Tag Archive for: Living to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones

Here’s Your Gift!

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Have you missed hearing my voice? As a little gift for you, I recorded all the Memos related to the Blue Zones docuseries in one audio for your listening pleasure. The advantage is you can download it to your phone or tablet and listen to it over and over again. Instead of looking up the Memos on drchet.com, you can listen on your device.

Do you remember the four lifestyle concepts of most people who live in Blue Zones? It may benefit you to hear them again, especially as we all start thinking about health changes we want to make next year.

Click here to buy the audio for free.

I hope you enjoy this small gift to help you stay on a healthy track for 2024. As always, it comes down to just one question:

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

The Bottom Line on the Blue Zones

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The docuseries on Blue Zones demonstrated that it really isn’t complicated to live to 100: find a purpose, a reason to get up every morning, remain physically active, eat reasonably with a focus on plant-based sources for food, and develop a social group that can provide support through the various stages of life.

The docuseries ended with the writer working to create Blue Zones in different cities throughout the USA. That part is complicated because it involves community buy-in from government, health and healthcare officials, as well as professionals from nutrition, exercise, and community planning.

The Most Important Thing

After giving it a lot of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important thing that anyone can do to live well to 100 is this: get to a normal body weight and stay there. Not everyone who actually was 100 years and older was thin, but they had already made it to 100.

Getting to a normal weight reduces your risk of just about every degenerative disease and reduces the stress on your joints; Paula adds that it also greatly expands your clothing choices. You may never be able to do the splits like the man in the photo, but you’ll be able to do more than you do right now. Genetics is always there to blindside us, but even with that unknown, we can be in a better position by being a normal body weight and maintaining it.

The Blowback Was Instant

I spent last weekend with several thousand people, and I enjoyed every moment. I was asked many times what is the most important thing to be healthy, and my answer was always the same: find a healthier way to eat that you’re willing to stick to for the rest of your life, get to a normal weight, and stay there.

Some replied that “if I got to that weight, I’d look like a skeleton.” Then they would tell me what weight they think they can get to; I gave no quarter, no permission to say that’s good enough. How long that takes you to do could be one, three, maybe ten years. If you’re 43, that means you’ll be 53 and that’s just when everything begins to decline body-wise. You’ll be better able to handle it.

Here’s a simple way to start that you can begin this minute: cut out sugary and ultra-processed foods as much as you can. Then you can go on to find more vegetables you like, learn to cook with less fat, and so on, but you can say no to that donut or cookie right now.

What should you weigh? Here’s a link to the BMI chart at drchet.com. Note that there are guidelines to determine whether you’re big-boned or small-boned, and that affects your goal weight.

The Bottom Line

I would ask nothing of others that I wouldn’t do myself. Getting to a normal weight within a year is my goal; redistribution of that weight may take another couple of years. So what? I don’t know if I have the genes to live to 100, and I don’t know whether that’s my goal. I just want to be able to live like I want every day I’m alive.

No matter your age today, you can help yourself live well longer, and it starts by getting to that normal weight. I know you can do it.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Blue Zones: Social Groups

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As I said on Saturday, when I began watching the Blue Zones docuseries, I would have wagered that either nutrition or exercise would be the most important factor in living longer. What we eat and how much we move are important, but the key to living well to 100 are the interactions we have with people.

That can take many forms. Your spouse can be the most important person you interact with along with family members who live close by: grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, and cousins, can all be part of your social group. Business groups such as Toastmasters and Chamber of Commerce, fraternal and sororal organizations, volunteer groups, and church groups all add to your social circle. An unstructured group that gets together to have coffee, make cookies, or play cards can also provide social interaction.

It’s more difficult in much of the world today because families often spread out due to school and jobs. Families may see each other during holidays but don’t have the frequent personal interactions that provide a support network. COVID also interfered with our ability to socialize; once regular social interaction was blocked, sometimes it never came back. Research has shown that the isolation was devastating to many. The governments of Japan and the UK were so concerned, they appointed Ministers of Loneliness.

I don’t have answers to how you increase your social interactions other than to seek them out; Facebook and texting are better than nothing, but being together is better. So my challenge to you is to take action to reconnect with friends and family:

  • Join a club or create one of your own, like a neighborhood walking group
  • Make a lunch date with someone you haven’t seen in a while
  • Call a friend in another city or state to catch up
  • Invite the neighbors over for dinner
  • When someone invites you to go to a movie or to meet for a drink after work, find a way to say yes

You may find that a few relationships can’t be rekindled, but you also may find yourself with a more stimulating social life—and that’s good for your health. I do know that if you want to live well to 100, social interaction is the most important lesson from the Blue Zones series. I’ll give you my final thoughts on Saturday.

