HSCI 317Name _________________________Tuesdays with Morrie Summary #4Respond to the following…1. Did you have a special relationship with a teacher or adult? Explain their impact.2. Have you struggled with finding your purpose in life? Explain.3. Morrie knows everyone knows death will happen, but no one really believes it will happen to them. What are your thoughts on death? Do you feel invincible? Explain.4. What is your perfect day and who would you spend it with?5. Morrie says there’s no such thing as too late to do something in life. What would you like to accomplish? Is there anything that seems out of reach? Briefly explain.6. Morrie was not a fan of the media and the images it portrayed to society. Why do you think he was so willing to let Ted Koppel and the ABC crew into his home?7. The reader gets a brief look into Morrie’s childhood. How did his relationships with his mother, father, stepmother, and brother shape him into the man he became?8. Morrie had a hibiscus flower in the study where he spent most of his time. How does that flower relate or compare to Morrie’s life?
THE Blue Zones
THE Blue Zones
LESSONS FOR LIVING LONGER
FROM THE PEOPLE
WHO’VE LIVED THE LONGEST
DAN BUETTNER
WASHINGTON, D.C.
For Roger and Dolly
Published by the National Geographic Society
Copyright © 2008 Dan Buettner
All rights reserved. Reproduction of the whole or any part of the contents
without written permission from the publisher is prohibited.
ISBN: 978-1-42620341-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buettner, Dan.
The blue zones: lessons for living longer from the people who’ve lived the
longest / by Dan Buettner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Longevity. 2. Medical geography. I. Title.
RA776.75.B84 2008
613.2—dc22
2007044375
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A MESSAGE TO THE READER
This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to
provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressd in the
publication. It is sold with the understanding that the authors and publisher are
not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of personal
professional services in the book. The reader should consult his or her medical,
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or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents in this book.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Get Ready to Change Your Life
Chapter One
The Truth About Living Longer
Chapter Two
The Sardinian Blue Zone
Chapter Three
The Blue Zone in Okinawa
Chapter Four
An American Blue Zone
Chapter Five
Discovering Costa Rica’s Blue Zone
Chapter Six
Your Personal Blue Zone
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgments
WITHOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA’S Dr. Robert Kane, who
endorsed and helped shape the Blue Zones premise, this book would have never
materialized. He and his colleagues from the National Institute on Aging, Dr.
Jack Guralnick, Dr. Luigi Ferrucci and Dr. Paul Costas; Dr. Thomas Perls from
the New En gland Centenarian Study; Dr. Greg Plotnikoff, Medical Director of
Allina’s Institute for Health and Healing; University of Lovain’s Dr. Michel
Poulain and University of Illinois, Chicago’s Dr. S. Jay Olshansky would spend
countless hours sharing expertise, identifying locations, developing
methodologies, and ultimately keeping me on the path of science and off the
short cuts of conjecture and hyperbole. I cannot thank them enough.
Of the many experts around the world who contributed to this project, I am
especially indebted to Dr. Craig Willcox, Dr. Bradley Willcox, Dr. Mokoto
Suzuki of the Okinawa Centenarian study; Dr. Tatsama; Dr. Luca Deiana of
Sardinia’s AKEA Study and his incandescently brilliant protégé Dr. Gianni Pes;
Dr. Paolo Francalacci; Drs. Gary Fraser and Terry Butler of the Adventist Health
Study; Dr. Luis Rosero-Bixby of the Central American Population Center; and
Dr. Leonardo Mata. They not only lent their expertise but also extended their
hospitality and generosity of spirit. Dr. Len Hayflick, Dr. Jack Weatherford, and
Dr. Richard Suzman graciously consented to many long interviews. The faculty
at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, including Dr. Robert
Jeffreys, Dr. Tatyana Shamliyan, Dr. Robert W. Jeffery, Dr. John Finnegan, Dr.
Cheryl Perry, and especially Dr. Leslie Lytle have been and still are my academic
partners.
