#122: Dan Buettner and the Blue Zones Challenge- Shape Your Surroundings and They Will Shape You
Dan Buettner , author of The Blue Zones Challenge
Rip welcomes researcher, friend, and author, Dan Buettner, back to the PLANTSTRONG Podcast to talk about his new book, The Blue Zones Challenge - A Four-Week Plan for a Longer, Better Life.This is the latest in his series of books about the five blue zones, which are locations around the world where people consistently live to 100 and beyond.
The Blue Zones Challenge is all about helping YOU to get set-up for long-term success so that the healthier choice becomes your natural, automatic choice. It's a four-week guidebook and year-long sustainability program for anyone looking to jumpstart their journey to better health, happiness, less stress, and a longer life.
In The Blue Zones Challenge, readers will learn tips, tricks, and nudges from these five blue zones. We’re talking about simple changes and advice for setting up your kitchen, pantry, work environment, and even resources for improving your social network.
It also includes nudges to help you:
Change Your Diet the Whole-Food Plant-Based Way
Naturally Increase Your Movement and Activity
Discover and Live Your Purpose
Build Your Social Life
No crazy extreme exercise programs and no deprivation diets are necessary! In fact, we know those don't work. What does work? Making small sustainable changes in your everyday environment so that the right choice becomes the automatic choice.
You can bet your life on it!
About Dan Buettner
Dan Buettner is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist and producer, and New York Times bestselling author. He discovered the five places in the world – dubbed blue zones hotspots – where people live the longest, healthiest lives. His articles about these places in The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic are two of the most popular for both publications.
Buettner now works in partnership with municipal governments, large employers, and health insurance companies to implement Blue Zones Projects in communities, workplaces, and universities. Blue Zones Projects are well-being initiatives that apply lessons from the Blue Zones to entire communities by focusing on changes to the local environment, public policy, and social networks. The program has dramatically improved the health of more than 5 million Americans to date.
His new book “The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-Week Plan for a Longer Better Life” is a four-week guide and year-long sustainability program to jump-start your journey to better health, happiness, less stress, and longer life.
Buettner also holds three Guinness World Records in distance cycling.
Episode and PLANTSTRONG Resources:
The holidays are here and it’s the perfect time to gift wrap the good news about following a whole-foods, PLANTSTRONG lifestyle. Here are some great gift ideas to help you introduce the science, and inspire a friend or family member to eat more plants!
First, books are often the easiest entry point for people interested in learning more. If you don’t already know, I’ve written four books - the original Engine 2 Diet, then PLANTSTRONG, The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet, and finally - with my sister Jane, The Engine 2 Cookbook. Each title is packed with digestible science and bundled with delicious recipes and powerful success stories. Visit Amazon or plantstrong.com to learn more or to send a book to someone you love.
Second, a gift membership to the PLANTSTRONG Meal Planner is incredibly thoughtful. It includes twelve months of access to curated recipes, live support from our meal planning experts, personalized meal recommendations, adaptive grocery lists, and optional grocery delivery via Amazon Fresh, Instacart, and Peapod. And great news! gift cards are on sale for the month of December for $20 off. Visit mealplanner.plantstrong.com
PLANTSTRONG Podcast Episode Page
Dan Buettner Website and Resources
Full Transcript
Dan Buettner:
In Blue Zones, they're not doing ... There's no silver bullet for longevity. It's the sum of lots of little things. And what the Blue Zone Challenge does is give you those little things that should add up to weight loss and longevity gain in a very short time.
Rip Esselstyn:
I'm Rip Esselstyn, and welcome to the Plantstrong podcast. The mission at Plantstrong is to further the advancement of all things within the plant-based movement. We advocate for the scientifically-proven benefits of plant-based living and envision a world that universally understands, promotes, and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment, and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with. We welcome you wherever you are on your Plantstrong journey. And I hope that you enjoy the show.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hello, Plantstrong people. I cannot believe that we're almost halfway into December and we're winding down 2021. It just seems absolutely surreal to me how fast the time has flown by. I'm Rip Esselstyn. Welcome to another episode of the Plantstrong Podcast.
