by Mark McDermott
Dan Buettner is a National Geographic Explorer, a vocation for which both wonder and wander are inherent. But he came of age at a time when the geographic wonders of the world had been thoroughly documented.
So early in his career, Buettner wandered in ways nobody had before, making his mark as an explorer through extraordinary exploits. He broke three world records by bicycling across five continents. He cycled 15,536 miles from arctic Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina; 12,888 miles following the 45th parallel around the world; and 11,885 from the top to the bottom of Africa.
He also began to understand that what he was doing was not sustainable, personally or professionally. Buettner had become “a walking science experiment,” as he later described it, contracting malaria, giardia, dysentery, intestinal worms, and most of the other types of gastrointestinal infection known to humankind. By the end of the ‘90s, he’d cycled 120,000 miles, and it occurred to him that statistically, he should already be dead, by disease or accident. “Maybe it’s my grandmother praying for me that got me through,” he told an interviewer at the time.
Something an editor at National Geographic magazine said to Buettner stuck with him. “If you want to keep on exploring,” the editor said, “you need to do expeditions that add to the body of knowledge, or educate.”
And so in 1999, Buettner began an investigation into human longevity that remains ongoing, although it has broadened in ways he could not have fathomed at the outset. It began on Okinawa, a 15-mile wide island, 900 miles south of Tokyo in Japan, where Buettner began studying how and why people were living longer than anywhere else in the world. In particular, he spent time among the island’s many centenarians — those who’d lived to 100 and beyond — as well as working alongside other scientific investigators. This led him across the world, to the mountain villages of Sardinia, a Mediterranean island that is part of Italy, in which 91 of the 17,865 people born between 1880 and 1900 lived past 100. Researchers Gianni Pes and Michael Poulain had been studying this population, mapping the parts of Sardinia that produced the most centenarians, which turned out to be concentrated in six mountain villages. The researchers denoted these areas by drawing blue circles, which they dubbed “blue zones.” Among Buettner’s many gifts as an explorer and writer is a genius for synthesizing. He took the concept of Blue Zones and began connecting dots around the world. He’d soon crisscross the world again, to the Nicoya peninsula of Costa Rica, where yet another concentration of long-living people had been discovered, and eventually back to Europe, to the mountain villages on Ikaria, Greece. Perhaps most unexpectedly, he found a fifth “longevity hotspot” in urban Southern California, among the Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda.
The initial result of this investigation was “Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest,” published in 2008. It became not only a bestseller but one of the most influential books of this century. The book, and the nine books delving into the Blue Zones that Buettner has written since, is an unusual combination of elements. It offers a sense of adventure, a warm and wise cast of characters who defy any description that fits our idea of “elderly,” and evidence-based prescriptions for how to live longer and better. Buettner possesses the practical folksiness of his Minnesota upbringing, but combines it with the wild wonder and hard science of his training as an explorer. The result is easily digestible, actual wisdom. The Blue Zones books provide recipes and blueprints, for cooking and especially for living.
Buettner and his team discovered the nine things all Blue Zones have in common, which include “move naturally,” or being active in ways you don’t think about (i.e. not the gym), eating a plant-based diet, living within community and family, and living with a defined sense of purpose. These prescriptions gave rise to Blue Zones projects, public health campaigns designed to alter the human environment to make healthy living a convenient choice rather than a diet or a fitness regime. In 2010, the Beach Cities Health District partnered with Buettner and his team for the first full-scale Blue Zones project. Since then, 72 cities have implemented Blue Zones projects. Although difficult to quantify, the projects combined have added an estimated 5 million human life years to their populations. Buettner has not only followed his National Geographic editor’s advice to add the body of human knowledge but has added untold years to human lives.
Buettner now is well known locally, nationally, and internationally. This year he brought his message to a global audience. His Netflix series, “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones,” premiered on August 30. It has been one of the top three most-viewed series in the United States over the last six weeks and ranked in the top 10 in 75 other countries. In its first week alone, 5.7 million people watched the series in the U.S. for a total of more than 15 million hours, according to Netflix.
But the reach of the show isn’t what is most striking. “Show, don’t tell,” is a dictum taught in journalism, meaning that specificity has unmatched descriptive power. For all the words and ideas that Buettner has disseminated over the two decades of his Blue Zones research, nothing has been quite so powerful as seeing, with your own eyes, the 100-year-olds who are the stars of the Netflix series.