Many of the experiences on which this book is based reflect a shared effort
by the members of Quest Team who have traveled with me to the Blue Zones.
Photographer and long-time expedition partner David McLain deserves much of
the credit in developing the Blue Zones idea. Nick Buettner, Damian Petrou,
Gianluca Colla, Sabriya Rice, Rachel Binns, Sayoko Ogata, Dr. Elizabeth Lopez,
Eliza Thomas, Tom Adair, Michael Mintz, Meshach Weber, Thad Dahlberg, Eric
Luoma, Joseph Van Harken, and Suzanne Pfeifer all shared their ample talents
and endured many long days and nights to bring Blue Zones to life.
This story would have never been told without Peter Miller, my editor at
National Geographic. He backed the idea for the original magazine story and
guided me through my first drafts of the book. Michelle Harris further improved
the book through her thorough fact checking, and Dr. Robert M. Russell’s review
of our chapters helped keep us on track. Also at National Geographic, I thank
Lisa Thomas and Amy Briggs for orchestrating this book; Rebecca Martin for
shepherding us through the Expeditions Council grant process; Valerie May and
Miki Meek for bringing Blue Zones to life online; and picture editor Susan
Welchman for her fiercely relentless friendship and guidance. Assistants Jorge
Vindas (Costa Rica), Marisa Montebella (Sardinia), and Kadowaki Kunio
(Okinawa) were the unseen engines behind our successful stories.
No project of this magnitude happens without sponsors and financial
partners. I wish to especially thank Marty Davis, the Davis family, and
DAVISCO for their commitment to health and vast generosity; Jane Shure from
the National Institute on Aging who was instrumental in obtaining our initial
funding from the National Institutes of Health; Becky Malkerson, John
Helgerson, Laura Juergens, and Maria Lindsley who championed Blue Zones at
Allianz Life; Valerie May and Nancy Graham for navigating the waters at
AARP; Nishino Hiroshi who found most of the funding in Japan; the Target
Foundation, the Best Buy Foundation, Lawson Software, and the National
Geographic Expeditions Council.
At Blue Zones’ Minneapolis headquarters, Scott Meyer has been our mentor
and marketing guru from the very beginning. The office team: Matt Osterman,
Sarah Kast, Phil Noyed, Amy Tomczyk, Nancy Fuller McRae, and Jennifer
Havrish have endlessly helped with research, proofreading, and have patiently
endured my nonlinear methods; and the extended team including PR maven
Laura Reynolds; Remar Sutton, Dr. Mary Abbott Waite, and the late George
Plimpton, who provided crucial editorial assistance; Britt Robson for his help on
the Okinawa and Loma Linda Chapters; our advisors including Tom Rothstein,
Frank Roffers, Elwin Loomis, Jon Norberg, Ed McCall, Tom Gegax, Kevin
Moore, Molly Goodyear, Chris Mahai, John Foley, and John Gabos who lent
generous business advice; Thad Dahlberg, Dan Grigsby, and Bruno Bornstein,
who built the Blue Zones website; and Keiko Takahashi, who created the Blue
Zones identity.
And to the members of the media who have taken a chance and made the
Blue Zones a national story I’d like to thank: Diane Sawyer, Rob Wallace,
Jennifer Joseph, Anderson Cooper, Barbara Walters, Sanjay Gupta, Alyssa
Caplan, Ned Potter, Patty Neger, and especially Walter Cronkite.
And finally to Cheryl Tiegs, my partner in love and life, who has endured
my absences and encouraged me along every step of this journey. For me, she
embodies the principles found in this book and is the very personification of
ageless beauty.
Preface
Get Ready to Change Your Life
THE FIRST TIME I MET SAYOKO OGATA SHE was wearing the sort of
fashionable gear one might expect a young Tokyo executive to take on a safari:
hiking boots and cuffed socks, khaki shorts and shirt, and a pith helmet. Never
mind that we were in Naha, a high-tech city of 313,000 on the main island in
Okinawa, Japan. When I gently poked fun at her by saying that I could see she
was ready for adventure, she didn’t blush. Instead, she responded with one of her
joyous, staccato laughs, wagged a finger at me, and scolded, “I’ll get even with
you, Mr. Dan.” But I never saw the pith helmet again.
