A Look Into the Blue Zones
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
People are coming on board and I am just delighted to have Dan Buettner with me. This is around 20 year anniversary of when Dan got the Blue Zones started, patented the Blue Zones with his work with Gianni Pez and Michel Poulain, a physician in Italy and a demographer in Greece. working together to form the Blue Zones. They'd done some work, I think, in Sardinia, and you were working, you had been to Okinawa, and somehow you came together, right, Dan?
Yes.
How did the Blue Zones concept start and which regions were first identified?
Well, I think the genesis, it was a, I got a grant from the National Institutes on Aging to, in a sense, reverse engineer longevity. And the whole project was predicated on the Danish twin study that established that only about 20 to 25% of the variance of how long we live is dictated by genes, 75% is something else. So I reasoned that if we could find the areas where people live the longest and then tease out the common denominators, it might point in the direction of some lessons the rest of us could learn And along the way, I met Gianni Pesce in Sardinia, who was identifying clusters of centenarians in the highlands in Oliostra. And Gianni had been working with this Belgian demographer named Michel Poulin.
And together, they wrote an article called academic article in 2003 about the Sardinian Blue Zone. And then I found another one in Okinawa, thanks to the Wilcox brothers, Bradley and Craig Wilcox, who had separately identified and studied a population in Okinawa. And then not too far from you, in Loma Linda, California, Gary Fraser, who ran the Adventist Health Study, followed 103,000 Americans and found that the Adventists, the adherent Adventists, conservative Christians, were living about seven years longer than their North American counterparts and wrote the original article in 2005. It was a cover story for National Geographic. Since then, I got two more National Geographic grants, identified a blue zone in Ikaria, Greece.
Interesting for you, Dr. Topol, because this population doesn't appear to suffer any Alzheimer's, only 10,000 people, but still, it's an extraordinary population. Then in Costa Rica, the Nicoya Peninsula, we have a population with the lowest rate of middle-aged mortality in the world. What does that mean? That means that these people have about a two-fold better chance of reaching a healthy age, 95. We don't promise people 100. You have to have won the genetic lottery to reach 100. But mid-90s is attainable by most people listening right now, by the way. And in Costa Rica, they appear to do it better than any place else in the world.
Yeah, no, it's really what you've been doing now for, I would say, about two decades as a champion, as an advocate for lifestyle factors that you've learned from these blue zones of extreme longevity and other features that you just mentioned from many visits, interviews with people at these places. And it's been a great proponent of something that's undervalued, which is lifestyle factors. We know them, but they don't necessarily get um, incorporated in our, in our lives. I mean, a perfect example of that is 75% of Americans don't even have the minimus, the minimus of physical activity. Um, so this is so important because what you did over these years was independent. I wrote a book, as you know, super agers that came out.
Great book.
Great book.
And basically, we came to similar conclusions. That is, it's really not the genes are not a big factor, but rather lifestyle factors are very important, prominent, and that we're not pushing anti-aging supplements or any other things that are, yeah, these hucksters that are basically peptides. I mean, you name it, all kinds of things with no data. So you provided the background, the evidence for healthy aging. Now, while we get to that, you came up with this Power9 kind of summarize the lifestyle factors that you saw were the common threads. Can you just kind of give a quick sense about that? Because now people are questioning wine. They're questioning whether there's ever really been evidence about religion as being a faith, as being part of that.
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