
And so what was the mystery you were trying to
solve with the blue zone work? What's the big puzzle?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
So it's quite literally reverse engineering longevity. And there's a
few generally accepted assumptions that we work on. Number One,
the Danish twins to established that only about twenty percent
of how long we live is dictated by our genes.
The other eighty percent is something else, and that's not
an individual, that's for a population. You understand that. And
(05:21):
then the second thing is a small team of demographers
were just figured out how to authenticate ages and identify
spots where people are living verifyly the longest. So I
reason if we could find the longest of hot spots
around the world and then look for their common denominators,
that those common denominators would explain eighty percent of longevity,
(05:43):
and that's the foundation of Blue zones.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
I mean, the Blue Zone work has started now a
while ago, honestly, but you're hitting on something that folks
are talking about a lot these days, this idea of
what's called health span. So lifespan is kind of how
long we live, but health span is this notion of
how long do you live a kind of healthy life.
The Blue Zones really focus on that. Why is health
span so important?
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Well, okay, I actually after three more years, I'm just
finishing a book on health span and just to give
you a little bit of background on that. So the
official term is health adjustedt life expectancy, which goes under
the acronym HAIL. And that didn't exist when I was
first doing my original Blue Zone work. But now there's
(06:26):
an enormous body of scientists called the Global Burden of
Disease Project, about ten thousand scientists who are trying to
figure out this big problem we have on Earth, which
is life expectancy is going up, but us having more
old people who are sicker for longer, so it's not
getting us what we really want, which is more years
(06:48):
of good life. So health adjust that life expectancy measures
life expectancy minus years loss due to chronic disease like
heart disease and type two diabetes minus years of full
health loss to disability. So it's a big cluster of things.
And for this project, I found the four areas where
people live the longest healthy lives and look for their
(07:12):
common denominators. In the United States, an average person can
only expect to live at age sixty four before a
major disability or disease comes on board. Only sixty four
good years. In the United States, I found places where
people are enjoyed seventy seven years of full life. So
I'm really interested in the cluster of characteristics, the policies
(07:35):
and the individual interventions and really the designs that are
producing genetically average people who are living an extra twelve
years more than Americans do.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
And so where were some of the places where you
found that, because that was what you first identified in
the original Blue Zone book, where these like literal location
cities where people are living longer and more healthfully.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yes, the original Blue Zones, the longest lived men were
in Sardinia, Italy, just one area called the Neural Province.
Longest lived women in Okinawa, Japan, the Nicoya Peninsula is
the area with the lowest rate of middle age mortality,
which means people your age LORI have the best chance
of reaching a healthy age ninety five. Ninety five is
(08:17):
kind of the ceiling for the average human being. People say,
promising you to live to one hundred, they probably have
their hand in your pocket. But we're all kind of
designed to make it to our mid nineties. Women like
you maybe a little bit more, men like me a
little bit less. But in Nicoya they enjoy the best
chance of reaching that age ninety five. It kindi a
(08:37):
Greece virtually without dementia, living eight years longer than Americans.
And then among the Seventh Day Adventists in Lomalina, California,
we have a population who live about eight years longer
than their California counterparts. So that's interesting because it's right
here in the US.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
And so one of the things I've heard you say
in other interviews is that you learn so much from travel,
because I think you're meeting people and stuff. I'm just
I mean, you're always a healthy guy, but I'm curious
when you first started going to the blue zones and
meeting people, like any experiences that struck you like, oh
my gosh, this is so different than my life in
the US.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
So I've had the privilege of interviewing almost five hundred
one hundred year old with five hundred centenarians. And I
didn't much care for old people, and I feared getting
older before I started, and I really fell in love
with these people. People are making it to one hundred,
I've noticed tend to be interested and interesting. The grump
(09:35):
seemed to be selected out of the gene pools, out
of the pool anyway, and it is done for me.
It's given me this appreciation for older people, but also
an appreciation for getting older. This Becca Levy from Yale
has found that people with a poor attitude towards aging
actually live shorter lives. And this work has given me
(09:57):
the gift of appreciating older people and even old age.
You know, you actually get happier as you get older.
And I realized that spending time with family, really curating
my immediate social network, and living in a walkable community
are the biggest things I can do for not only
(10:18):
quantity but quality of life. And I've really been conscious
about setting up my life like that.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
And so when a lot of people these days talk
about kind of longevity and health span or what is
it health adjusted years for life.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Yeah, I already forgot that health adjusted life expected.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Health adjusted life expectancy.
Speaker 4 (10:36):
So when folks are talking about that, sometimes they kind
of have their hand in your pocket. As you said, right, Like,
if you talked a lot of influencers and you talk
about increasing your lifespan, you'll hear lots of things about
supplements and individual fixes and workout plans and things like that.
And one of the reasons I love your work so
much is you've kind of pushed back against this. You've
(10:57):
argued that these kind of quick fixes don't work as
well as we assume.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
What do you mean there, Well, there's an eighty four
billion dollar anti aging industry out there that has failed
to produce even one hill or supplement or hormone or
stem cell that is shown to reverse, stop or even
slow aging in humans. You know, there's some theoretical base,
but when you take these things, you're usually being promised
(11:22):
something that can't deliver, and you're performing an experiment on
your own body. You know. I like to point out
stem cells there's no regulation of where they come from
the medium they're delivered in that there could be a
medium that delivers infection as well as stem cells. I
have a neighbor in Miami who went down to Central
America for stem cell treatment and he never came back.
(11:42):
He embolized and died. So I'm not a big fan
of those. You know, I always defy anybody to show
me one behavioral modification intervention, say a diet or an
exercise program or supplement regimen that works for more than
single digit percentage of people over two years. You can't
(12:03):
find it. So you know, it's a great business plan
because every year or two and you know, we promise
better health, they're less weight or you know, more muscle,
and it doesn't deliver. But people still want it and
they'll try the new thing. And that's not the way
populations who are enjoyed in extra twelve good years, that's
(12:24):
not the way they do it. So I try. I'm
trying to illuminate the real characteristics or secrets of longevity.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Some treees what's going on in these different zones. I
know you've identified four different things that they might be
doing that's helping them live longer.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
What are those things?
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Number one? If you want to know what a centenarian
or a hundred year old ate to live to be
one hundred, you have to know what she ate as
a little girl, in middle age and lately. And you
can't just ask them, you know, what are you eating
because most people can't remember what they had two weeks
ago Tuesday for line, so how they can remember what
they ate as a little kid. So to get at that,
(13:00):
we found about one hundred and fifty five dietary surveys
done in all five Blue zones over the past eighty years.
Harvard's Walter Willett, who used to run the school public
Health there, he helped me do something called a meta
analysis to see what people ate over time and sort
of average it out. And you see they're eating mostly
(13:22):
a whole food diet, and about ninety percent of what
they eat ninety to ninety five is plants. It's mostly
whole grains, greens, tubers like sweet potatoes, nuts, and the
cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans.
People don't realize if you eat a couple of beans
of days predicts about four extra years of life expectancy.
(13:43):
So number one whole plant based diet. Number two, they
don't exercise. But they live in places where every time
they go to work or a friend's house, are out
to eat it occasions a walk. Their houses aren't full
of mechanical conveniences to do kitchen work and housework. In
yard work, they do it by hand. They have gardens
out back, so they're unconscious decisions when it comes to
(14:06):
movement nudges them into activity all day long, every day.