At the time, in the spring of 2000, Sayoko was a young, fast-climbing
executive in Tokyo. Her company had brought me to Japan to explore the
mystery of human longevity, a topic that would likely spark the imagination of a
large audience. For more than a decade, I’ve been leading a series of interactive,
educational projects called “Quests,” in which a team of Internet-linked
scientists investigated some of Earth’s great puzzles. Our goal was to engage the
imaginations and brainpower of tens of thousands of students who followed our
daily dispatches on the web. Previous Quests had taken me to Mexico, Russia,
and throughout Africa.
I’d first learned about Okinawa’s role in longevity studies a few years
earlier, when population studies indicated it was among the places on our planet
where people lived the longest, healthiest lives. Somehow Okinawans managed
to reach the age of 100 at a rate up to three times higher than Americans did,
suffered a fifth the rate of heart disease, and lived about seven good years longer.
What were their secrets to good health and long life?
I landed in Okinawa with a small film crew, a photographer, three writers,
and a satellite technician to keep us connected to about a quarter million school
kids. We identified gerontologists, demographers, herbalists, shamans, and
priestesses to contact, as well as centenarians themselves, who were living
emblems of Okinawan longevity.
Each morning our online audience voted to decide whom we should
interview and where the team should focus its research. Each night we reported
back to the audience with a variety of dispatches and short videos.
Sayoko had brought a team of translators with her, a computer filled with
spreadsheets, and an intimidating plan to make sure that our daily reports and
videos were translated into Japanese and transmitted by midnight to Tokyo. We
spent ten hectic days asking questions about life on Okinawa and summing up
what we found. I met lots of fascinating people, which made me happy. Sayoko
made her deadlines, which made her happy. And when the project was over, her
team and mine celebrated with karaoke singing and sake and then parted ways.
That was that.
THE BLUE ZONES QUEST
Five years later, I returned to Okinawa with a new team of experts. I’d just
written a cover story for NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC about the “Secrets of Long
Life,” which profiled three areas of the world with concentrations of some of the
world’s longest-lived people—areas we dubbed “Blue Zones.” Demographers
had coined the term while mapping one of these regions on the island of
Sardinia. We expanded the term to include other longevity pockets around the
world. Okinawa still ranked among those at the top of the list.
I was determined to delve deeper into the lifestyle of Okinawans as part of a
new online expedition—the Blue Zones Quest. More than a million people a day
would follow our progress online. It was a huge opportunity to make a
difference, and I knew we couldn’t miss any deadlines. I decided to track down
Sayoko.
She wasn’t easy to find. I tried her old e-mail address and queried all of my
old teammates concerning her whereabouts. I contacted her former boss, who
told me she’d left her high-powered job behind to become a full-time mom. This
news blew me away. By now I expected her to be a senior executive at Sony or
Hitachi. Instead, she’d left Tokyo, he said, and moved to the island of Yaku
Shima, where she lived with her husband, a schoolteacher, and their two
children. When I phoned her, she was ebullient.
“Mr. Dan!” she said. “It makes me happy, really, to hear your voice.” I told
her about my new project in Okinawa and said I hoped she could join us.
“Dan,” she replied, “you know I loved Quest, and for me it was really
something quite powerful in my life. But now I have two small children, and I
cannot leave them.”
We talked for a few more minutes and then I hung up, disappointed. I’d have
to find someone else. But a few days later, she called me back and abruptly
accepted the offer. I had no idea why. I was just relieved to have her back on the
team.