Rip Esselstyn:
Man, we got a fabulous guest today. This is his second appearance on the Plantstrong Podcast. And I'm just going to start by saying we all need a little nudge sometimes in order to kick ourselves into gear, to get motivated to move, and to make some long-term, sustainable, healthy changes. Today, I'm going to give you that nudge along with Mr. Blue Zones himself, Dan Buettner. He's a researcher, explorer, world record holder. He's become a good friend. And he's author of the new book The Blue Zones Challenge, which is the latest in his series of Blue Zones books inspired by his research discovering the world's longest living people.
Rip Esselstyn:
This new book, it's gorgeous and includes all kinds of tips and tricks from the five Blue Zones. And these are locations around the world where people consistently live til 100 and beyond. And I'm going to give you a little trick right now. It's an acronym, so you'll always remember the five locations and impress your friends and family at parties. So the acronym is LIONS, L-I-O-N-S. The L stands Loma Linda here in the United States. The I is Icaria, Greece. The O is Okinawa, Japan. The N is Nicoya, which is in the peninsula of Costa Rica. And the S is Sardinia, Italy. There you have it. You'll never forget them.
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, The Blue Zones Challenge, it's all about helping you to get set up for success so that the healthy choice becomes your natural, easy choice. And it's all about changing your surroundings so this is the case. We're talking about simple changes and advice for changing up your kitchen, your pantry, your work environment, and even how to improve your social network and your sense of purpose, because we all know that people with a strong sense of purpose are more likely to stay active, engage their brains, and live a longer, healthier life.
Rip Esselstyn:
Dan, he's making the rounds this week, the interview rounds, so I was honored to have him with me today to introduce his new work into the universe and to give you that nudge to kickstart your journey to happiness and longevity in a sustainable way by reshaping your surroundings.
Rip Esselstyn:
Before we dive in with Dan, the holidays are here and it's the perfect time to gift wrap the good news about following a whole food, plant-strong lifestyle. I want to give you some gift ideas to help you introduce the science and inspire a friend or family member to eat more plants.
Rip Esselstyn:
First, you guys all are aware that I've written a bunch of books. Now, books are sometimes the easiest entry point for people interested in learning more. Now, the four books are The Engine 2 Diet, my first book that came out in 2009. Then I wrote the Plant-Strong: the World's Healthiest Diet, and that came out in 2013. Then in 2017, I wrote The Engine 2 Seven-Day Rescue Diet. And finally, in 2018, with my sister Jane, The Engine 2 Cookbook. Each one is packed with digestible science and bundled with delicious recipes and lots of great success stories. You can visit Amazon or plantstrong.com to learn more or to send a book to someone that you love.
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, secondly, a gift membership to the Plantstrong Meal Planner is incredibly thoughtful. It includes 12 months of access to curated recipes, live support from our meal planning team, personalized meal recommendations that you can customize, adaptive grocery lists, and optional grocery delivery via Amazon Fresh, Instacart, or Peapod. And the great news, for the month of December we have gift cards that are on sale for 20 bucks off, and you can just simply visit mealplanner.plantstrong.com to learn more.
Rip Esselstyn:
Now, finally, having simple ready-to-eat meals on hand is a true lifesaver, especially if the loved one doesn't feel like cooking or lives alone. Our all new Plantstrong chilis and stews are delicious, nourishing, and a wonderfully thoughtful gift. They're available online. You can send one of our sampler packs today and give the gift of convenience. Visit plantstrongfoods.com.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay, let's dive in with Dan and the Blue Zones.
Rip Esselstyn:
Hey, hey, Plantstrong people. I'm here with Dan Buettner, of all the wonderful people in the world. Love this man, love his work. Dan, if I'm not mistaken, the last time that I saw you, we were playing pickleball in the Texas [inaudible 00:07:07].
Dan Buettner:
That's right. That's right.
Rip Esselstyn:
And we had a lot of fun camping and eating plant-strong food and exercising.
Dan Buettner:
That's right.
Rip Esselstyn:
And since I last saw you, I think you made the exodus from Los Angeles to Miami along with Brian Wendell and Robby Barbaro. Is there something going on that I should know about?
Dan Buettner:
Well, this is what's going on right here.
Rip Esselstyn:
Oh. Oh, Jiminy Christmas.