These centenarians are not what you might imagine. From the dancing, singing, laughing, and radiantly beautiful 101-year-old Umeto Yamashiro in Okinawa to the 100-year-old Nicoyan cowboy Jose Ramiro Guadamuz hopping on his horse and galloping across the screen, “Live to 100” has established a new kind of movie star — people who have lived well, and continue to do so, for over a century. We tend to think of aging as a series of small thefts — losing your hair, mobility, eyesight, and finally, memory — culminating in the larger robbery of death. What we see in this documentary are people who have, with the immensity of their years, been given more grace, love, and vitality. And they have been endowed with a kind wisdom only age can give, which they are joyously willing to share.
Buettner has been spending time with centenarians for nearly a quarter century. If the early part of his career as an explorer was a series of epic wanders, these last decades have been a deep dive into the wonder that is a deeply lived human life.
“First and foremost, it gave me an appreciation for the aging process and the beauty it can possess,” Buettner said. “I’d always kind of found it mildly repulsive. I remember my great, great uncle –going to see him in a retirement home, and it smelling like urine and Lysol, and I just couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But people who live in the right environment, and age well, I now know — statistically, they are happier. After the age of 55, happiness increases, as long as you keep your health. And so 100-year-olds are happier than any other demographic. They learn how to be satisfied.”
As much as the Blue Zones research has positively altered the lives of millions of people, it has had a profound impact on the man who led this expedition into longevity. He’s not only learned how to live longer, but to live better.
“It’s changed me,” Buettner said. “I recognize that being social, and being clear on my purpose and living it, are far more powerful than anything else I can do.”
Secrets of the Blue Zones
The series begins at an end. We see Buettner walking through a graveyard. It appears he’s somewhere outside the United States, somewhere older, probably in Ikaria. He finally finds the grave he is looking for, and we hear him quietly say, “My friend.”
“Most of us don’t even want to think about dying, getting frail or losing vitality, closing our eyes for the last time,” Buettner says in a voiceover. “But one thing’s for sure: it’s coming. The question is when. How many years will you get out of your body, and do we even have any say in the matter? I have found that most of what people think leads to a long, healthy life is misguided or just plain wrong. It’s not like we don’t care about this stuff. Every year Americans spend billions of dollars on diet plans, gym memberships, and supplements, but it’s clearly not working for us. The fact of the matter is that most of us are leaving good years on the table. Worldwide, about two-thirds of the 8 billion people on this planet will die prematurely from an avoidable disease. In America, for the first time in a century, life expectancy is dropping. So how do we fix this? I believe it’s not by trying to prevent death. It’s by learning how to live.”
“Live to 100” is a four-part series that is both an exercise in deft storytelling and a revelation in hopefulness. As his own star rose, Buettner was approached several times about doing a documentary, but he was careful about how it would be done, and by whom. In director Clay Jeter, perhaps best known for his work on another Netflix series, “Chef’s Table,” he found exactly the right person to bring his Blue Zones journey to cinematic life. Nothing can rival books for conveying detailed information in a learnable way, and Buettner is a warm companion as a writer, delivering lessons from the Blue Zones somehow both conversationally, and with light-on-his-feet erudition. But he is also a great storyteller in-person, and possesses homespun Midwestern charisma. He is a tall man with a distinct, bow-legged happy gait who frequently emits a horse-like uptake of laughter. Jeter captures both Buettner and the often gorgeous landscapes of the Blue Zones with utter exuberance. Though four episodes can’t cover as much ground as the books, the compactness of Jeter’s own storytelling lends the series a caper-like sense of “What’s next?” as if Buettner were a detective on the trail of a crime— which, in a way, he is. Buettner believes people are being robbed of good years, and the series occasionally conveys a sense of outrage, albeit leavened with a can-do sense of redress. The episode in Costa Rica, for example, shows how the country spends one-fifteenth of what the U.S. does, per capita, on health care, but does so effectively, with healthcare workers who come to people’s homes to perform free-of-charge health checks aimed at preventing sickness, not treating it.
“In the United States, we hope for health but we really incent for sickness,” Buettner says in the episode. “All of the money lies in waiting for you to get sick, and then getting paid to heal you. It’s both incredibly expensive and ineffective. But here’s a country that spends a fraction of the amount we do on health care, and they’re still getting better results. How is it that such a poor country is able to offer such an efficient health care system?”
Nothing ever comes across as a diatribe, though, because it’s told in simple human stories, always with a dash of good humor. When a visiting healthcare worker arrives on a motorcycle and asks a centenarian named Jose Benerando if he knows what year it is, the old man wrinkles his eyes and smiles.
“Well, I am not very sure of the year, but I know it’s March 8,” he says.