We set up our Blue Zones headquarters in a traditional guesthouse on the
remote northern half of Okinawa. I’d recruited a team of scientists, writers,
video producers, and photographers, and Sayoko had arrived with a team of
Japanese translators and technicians. Gone was Sayoko’s fashionable expedition
wear. Now she wore sandals and earth-toned cottons. A few strands of gray
streaked her hair, and she exuded calm. But when she opened her computer to a
spreadsheet, I could see she’d lost none of her organizational zeal.
“Okay, Mr. Dan, let’s talk about our deadlines.”
For the next two weeks, we rarely saw each other face-to-face. During the
day, my team gathered information and produced stories. Each night Sayoko’s
team translated them and published them to the Web. Since I was waking up
about the time she was going to bed, we saw each other only at dinnertime, when
both of our teams—20 of us—ate together. Our midnight deadline dominated all
the dinner conversation. Sayoko and I never really got around to catching up on
our personal lives.
LIFE CHANGES
Midway through the project, our online audience voted for my team to travel to
Ogimi, a tiny fishing village, to interview a 104-year-old woman named Ushi
Okushima. Sayoko and I had visited with her before when I had profiled her in
my NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article. She’d impressed us with her amazing vigor,
saying she grew most of her food and hosted drinking parties for her friends.
Since turning 100, she’d somehow become a media darling. It seemed like every
major news organization in the world, including CNN, the Discovery Channel,
and the BBC had come to see her.
When Sayoko heard about our plans to visit Ushi again, she asked to come
along. On the hour-long car ride to Ogimi, we had our first opportunity to really
talk. We were sitting in the back seat as the vivid foliage of northern Okinawa
zipped by.
“You know Dan, Ushi really changed my life,” she began. “I’d been working
in the center of Tokyo. I’d go from 7:30 in the morning until late at night, five to
seven meetings a day, then dinner and karaoke until one or two in the morning. It
was hard work, and I loved it. I did a good job. I made lots of money. But my
life lacked something. I felt empty right here.” She brought her hand to her
chest.
“Dan, you remember,” she recalled, “when we met Ushi I first saw her big
smile. You were a man from another country, but she talked to you like a friend.
In Japan, we’re usually wary of strangers. Ushi immediately welcomed you. The
atmosphere was like a big hug. You could tell that she made everyone happy
around her—her family, her friends, and now even strangers. And even though
she never even talked to me, I felt a big energy from her.”
After our first meeting with Ushi, Sayoko said, she had gone into the street
to drink some juice. “I was thinking, ‘This is something for me.’ For the rest of
our trip in Okinawa, I thought of Ushi—the simplicity of her life, how she made
people around her feel good, how she was not worried about getting something
in the future or sad that she had missed something in the past. Gradually I was
starting to think, ‘I want to be like her. That is my goal.’
“When I returned to Tokyo, I told my boss that I was quitting. My dream had
always been related to business. But I realized that I was like a horse chasing a
carrot. I realized that I wanted to be like Ushi. I thought, ‘How can I organize
this?’ I called my boyfriend in Yaku Shima and told him I wanted to visit. I
moved to Yaku Shima and learned to cook. A year later, we were married.
“When my first child was on the way, my husband and I came back to
Okinawa to meet Ushi again. I wanted her to bless my child. I don’t think she
remembered me. But my baby was born healthy. Now I have two children, and
they are my life. No one knows about my career in Tokyo.”
By this point, we’d almost reached Ogimi on a road that ran parallel to the
sea. “What have you done to be like Ushi?” I asked.
“I’ve learned to make my own meals for the family,” Sayoko said. “I put
love into my food. I care for my husband and my children, the husband comes
home, and I have a good family. Also, I try to mentally check to make sure that I
haven’t hurt anyone, that the people around me are okay. I take time each night
to think about the people around me, and think about what I eat, and what is
important to me. I also do this during dinner. I take time to reflect. I’m not
chasing the carrot any more.”