Dan Buettner:
That's what's going on.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Say no more. Well, this is a big day for you because today is your publication date for The Blue Zones Challenge. I got to say, Dan, I just got this flexibound copy right here, you guys have the best branding, the best Pantones. My favorite color is blue. You guys always rock it out. So tell me, and all the Plantstrong people that are listening, is this kind of a great way for people to incorporate the Blue Zones into their life? Why the challenge, and why now?
Dan Buettner:
Yes. The idea behind Blue Zones was to reverse-engineer longevity. It was a big project with the National Institute on Aging and with National Geographic. And we really spent a long time identifying these five populations around the world, so-called Blue Zones where people are living statistically longest, and then several more years after confirming them, finding out exactly what these people do.
Dan Buettner:
And of course, a big reason they're living up to a dozen years longer than the rest of us is because they're eating mostly a whole-food, plant-based diet. Mostly. They have traditionally a little bit of animal products. But, really, peasant foods made to taste delicious have fueled them. They're moving naturally every 20 minutes or so. They have a strong sense of purpose, strong family. These are the things we all know add to longevity.
Dan Buettner:
But the reason that they're getting all these good years without developing type 2 diabetes and heart disease and many types of cancer ... And even dementia. We have one Blue Zone in Icaria where there's almost no dementia at all among a population of 10,000 people. It's not because these people have better discipline or better self-control or they're somehow morally better people, better genes or something. They just live in environments that make the healthy choice the easy choice.
Dan Buettner:
And what this book, The Blue Zone Challenge, does is it takes 30 or so evidence-based nudges and defaults that help you set up your social life, your home life, your kitchen, your bedroom, your work life, and to a certain extent your internal life so the healthy choice is unconscious. And there's where the big opportunity is. We're not trying to engineer your conscious choice. We're trying to engineer your unconscious choice, so you're set up for success.
Dan Buettner:
This has worked in five places around the world. It's worked in our 50 or so Blue Zone project cities. And now for the first time in 20 years, I really put the work into making sure it's a manual that can work for individuals who tried everything else. And this New Year's, instead of thinking that finally another diet's going to work for you, instead of trying to change your behavior, probably time now to let me help you change your surroundings and set yourself up for success.
Rip Esselstyn:
You just said, "Change your surroundings." So help me out here. What's the difference between changing your surroundings as opposed to changing your environment? And I know-
Dan Buettner:
Same thing. Same thing.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay, okay, same thing. Okay. So change your surroundings. And I know in the acknowledgement, you acknowledged two very important people that helped you realize how important it was to change your surroundings. That's Pekka Puska and Stamatis Moraitis. Can you tell us about those two people and how they influenced you?
Dan Buettner:
Yeah. Stamatis Moraitis is a Greek guy. I wrote a story in the New York Times Sunday magazine about him. The name of the article was The Island Where People Forget to Die. And he traveled from Icaria, one of our Blue Zones, to America when he was a young man. He started living an American lifestyle. At age 66, he found himself with a terminal case of cancer. And instead of going on chemotherapy and taking a bunch of pills, he moved back to Icaria, where he lived for another 40 years.
Dan Buettner:
And he got back, he started eating the plant-based Mediterranean diet, drinking clean water, clean air, connecting with his religion, and connecting with his social network. And I can't tell you for sure that it was his environment that enabled him to make it to 102, but he was our poster boy because on his island, you have eight extra years of life expectancy and no dementia. And that's not because they're better people. It's just because they live in a better environment.
Dan Buettner:
The other guy, Pekka Puska, he ran a project in North Karelia, Finland back in the 1970s. In the 1970s, North Karelia, Finland had the highest rate of cardiovascular disease in the world. These people were eating dairy. They would fry their cheese and butter. And the national dish was this sort of pork stew that had three ingredients: water, pork, and salt. And if you wanted it spicy, you added more salt. So it wasn't a shock that men were dropping dead at age 55.
Dan Buettner:
Pekka Puska came in, and he had the insight that instead of trying to hound people to stop eating their sausages or their pork or their dairy or their butter, he just brought in canola oil and helped, worked with local universities to create a rapeseed canola oil that people could afford.