One of the points the documentary makes, repeatedly, is about both this sense of time, and humor. None of those living long in the Blue Zones are on the clock. Nor is anyone focused on material wealth. At one point, Buettner talks to an 86-year-old laborer named Juan Carillo in Nicoya, who works chopping wood from 6 to 10 most mornings and spends the rest of his day relaxing.
“Do you have money in the bank?” Buettner asks him.
“No, no, no,” Carillo responds.
“You don’t have any security, you only have what you can get?”
“That’s right.”
Carillo says when he has a little money, he “treats himself,” and the camera follows him having a beer, out dancing and flirting at a roadside taqueria. He and Buettner toast to a long life.
“I do not complain,” Carillo says. “I am poor and ugly, but I have enjoyed as much as one should.”
“Tu eres macho,” Buettner interjects, telling the old man he is not at all ugly.
Carillo tells him he thanks God on a regular basis.
“I ask Him, I am already 86, but if there are to be more days, let it always be like this,” he says. “I ask Him when I go to bed, and then I get up and ask, ‘Give me strength.”
In Sardinia, where centenarians are revered as heroes and portrayed in murals on village walls, a favorite pastime is sitting around drinking coffee or perhaps a glass of wine during the afternoon and exchanging kindly insults with friends they’ve known seven, eight, or nine decades. Many of the lessons of the Blue Zone are like a form of remedial training in how to be human: eat plants, and don’t eat too much; move your body all day, every day; take naps; believe in something beyond yourself, be it a religion, family, or community, or all the above. Know people. Hang out together, a lot. Laugh, even more. In Okinawa, everyone gardens, and nobody has furniture, meaning they exert their bodies just by standing up.
“We followed 103-year-olds who would get up and down 30 times a day,” Buettner says in the first episode. “That’s like doing 30 squats. They’re strengthening their core, they’re strengthening their lower body, they’re improving their balance. How would that map to longevity? Well, it turns out that in America one of the top 10 reasons older people die is because they fall down. They have weak lower bodies and bad balance because they’re sitting on chairs and Lazy Boys all the time.”
In both Ikaria and Sardinia, the villages are on mountains, so the streets and sidewalks are steep, meaning people exercise their bodies naturally, rather than going to a step machine at a gym. Both places, as well as Okinawa and Nicoya, maintain a reverence for family.
“It’s very clear that people in Blue Zones keep their aging family members nearby where they can get better care,” Buettner says in the documentary. “One of the quickest ways to take life expectancy away from your parents is to put them in a retirement home. If they go into a retirement home, they lose between two and six years, depending on a number of circumstances. One study estimated that today a 50-year-old in America has at least a 53 percent chance of ending up in a nursing home during his or her lifetime. But in Sardinia, you never see that. They had to make the community a core value….and the building block of the community was the family. So [older people] are all at home, not only getting much better care but they’re also tapped for their wisdom.”
“Live to 100” shows this dynamic in action. When Buettner arrived back in a Sardinian village called Villagrande Striisalili he’d visited many times, he noticed a banner across the outside of a house that said, “Buon 101. Compleananno Zia Guilia,” or Happy Birthday Aunt Giulia. Inside he found a smiling centenarian with a heart-shaped face, surrounded by five nieces and a nephew, all of whom take turns staying on a small bed in her house, caring for her. Much of the village, it turned out, regarded Guilia as a mother, so generous had she been with her own love and care all her life. This was not repayment, however, one of the nieces was quick to point out to Buettner. “We don’t think of it that way,” she said. “It’s not even a question for us. We do it because that is what a family does.”
The concept of retirement is likewise little known in most of the Blue Zones.
“In Okinawa, there is no word for retirement,” Buettner says, over footage of an older woman gardening, then an older man working as a school crossing guard. “When they get to be 60 or 7 or 80, they’re still working. They might only be working in their garden to grow some vegetables, or they may have a stall on the market where they’re only working in the morning. You’re keeping your mind engaged. You’re keeping your body engaged…They are told constantly, ‘You count. We need you.”
Food, of course, is a big focus of the Blue Zones research, and thus of the documentary. Buettner has written two National Geographic books on food that include hundreds of recipes. The choice of Jeter as director certainly was not accidental in terms of showing all the beautiful food in the Blue Zones. But again, there is an unexpected power in actually seeing the food in its cultural context. Seeing the hard work of grounding the corn for tortillas in Nicoya, one realizes that meal preparation itself is often health-inducing because it requires physical work. Witnessing the multigenerational feasts in Ikaria, with plate upon plate of sumptuous vegetables, and no roasted animals anywhere in sight, makes real the connection between food and community. Buettner’s research turned out to be ahead of science that has since shown the importance of fiber from beans and vegetables on the “microbiome,” or the gut bacteria that in the last decade we have begun to understand is central to both physical and cognitive health. The one food that cuts across all Blues Zones is the most easily available food on the planet.