The equivalent we figured of about nine to eleven thousand
steps a day without thinking about it, average American gets
about four thousand steps a day. And then there's a
vocabulary for purpose in all these boo zones. And when
I first wrote the book in the mid two thousand
(14:26):
and two thousand and five, people looked at me and
said purpose, it was woo woo, airy, fiery. But we
now know from studies done by the National Institutes on
Aging that people who can articulate why they wake up
in the morning live about seven to eight years longer
than people who are rudderless in life. Maybe it's existential stress,
or maybe it's you're less likely to take your pills
(14:48):
or get exercise, and then the last one is socializing.
These people live in environments where they're bumping into friends
all day long, tend to live in extended families, so
this loneliness an epidemic here in the United States, is
not a problem in blue zones. They're just born into
society where they're richly socially connected from birth on.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
It's time for a quick break, but I'll be back
in just a moment to ask Dan how we can
bring the blue zone lifestyle into.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Our homes wherever we happen to live. The Happiness Lab
will be right back.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Explore. Researcher, podcaster, and now cookbook author Dan Butner has
spent years trying to unlock the secrets of blue zones,
those places around the world where locals live longer and
happier lives. One of the striking things Dan has learned
about blue zones is that the inhabitants there who live
well into their nineties don't seem to be making a
conscious effort to prolong their lives.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Remember, none of these places, these blue zones, are people
trying to live a long time. In America, we tend
to think the road to health and longevity is achieved
by finding a program, mustering the resources to buy it,
finding the discipline in the presence of mind to keep
at it. But that doesn't work in blue zones. They're
not pursuing health and longevity. It ensues they live in
(16:14):
environments where they're nudgs to move more, eat better, socialize
more without really thinking about it. So I got to thinking, well,
if the longest of the people in the world are doing
so because of their environment, how about the happiest people.
So I worked with the World Value Survey and the
World Poll by Gallup, and I looked at worldwide data
(16:37):
it covers about ninety five percent of the human population,
and convince them to first tell me where in the
world people are enjoying the most life satisfaction, the most
positive affect, which is moment to moment happiness, and the
most purpose. And they sent me in Asia anyway, highest
(16:58):
life satisfaction was in Singapore, not Bhutan, as many people
mistakenly believe. In the America, as it turns out, the
area with the most positive affect in other words, they
enjoy life most from day to day. And in fact,
the place that produces more happiness per GDP dollar than
any place else in the world is a place called Cartago,
(17:19):
Costa Rica. And then back to Scandinavia, a place called
Ohu's Denmark. We found that was the happiest region there.
I know lately Finland is sort of outperforming by a
tiny margin Denmark, but this region within Denmark is happier
than the country of Finland. So I actually went there
(17:41):
to try to find the common denominators and look for
why people aren't happier. And in no case, I hate
to tell you, LORI are they doing positive psychology exercises.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
It's not just because they're listening to this podcast what
you're telling you.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Well, you know, I love positive psychology, but nobody in
mass is writing journalists, or they're practicing gratitude or savory
or you know, these things that are are good idea,
and I know they've been shown with small sample sizes
to work in the short run, but as a long term,
you know, we want to be happy for a long time,
(18:18):
not just for as long as we think about it.
So you know, I tend to pay attention to the systems,
the elements of their surroundings that are coinciding or I
would argue producing happiness.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
And so what did you find?
Speaker 4 (18:32):
What are these systems doing differently when it comes to
producing happiness.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Well, we'll start with policies. So the World Happiness Report,
when they suck in all of this worldwide data, they
tell you the biggest driver of happiness on a national level,
GDP is important. You know, we need enough money for food, shelter, healthcare,
and mobility. We also need to be able to treat
(18:56):
ourselves once in a while when it comes to happiness.
But after too much money, then money doesn't really bring
much happiness. But equality very highly associated with happiness. Trust.
Can I trust my neighbor? Can I trust the police?
Can I trust politicians? It turns out that healthy life
expectancy is a big predictor of happiness. So you look
(19:17):
at places like Denmark where there's not necessarily really high
highs or you know, a sstasy or something that. But
people don't have to worry about what happens if I
get sick. Their healthcare system takes care of them from
creator to greve. They don't have to worry about do
I have enough money to send my kids to school
(19:38):
to college. Everybody's covered. They don't have to worry about
what happens when I get old and retire. So a
lot of the things that Americans worry about at least,
you know, the lower twenty five percent income are completely
absent in that culture.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
It also seems like those cultures have a lot of
ways to get in social connection. Naturally, that social connection
kind of ensues like less hours at work in the
Scandinavian countries, more public spaces for people to kind of
go out and connect.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Do we know how much that.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Is affecting people's happiness in different places.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
It's possible to sort of slice it out somewhat, But
in rank order, I would say in Singapore and Denmark,
I would say it's trust as number one. Number two,
it's safety. Safety is more important than freedom. I know
we're a country obsessed with freedom, but actually when it
comes to happiness, it's more important than our kids can
(20:29):
go out and play and we can feel like we
can walk on the street, we're not nervous that our
house is going to get broken into, and both of
those places they're very safe. Universal healthcare reduces a lot
of the worry about what happens if I'm going to
get sick. But to your point, so, in nineteen seventy five,
Denmark or Copenhagen was a traffic clog city, a high stress,
(20:54):
more dangerous to make your way through bad air. By
the way, the quality of air is associated with happiness too,
so bad air less happiness. So in Copenhagen, a guy
named Yan Gel, a designer, an environment designer, did the
first walk bikable city, and now about fifty five percent
of all trips taken across Copenhagen are done on foot
(21:15):
or done by bicycle. So gone is the danger, is
the stress? Gone is the long commute. We know from
Daniel Kahneman the least happy thing we do on a
day to day basis is our commute. And what you
get out of the deal is people are getting the
equivalent of about nine thousand steps a day without thinking
(21:36):
about it because it's just easier to walk to work
or it's easier to bike to the grocery store. So
it's this environment where people are mindlessly doing the things
that yield happiness.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
So it seems like one way that you can get
these benefits is to move to these places.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Right.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
You know, if I move to Scandinavia, you know I'm
going to get access to all these walkable cities. Right
if I move to Singapore, maybe I'll kind of have
my life satisfaction sort of end zue. It's much easier
if your whole culture is doing it. But we're not
totally screwed. If you're unable to move to a new city.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Well first, you know, just to drive home the point.
There's been a few studies that have fouled immigrants that
moved from unhappy places in Southeast Asia and Africa to Canada,
which is a happy place, or move from Soviet Bloc
countries to Denmark. Those people they don't change sex, they
don't change age very much, they don't change education level
(22:28):
very much, they don't change religious or sexual orientation. But
within one year they are reporting the happiness level of
their adoptive home, which often represents a doubling of their happiness.
And I'm not aware of anything in the academic literature
that can produce a doubling of happiness. And here all
they're doing is moving environments. So you say to yourself, well,
(22:50):
I can't move. And if you look at census data,
it shows that the average American moves over ten times
in their life, and that gives us ten opportunities to
move to a place where happiness will ensue. And there's
something called the Gallop Well Being Index, which tells us
where in America people are happy, and the walk score
where people are walking to work more and where air
(23:13):
quality is better and even within cities. I'm right now
coming to you from Minneapolis, and we have zip codes
with a life expectancy is thirteen years higher than in
the worst neighborhood. You don't want to dismiss the idea
of moving out of hand because it's so powerful. So
my daytime job. Since two thousand and nine, my company
and I have worked with about seventy different cities to
(23:37):
help them change their environment to set people up for
success or design for life I like to think of.