Dan Buettner:
People generally didn't eat berries because they couldn't afford them. They had no access. Blueberries and raspberries grew in abundance in Northern Finland, and he helped make sure they found distribution in grocery stores and in restaurants, people's homes. He engineered out some of the fat and salt in the sausages and replaced it with cheap mushroom filler, thereby lowering the animal product consumption and sodium consumption.
Dan Buettner:
So again, instead of trying to change very firmly rooted cultural norms, he changed the surroundings, so people mindlessly made better decisions. And lo and behold, the rate of cardiovascular disease drops 70% in the last 30 years, and they've maintained it. Not because he sold some fad diet or some snake oil super food. Whole food, plant based.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Those numbers are absolutely crazy. And in the book you also mention a great quote. I love Winston Churchill, and you mention him. He says, "Shape your surroundings and they will shape you," which I really like. I also like when he says, "America always gets it right, but only after they've tried everything else."
Dan Buettner:
It's so true.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. You talk about nudges in this fantastic book. Can you give me some example of some nudges that some of our listeners can start thinking about?
Dan Buettner:
Yeah. In your kitchen, I like to say most of us are on what I call see-food diet. We tend to eat the food we see, and Cornell Food Lab has really done the best research on this. If you have chips on your counter with a clip or a toaster, after about two years you weigh about six more pounds than the same people who have no toaster, no chips on their counter. If you have a candy jar within arm's reach, you weigh about four more pounds after two years. So replacing those negative nudges with a positive nudge with, say, a fruit bowl, which you keep full on your counter, you're way more likely to eat that fruit. And establishing a junk food drawer. A lot of us are going to bring salty snacks and sugar packet sugar. I know you're not, but a lot of other of us, we have cheap foods. It's not a sin to have them in your house, but put them out of the way.
Dan Buettner:
The other nudge is the TV set. We know that if you're watching TV while eating your meal, you tend to eat to your show, and you stop eating when your show's over. There's a good research behind it. So taking a TV out of your kitchen occasions losing a couple pounds a year.
Dan Buettner:
Eating off of 10-inch plates as opposed to 14-inch plates. We know if you're eating off a 10-inch plate, you perceive a bigger helping of food and you tend to eat less.
Dan Buettner:
So these are all things you can set up in a few minutes and you will mindlessly have better food behaviors. In Blue Zones, there's no silver bullet for longevity. It's the sum of lots of little things. And what the Blue Zone Challenge does is give you those little things that should add up to weight loss and longevity gain in a very short time.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Which is what everybody wants, and to make that sustainable. You say in the book, I think you even started out, it might be in the first page, that if you're overweight, if you have diabetes, if you're suffering from a heart disease, if you've had a shot across the bow with cancer, it's not your fault. And then I think shortly thereafter, to support that, you say in 1960 we had a hundred McDonald's and then today we have over 250,000 fast food restaurants, just as an example.
Dan Buettner:
That's right. In 1980, and most of us were around in 1980, only 15% of Americans were obese. Today, we're over 45%. So threefold growth and increase in obese people. The diabetes and prediabetes rate is up about sevenfold. That's not because we are lesser humans than we were in our 1980. It's not because we have less discipline and less self-control. Our environment has changed.
Dan Buettner:
In addition to the proliferation of fast food restaurants, most of which just serve junk, over 55% of all retail outlets, from the place you get your tires changed to the place you buy your diabetes medicine, force you, route you through a gauntlet of sugar, sweet beverages, through sweets, through salty snacks. And we're genetically hardwired to crave sugar and salt and fat. And we evolved in this environment of scarcity and hardship, and now we're in this environment where you can't take five steps without being confronted by something. And eventually, your discipline's going to wear down. And we're an obese, overweight nation not because Americans are bad people. It's because we have just let the food environment we live in get out of control.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. One of the things you also talk about in the book is how almost, I think it's one in five of us have less than three friends, three good friends, and just how lonely we have become. And there's something that you learned, I think it was from the Okinawans called moai. Can you talk about that and how you incorporate that into the challenge?
Dan Buettner:
Yes. Yes. If you are one of the lonely people who don't have at least three friends you can count on on a bad day, that's the technical definition of loneliness, it shaves about eight years off your life expectancy. It's as bad for you as a smoking habit. We don't live in a culture where there's any guarantees that we're going to have a supportive social circle.
