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Dan Buettner, a storyteller and cyclist who tours the continent, discovered that the world consisted of at least five Blue Zones in the early 2000s. It was then that he made the term, first coined by European demographers Michel Poulain and Gianni Pes, a familiar phrase in a best-selling cover story for National Geographic.
In this handful of hidden corners scattered around the world, he found that people passed the 100-year mark with surprising frequency and often avoided dementia.
According to Buettner, the people who reside in these Blue Zones survive us because they have discovered what others have not discovered. They consistently eat a healthy diet and also move about every 20 minutes during each day.
But he says it took him years after that initial discovery to figure out exactly why the rest of us are so misunderstanding the simple formula of diet and exercise.
“People are starting to think that the entrance to a healthier lifestyle, for most Americans, is through the mouth,” he previously told Insider. “But the main tenant of the Blue Zones, and it took me about 10 years to realize what I’m going to tell you, none of them have better discipline, better diets, better individual responsibility, they don’t have better genes than us.”
The homegrown plant-based diets of Blue Zone residents account for only about half of the longevity equation, Buettner estimates. The rest is about making the healthy choices the easiest, turning them into instinctive rituals of daily life that people don’t have to think about or use willpower to fight.
That is, the residents of the Blue Zones, which are located in Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California – steadily moving forward each day, living on purpose, and doing it all with a little help from their friends.
Buettner reverse-engineered a Blue Zone in rural Minnesota, and people there lost four tons of fat.
Buettner has successfully tested this holistic approach in cities and towns across the United States, with amazing success. In 2009, she piloted her first “Blue Zones Project” in Albert Lea, Minnesota. The goal was to reverse engineer it into a Midwestern Blue Zone.
“If you want to live longer and be healthier, don’t try to change your behaviors, because that never lasts long,” he said. “Think about changing your environment.”
For Albert Lea, that meant the city of about 18,000 was forced to make more daily moves, with changes across the city making healthy actions the simplest of choices.
The city added 10 miles of sidewalks and bike lanes for its residents, and local businesses made it easy to pick up and eat healthy foods. People started walking more and creating their own walking groups who took to the streets together, collectively losing 4 tons of weight (an average of 2.6 pounds per person). Smoking was reduced by 4% during the first five years of the program.
“When I started four years ago, I had high cholesterol and high blood pressure,” Albert Lea City Councilman Al Brooks told MinnPost in 2015, saying he has started walking 2.5 miles a day since the city it became a Blue Zone. “My cholesterol is lower, my blood pressure is 116/70, and I lost 15 pounds.”
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