RETURN TO USHI
By the time we arrived at Ushi’s house, it was mid-afternoon. She lived in a
traditional Okinawan wooden house with a few rooms separated by sliding rice
paper doors and tatami mats on the floor. We removed our shoes and stepped
inside. Though it is customary to sit on the floor, Ushi sat queen-like and serene
on a chair in the middle of the room. When I first met her, she’d been
anonymous. Now she had become a celebrity—a sort of “Dalai Lama” of
longevity. Wrapped in a blue kimono, she motioned for us to sit down. So like
kindergartners around a teacher, we sat cross-legged at her feet. I noticed that
Sayoko, however, barely entered the room. For some reason, she seemed
reluctant to get too close to Ushi.
By way of greeting, Ushi raised her arms above her head as if to show off
her biceps and shouted, “Genki, genki, genki,” or “Vigor, vigor, vigor!”
“What a treasure,” I thought. So many people fear getting older. But if they
could see this vibrant woman, they’d look forward to it. I showed Ushi the
photograph of her in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. I was beaming with pride that the
story I’d written had made the cover. She looked at it blankly, put it down, and
offered me a piece of candy.
I interviewed Ushi again, asking about her garden, her friends, and how
things had changed in the five years since we’d last visited with her. She’d cut
back on gardening some, she said, but had taken a job bagging fruit at a nearby
market. She still spent much of her day with her grandchildren and the three
surviving women in her circle of friends she’d had since childhood. She still ate
a dinner of mostly vegetables and drank a cup of mugwort sake before bed. That
was her secret, she told me. “Work hard, drink mugwort sake before bed, and get
a good night’s sleep.”
As I spoke with Ushi, I caught Sayoko’s eye. She was sitting off to the side,
watching my interview. “Sayoko,” I said, conscious of the fact that I was raising
my voice inappropriately, but also figuring that Sayoko was too polite to
approach Ushi without being beckoned. “Don’t you want to tell Ushi your
story?”
Sayoko hesitated but then came forward and knelt in front of Ushi. “Five
years ago I came here, and you changed my life,” she said. “Because of you, I
decided to quit my job and get married. I owe you a big debt of thanks.”
Sayoko’s eyes welled up with tears as she spoke. Ushi looked bewildered. She
didn’t remember their meeting.
“Then I came back a few years later,” Sayoko continued. “You touched my
belly when I was pregnant.” This recollection now sparked recognition. Ushi
smiled and then grabbed Sayoko’s hands. Her thumb caressed Sayoko’s thumb.
“You inspired me, and now I am very happy,” the younger woman said. “I had to
come to thank you.” Speechless, but understanding, Ushi patted Sayoko’s hand.
“I share my blessings with you,” she said.
On the street outside Ushi’s house, I caught up with Sayoko, who looked
dazed but serene. I asked her what she was thinking. She smiled. “I feel like
something is a little bit closed,” she said in her own poetic Japanese-tinged
English. “I feel complete.”
CENTENARIAN WISDOM
This book is about listening to people like Ushi who live in the world’s Blue
Zones. The world’s healthiest, longest-lived people have many things to teach us
about living longer, richer lives. If wisdom is the sum of knowledge plus
experience, then these individuals possess more wisdom than anyone else.
So we’ve packed this book with insights from centenarians about living life
well. Their stories cover everything from child rearing to learning how to be
likable, from getting rich to finding—and keeping—love in your life. From
them, we can all learn how to create our own personal Blue Zones and start on
the path to living longer, better lives.
When it comes to the science of living longer, however, centenarians can no
more tell us how they reached age 100 than a seven-foot man can tell us how he
got to be so tall. They don’t know. Does Ushi’s nightly cup of sake infused with
mugwort provide some healthful benefits? Perhaps, but it doesn’t begin to
explain why she doesn’t have cancer or heart problems or why she possesses
such vigor at age 104. The way to learn longevity secrets from people like Ushi
is to find a place where there are many Ushis—to find a culture, a Blue Zone,
where the proportion of healthy 90 or 100-year-olds to the overall population is
unusually high. Then science can kick in.
