While grabbing lunch in the office cafeteria, I noticed a webinar advertisement on the billboard monitor, boldly titled “Live to 100—inspired by the world’s blue zones.” The session was sponsored by my company’s catering supplier, and I was intrigued.
I had read of blue zones in a cookbook I borrowed from my mother-in-law. And I was uncomfortably reminded that nearly all of the male relatives in my family tree didn’t make it far past age 70. Some extended, still-living family have started to embrace various lifestyle health techniques, from going vegan to cold plunges—maybe this was a chance to find my own thing?
MAHA has given many health and longevity lifestyle movements a new day in the sun as people worry anew about the impact of their food and lifestyle on their longevity. Although not quite in the news as much as Bryan Johnson and his attempt to live forever, Blue Zones as a longevity movement is still “trendy,” as the nutritionist admitted at the start of the webinar.
For the unfamiliar, the Blue Zones approach to living longer is a fairly simple 2-part formula: 1) find the places on earth where people live longest, and 2) see what those people are doing that makes them live longer. The first of these steps is fairly academic. The story goes that demographer Gianni Pes identified what would become the first Blue Zone in 1997 when he penned a blue dot on the map for each village in Sardinia that had an outsized number of centenarians. Through the collaboration of Pes, demographer George Poulain, and National Geographic writer Dan Buettner, the following Blue Zones were identified: the mountains of Sardinia (Italy), the island of Icaria (Greece), Okinawa Prefecture (Japan), the Nicoya Peninsula (Costa Rica). At the request of National Geographic to include a US location in the list, Buettner labeled as a Blue Zone the Seventh day Adventist community in Loma Linda (California), but some demographers do not include this. Recently, Poulain has labeled the French island of Martinique as a Blue Zone.
Despite the research and tabulation of historical documents that goes into identifying and validating a Blue Zone, the approach is not without its critics: some have noted inconsistencies and inaccuracies when verifying the ages of the very old in more isolated parts of the world. I’m less interested in this controversy and the scientific validity of the Blue Zone concept. Instead, what fascinates me most is how Blue Zones have been marketed to promote a particular set of lifestyle choices. What do people find so appealing about specific behaviors by which they can take control of their health and fend off death?
It was offering a key to longevity that made the Blue Zones take off. Buettner would trademark the term “Blue Zones” in 2005 and founded Blue Zones LLC, a for-profit company that charges fees to cities and companies to promote the Blue Zone approach. What started as an exercise in crunching longevity data from birth, death, and marriage records has spawned a multi-million-dollar lifestyle company, city health initiatives, public and private partnerships, conferences, apps, a Netflix Special, and an awful lot of cookbooks.
This approach can produce a compelling narrative: rather than physicians doing studies that correlate smoking or wearing a seatbelt to fewer or lesser years, the Blue Zones present real people in real places with real behaviors who also live longer. It allows for much more dynamic storytelling: instead of a passing “wow” when you mention your great grandmother lived to a hundred and one, every Blue Zone centenarian’s story might hold some secret to our own longevity. (It also hasn’t hurt interest that several of the Blue Zones are exactly the kinds of places to which the laptop class dreams about vacationing or retiring.)
Buettner identified 9 behaviors exhibited by the longest-lived people in the Blue Zones that he correlates to longevity, what he calls—in true lifestyle marketing speak—the “Power 9”:
- Move naturally—Incorporate physical activity into daily routines
- Purpose—have and know a reason to wake up every morning
- Downshift—set time aside regularly to shed stress
- 80% rule—stop eating after you feel 80% full
- Plant slant—eat mostly plants
- Wine @ 5—drink alcohol moderately and regularly, preferably with friends and/or food.