Tomorrow night is the Insider conference call. There’s some interesting research I’ll share as well as answer Insider questions. Become an Insider by 8 p.m. tomorrow night and you can join in.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Blue Zones: Eat Reasonably

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As I continued to consider the four areas that make up the health habits related to living to 100, I would have thought that nutrition was going to be the key. After much reflection, it’s not. However, it doesn’t mean you should live on a diet of sweets, deep-fried foods, and a lot of ultra-processed foods.

Eat a Selective Plant-Based Diet

Do I mean you have to be a vegan? No. But as North Americans, we just don’t eat very many minimally processed vegetables. By minimally processed I mean you cut them up, season to taste, and cook. It can be stews, soups, side dishes, or whatever.

While the types of plant-based foods vary by culture, there are several foods in common:

  • Beans, lentils, and nuts of all types are an important source of fiber and protein. Soups and salads are perfect delivery systems, but so is chili—as spicy as you like it.
  • Root vegetables are important: potatoes, especially sweet potatoes and yams, carrots, and purple yams called ube.
  • Green, leafy vegetables: lettuces, cabbages, and greens of all types, such as coleslaw or collard greens with bacon. Eat some every day.
  • Lean meats for additional protein.
  • Wine, if you drink it, even though it’s a processed grape.

Make those the foundation of your diet along with healthy oils such as olive oil and some whole grains, and that’s it. Remember, this isn’t a weight loss program; it’s a way to eat for life.

Two More Important Points

Don’t overeat. Eat just enough and no more. The Okinawans eat to feel 80% full and that’s where they stop.

Get to a normal body weight, no matter what it takes or how long it takes, and stay there. It’s easier to move around if you’re leaner, and you’ll have fewer complications of degenerative disease.

The Bottom Line

What you eat is important to live well, whether to 100 or not. It’s not difficult, but it may force you to think about how you can do that until it becomes a habit. The sooner you figure that out, the more time you get to live well. Next week I’ll finish this up with the most important secret of living to 100, Blue Zones or not. It surprised me.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Blue Zones: Keep Moving

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Continuing our look at the lessons from Secrets of the Blue Zones, the next point that stood out to me was that everyone was physically active. I mentioned tai chi, but that’s organized activity. The Blue Zone secret is that the people were physically active throughout their day.

In some zones, they tended to gardens for part of the day. Or they got together in groups to prepare food. They didn’t stop at the grocery to pick up a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad—they butchered the chicken, plucked the feathers, put it on the spit, turned the spit, and so on. Bread was made from scratch and pasta as well.

One scene struck me: the people who lived in Sardinia were always walking either uphill or downhill to visit friends, to go to the market, to church, or to get an espresso. In general, people who lived to 100 never really stopped physical activity.

In more modern areas such as Loma Linda and Singapore, there were parks and walking paths close by. However, whenever they could, they walked to get where they were going.

Did they also do more conventional workouts, alone or in groups? Absolutely, but the real key is that they moved throughout their day. Conventional exercise is important for a lot of reasons; for example, Paula sent me a quote yesterday that sedentary middle-aged Japanese women found that 16 weeks of regular exercise improved the elasticity and structure of their skin.

If you’re serious about living well regardless of age, find a way to move more every day.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Lessons from the Blue Zones

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Living to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones is a Netflix documentary that examines the lifestyles of people in several regions of the world that have a high proportion of people who live to 100. It’s a review of the observations of Dan Buettner, who has spent the better part of 30 years finding and examining cultures that have a larger than normal number of residents who live to 100. He’s written several books, films, and articles on the topics over those years. In this series, he goes back to look at those cultures again.

In the next several Memos, I’m going to give you my thoughts on each of the four areas he describes in his summary. I came away with a new perspective on a couple of areas including exercise and nutrition. In reality, they might contribute to longevity the least. While I think that each area is important, I’ll start with what I see as the weakness of his approach.

We know a lot about how people in these cultures ate and moved. We also see the social interactions they develop and their outlook on life. But they were already in their 80s, 90s, and 100s; we don’t know anything about people who were in their 70s when he began his observations 30 years ago and where they are today. Could someone adapt these lifestyles in their 50s, 60s, even 70s and live well into their 80s, 90s, or 100s? It sounds reasonable, but unless there are studies ongoing that will be published in the future, we don’t know that for sure. We can only look at the present.

I’ve decided the answer would be yes which is why I’m developing aging with a vengeance. The goal isn’t to live to 100; it’s to live well to 100 years or whatever your goal is. We’ll begin with outlook on life on Saturday. What’s yours? We’ll find out how important that can be.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Living to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zone. Dan Buettner. 2023. Netflix.