NY Times Piece on Blue Zones

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/fashion/24CYBER.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

How to Live Longer Without Really Trying

By MICHELLE SLATALLA
Published: April 24, 2008

MY neighbor Bruce has the healthiest lifestyle on the block. He eats small portions and skips dessert. He walks to work. His hobbies — coaching Little League, riding his bike and taking his dog on hikes — all involve getting wholesome, fresh air.

This behavior drives my husband, who has the least healthy lifestyle on the block, crazy. “You’re going to be so lonely living forever,” he yells at Bruce from our balcony, where we drink beer. “All the interesting people will be dead.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I chime in to show support for my husband (and Anchor Steam).

But secretly I’m on Bruce’s side. I wouldn’t mind living forever. Or at least long enough to blow out the candles on my 100th birthday cake.

Maybe I can. According to a new book that looks at the daily routines of clusters of centenarians who live in four geographically remote or culturally isolated “blue zones” of longevity — from Okinawa to a community of Seventh Day Adventists in Southern California — all I need to do to extend my life is follow a few of their simple secrets.

Eat less. Make family a priority. Banish stress. I figured it should be no problem to follow most of the common-sense tips that Dan Buettner outlines in “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest” (National Geographic, 2008).

Of course, I was not going to be able to work a nightly glass of mugwort sake into my diet as easily as an Okinawan. Or spend the whole day hiking uphill like a Sardinian shepherd.

But maybe I could take advantage of the culturally isolated and geographically remote environment in which I live — my basement, in front of a computer — to create my own blue zone. I hoped, in fact, to find a way to obey the Power 9 — what Mr. Buettner nicknamed the rules of longevity — without ever getting up from my desk.

The first step was a cinch. Mr. Buettner recommends getting started by visiting www.bluezones.com to take a test called the Vitality Compass. Answer 35 questions, and voilà, it calculates your life expectancy.

I felt healthier already. Two minutes later, I received (sort of) good news.

“You are in the Blue Zone!” the Web site told me, adding that my biological age is 40, which is better than both my real age (46) and my Wii Fit age (49), but not nearly as young as the age I would like to look (23).

But then the results took a dark turn.

My life expectancy: 95.2.

My healthy life expectancy: 83.9.

While 12 years of decline was bad news for me, it would be even more of a blow to my children, who already have been warned that they won’t inherit my jewelry if they put me in a nursing home.

The only way to react to such dark news was to scoff at it, and dismiss the quiz as a publicity stunt to sell books.

Sadly, however, it turned out that the quiz results were based on a complex, 106-page algorithm developed by Dr. Robert Kane, a physician and a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

“What the results tell you are a confirmation and a consolidation of what’s been known, for the most part,” for decades, Dr. Kane said in an interview. “The challenge now is to try to get people to use it to change behavior. Most of us know what we ought to do, but have a hard time doing it.”

Like me. If I followed all the personalized advice in the quiz’s final report, I could get as much as an extra 2.3 years — if I didn’t get struck by lightning or some unforeseen fatal disease. But even knowing that incentive, I suffered an immediate setback. Two suggestions — get more rigorous exercise and eat less — made me hungry.

A few Mint Milano cookies later, I returned to my desk determined to improve. I e-mailed my tennis doubles partner, Stacey (who is also studying to become a certified personal trainer), to volunteer to let her train me twice during the next week.

She wrote back, with suggested training sessions and gossip about the latest team scandals, which sidetracked me until my fingers had gotten such a rigorous typing “workout” that I was ready to move on to the next suggestion: avoid salt.

To accomplish this, I sat at my desk awhile, eating nothing, until I figured enough time had passed to allow me to check off the no-salt suggestion.

Next: eat more fruit.

A Google search for salty fruit yielded 456,000 results. I settled quickly on something delicious called Sweet-n-Salty Fruit-n-Nut Honey Lace Brittle. Was that so hard?

After printing out the recipe, I moved on to the next suggestion: drink red wine.

Here — while people who know me might find this hard to believe — I hit a roadblock. While it’s possible, sometimes even essential, to drink wine in front of my computer, I couldn’t imagine myself drinking red.