So we help these cities change their policies to favor
healthy food over junk food, and junk food marketing, to
favor the pedestrian and cyclist over the motorists, and favor
the non smoker over the smoker. By the way, non
smokers are happier. And then we have a certification process
(24:00):
or program for all the restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, schools,
and churches so that they can optimize their designs and
their policies and ways that we know are likely to
produce higher happiness and better health. And then we have
also a program for individuals which gives them checklists to
go into their home and set up their homes to
(24:22):
nudge them into better behaviors. We help them find like
minded people who are healthy. We know that who you
hang out with measurably influences how you're going to eat,
how happy you feel, how lonely you feel, how much
you smoke, how much you drink, et cetera. So we
want to upgrade your social circle. And finally we give
people a purpose workshop so they know what their values
(24:46):
and what they like to do and what they can contribute,
and then we make sure there's an outlet for that.
We've shown that if we can do the policy people
and then places the certification for five years that according
to Gallup, this is a third party, life expectancy goes up,
obesity goes down, healthcare costs go down, happiness goes up,
(25:09):
and everybody's satisfied, so to speak. This actually works not
by hounding people to change their diet or you know,
go run a marathon or run down to Central America,
and takes stem cells simply setting up their environments so
their unconscious decisions are slightly better every day for months, years,
(25:31):
in at least one case now decades.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
And so let's give me an example of a city
where you've done this, and like some of the specific
changes they've made, because I find the fact that you
can make these changes so quickly quite fascinating.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Well quick is I mean relative, and everybody wants to
see it in months it takes five years. So our
biggest city was Fort Worth, Texas. There's about a million
people there. They became largely more walkable and bikeable. They
certified about five hundred restaurants that so we made sure
that there were places for people to go get whole
plant based options and not just steak. About two thirds
(26:04):
of the schools became Blue Zone certified. We got the
soda pops out of their vending machines, and we changed
the default so elementary school kids are not eating in
hallways and classrooms in the inner city. We raised money
to put coolers in these convenience stores, and what was
otherwise a food desert now all of a sudden there
(26:26):
was a way for people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.
And it turns out that was a huge bonanza for
both the convenience store owner and the local people so
we don't rely on I could go on. There were
about forty different interventions. We made smoking harder. We got
them to change the default so there was no smoking
indoors or outdoors. So this all produced a three percent
(26:51):
drop in BMI, and the city itself, working with Gallop,
figured we saved them a quarter of a billion dollars
in projected healthcare costs every year because of these little
micro changes.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
I always love chatting with Dan, but we haven't gotten
to the main reason. I wanted to bring him on
the show today to explain how he's extended his blue
zone thinking into his new cookbook, so we'll turn to
that right after the break. Dan Butener has written lots
(27:25):
of books chronicling what people do better in blue zones,
those special geographic locations where people statistically live longer.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Happier lives.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
But the book I picked up over the summer, One
Pot Meals, didn't just list what folks in Okinawa or
Sardinia were doing better. It explained how we can cook
our own meals more like they do in blue zones.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
I asked Dan to explain this new direction.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yes, it's a bit of a shift, you know. So
I'm trying to articulate the blue zone diet of people
in places like Fort Worth and Naples and Jacksonville, Florida,
et cetera. So I started writing these cookbooks and working
with others to write these cookbooks. First of all, you
have to realize that every time you go out to eat,
you consume about three hundred extra calorieslessly. Those calories tend
(28:11):
to be laden with sodium, ultra processed foods, and sugars.
So the only real way you're gonna eat healthy or
eat for longevity is to cook at home. So when
you tell people you got to cook at home right away,
a lot of people I don't have time, I don't
know how, or I can't afford fresh fruits and vegetables.
But wait, it turns out the healthiest longevity foods in
(28:32):
the world are peasant foods. Beans. Last I check and
get a pound of beans for two bucks. Whole grains.
There are bins of them. You can fill up bags
of them, root vegetables, potatoes, sweet potato. They're old, dirt sheap.
What people in blue zones teach us is how to
take those very simple ingredients and make them taste delicious.
(28:53):
You know, I was a meat eater before I started
on this, and now I don't eat meat anymore. It's
not worth it for me health wise. And you know
there's other facets that don't make sense to me. But
for this new book, I wanted to take another step.
I've learned the most in important and I'm going to
actually quiz you on this, LORI, what do you think
(29:13):
is the most important ingredient for longevity?
Speaker 1 (29:17):
The most important ingredient like a food.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
Ingredient, yes, or a characteristic I.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
Would say plant based, social connection, time, having free time.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Those are all important. But number one is taste.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Taste right, because if it doesn't taste good, I'm not
gonna eat.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
It, that's right. And if it does taste good, you
don't much care what it is. If it's good for
you or bad for it, you're gonna eat it for
the long run. So to make sure that people like
this one, this new book is called The Blue Zone
Kitchen One Pot Meals. So I worked with Stanford in
AI Lab and we scraped six hundred and fifty thousand
(29:52):
recipes from the most popular sites on the internet. We
isolated all of the recipes with one hundred or more
five star reviews, and then we analyzed it and we
saw seven very clear flavor patterns, and then I gave
the Blue Zones Food Guidelines these seven patterns to the
Most Gifted Recipe Developer Guide from the New York Times,
(30:15):
and he helped me create one hundred recipes to live to,
one hundred that are maniacally delicious and formulated for longevity.
And you can make them in one pot, and they
cost less than three dollars of serving, and you can
make most of them less than twenty minutes. So overclaim
every single objection somebody might have and lead with deliciousness.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
And I love that you're doing this with an eye
for saving people time, because I think there's the you know,
there's the finance thing, there's the people don't know how
to do it thing, But I think the time thing
is real. And I think one of the big hits
on happiness that we see in the US right now
is that people self report being really time famished. Right
they don't have time to cook a whole meal, and
so I think kind of adding to that, adding to
(31:01):
the time bamin by having them cook, you know, a
plant based meal. It's going to take hours and hours
to make it delicious. Like that just doesn't really help.
But all your meals were the reason I'm so excited
about this cookbook. It seems like all the meals are
are quick, like they're frugal like monetarily, but they're also
frugal for our time too.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Yeah, there's several in there where you can just take
you fifteen minutes to assemble in the morning. You put
it an insta pot. I have no connection to instapot,
but it's it's a basically electric pressure cooker and you
push a butt and you come home from work, dinner
for eight people's done. But I also want to make
a very important point. So if you're eating the standard
(31:38):
American diet, which means you're not paying a hell of
a lot of attention to what you're eating, and you're
a twenty year old, you're losing about ten years of
life expectancy. For a male it's twelve years. And if
you're sixty, you're still losing six years over eating a
whole food, largely plant based diet. So people say, I
don't have time to make healthy food. But if you
(32:01):
take those let's just say those six years of extra
life expectancy and average and back through your life. It's
an extra two hours a day. We got to afford
to not eat healthy.
Speaker 4 (32:12):
I do. I do love that framing that, like by eating,
by spending this, you know, twenty minutes half hour to
cook the healthy meal, I'm actually getting two hours a
day over my whole lifetime.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
What do I know that? It's a cognitive trap, right
to think, oh, I don't have time.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Yeahs such a cognitive trap, right, because we're not thinking
over the long term. We're thinking this Thursday at five o'clock,
like what am I doing for my time?
Speaker 1 (32:31):
We're not kind of thinking for the right term.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
The cookbook is called The Blue Zones Kitchen, One Pot,
and to test it out, you know, I live in
Miami these days, and I went to something called the
Overtown Center and this is a place where inner city
moms who don't have a lot of money, you know,
bring their kids. And I invited twenty moms to spend
ten weeks with me. And every week we got together
(32:54):
and I put them in what we call mo eyes,
which are these sort of committed social circles, and we
spend some time making sure they get to know each other.