- Belong—be a part of some sort of faith-based community and show up
- Loved ones first—Put family first; keep aging parents/grandparents nearby, commit to a partner, invest in children and loved ones
- Right Tribe—be part of social circles that support healthy living
A person could easily hear recommendations similar to these from his or her doctor at an annual physical: stay active, watch your portion size, eat less meat and more veggies, reduce stress, and please don’t drink too much. Some of these you probably won’t hear from your doctor: the recommendation to drink wine every day has not always been linked to longevity and has received pushback. There’s also a surprising absence: is avoidance of smoking excluded because it’s already obvious that people shouldn’t smoke (as Buettner later claimed), or because several of the Blue Zones have higher smoking rates than the United States? (US smoking rates among the elderly (65+) are 13.2% for men and 11.1% for women; in contrast, the Ikaria study identified a current smoker rate among the elderly (>80) of 17.0% for men and 7.0% for women, with 82% of men former smokers (only 25% for women). While not an apples-to-apples comparison, I find this discrepancy telling.)
But what strikes me as particularly unique in the Blue Zones approach are the last three behaviors listed: belong to some sort of faith-based community, put family first, and be part of a community that supports how you live. Shocking in our modern context, these contain the unstated assumption that the institutions of church, family, and community—and potentially the traditions that sustain them—have some good, even if for the utilitarian good of living a few more years.
Unfortunately for lifestyle health aficionados, these three recommendations are probably harder to implement than changing your diet or becoming more active throughout your day. Such behaviors fit within the scope of individual self-betterment and optimization, and a legion of companies will gladly take your money to help you meet your diet and exercise goals. But you cannot pay a company to create community for you. Individual pursuit of “community” is an oxymoron—building community doesn’t map well into the high value we place on choice at the individual level. There is a tension between the pursuit of individual longevity and finding a community that supplies a sense of belonging.
This tension might be better seen in a hypothetical illustration. Suppose a middle-aged “American Man,” fearing his eventual death, tries to buy himself more years by methodically adopting the “Power 9” behaviors of the Blue Zones. He changes his diet to eat fewer calories and more plants, while cutting out most meat. He incorporates light exercise into his “routine” and starts puttering constantly around the house and the office to increase his movement. He dutifully quaffs a glass of red wine every night, perhaps the easiest behavior change he has ever been asked to do. This picture thus far is stereotypical but does represent a notable effort on the part of our American Man, as many parts of the structure of our society don’t broadly support his efforts—our infrastructure is built for driving, not walking, and the food industry wants to sell him a lot items that don’t fit into his new diet.
When American Man comes to the last three behaviors—belong, loved ones first, and right tribe—he starts to have some difficulties. All three of these behaviors necessitate interaction and cooperation with other people. He joins a church, but the church fellowship hour gathers around donuts and coffee, while his weekly small group features cookies, soda, and other processed snack food (but never any wine). He cannot find anyone else there who is particularly interested in living to 100—he suspects a focus on eternal things has limited the other congregants’ concern for their own longevity. He can, of course, abstain, but his fixation on health for the sake of longevity perplexes the other congregants. He had picked this particular church because he sensed the congregation had a stronger sense of community, but now he suspects that the sugar and soteriology play a larger role than aspirations for a long life.
Home is not much better: the kids have complained every night about the switch to a plant-based diet. While initially supportive, his wife has tired of the new dietary regime as well. In response to these complaints, our man cooks his own food separately from his family. When extended family come over for events such as birthdays or holidays, his solitary portion of food results in acute awkwardness. Additionally, his constant puttering and additional exercise have frustrated his wife as it has cut into their time together. American Man does have some friends within his community, but the traditions that bring them together revolve around beer, trucks, meat, and watching football. He will need to look for a new tribe. Overall, the new lifestyle approach has resulted in weaker family and community connections, not stronger.
While perhaps a bit stereotypical, American Man’s situation is not hard to imagine. Not only is the rest of the world just not that interested in giving American Man the time or support to achieve whatever health goals he has, but any benefit from sharing life within a church, family, or broader community is eroded by the conflicts he has created from his personal health goals.
We are used to having options, levers to pull to achieve our desired outcomes, but the irony is that the places that have strong bonds around religion, family, and community seem to be places with fewer options and, indeed, value options less. To see this in action, let’s “visit” one of the Blue Zones. Using the island of Ikaria (Greece), I’d like to identify three unchosen characteristics that sustain an almost pre-modern sense of religion, family, and community. All of these represent a circumscription of modern choices.