“Eat beans,” Buettner said. “I’m the self-appointed king of beans. People laugh, but they have no idea how important beans are. Eighty percent of Americans don’t get enough fiber. Just a cup of beans a day will give your body what it needs. Your microbiome can then produce the anti-inflammatories and the immune boosters and the feel-good hormones that we need, that the standard American diet does not provide.”
Two images in particular are likely to stick with you after watching “Live to 100.” The first centenarian you meet is 101-year-old Umeto Yamashiro, in Okinawa. It appears she is hosting a small party for her famous visitor and his camera crew. Three generations of her family are present. The surprising thing, however, is that she is the life of the party. And she’s not just beautiful in the almost holy way most of these centenarians age, as if age were circular, not linear, a childlike purity and whimsy shining through their eyes. She is actually gorgeous.
When prompted, she gives Buettner very clear advice about how to live to 101. “Always have fun. Don’t get angry. Have fun with everyone,” she says. “Make everyone happy…This laughter brings us longevity.”
Then she sings, playing a three-string folk instrument, and at one point dances across the room balancing a large bottle of sake on her head. The song she sings says, “Don’t catch a cold, don’t fall down, don’t forget to laugh, and talk often.” Her whole family claps along as she plays.
“A hundred and one years old, Umeto-san, she’s vital, vigorous, funny, positive, and then she plays this Okinawan sort of banjo instrument that she plucks with precision, not missing a note, singing the song,” Buettner muses. “To have that vitality, that positiveness, all in one package….I look at her and I say, ‘I want that.’”
In episode three, we meet the cowboy. Buettner recalls that one of his colleagues went looking for this 100-year-old cowboy people had been telling them about.
“So my colleague Jorge, he shows up at a ranch in Costa Rica, expecting to meet this centenarian,” Buettner recounts. “Instead, he meets this cowboy who’s got smooth skin and perfect teeth and he’s jumping on a horse and lassoing cows and riding around. And after a while, he asks, ’I was supposed to meet a centenarian.’ And Ramiro says, ‘Well, that’s me.”
As Buettner tells the story, footage of Ramiro shows that he’s not just playing at being a cowboy. You see him sitting with ease atop a white horse, herding cattle, crossing a river, calling out in a deep, clear voice. Buettner talks to him when he’s done working, and discovers he was up at 4 a.m. and just finished work now, at 10 a.m. When asked why he still works so much, he responds like any cowboy would. “Because that’s my life,” he says.
A new book that came out at the same time as the series, “The Blue Zones Secrets to Longer Living,” reveals a bit more of the cowboy’s secrets to long life. First, he’s surrounded by family, who revere him. “This is why I am still here,” he told Buettner. “They make me happy.” The other secret is that though his wife died many years ago, Ramiro has remained an active lady’s man. He’s had seven “novias,” or girlfriends, since losing his wife. He told Buettner that after checking on his cattle that evening, he planned to take his horse the long way home in order to pass by a pretty woman’s house, just in case she might be sitting on the porch.
“Si los ojos no ven, el corazón no siente,” Ramiro told Buettner. “If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t feel.”
Perhaps the central insight in all of Buettner’s work is this: it does not work to try to change human behavior, because it is the environment in which we live that almost inevitably determines behavior, resulting in choices that lead to either longer or shorter lives. The grave that he visited in the documentary’s opening scene was indeed in Ikaria, Buettner confirmed, at an old friend’s grave. Stamatis Moriati’s life story was a dramatic example of this truth. He had emigrated to the United States as a young man and lived there until his 60s when he was diagnosed with lung cancer and given six to nine months to live. He returned to Ikaria in order to be buried with his ancestors. While there, he began working in his parents’ garden, and quickly fell into an older way of life, taking naps in the afternoons, playing dominoes at the village tavern with old friends. He started making his own wine, and somehow the months, then the years, just started passing by. Buettner met him when he was 97, not long before he passed away. In a story Buettner wrote for the New York Times called “The Island Where People Forget to Die,” he recalled one of his last phone calls with Moriatis. He’d asked him why he thought he’d recovered from his lung cancer.
“It just went away,” Moiatis told him. “I actually went back to America about 25 years after moving here to see if the doctors could explain it to me.”
“I had heard this part of the story before,” Buettner wrote. “It had become a piece of the folklore of Ikaria, proof of its exceptional way of life. Still, I asked him, ‘What happened?’”