Then I brought my cookbook and I said, pays through
this and identify a recipe you'd like to cook with.
You know, it's actually for next week. But then I
hired a chef to help me, and we brought cutting boards.
(33:16):
I gave them all instapots, and every Wednesday at from
eleven to one, we all cooked together. It was simple
and it was fun and it was just chopped and
we put it in the instapot. We put the lid on,
and then and a lot of these ladies are eating,
you know, popeyes and frozen pizza and junk food from
the convenience store. And once they realized that A they
(33:38):
could afford it, B they could make it. And see
now they have an instapot, they have the hardware to
cook it. And then the closer was they tasted it
and oh my god, this is delicious. My job is done.
I send them home and we captured their blood pressure
and their weight, and every one of them lost weight.
Every one of them had a little too a lot
(34:00):
dropping blood pressure in just ten weeks. So, you know,
I just think it's the killer app to get people
cooking at home again. You don't have to buy my
book books, but the idea of eating whole plant based
food is the biggest gift you can give to your
family when it comes to longevity.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
I also love that you've mentioned this idea of like
getting the moeyes together, or that you're making dinner for eight,
because another thing that we know about the power of
home cooked meals is that oftentime, our home cooked meals
are eating with the family together. And one of the
most recent World Happiness reports talked about the power of shared.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Meals and eating together.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
I think another thing we do when we're kind of
getting our standard American diet fast food is that we
run over to fast food. We eat in our car
by ourselves, but you know, the instapot meal that we're
making for multiple people. It means we can get the
benefit of social connection while we're enjoying that meal as well.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
There's two other things besides social connection. Number one, you know,
if you're eating with one hand on the spearing wheel
or standing up, you tend to eat much faster, and
it takes about twenty minutes for that full feeling to
travel from your belly to your brain. And if you're
eating on the run, you're much more likely to overeat
(35:09):
than if you're sitting with your family or even with
friends and punctuating the meal with a conversation. The other
thing is if you eat when you're stressed, Cortisol interrupts
the digestion process. It makes it less complete, makes it
more like you're going to get indigestion, creates an inflammatory
situation in your body, so you really want to slow down.
(35:33):
And it's other thing you see in blue zones. You
know in the Christian countries, they're always saying grace before
a meal or in a okay now it's hot, a
hotchy boo, a confusion adage. It reminds them to stop
eating when their stomach is eighty percent full. But they're
putting some punctuation between their busy life and okay, now
we're eating, thank you Higher Power for this food, honoring
(35:57):
the food, so it's not just stuffing stuff in their mouth.
And now this is a social activity. We're gonna eat
with our family or friends. Makes a big difference over time.
Speaker 4 (36:08):
As I mentioned, I just turned fifty and so I
feel like I'm looking forward to the next fifty years
so I can become a centenarian as well. Any advice
for me to live longer and better during my next
fifty years.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
Well, number one, think about who you're spending time with.
I don't know your social so first of all, you
look pretty happy and healthy to me, so maybe nothing.
But if I'm to an average person, I would say,
who are my three best friends? Who are the people
I spend the most time with. We know, if your
three best friends are obese or unhealthy, there's about one
(36:40):
hundred and fifty percent better chance you'll be overweight. So
I'm wont tight to dump your you know, your old, unhappy,
unhealthy friends, because they might need you. But I would
say that adding happy and healthy friends probably one of
the most powerful things you can do to add yours,
because friends have a long term impact on your health
behaviors without you even thinking about it. I'd also think
(37:03):
about where I'm living. You know, if you live in
a place with too much stress or traffic or not
access to good food, I would think about moving. And
then the last thing, take it a few moments to
write down what your values are. I care about women's issues.
I'm a Christian, I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat, whatever
(37:23):
it is, write them down. Then in a separate column,
Write down what you love to do. Oh, I love
I love writing, or I love teaching, or I love
I love to fix things. I'm really good at resolving
conflicts whatever, boom boom boom LISTA. And then a third column.
What am I good at? Well, I'm really good at
(37:45):
taking care of people. I'm really good at inspiring the
next generation, whatever it is. Get that out in front
of you, and then make sure you have an outlet
for those things. You know, the main values, passions and
what you're good at. And if you're not getting it
at work. And by the way, according to Gal, about
seventy percent of Americans don't get it at work. They
(38:05):
don't have purpose at work. Make sure you're deploying it
at home or volunteering. Seems like such a cuiche to volunteer,
but it is so powerful for both longevity and happiness.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
This is my Dan Butner proved recipe for living into
one hundred years private consultations.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
And it's free, not as I can't sell you a supplement,
and I'm not selling you I'm or a hormone or
any of that other snake oil than on other influencers.
But this is these are I'm coming to you from
the populations who are manifestly living the longest, healthiest lives.
It's just a distillation. I'm just a medium here.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
If this discussion has what your appetite, then you should
check out Dan's cookbook One Pot Meals, which is out now,
and for more tips I'm living happier and healthier, you
should check out dance new podcast, it's called the Dan
Buttner Podcast. In our next episode, I'll be leaving the
cookbooks behind to explore a classic text on behavioral science
with a brand new, an improved edition for twenty twenty five.
(39:11):
It's even written by a Nobel Laureate.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
You don't, Mike drop the like en Nobel Laureate.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
I'll let you mention that all that next time on
the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin, the standard American diet is killing us.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
That's a stark line from the book I want to
tell you about in this episode, which is a bit
different from the other works I'll be sharing in this
season on my favorite books of twenty twenty five. My
other choices are mostly science y type books related to
the study of happiness, but today's pick is a bit different.
It's a cookbook entitled One Pot Meals, one hundred Recipes
to Live Till one hundred and the author of One
(00:45):
Pot Meals is someone you may remember if you're a
fan of the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
My name is Dan Buttener. I am a New York
Times bestselling writer, a national geographic explorer, and most significantly,
I'm a guest of Lori Santos, which is my proudest accolade.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
He's most well known for his work on what are
called blue zones, the places around the world where people
live the longest and happiest lives. Dan's research has shown
that there are lots of cultural factors that promote health
and happiness, but he's also found that food seems to
be an important factor.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Too, Hence a cookbook. The premise behind One.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Pot Meals is that America is definitely not a blue
zone when it comes to what we eat. As Dan
explains in his book, Americans are suffering from chronic illnesses
like diabetes and heart disease at higher rates than ever.