Scientific studies suggest that only about 25 percent of how long we live is
dictated by genes, according to famous studies of Danish twins. The other 75
percent is determined by our lifestyles and the everyday choices we make. It
follows that if we optimize our lifestyles, we can maximize our life expectancies
within our biological limits.
When we first set out to investigate the mysteries of human longevity, we
teamed up with demographers and scientists at the National Institute on Aging to
identify pockets around the world where people live the longest, healthiest lives.
These are the places where people reach age 100 at rates significantly higher,
and on average, live longer, healthier lives than Americans do. They also suffer a
fraction of the rate of killer diseases that Americans do. We worked with some of
the world’s top longevity experts to distill lifestyles into the characteristics that
could help explain their extraordinary longevity.
LONGEVITY LESSONS
This book begins by tackling the realities of aging. What are the chances that
you will actually reach 100? What promises do supplements, hormone therapies,
or genetic intervention offer? What are some of the scientifically proven ways
for you to increase your years of healthy life?
In the following chapters, we’ll take you to the world’s confirmed longevity
hotspots, the Blue Zones themselves: the Barbagia region of Sardinia in Italy,
Okinawa in Japan, the community of Loma Linda in California, and the Nicoya
Peninsula in Costa Rica. In each of these places we’ll encounter a different
culture that has taken its own unique path to longevity. We’ll meet longevity allstars like Ushi and the experts who study their lifestyles and cultures. We’ll
show how history, genes, and time-honored traditions conspire to favor each
population. We’ll tease out the lifestyle components and let science explain why
they seem be adding good years to people’s lives.
The final chapter boils it all down into nine lessons, a cross-cultural
distillation of the world’s best practices in longevity. This, we believe, amounts
to a de facto formula for longevity—the best, most credible information
available for adding years to your life and life to your years.
Of course this information will do you no good unless you put it into
practice. So, leading behavior experts will also offer an action plan to put these
longevity secrets to work in your own life. And here’s the good news: You don’t
have to do it all. We present an à la carte menu of sorts. You can pick and choose
the most appealing items, follow our advice for converting items from the
longevity menu into everyday habits, and know that whatever you choose,
chances are you’ll be adding months or years to your life.
Encoded in the world’s Blue Zones are centuries—even millennia—of
human experiences. I believe that it’s no coincidence that the way these people
eat, interact with each other, shed stress, heal themselves, avoid disease, and
view their world yields them more good years of life. Their cultures have
evolved this wisdom over time. Just as nature selects for characteristics that
favor the survival of a species, I believe that these cultures have passed on
positive habits over time in a way that most favors the longevity of their
members. To learn from them, we need only be open and ready to listen.
Sayoko was ready to listen. Her brief time with Ushi led to a transition,
helping her change from being a chronically stressed, marginally healthy
professional to becoming a more serene, physically fit person living a life that
matches her values.
Maybe you’re ready to listen too. Who knows? It may change your life just
as profoundly.
1
The Truth About Living Longer
The Truth About Living Longer
You May Be Missing Out on Ten Good Years
WHEN JUAN PONCE DE LEÓN LANDED ON the northeast coast of
Florida on April 2, 1513, he was searching, it’s been said, for a Fountain of
Youth—a fabled spring of water that could bestow everlasting life. Historians
now know there was more to the story. The reason the Spanish explorer set out
to investigate lands north of the Bahamas was probably because Spain had
reinstated Christopher Columbus’s son Diego as military governor, effectively
removing Ponce de León from the office. Nevertheless, the legend behind Ponce
de León’s voyage stuck.
The idea of discovering a magic source of long life still has so much appeal
today, five centuries later, that charlatans and fools perpetuate the same
boneheaded quest, whether it comes disguised as a pill, diet, or medical
procedure. In an all-out effort to squash the charlatans forever, demographer S.
Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago and more than 50 of the
world’s top longevity experts issued a position statement in 2002 that was as
blunt as they could fashion it.
“Our language on this matter must be unambiguous,” they wrote. “There are
no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones, or
techniques of genetic engineering available today that have been demonstrated to
influence the processes of aging.”