Dan Buettner:
One of the neat things I observed in Okinawa was the concept of a moai. And this is a committed social circle, usually half a dozen friends, and they often are formed by their parents. So kids, when they're five years old, they're put in this moai. They're expected to travel through life, and if things go well, if you get a raise or there's a good crop, you're expected to share it. And conversely, if a parent dies or a child gets sick or you get divorced or you need to borrow some money for seed or whatever, you have this circle of friends who are going to support you.
Dan Buettner:
And I got to sit with five members of a moai. They were 102-year-old women who'd been friends for 97 years, and it was a beautiful and powerful thing. And you could see how this social circle really favored their longevity because they were checking in with each other every night. They got together, drank a little sake, they gossiped. They maybe shared a meal, which in Okinawa it's almost always a tofu stir fry. So they reinforce the right behaviors for the decades that get them into their hundreds.
Rip Esselstyn:
Do you have a moai that you are part of that helps keep you kind of socializing [crosstalk 00:22:04]?
Dan Buettner:
Yeah, I do. I would say actually you're part of my extended moai. But John Mackey who are both friends of ours and this whole plant-based world, Robby Barbaro and these people who have really had the epiphany that the way to a healthier and happier America is through eating whole, plant-based. These are the people I tend to socialize with and play a lot of pickleball with them. And we share values, we share interests, we share passions, and we really look out for each other.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. One of the things that I think is so prevalent right now in this country is how sedentary we are. And you talk about the Blue Zones and how these people, they move naturally. What are some ways that you suggest people who need to move more, what are some nudges that we can do to move more naturally?
Dan Buettner:
Right. Well, first of all, don't get obsessed with exercise because exercise has been an unmitigated public health failure. Fewer than 15% of Americans get the minimum recommended amount of physical activity, which is 30 minutes of walking a day. And we keep beating this dead horse.
Dan Buettner:
In Blue Zones, it's very clear that they're moving every 20 minutes because they're nudged into it. Every time they go to work or a friend's house or out to eat, an occasion to walk. Their houses aren't full of mechanical conveniences to do their kitchen work for them or their yard work or their housework for them. They have gardens out back. They're moving every 20 minutes or so. Easy on the joints. They're burning more calories than they would if they sat at their desk all day long and thought they were making up at the gym. If you look at the data on gym usage, people who are members of gyms, they use it fewer than five times a month, so that's not really working. And their metabolism's higher.
Dan Buettner:
So a few nudges that work, having a comfortable pair of walking shoes by your door, having a bicycle that works, learning how to get to work by taking a bus. People kind of roll their eyes, but there's actually good research that shows that people who take a bus to work have about 20% lower rate of cardiovascular mortality because they're walking from their house to the bus stop, the bus stop to work, and doing that in reverse 10 times a week.
Dan Buettner:
It's the long-term, daily stuff that's going to get us to a healthy age, 70 or 80 or 90, not this folly that, "Okay, I'm going to run a marathon this year," and somehow that's going to do it. And, Rip, you and I are both ultra-distance and high-performing athletes. And we've done that. And these days, I ride my bike and play pickleball.
Rip Esselstyn:
That's right.
Dan Buettner:
I feel better than I ever have.
Rip Esselstyn:
I know. One of the things, too, that you talk about in the book that I really like is, I think you talk about how a lot of these Okinawan elders, they don't have chairs or couches. They just sit on the floor. And so they have to get up off the floor, what, a hundred times a day?
Dan Buettner:
Well, it might not be that many, but 20 or 30 for sure. This was actually my observation. But at a certain age, falling down, if you're over age 50 and you fall down and break a hip, there's a 25% chance you'll be dead within a year. Very high mortality rate.
Dan Buettner:
Part of the reason Okinawa has the longest lived people in the history of the world is because their incidence of falls is so low, probably one fifth the number of falls that Americans have, of fatal falls. So you start to ask yourself, well, why is that? And you look around at their house, and indeed they sit on the floor. So they're not only getting up and down, that means lower body strength, it means lower body flexibility, it means they don't have furniture to trip over.