He also shared the scary statistic that Americans are dying
on average, about twelve years earlier than we should be.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yikes.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
But in One Pot Meals, Dan shares a whole host
of tasty recipes that use the kinds of ingredients that
people eat in blue zones across the globe. The dishes
that result are low in sugar, salt, and other processed stuff,
and high and whole grains and plants.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Plus they're really cheap.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I really love Dan's Blue zone work, so I was
excited to get my hands on One Pot Meals.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
But there was another reason I was excited to talk
to Dan.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
You see, I recently celebrated one of those big birthdays
with a zero.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
I just turned fifty.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Join the half a century club.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
It is a time when you start thinking about longevity
a really different way. Forty was like, oh, yeah, I'm
getting old, but fifty's like, hey, you know this this matters.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Yeah. I just saw a study from the World Bank
that showed that fifty four year olds in two thousand
have the same cognitive level as a seventy one year
old today. So in this world of bad news, seventy
one is the new fifty four, you know, so turning fifty,
you're probably about thirty eight.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I'll take it.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I'll take whatever I can get. Even if fifty is
the new thirty eight.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Dan still thinks I could benefit from trying to emulate
what people do differently in blue zones. So I asked
Dan to start at the beginning. What sparked his blue
zone research in the first place.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Graduating from university at a time when most people are
launching into careers of productive and useful things, I went
and rode my bike. I bike from Alaska, Argentina, top
to bottom of Africa and around the world. That took
eight years, set three world records. But it sure did
help me understand the world in a way. You know,
somebody taken a Delta one flight doesn't absorb. And then
(03:13):
I've been wanting to work for National Geographic for a
long time, and I had a very clever editor there
who said, you know, my expeditions were interesting, but the
expeditions they're looking for at the National Geographic Society are
ones that add to the body of knowledge. You know,
we've been to the top of Everest four thousand times,
and those are sort of stunts these days. So it
got me thinking, could I devise a strategy for exploration
(03:38):
that actually added to the body of knowledge? And I
came up with these quests that let an online audience
direct a team of experts to solve mystery, thereby harnessing
the wisdom of the crowd and letting the audience actually
vote to decide where our expedition team went to gather clues,
and we did five expeditions to help solve why the
(03:58):
Maya civilization collapse. We did an expedition to illuminate human origins,
the origins of Western civilization. Many people think that's Greece,
but actually it's probably more Turkey. And got very good
at networking with top scientists and reading academic papers. As
you well know, reading academic papers is like learning a
(04:19):
second language. But once you get good at it, it
opens up this whole world of insights you don't have
when you're reading secondhand interpretations of those papers. And then
that led me eventually to Blue zones.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
You just use that term blue zone. So what is
a blue zone? What does that mean?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
A blue zone is a demographically confirmed, geographically confined area
where people live the longest. But now it's grown into
a movement. It's sort of a way of life that
focuses on setting up your surroundings so you're more likely
to live longer in a happier life.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
And so what was the mystery you were trying to
solve with the blue zone work? What's the big puzzle?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
So it's quite literally reverse engineering longevity. And there's a
few generally accepted assumptions that we work on. Number One,
the Danish twins to established that only about twenty percent
of how long we live is dictated by our genes.
The other eighty percent is something else, and that's not
an individual, that's for a population. You understand that. And
(05:21):
then the second thing is a small team of demographers
were just figured out how to authenticate ages and identify
spots where people are living verifyly the longest. So I
reason if we could find the longest of hot spots
around the world and then look for their common denominators,
that those common denominators would explain eighty percent of longevity,
(05:43):
and that's the foundation of Blue zones.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
I mean, the Blue Zone work has started now a
while ago, honestly, but you're hitting on something that folks
are talking about a lot these days, this idea of
what's called health span. So lifespan is kind of how
long we live, but health span is this notion of
how long do you live a kind of healthy life.
The Blue Zones really focus on that. Why is health
span so important?
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Well, okay, I actually after three more years, I'm just
finishing a book on health span and just to give
you a little bit of background on that. So the
official term is health adjustedt life expectancy, which goes under
the acronym HAIL. And that didn't exist when I was
first doing my original Blue Zone work. But now there's
(06:26):
an enormous body of scientists called the Global Burden of
Disease Project, about ten thousand scientists who are trying to
figure out this big problem we have on Earth, which
is life expectancy is going up, but us having more
old people who are sicker for longer, so it's not
getting us what we really want, which is more years
(06:48):
of good life. So health adjust that life expectancy measures
life expectancy minus years loss due to chronic disease like
heart disease and type two diabetes minus years of full
health loss to disability. So it's a big cluster of things.
And for this project, I found the four areas where
people live the longest healthy lives and look for their
(07:12):
common denominators. In the United States, an average person can
only expect to live at age sixty four before a
major disability or disease comes on board. Only sixty four
good years. In the United States, I found places where
people are enjoyed seventy seven years of full life. So
I'm really interested in the cluster of characteristics, the policies
(07:35):
and the individual interventions and really the designs that are
producing genetically average people who are living an extra twelve
years more than Americans do.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
And so where were some of the places where you
found that, because that was what you first identified in
the original Blue Zone book, where these like literal location
cities where people are living longer and more healthfully.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yes, the original Blue Zones, the longest lived men were
in Sardinia, Italy, just one area called the Neural Province.
Longest lived women in Okinawa, Japan, the Nicoya Peninsula is
the area with the lowest rate of middle age mortality,
which means people your age LORI have the best chance
of reaching a healthy age ninety five. Ninety five is
(08:17):
kind of the ceiling for the average human being. People say,
promising you to live to one hundred, they probably have
their hand in your pocket. But we're all kind of
designed to make it to our mid nineties. Women like
you maybe a little bit more, men like me a
little bit less. But in Nicoya they enjoy the best
chance of reaching that age ninety five. It kindi a
(08:37):
Greece virtually without dementia, living eight years longer than Americans.
And then among the Seventh Day Adventists in Lomalina, California,
we have a population who live about eight years longer
than their California counterparts. So that's interesting because it's right
here in the US.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
And so one of the things I've heard you say
in other interviews is that you learn so much from travel,
because I think you're meeting people and stuff. I'm just
I mean, you're always a healthy guy, but I'm curious
when you first started going to the blue zones and
meeting people, like any experiences that struck you like, oh
my gosh, this is so different than my life in
the US.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
So I've had the privilege of interviewing almost five hundred
one hundred year old with five hundred centenarians. And I
didn't much care for old people, and I feared getting
older before I started, and I really fell in love
with these people. People are making it to one hundred,
I've noticed tend to be interested and interesting. The grump
(09:35):
seemed to be selected out of the gene pools, out
of the pool anyway, and it is done for me.
It's given me this appreciation for older people, but also
an appreciation for getting older. This Becca Levy from Yale
has found that people with a poor attitude towards aging
actually live shorter lives. And this work has given me
(09:57):
the gift of appreciating older people and even old age.
You know, you actually get happier as you get older.
And I realized that spending time with family, really curating
my immediate social network, and living in a walkable community
are the biggest things I can do for not only
(10:18):
quantity but quality of life. And I've really been conscious
about setting up my life like that.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
And so when a lot of people these days talk
about kind of longevity and health span or what is
it health adjusted years for life.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
Yeah, I already forgot that health adjusted life expected.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
Health adjusted life expectancy.
Speaker 4 (10:36):
So when folks are talking about that, sometimes they kind
of have their hand in your pocket. As you said, right, Like,
if you talked a lot of influencers and you talk
about increasing your lifespan, you'll hear lots of things about
supplements and individual fixes and workout plans and things like that.
And one of the reasons I love your work so
much is you've kind of pushed back against this. You've
(10:57):
argued that these kind of quick fixes don't work as
well as we assume.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
What do you mean there, Well, there's an eighty four
billion dollar anti aging industry out there that has failed
to produce even one hill or supplement or hormone or
stem cell that is shown to reverse, stop or even
slow aging in humans. You know, there's some theoretical base,
but when you take these things, you're usually being promised
(11:22):
something that can't deliver, and you're performing an experiment on
your own body. You know. I like to point out
stem cells there's no regulation of where they come from
the medium they're delivered in that there could be a
medium that delivers infection as well as stem cells. I
have a neighbor in Miami who went down to Central
America for stem cell treatment and he never came back.