I choose Ikaria because, in addition to Buettner’s account, I have access to three primary sources: the account of the island by Joseph Georgirenes, archbishop of Samos and Icaria in the 17th century; the Ikaria Study, produced by a team of physicians from Athens; and local chef Diane Kochilas’s book Ikaria: Lessons on Food, Life, and Longevity from the Greek Island Where People Forget to Die, which, while a recipe book, is interspersed with personal anecdotes and odd facts that aid in the picture I have created. The portrait is certainly a bit romanticized, but it gives a clue as to why the “secret” of these places might not boil down to a set of individually chosen behaviors.
The first unchosen characteristic is isolation. Ikaria is, of course, an island with historically limited outside influence (especially prior to the internet). Strong winds and a lack of natural harbors limited contact even with its Aegean neighbors, so much so that political undesirables were exiled to the island as late as 1960. Electricity was only brought to the island midway through the last century, and the airport in the 1990s. This necessitated a semi-subsistence style of living, with most homes having their own garden and orchard.
This isolation shapes the relationships between the members of the population: there’s simply not a lot to do. Pull up Trip Advisor for Ikaria, and you’ll see you are limited to visiting the beaches, the monasteries, and the restaurants. This means that before the internet, the populace had broad common experiences and entertainment had to be found among the other people living on the island. It’s no surprise then that a major part of island life is dancing and panygyri (local festivals).
Secondly, Ikarians lack purchasing power, with a good income on Ikaria being around €18,000 per year. Until the recent uptick in tourism, Ikaria was primarily an agrarian economy. Industrialization is still almost completely absent. This too helps explain some of the diet: lacking resources to buy food—including meat—you grow your own vegetables and teach yourself to be content with less. But lack of income also sets limits on habits of consumption and encourages families to stay together to pool resources. Archbishop Georgirenes noted that the Ikarians were so poor that pirates did not even bother to raid them. He concluded: “Thus you have an account of a small Island, the Poorest, and yet the Happiest of the whole Aegaean Sea. The Soil is Barren, but the Air is Healthful; their Wealth is but small; but their Liberty and Security is great… Whence we may learn, that they approach the nearest to Contentedness in this Life; whose desires are contracted into the narrowest compass.” (Emphasis mine) Similar to how isolation drives people together for entertainment, a lack of purchasing power drives people together for mutual support.
Finally, it appears the elderly Ikarians exhibit religious homogeneity. I was not able to find good data on religious attendance other than Buettner’s anecdotal claims that the elderly he talked with often attended church, but this says nothing of the sincerity of belief. The only churches I found on the island (via Google Maps) were all Greek Orthodox, so those who grew up in institutional religion did so without the availability of other denominations but also without the pressure to choose the ‘right’ one. Widely accepted and practiced religion can better supply a cadence of traditions and rituals that positively reinforce socially desirable outcomes—for example, social pressure to marry and sustain a family.
Most of the Blue Zones exhibit these unchosen traits as well. Sardinia, Okinawa, and Martinique are islands, while the Nicoyan peninsula is difficult to access. They are poorer and they exhibit religious homogeneity, especially the western ones. The Seventh Day Adventist community of Loma Linda is different in its lack of isolation, but the high population of Adventists in a single town is indicative of rare religious homogenization within the United States, compounded by the Adventists influencing many major cultural and employment centers in the town via the hospital, university, and private academy.
Americans value the opposite of these limits, and our world is structured accordingly: we want easy access to new experiences and new people, whether in the nearest city or a plane ride away. Not only are we wealthy, but having wealth subjects us to constant bombardment by companies highlighting any possible discontent we may have and then offering a product to fix it. While Americans can be religious, religion in our context is most definitely chosen, one option among many in our social fabric.
In his latest book, Blue Zones: Secrets for Living Longer, published after almost two decades of his studying the Blue Zones, Buettner offers suggestions for building the kinds of connections he has identified in the actual Blue Zones: Start meditating, try attending church, keep your parents nearby, start some family rituals, volunteer. These are acceptable choices to make in the modern world, but they are choices that the individual makes about themselves.