Dan Buettner:
So once again, it loops back to my central argument that if you want to live longer, pay attention not to try to change your behavior, change your environment, shape your surroundings.
Rip Esselstyn:
You kind of touched upon this earlier, but I love saying the word, and I'd love for you to just talk a little bit more about it, and that's Hara Hachi Bu. Am I pronouncing it correctly?
Dan Buettner:
You are.
Rip Esselstyn:
Okay. What in the world-
Dan Buettner:
High five.
Rip Esselstyn:
What in the world is that, and why should our listeners pay attention to that?
Dan Buettner:
Hara Hachi Bu is a Confucian adage, goes back about 2,500 years, and it reminds Okinawans ... They'll say it like a prayer before a meal, and it reminds them to stop eating when their stomachs are 80% percent full. And most of that, quite honestly, is manifested at the counter. So they'll typically portion out 80% of the calories and put their leftovers away before the meal instead of putting them away after the meal, when you've eaten too much.
Dan Buettner:
But it's also that reminder to slow down, to enjoy the meal. And when you slow down, there's a better chance that that fullness feeling has a chance to travel up to the brain to tell you to stop eating. There's usually about a 20-minute delay between the time our bellies are full and our brains register it. So if you're eating too fast, you're more likely to overeat than if you slow down.
Dan Buettner:
I think in the West here, I think saying grace is a really great idea because it puts some punctuation between our busy lives and our meals. It reminds us that food is often ... it's traditionally been hard-won, and it shouldn't just be wolfed down. And it just sets the tone of a slower meal. Again, it's one of the subtle things that probably is occasioning longevity.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of good research to show a little bit of calorie restriction goes a long way. I mean, again, in going through this book, I love how you have all these workbook activities, journaling. And one of the things that you talk about that's, I think, pretty important is living your purpose. Can you address that and how important that is?
Dan Buettner:
Yeah. The first director of the National Institutes on Aging, Dr. Robert Butler, did this landmark study examining people's writings and found that people who could articulate their sense of purpose were living about seven years longer than people were rudderless in life. And along those same lines, in Blue Zones, people have actually a vocabulary for purpose: ikigai in Okinawa or Costa Rica's plan de vida.
Dan Buettner:
So rather than just glossing over purpose and its power, in the Blue Zone Challenge, I really try to take people through an internal inventory. I believe purpose is the cross-section of knowing your values, knowing your skills and what you do well and your passions, and most importantly, is having an outlet for them. It's putting your gifts or your abilities to work. I don't have much confidence in having purpose and not leaving the TV. It's really when that purpose is put to work through volunteerism or through helping your family or helping your friends or contributing to the community where that purpose, I think, really makes a difference.
Dan Buettner:
How does that add to longevity? People with a strong sense of purpose are more likely to stay active, they're more likely to take their meds, and they're more likely to engage their brain. And we just see so clear in Blue Zones people with purpose live longer.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. The other thing that we really haven't talked about, I mean, you said it at the top of the show about being predominantly plant-based, but you have four always foods that you kind of suggest and four to avoid food. You want to quickly go through those?
Dan Buettner:
Sure. And I recommend that people put this on a Post-it note or post it on the refrigerator, so they see it every day. So the four always foods. Fruit that you like because you'll eat it. Beans. We know that people who eat a cup of beans a day live about four years longer than people who aren't eating beans. I recommend an Instant Pot, doing it yourself in a delicious recipe, but you can eat it out of the cans. Sweet potatoes. In Okinawa, 70% of the dietary intake until about 1970 were sweet potatoes. A powerful food. And then nuts. Nuts as your go-to snack. People who eat a handful of nuts live about two years longer than people who don't eat nuts.
Rip Esselstyn:
Can I interrupt you just for a second? Just say to the listener, I think it's really important that, and in the book you say a handful of nuts a day. And maybe not to have five or six handfuls of nuts, but one handful. Because they're such-
Dan Buettner:
That's right.
Rip Esselstyn:
Calorie dense.
Dan Buettner:
Yeah, a lot of oil in those nuts. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yup. Okay.
Dan Buettner:
And then the food-
Rip Esselstyn:
And then what about to avoid?