(11:42):
He embolized and died. So I'm not a big fan
of those. You know, I always defy anybody to show
me one behavioral modification intervention, say a diet or an
exercise program or supplement regimen that works for more than
single digit percentage of people over two years. You can't
(12:03):
find it. So you know, it's a great business plan
because every year or two and you know, we promise
better health, they're less weight or you know, more muscle,
and it doesn't deliver. But people still want it and
they'll try the new thing. And that's not the way
populations who are enjoyed in extra twelve good years, that's
(12:24):
not the way they do it. So I try. I'm
trying to illuminate the real characteristics or secrets of longevity.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
Some treees what's going on in these different zones. I
know you've identified four different things that they might be
doing that's helping them live longer.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
What are those things?
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Number one? If you want to know what a centenarian
or a hundred year old ate to live to be
one hundred, you have to know what she ate as
a little girl, in middle age and lately. And you
can't just ask them, you know, what are you eating
because most people can't remember what they had two weeks
ago Tuesday for line, so how they can remember what
they ate as a little kid. So to get at that,
(13:00):
we found about one hundred and fifty five dietary surveys
done in all five Blue zones over the past eighty years.
Harvard's Walter Willett, who used to run the school public
Health there, he helped me do something called a meta
analysis to see what people ate over time and sort
of average it out. And you see they're eating mostly
(13:22):
a whole food diet, and about ninety percent of what
they eat ninety to ninety five is plants. It's mostly
whole grains, greens, tubers like sweet potatoes, nuts, and the
cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans.
People don't realize if you eat a couple of beans
of days predicts about four extra years of life expectancy.
(13:43):
So number one whole plant based diet. Number two, they
don't exercise. But they live in places where every time
they go to work or a friend's house, are out
to eat it occasions a walk. Their houses aren't full
of mechanical conveniences to do kitchen work and housework. In
yard work, they do it by hand. They have gardens
out back, so they're unconscious decisions when it comes to
(14:06):
movement nudges them into activity all day long, every day.
The equivalent we figured of about nine to eleven thousand
steps a day without thinking about it, average American gets
about four thousand steps a day. And then there's a
vocabulary for purpose in all these boo zones. And when
I first wrote the book in the mid two thousand
(14:26):
and two thousand and five, people looked at me and
said purpose, it was woo woo, airy, fiery. But we
now know from studies done by the National Institutes on
Aging that people who can articulate why they wake up
in the morning live about seven to eight years longer
than people who are rudderless in life. Maybe it's existential stress,
or maybe it's you're less likely to take your pills
(14:48):
or get exercise, and then the last one is socializing.
These people live in environments where they're bumping into friends
all day long, tend to live in extended families, so
this loneliness an epidemic here in the United States, is
not a problem in blue zones. They're just born into
society where they're richly socially connected from birth on.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
It's time for a quick break, but I'll be back
in just a moment to ask Dan how we can
bring the blue zone lifestyle into.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Our homes wherever we happen to live. The Happiness Lab
will be right back.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Explore. Researcher, podcaster, and now cookbook author Dan Butner has
spent years trying to unlock the secrets of blue zones,
those places around the world where locals live longer and
happier lives. One of the striking things Dan has learned
about blue zones is that the inhabitants there who live
well into their nineties don't seem to be making a
conscious effort to prolong their lives.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Remember, none of these places, these blue zones, are people
trying to live a long time. In America, we tend
to think the road to health and longevity is achieved
by finding a program, mustering the resources to buy it,
finding the discipline in the presence of mind to keep
at it. But that doesn't work in blue zones. They're
not pursuing health and longevity. It ensues they live in
(16:14):
environments where they're nudgs to move more, eat better, socialize
more without really thinking about it. So I got to thinking, well,
if the longest of the people in the world are doing
so because of their environment, how about the happiest people.
So I worked with the World Value Survey and the
World Poll by Gallup, and I looked at worldwide data
(16:37):
it covers about ninety five percent of the human population,
and convince them to first tell me where in the
world people are enjoying the most life satisfaction, the most
positive affect, which is moment to moment happiness, and the
most purpose. And they sent me in Asia anyway, highest
(16:58):
life satisfaction was in Singapore, not Bhutan, as many people
mistakenly believe. In the America, as it turns out, the
area with the most positive affect in other words, they
enjoy life most from day to day. And in fact,
the place that produces more happiness per GDP dollar than
any place else in the world is a place called Cartago,
(17:19):
Costa Rica. And then back to Scandinavia, a place called
Ohu's Denmark. We found that was the happiest region there.
I know lately Finland is sort of outperforming by a
tiny margin Denmark, but this region within Denmark is happier
than the country of Finland. So I actually went there
(17:41):
to try to find the common denominators and look for
why people aren't happier. And in no case, I hate
to tell you, LORI are they doing positive psychology exercises.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
It's not just because they're listening to this podcast what
you're telling you.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Well, you know, I love positive psychology, but nobody in
mass is writing journalists, or they're practicing gratitude or savory
or you know, these things that are are good idea,
and I know they've been shown with small sample sizes
to work in the short run, but as a long term,
you know, we want to be happy for a long time,
(18:18):
not just for as long as we think about it.
So you know, I tend to pay attention to the systems,
the elements of their surroundings that are coinciding or I
would argue producing happiness.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
And so what did you find?
Speaker 4 (18:32):
What are these systems doing differently when it comes to
producing happiness.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Well, we'll start with policies. So the World Happiness Report,
when they suck in all of this worldwide data, they
tell you the biggest driver of happiness on a national level,
GDP is important. You know, we need enough money for food, shelter, healthcare,
and mobility. We also need to be able to treat
(18:56):
ourselves once in a while when it comes to happiness.
But after too much money, then money doesn't really bring
much happiness. But equality very highly associated with happiness. Trust.
Can I trust my neighbor? Can I trust the police?
Can I trust politicians? It turns out that healthy life
expectancy is a big predictor of happiness. So you look
(19:17):
at places like Denmark where there's not necessarily really high
highs or you know, a sstasy or something that. But
people don't have to worry about what happens if I
get sick. Their healthcare system takes care of them from
creator to greve. They don't have to worry about do
I have enough money to send my kids to school
(19:38):
to college. Everybody's covered. They don't have to worry about
what happens when I get old and retire. So a
lot of the things that Americans worry about at least,
you know, the lower twenty five percent income are completely
absent in that culture.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
It also seems like those cultures have a lot of
ways to get in social connection. Naturally, that social connection
kind of ensues like less hours at work in the
Scandinavian countries, more public spaces for people to kind of
go out and connect.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Do we know how much that.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Is affecting people's happiness in different places.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
It's possible to sort of slice it out somewhat, But
in rank order, I would say in Singapore and Denmark,
I would say it's trust as number one. Number two,
it's safety. Safety is more important than freedom. I know
we're a country obsessed with freedom, but actually when it
comes to happiness, it's more important than our kids can
(20:29):
go out and play and we can feel like we
can walk on the street, we're not nervous that our
house is going to get broken into, and both of
those places they're very safe. Universal healthcare reduces a lot
of the worry about what happens if I'm going to
get sick. But to your point, so, in nineteen seventy five,
Denmark or Copenhagen was a traffic clog city, a high stress,
(20:54):
more dangerous to make your way through bad air. By
the way, the quality of air is associated with happiness too,
so bad air less happiness. So in Copenhagen, a guy
named Yan Gel, a designer, an environment designer, did the
first walk bikable city, and now about fifty five percent
of all trips taken across Copenhagen are done on foot
(21:15):
or done by bicycle. So gone is the danger, is
the stress? Gone is the long commute. We know from
Daniel Kahneman the least happy thing we do on a
day to day basis is our commute. And what you
get out of the deal is people are getting the
equivalent of about nine thousand steps a day without thinking
(21:36):
about it because it's just easier to walk to work
or it's easier to bike to the grocery store. So
it's this environment where people are mindlessly doing the things
that yield happiness.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
So it seems like one way that you can get
these benefits is to move to these places.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Right.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
You know, if I move to Scandinavia, you know I'm
going to get access to all these walkable cities. Right
if I move to Singapore, maybe I'll kind of have
my life satisfaction sort of end zue. It's much easier
if your whole culture is doing it. But we're not
totally screwed. If you're unable to move to a new city.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Well first, you know, just to drive home the point.