Seeking clarification, I phoned Mr. Buettner. “Do you really think some book is going to get me to give up white wine?” I asked.

“No, no, you don’t have to,” he said in a reassuring tone meant to lower my stress level (another suggestion from my final report). “When it comes to drinking any spirits, a woman should have a drink a day and maybe two, unless pregnant.”

“Any spirits?” I pressed.

“You get this extra little antioxidant bump” from the polyphenols in red wine, he explained. “But white wine is fine too. I know drinking alcohol helps because I looked at epidemiology studies of huge populations and saw that those who drink a little outlive those who don’t.”

No doubt because nothing reduces stress like a full glass of chardonnay. And I needed relaxation more than ever because Mr. Buettner had become part of the problem. “I’m feeling considerable stress,” I told him, “because, according to your quiz, I am not going to live to be 100.”

“You have to have won the genetic lottery to live that long,” he said. “Like, did your grandparents and all their siblings live to be 100?”

I considered. Perhaps all four grandparents combined reached that age. My only option was to tackle another of the Power 9.

“I am thinking of trying to be more likable, as page 259 of your book suggests,” I said. “But how does that help?”

“If you’re likable, you’re likely to have a better social network, and even get better health care at the doctor’s office because the people who take your blood pressure will do a better job,” he said.

Pray tell, how to become more likable? “Be interested, not just interesting,” he said. “Likable people tend to ask you a question about yourself instead of just talking about themselves.”

Taking his advice, I changed my Facebook status to say, “Michelle is wondering what YOU are thinking.”

This prompted a Facebook friend to write a post: “Funny you should ask. ...”

Encouraged by how youthful my newfound amiability made me feel, I sent a text message to my Twitter entourage that said, “I meant to mention earlier, you look really good today.”

No response. So I texted, “Did you change your hair or what?”

This backfired. One of my Twitter-hating teenagers texted, “Do you realize that everyone can see what you’re typing?”

In desperation, I was ready to take the final bit of Mr. Buettner’s advice (“Maybe you should minimize time spent on the Internet as a way to reduce stress”) and spend some quality offline time “surrounded by those who share your blue-zone values.”

So I made a pan of calorie-laden chicken tetrazzini and went across the street to Bruce’s house with it. There my husband and I found him poring over the score sheet from a Little League game (his team won 20-5, which had to have diminished his stress).

“That looks good,” Bruce said, pointing to the casserole.

“Try some,” I said.

He had seconds. I didn’t.


E-mail: slatalla@nytimes.com


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Not terribly chock full of any new info on the Blue Zone book, but I included it because her writing is entertaining. I've seen conflicting reports about alcohol--some say it improves average lifespan, but then I've seen reports that most centenarians tend not to be drinkers. This researcher seems to be giving it the go-ahead. I presume the epidemiological evidence he mentioned was more than just average lifespan, and analyzed centenarian patterns separately as well.

Oh, did I not tell you last time that Blue Zones has a website? Yah, because it does.

I've been there; there's a lot of bunk, because they hired a bunch of bloggers to post new material constantly based on their personal opinions and not Buettner's research. Whatever you gotta do to market your book, I guess.

Centenarian Blue Zones

Source: http://www.startribune.com/17163371.html

Centenarians: Living, learning

By RANDY A. SALAS, Star Tribune

Last update: March 31, 2008 - 5:53 PM

By Gianluca Colla

Dan Buettner with 100-year-old Felipe Gudoy, in Costa Rica's Nicoya penninsula.

Aging only has an accelerator pedal, Dan Buettner says -- there is no brake. So the key to living longer is simple: Don't step on the gas.

But how do you do that? For a clue, the Minneapolis author and explorer traveled the world to find so-called Blue Zones, places where the people live much longer and in greater number than is the norm. He and a team of researchers then studied those people to find common links that might translate into a longer life for anyone.

The result is Buettner's new book, "The Blue Zone: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest" (National Geographic, $26).