In The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-week Plan for a Longer Better Life, Buettner’s most dynamic recommendation is to try to start moai, based on the Okinawan social support groups among poor villagers that pooled financial resources for emergencies but often formed the foundation for lifelong friendships and emotional support systems as well. From this background, a moai sounds appropriately demanding, until Buettner explains how to start one: just find 4-8 friends and invite them to go walking once a week or have a weekly potluck to cook Blue Zone sponsored meals. No commune required!
Buettner’s approach to connection is necessarily shallow, not because all lifestyle gurus are necessarily shallow people who will use any trick they can to live longer, but because he cannot tell American consumers that relationships built around religion, family, and community entail obligations to others that will take precedence over one’s health goals.
I am not saying that strong religion, families, and communities don’t require any choices—indeed, in the modern world they require very difficult choices. To belong to a church means being willing to submit to the teachings of elders and bishops. To put loved ones first may mean forgoing a great job or many of your personal goals. And to be in a tribe, a community, may mean committing to a stay in a place that isn’t all that exciting. A person that would seek to hijack these commitments for the sake of living a few years longer—or worse, breaking these bonds to find a new religion, family, or community that does support one’s health goals—won’t find the very type of belonging ostensibly as correlated to longevity.
Which brings me back to that “Live to 100” webinar put on at my company. In the first few minutes the supplier’s nutritionist walked through the Blue Zone behaviors. Then a chef talked about a cool new blender and demonstrated how to make a mezze platter by blending your own chickpeas. Q&A focused on ingredient alternatives, what kinds of olive oil were good for what kinds of cooking, and where one could get healthy recipes. While interesting, I felt most of the session had missed the “good stuff” of the Blue Zones by focusing almost exclusively on diet, and while one expects a corporate catering company to focus on food, most promotion and discussion of the Blue Zones generally skirts around the question of religion, family, and community.
For instance, in just one example from The Blue Zones: Secrets for Living Longer, Buettner gives a “social circle checklist”: Are your friends smokers, overweight, complainers, and enjoyers of TV? If so: “While we couldn’t tell you to drop your old friends, we might encourage you to spend more time with your healthier new ones.” Buettner cannot tell people who they can and can’t hang out with, but simultaneously these relationships are so utilitarian that new ones can be added with no consequence. Any lifestyle movement must focus on the elements that can be chosen (diet and exercise), and elements that are given to us in life, like the family we are born into and community we have found ourselves in, get quickly brushed aside. It certainly does not justify fraying already weak communal bonds in churches, families, and broader communities in order to attain those couple more years.
How should these three institutions and their members approach the claims of Blue Zone Project, or for that matter any health movement—be it supplements or raw eggs or biophotons? I got an on the ground view from James Petersen, who pastored a church in Albert Lea, MI as Buettner was trying to ‘create’ a Blue Zone in the town (Petersen now works for a global ministry overseeing missionaries but still lives and attends church in Albert Lea). Petersen noted there were some positive changes: the grocery store has added to the impulse rack at checkout a “Blue Zone” rack of healthy snacks. Many people still regularly get together for walking Moai. But “Blue Zones needed [the church I served]; I didn’t need Blue Zones” to achieve the church’s missional goals. Take away the Blue Zones, and you still have a church; take away the church, and forming a new blue zone becomes more difficult. He noted that while possible to support many of the Blue Zone behaviors as a Christian, he drew the line at the underlying principle of merely using his church as a means to the end of improving the quality of life in a way that didn’t align with the purpose of his church.
Whether it makes us live longer or not, focusing on deepening our relationships in these institutions—rather than instrumentalizing them to another end—may help us to approximate the fullness of life seen in the Blue Zones. None of the centenarians interviewed for the Blue Zones books or Netflix special (or any centenarian I’ve ever met) has lived as if living to 100 was a choice they made, or even a goal towards which they could shape their communities and environment. If there’s a lesson I have gleaned from the Blue Zones, it is that genuinely caring for others—and limiting my own choices accordingly—makes for a fuller life than does seeking to maximize my own years.
Image via flickr.