There's been a few studies that have fouled immigrants that
moved from unhappy places in Southeast Asia and Africa to Canada,
which is a happy place, or move from Soviet Bloc
countries to Denmark. Those people they don't change sex, they
don't change age very much, they don't change education level
(22:28):
very much, they don't change religious or sexual orientation. But
within one year they are reporting the happiness level of
their adoptive home, which often represents a doubling of their happiness.
And I'm not aware of anything in the academic literature
that can produce a doubling of happiness. And here all
they're doing is moving environments. So you say to yourself, well,
(22:50):
I can't move. And if you look at census data,
it shows that the average American moves over ten times
in their life, and that gives us ten opportunities to
move to a place where happiness will ensue. And there's
something called the Gallop Well Being Index, which tells us
where in America people are happy, and the walk score
where people are walking to work more and where air
(23:13):
quality is better and even within cities. I'm right now
coming to you from Minneapolis, and we have zip codes
with a life expectancy is thirteen years higher than in
the worst neighborhood. You don't want to dismiss the idea
of moving out of hand because it's so powerful. So
my daytime job. Since two thousand and nine, my company
and I have worked with about seventy different cities to
(23:37):
help them change their environment to set people up for
success or design for life I like to think of.
So we help these cities change their policies to favor
healthy food over junk food, and junk food marketing, to
favor the pedestrian and cyclist over the motorists, and favor
the non smoker over the smoker. By the way, non
smokers are happier. And then we have a certification process
(24:00):
or program for all the restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, schools,
and churches so that they can optimize their designs and
their policies and ways that we know are likely to
produce higher happiness and better health. And then we have
also a program for individuals which gives them checklists to
go into their home and set up their homes to
(24:22):
nudge them into better behaviors. We help them find like
minded people who are healthy. We know that who you
hang out with measurably influences how you're going to eat,
how happy you feel, how lonely you feel, how much
you smoke, how much you drink, et cetera. So we
want to upgrade your social circle. And finally we give
people a purpose workshop so they know what their values
(24:46):
and what they like to do and what they can contribute,
and then we make sure there's an outlet for that.
We've shown that if we can do the policy people
and then places the certification for five years that according
to Gallup, this is a third party, life expectancy goes up,
obesity goes down, healthcare costs go down, happiness goes up,
(25:09):
and everybody's satisfied, so to speak. This actually works not
by hounding people to change their diet or you know,
go run a marathon or run down to Central America,
and takes stem cells simply setting up their environments so
their unconscious decisions are slightly better every day for months, years,
(25:31):
in at least one case now decades.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
And so let's give me an example of a city
where you've done this, and like some of the specific
changes they've made, because I find the fact that you
can make these changes so quickly quite fascinating.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Well quick is I mean relative, and everybody wants to
see it in months it takes five years. So our
biggest city was Fort Worth, Texas. There's about a million
people there. They became largely more walkable and bikeable. They
certified about five hundred restaurants that so we made sure
that there were places for people to go get whole
plant based options and not just steak. About two thirds
(26:04):
of the schools became Blue Zone certified. We got the
soda pops out of their vending machines, and we changed
the default so elementary school kids are not eating in
hallways and classrooms in the inner city. We raised money
to put coolers in these convenience stores, and what was
otherwise a food desert now all of a sudden there
(26:26):
was a way for people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.
And it turns out that was a huge bonanza for
both the convenience store owner and the local people so
we don't rely on I could go on. There were
about forty different interventions. We made smoking harder. We got
them to change the default so there was no smoking
indoors or outdoors. So this all produced a three percent
(26:51):
drop in BMI, and the city itself, working with Gallop,
figured we saved them a quarter of a billion dollars
in projected healthcare costs every year because of these little
micro changes.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
I always love chatting with Dan, but we haven't gotten
to the main reason. I wanted to bring him on
the show today to explain how he's extended his blue
zone thinking into his new cookbook, so we'll turn to
that right after the break. Dan Butener has written lots
(27:25):
of books chronicling what people do better in blue zones,
those special geographic locations where people statistically live longer.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Happier lives.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
But the book I picked up over the summer, One
Pot Meals, didn't just list what folks in Okinawa or
Sardinia were doing better. It explained how we can cook
our own meals more like they do in blue zones.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
I asked Dan to explain this new direction.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yes, it's a bit of a shift, you know. So
I'm trying to articulate the blue zone diet of people
in places like Fort Worth and Naples and Jacksonville, Florida,
et cetera. So I started writing these cookbooks and working
with others to write these cookbooks. First of all, you
have to realize that every time you go out to eat,
you consume about three hundred extra calorieslessly. Those calories tend
(28:11):
to be laden with sodium, ultra processed foods, and sugars.
So the only real way you're gonna eat healthy or
eat for longevity is to cook at home. So when
you tell people you got to cook at home right away,
a lot of people I don't have time, I don't
know how, or I can't afford fresh fruits and vegetables.
But wait, it turns out the healthiest longevity foods in
(28:32):
the world are peasant foods. Beans. Last I check and
get a pound of beans for two bucks. Whole grains.
There are bins of them. You can fill up bags
of them, root vegetables, potatoes, sweet potato. They're old, dirt sheap.
What people in blue zones teach us is how to
take those very simple ingredients and make them taste delicious.
(28:53):
You know, I was a meat eater before I started
on this, and now I don't eat meat anymore. It's
not worth it for me health wise. And you know
there's other facets that don't make sense to me. But
for this new book, I wanted to take another step.
I've learned the most in important and I'm going to
actually quiz you on this, LORI, what do you think
(29:13):
is the most important ingredient for longevity?
Speaker 1 (29:17):
The most important ingredient like a food.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
Ingredient, yes, or a characteristic I.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
Would say plant based, social connection, time, having free time.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
Those are all important. But number one is taste.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Taste right, because if it doesn't taste good, I'm not
gonna eat.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
It, that's right. And if it does taste good, you
don't much care what it is. If it's good for
you or bad for it, you're gonna eat it for
the long run. So to make sure that people like
this one, this new book is called The Blue Zone
Kitchen One Pot Meals. So I worked with Stanford in
AI Lab and we scraped six hundred and fifty thousand
(29:52):
recipes from the most popular sites on the internet. We
isolated all of the recipes with one hundred or more
five star reviews, and then we analyzed it and we
saw seven very clear flavor patterns, and then I gave
the Blue Zones Food Guidelines these seven patterns to the
Most Gifted Recipe Developer Guide from the New York Times,
(30:15):
and he helped me create one hundred recipes to live to,
one hundred that are maniacally delicious and formulated for longevity.