Dan Buettner:
Avoid, okay. The number one source of refined sugar in the American diet is soda pop. I never bring ... There's no redeeming quality to soda pop in my opinion. It should never be brought in the house. Number two, processed meats. And that's your hot dogs to your lunch meats and your bacon. World Health Organization puts those in the same category as cigarettes, as a known carcinogen.
Dan Buettner:
Number three is packaged sweets. That's not to say you can't enjoy sweets once in a while, but I'd argue just make yourself go outside to have those sweets. And then salty snacks, especially potato chips, are the most highly correlated for obesity. It turns out that too much salt and too much fat, your body actually makes fructose, so it makes sugar. But we don't know a hundred percent why salty snacks seem to make people fat. There's lots of theories. But again, if you want to enjoy a small bag of chips once in a while, you have every right to treat yourself, but just don't have it in your house.
Rip Esselstyn:
We just got, Dan, a cat. We named the cat Pickles. We've had Pickles for four months. It's a black cat. And we also have a dog. But I'm wondering if you've, in your research with the Blue Zones, have you found any correlation with pets? Should we have pets? Does that help us live longer, happier lives?
Dan Buettner:
I've only seen it ... the research in dogs. People who own dogs tend to have about half the rate of obesity than non-dog owners. And it's probably because that if you own a dog, the dog gets walked every day and, therefore, so does the human. Again, it's one of these great ways to shape your home environment, so you're nudged into moving.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Dan, this is out, The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-Week Plan for a Longer, Better Life. What is this? Is this your fourth or fifth book or sixth book?
Dan Buettner:
Well, I hope it'll be my fifth New York Times Best Seller. We'll see this week. But it's out this week. It's already a best seller on Amazon. But it really represents 20 years of work. And I think for individuals who want to put this to work in their life, it's the easiest. It's not a big, intimidating book. It's interactive. It'll help you go plant based.
Dan Buettner:
About 80 million people on January 1st will start their New Year's resolution, and research shows by the first week in February 80% of those will have forgot what their resolutions were. This book doesn't ask you to change your behavior. It takes you, take that four weeks, set up your environment, and that should exert an effect for decades. It's timed to come out before the holidays, so you can give the gift of life. It's an inexpensive book. It's available on Amazon. And I'm very proud of it.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yeah. Well, you should be. You really should be. I loved reading it the last two days. Tell me before I let you go to your next interview, what's the next exciting thing that you got going on? Is there a place you're traveling to or something you're looking forward to?
Dan Buettner:
Yes. Well, I'm finally actually, I'm working on a book right now about the American diet. The standard American diet's probably the most lethal thing that anybody's invented ever. But if you go about a hundred years back and you look at certain ethnicities in America a hundred years ago, you find essentially a Blue Zone diet. So I'm working again with National Geographic to capture those ethnic American diets, and I'll be making the argument that actually there's an American diet that's the healthiest diet in the world. We've just forgotten it.
Rip Esselstyn:
It's brilliant. Brilliant. What a partnership you've had with National Geographic. That's so beautiful. Man.
Dan Buettner:
We love them.
Rip Esselstyn:
Well, Dan, I appreciate your time today. Congrats on getting another fantastic book out into the universe, The Blue Zones Challenge. You are something else. Appreciate it.
Dan Buettner:
Rip, you are too. I appreciate you, and I consider you a brother. And if I can ever help, let me know. And thank you for all the good you do in the world, and I look forward to many, many years of collaboration.
Rip Esselstyn:
Yes. Thank you. Plantstrong.
Dan Buettner:
Plantstrong. Boom.
Rip Esselstyn:
Boom.
Rip Esselstyn:
Thank you, Dan. Dan's new book, The Blue Zones Challenge, is out now, and I think you'll benefit from the lessons and nudges in his book. For details on the book and all of the episode resources, visit the episode page at plantstrongpodcast.com. I'll see you next week with a little holiday snackables episode with two of my favorite women in the whole wide world: my mother, Ann Crile Esselstyn, and my sister, Jane [Allie 00:37:45] Esselstyn.
Rip Esselstyn:
The Plantstrong Podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Laurie Kortowich, Ami Mackey, Patrick Gavin, and Wade Clark. This season is dedicated to all of those courageous truth-seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth. Most notably, my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr,. and Ann Crile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