The brutal reality about aging is that it has only an accelerator pedal. We
have yet to discover whether a brake exists for people. The name of the game is
to keep from pushing the accelerator pedal so hard that we speed up the aging
process. The average American, however, by living a fast and furious lifestyle,
pushes that accelerator too hard and too much.
This book is about discovering the world’s best practices in health and
longevity and putting them to work in our lives. Most of us have more control
over how long we live than we think. In fact, experts say that if we adopted the
right lifestyle, we could add at least ten good years and suffer a fraction of the
diseases that kill us prematurely. This could mean an extra quality decade of life!
To identify the secrets of longevity, our team of demographers, medical
scientists, and journalists went straight to the best sources. We traveled to the
Blue Zones—four of the healthiest corners of the globe—where a remarkably
high rate of the longest-living people manage to avoid many of the diseases that
kill Americans. These are the places where people enjoy up to a 3 times better
chance of reaching 100 than we do.
In each of the Blue Zones, we used a survey developed in collaboration with
the National Institute on Aging to identify the lifestyle components that help
explain the area’s longevity—what the inhabitants choose to eat, how much
physical activity they get, how they socialize, what traditional medicines they
use, and so forth. We looked for the common denominators—the practices found
in all four populations—and came up with what I consider to be a cross-cultural
distillation of the best practices of health, a de facto formula for longevity.
Herein lies the premise of The Blue Zones: If you can optimize your
lifestyle, you may gain back an extra decade of good life you’d otherwise miss.
What’s the best way to optimize your lifestyle? Emulate the practices we found
in each one of the Blue Zones.
LONGEVITY PIONEER
In 1550, Italian Luigi Cornaro wrote one of the first longevity “best sellers.” His
book, The Art of Living Long, said that life could be extend through practicing
moderation. His book would be translated into French, English, Dutch, and
German. Cornaro may have been on to something; sources differ on his exact
age, he lived well into his 90s and possibly beyond.
FACTS ABOUT AGING
When taken together, the Blue Zones yielded nine powerful lessons to achieve a
longer, better life. But before we get into the details, I think it’s crucial to
understand a few things about just how people age and establish some basic
principles and definitions. How long can each of us expect to live? What really
happens to our bodies when we age? Why can’t we just take a pill to extend our
lives? How can we live longer? How can we live better? And why does changing
our lifestyles add more good years?
To answer these and other fundamental questions, I’ve asked some of the
world’s experts to describe their latest research in everyday terms. Together
these scientists represent the best thinking in biology, geriatrics, and the science
of longevity.
Steven N. Austad, Ph.D., studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms of
aging at the University of Texas Health Center at San Antonio. A professor at the
Sam and Ann Barshop Center for Longevity and Aging, he is the author of Why
We Age: What Science is Discovering About the Body’s Journey Through Life.
Robert N. Butler, M.D., is President and CEO of the International Longevity
Center-U.S.A., a policy and education research center in New York City. A
professor of geriatrics and adult development at Mount Sinai Medical Center, he
is the author of Why Survive: Being Old in America.
Jack M. Guralnik, M.D., Ph.D., is chief of the laboratory of epidemiology,
demography, and biometery at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda,
Maryland.
Robert Kane, M.D., is director of the Center on Aging and the Minnesota
Geriatric Education Center at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He is
a professor in the School of Public Health, where he holds an endowed chair in
Long-term Care and Aging.
Thomas T. Perls, M.D., M.P.H., is director of the New England Centenarian
Study, an associate professor of medicine and geriatrics at the Boston University
School of Medicine, and author of Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your
Maximum Potential at Any Age.
I interviewed each of these experts separately, then sorted the best of their
answers to each question. Here’s what they told me.
WHAT EXACTLY IS AGING?
Robert Kane: That is a very profound question. Number one, aging starts at
birth. If you think about it, there is a constant development that occurs within all
species. You can think of it as the balance between the individual and the
environment. In essence, we can think of aging as