And you can make them in one pot, and they
cost less than three dollars of serving, and you can
make most of them less than twenty minutes. So overclaim
every single objection somebody might have and lead with deliciousness.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
And I love that you're doing this with an eye
for saving people time, because I think there's the you know,
there's the finance thing, there's the people don't know how
to do it thing, But I think the time thing
is real. And I think one of the big hits
on happiness that we see in the US right now
is that people self report being really time famished. Right
they don't have time to cook a whole meal, and
so I think kind of adding to that, adding to
(31:01):
the time bamin by having them cook, you know, a
plant based meal. It's going to take hours and hours
to make it delicious. Like that just doesn't really help.
But all your meals were the reason I'm so excited
about this cookbook. It seems like all the meals are
are quick, like they're frugal like monetarily, but they're also
frugal for our time too.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Yeah, there's several in there where you can just take
you fifteen minutes to assemble in the morning. You put
it an insta pot. I have no connection to instapot,
but it's it's a basically electric pressure cooker and you
push a butt and you come home from work, dinner
for eight people's done. But I also want to make
a very important point. So if you're eating the standard
(31:38):
American diet, which means you're not paying a hell of
a lot of attention to what you're eating, and you're
a twenty year old, you're losing about ten years of
life expectancy. For a male it's twelve years. And if
you're sixty, you're still losing six years over eating a
whole food, largely plant based diet. So people say, I
don't have time to make healthy food. But if you
(32:01):
take those let's just say those six years of extra
life expectancy and average and back through your life. It's
an extra two hours a day. We got to afford
to not eat healthy.
Speaker 4 (32:12):
I do. I do love that framing that, like by eating,
by spending this, you know, twenty minutes half hour to
cook the healthy meal, I'm actually getting two hours a
day over my whole lifetime.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
What do I know that? It's a cognitive trap, right
to think, oh, I don't have time.
Speaker 4 (32:25):
Yeahs such a cognitive trap, right, because we're not thinking
over the long term. We're thinking this Thursday at five o'clock,
like what am I doing for my time?
Speaker 1 (32:31):
We're not kind of thinking for the right term.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
The cookbook is called The Blue Zones Kitchen, One Pot,
and to test it out, you know, I live in
Miami these days, and I went to something called the
Overtown Center and this is a place where inner city
moms who don't have a lot of money, you know,
bring their kids. And I invited twenty moms to spend
ten weeks with me. And every week we got together
(32:54):
and I put them in what we call mo eyes,
which are these sort of committed social circles, and we
spend some time making sure they get to know each other.
Then I brought my cookbook and I said, pays through
this and identify a recipe you'd like to cook with.
You know, it's actually for next week. But then I
hired a chef to help me, and we brought cutting boards.
(33:16):
I gave them all instapots, and every Wednesday at from
eleven to one, we all cooked together. It was simple
and it was fun and it was just chopped and
we put it in the instapot. We put the lid on,
and then and a lot of these ladies are eating,
you know, popeyes and frozen pizza and junk food from
the convenience store. And once they realized that A they
(33:38):
could afford it, B they could make it. And see
now they have an instapot, they have the hardware to
cook it. And then the closer was they tasted it
and oh my god, this is delicious. My job is done.
I send them home and we captured their blood pressure
and their weight, and every one of them lost weight.
Every one of them had a little too a lot
(34:00):
dropping blood pressure in just ten weeks. So, you know,
I just think it's the killer app to get people
cooking at home again. You don't have to buy my
book books, but the idea of eating whole plant based
food is the biggest gift you can give to your
family when it comes to longevity.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
I also love that you've mentioned this idea of like
getting the moeyes together, or that you're making dinner for eight,
because another thing that we know about the power of
home cooked meals is that oftentime, our home cooked meals
are eating with the family together. And one of the
most recent World Happiness reports talked about the power of shared.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Meals and eating together.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
I think another thing we do when we're kind of
getting our standard American diet fast food is that we
run over to fast food. We eat in our car
by ourselves, but you know, the instapot meal that we're
making for multiple people. It means we can get the
benefit of social connection while we're enjoying that meal as well.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
There's two other things besides social connection. Number one, you know,
if you're eating with one hand on the spearing wheel
or standing up, you tend to eat much faster, and
it takes about twenty minutes for that full feeling to
travel from your belly to your brain. And if you're
eating on the run, you're much more likely to overeat
(35:09):
than if you're sitting with your family or even with
friends and punctuating the meal with a conversation. The other
thing is if you eat when you're stressed, Cortisol interrupts
the digestion process. It makes it less complete, makes it
more like you're going to get indigestion, creates an inflammatory
situation in your body, so you really want to slow down.
(35:33):
And it's other thing you see in blue zones. You
know in the Christian countries, they're always saying grace before
a meal or in a okay now it's hot, a
hotchy boo, a confusion adage. It reminds them to stop
eating when their stomach is eighty percent full. But they're
putting some punctuation between their busy life and okay, now
we're eating, thank you Higher Power for this food, honoring
(35:57):
the food, so it's not just stuffing stuff in their mouth.
And now this is a social activity. We're gonna eat
with our family or friends. Makes a big difference over time.
Speaker 4 (36:08):
As I mentioned, I just turned fifty and so I
feel like I'm looking forward to the next fifty years
so I can become a centenarian as well. Any advice
for me to live longer and better during my next
fifty years.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
Well, number one, think about who you're spending time with.
I don't know your social so first of all, you
look pretty happy and healthy to me, so maybe nothing.
But if I'm to an average person, I would say,
who are my three best friends? Who are the people
I spend the most time with. We know, if your
three best friends are obese or unhealthy, there's about one
(36:40):
hundred and fifty percent better chance you'll be overweight. So
I'm wont tight to dump your you know, your old, unhappy,
unhealthy friends, because they might need you. But I would
say that adding happy and healthy friends probably one of
the most powerful things you can do to add yours,
because friends have a long term impact on your health
behaviors without you even thinking about it. I'd also think
(37:03):
about where I'm living. You know, if you live in
a place with too much stress or traffic or not
access to good food, I would think about moving. And
then the last thing, take it a few moments to
write down what your values are. I care about women's issues.
I'm a Christian, I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat, whatever
(37:23):
it is, write them down. Then in a separate column,
Write down what you love to do. Oh, I love
I love writing, or I love teaching, or I love
I love to fix things. I'm really good at resolving
conflicts whatever, boom boom boom LISTA. And then a third column.
What am I good at? Well, I'm really good at
(37:45):
taking care of people. I'm really good at inspiring the
next generation, whatever it is. Get that out in front
of you, and then make sure you have an outlet
for those things. You know, the main values, passions and
what you're good at. And if you're not getting it
at work. And by the way, according to Gal, about
seventy percent of Americans don't get it at work. They
(38:05):
don't have purpose at work. Make sure you're deploying it
at home or volunteering. Seems like such a cuiche to volunteer,
but it is so powerful for both longevity and happiness.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (38:18):
This is my Dan Butner proved recipe for living into
one hundred years private consultations.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
And it's free, not as I can't sell you a supplement,
and I'm not selling you I'm or a hormone or
any of that other snake oil than on other influencers.
But this is these are I'm coming to you from
the populations who are manifestly living the longest, healthiest lives.
It's just a distillation. I'm just a medium here.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
If this discussion has what your appetite, then you should
check out Dan's cookbook One Pot Meals, which is out now,
and for more tips I'm living happier and healthier, you
should check out dance new podcast, it's called the Dan
Buttner Podcast. In our next episode, I'll be leaving the
cookbooks behind to explore a classic text on behavioral science
with a brand new, an improved edition for twenty twenty five.
(39:11):
It's even written by a Nobel Laureate.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
You don't, Mike drop the like en Nobel Laureate.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
I don't.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
I'll let you mention that all that next time on
the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
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