“My doctors were all dead.”
This does not mean you have to move to Ikaria to live longer. Buettner’s research includes another Blue Zone, in Loma Linda, in which the Seventh- day Adventists have created an environment — in the midst of urban California — that has resulted in longer, healthier lives. In the Netflix series, he unveils a new Blue Zone, Singapore, where government-led policy initiatives have woven preventative health measures into the society and resulted in an unprecedented jump in longevity. And as Exhibit A for the success of his Blue Zones projects, Buettner holds up the Beach Cities as an example of how the lessons of longevity can be applied throughout the United States.
“The Beach Cities were the important link between an experiment and a real public health intervention that could change America,” Buettner said. “I mean that. It was there we learned how to scale.”
The OG Blue Zone project
Dan Buettner came back to the Beach Cities last Friday like a returning hero. He became a favored son here before the rest of the world knew him for the work he did with the Beach Cities Health District. Together, they created the first Blue Zones Project, proving ground that enabled the public health campaigns that would occur in the decade since in 72 cities throughout the United States.
The idea of the projects occurred to Buettner when he was making the rounds of media appearances after the release of the first Blue Zones book in 2008.
“I was in a green room at Good Morning, America, and I was with two or three health gurus,” he recalled. “Dr. Oz is there, and a couple of others, and they all were promoting exercise and various diets and some supplements. And I thought, ‘None of what they’re doing has actually been proven in a population. I just saw true health manifest.’ And so I got the idea if it can happen in faraway places like Sardinia or Okinawa, could you recreate it in America? It seemed like an audacious goal, but I kind of like big, outlandish ideas.”
He began with a pilot project in a small town, Albert Lea, in Minnesota. He partnered with AARP to make environmental changes throughout the town of 18,000, adding pedestrian and bike paths, and rearranging grocery store displays to make healthier choices more appealing.
In the course of nine months in 2009, the project achieved startling success in what was dubbed “the miracle in Minnesota.” Participants lost an average of 2.6 pounds and increased their projected life expectancy by 3.1 years.
The success made Buettner want to scale up. More than 60 communities throughout the United States applied to become the next project, and the Beach Cities were chosen. It was a natural fit, because of the existence of BCHD. Few similar organizations exist in the U.S., or anywhere — a health district dedicated not to treating illnesses, but preventing ill-health through outreach and small-scale public health initiatives.
Blue Zones advocate Dan Buettner addresses Beach Cities Health District guests at the westdrift Hotel last Friday, October 6. Photo by Kevin Cody
Buettner returned to town Friday to help BCHD celebrate 25 years of its programs. What BCHD saw in the Blue Zones was a way to reach a broader swath of the community than its existing programs, which focused more on youth and older adult populations.
The stakes were high. BCHD appropriated $1.8 million for a three-year project, which was matched by $3.8 million from Blue Zones, and Healthways, a private company focused on workplace health.
Dan Burden, a nationally recognized transportation expert who was brought on to help on the project, stressed how important its success could be.
“The eyes of the nation are on you,” Burden said at the time. “What you do here, long-term, is going to change the health of the entire nation. People need models to get back the health of our nation, and give us back our social lives and all the things that matter to us.”
To establish a baseline, the Blue Zones Project brought in Gallup to conduct an in-depth poll, and to add the Beach Cities to its national Well-Being Index. The results were shocking, particularly the emotional health indicators: the Beach Cities ranked 176 out of 188 cities in stress, 160th in anger, and 178th in worry. By way of national comparison, the beach cities were angrier than Detroit, and as stressed out as New Orleans. Physically, the Beach Cities were slightly healthier than the national norm, but still, 60 percent of its population was obese or overweight.
The project, which was eventually extended beyond its first three years, was an astonishing success. The most recent Well Being Index, from 2020, showed a 20 percent increase in “life evaluation” — basically, hopefulness, a 42 percent decrease in smoking, and a 29 percent decrease in obesity among the population. While direct causality cannot be attributed to the Blue Zones Project, it undoubtedly played an essential role in increasing health in the Beach Cities.
“There is no other community in America that has achieved this, that actually started with a kind of unhealthy community and got a lot healthier,” Buettner told the BCHD gathering at westdrift Hotel in Manhattan Beach on Friday morning.
“In many respects, this set the tone. From the Beach Cities, we’ve now gone on and we’ve worked in 72 cities…Jacksonville, Florida just came on, and Phoenix, Arizona, and other big cities are doing this. But I don’t think we’ve ever captured the magic of this place.”