In three years of research, Buettner found four Blue Zones, places where people have up to a three times better chance of living to 100 than we do: Okinawa in Japan, a mountainous region in Sardinia in Italy, the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, and Loma Linda, Calif. He joined with the National Institute on Aging to come up with a methodology to understand each region's culture of longevity and then backed it up with epidemiology studies.

"It's not just Dan Buettner's observations," he said.

Dr. Greg Plotnikoff, director of the Institute for Health and Healing at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, joined Buettner in Okinawa to vet the author's field work there. He praised Buettner's big-picture approach to studying the centenarians.

"It's not just 'What did you have for breakfast Mrs. Jones?' It's the whole context," Plotnikoff said. "This is why I'm such a big supporter of Dan's work. He's starting from a different perspective."

The gist of Buettner's findings, which he will discuss Wednesday during a sold-out book-launch presentation at Minneapolis Central Library and Friday at the SweatShop Health Club in St. Paul, should be good news to most people.

"Typically, when Americans think, 'I want to live longer or stay younger,' they jump to supplements or to diets or to exercise programs," Buettner said. "But the biggest 'Aha!' for us was that the things that truly give you extra quality years and make you look and feel younger now are easy and don't cost anything."

Dr. Steven Miles, a geriatrician and a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota, said he generally agrees with the tips derived from Buettner's findings.

"On the other hand, you really don't need to go and look at exotic subcultures to derive these rules," Miles said. "They can be derived relatively easily right here at home."

Buettner condensed the lessons in "The Blue Zone" to five tips:

1. Be naturally active.

That means gardening, walking with friends, playing with the kids and other everyday activities.

"The type of physical activity you enjoy is probably much better for you in the long run than anything else you can do, such as running marathons or triathlons or pumping iron," Buettner said.

Also consider changes that force spontaneous exercise, such as getting rid of the TV remote control so you have to get up whenever you want to change the channel or using a shovel instead of a snowblower.

2. Hang out with the right people.

If you spend your time with people who eat fast food and don't exercise, you're likely to pick up the same habits.

"This has a huge, profound impact on your lifestyle," Buettner said. He cited the extensive Framingham Heart Study, which found that obesity can be "socially contagious."

3. Reduce calories.

Before each meal, elders in Okinawa recite an adage to remind themselves to stop eating before they're full. You can do that more easily by replacing your 12-inch dinner plates with smaller ones.

"Every single meal, you'll cut 20 to 30 percent of the calories," Buettner explained, "because a big cue for telling us whether or not we're full is, is our plate empty?"

He added that University of Minnesota research suggests that people who eat a big breakfast tend to eat fewer calories throughout the day than people who skimp on their morning meal.

4. Restrict meat intake.

The easiest way to do this, Buettner said, is to stop buying meat at the grocery store. That will cut meat from your daily life but still allow you to eat it on special occasions or when you dine with your family and friends.

"The longest-lived people in the world eat meat less than four times a month," he said. "I think not eating meat adds an easy half a dozen years to your life."

5. Have a sense of purpose.

Two ways to do so are reconnecting with your religion and volunteering.

"As your job wanes down and your kids grow up, that's when it's hugely important to have a sense of purpose," Buettner said.

He's working on a new project about happiness and said he has found that 80 percent of the things that optimize your lifestyle also make you happier.

"By just putting a little more energy in the right areas of our life, it will have a huge payoff," he said.

"The power is in the repetitiveness, in doing it for a long time and making it your lifestyle. The key is to change your environment -- your social environment, your work environment -- because that will last. A diet won't. An exercise program won't."

Here's to a long life.

Randy A. Salas • 612-673-4542


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If the link is still active, I highly recommend following it for the captioned photo gallery; among the pictures are a 99-year old man waterskiing (his secret, it says, is his physical activity, eating small portions of good food, and that his weight is the same as it was when he enlisted in the service for WWII) and a centenarian woman who starts every morning by walking a mile through the halls of her building, then goes to the gym to cycle for 6-8 miles, and finishes off with weight training. If those pictures don't inspire you, you're doomed!

The Okinawan adage they recite before eating is a concept known as "harahachibu," or eating only until one feels 80% full. My mother always struggles to remember that one ("hairy hotsy boo-boo?").