The Blue Zones Challenge focuses on setting up your environment to make healthy choices the easiest choices. By borrowing lifestyle practices common to blue zones—areas with the longest-lived people in the world—we can optimize the places we live, socialize, and work. Our homes can become mini blue zones, and along with our social network, we can expand the reach and improve the overall health of our immediate circle, including friends and family and even our greater community.

Individual change is hard—willpower runs out quickly. Most New Year’s resolutions last just four to six weeks. In the Blue Zones Challenge, I help you make over your own environment—in your kitchen, in your home, in your yard, in your office, and even in your social circle. Each aspect of the Blue Zones Challenge will help you create a lifestyle that supports longevity and a better quality of life. 

1. Enjoy a Japanese or Costa Rican breakfast.

Breakfast in the blue zones looks vastly different from the standard American breakfast of eggs and bacon. Beans and rice are a common breakfast staple in Costa Rica, while miso soup and rice are popular in Okinawa. In Loma Linda, centenarians often eat a hearty breakfast of oatmeal or a somewhat nontraditional tofu scramble.

In most blue zones regions, breakfast doesn’t look that different from other meals of the day. Retraining yourself to enjoy soup and bread or even a hearty salad and sandwich in the morning might take some getting used to, but it’s an easy way to simplify your cooking routine while cutting out American breakfast favorites that are most often heavy in fat and sugar. Put together a hearty meal using healthy blue-zones staples such as cooked whole grains, fruits and veggies, and beans. 

2. Set up your home for better health by design.

Trying to change your behavior without changing your environment will lead to failure. Now is the time to set up your home and your kitchen for success. You will have a much easier time if you don’t have candy on your counter and a pantry filled with chips and soda. We’re not telling you to never have this kind of food, but please don’t bring it into your house.

Prepare to make this transition easy by decluttering your pantry, kitchen, and refrigerator: Physically remove foods that are off-limits or might be too tempting but that your family members don’t want to throw out, such as candies or junk and processed items, and clear your countertops of any kinds of snack foods (that open bag of chips, the box of crackers). Most of us are on a “see-food diet”: We tend to eat what we see. Create an inconvenient junk food cabinet or drawer that is up high or down low.

3. Socialize more. 

Americans had an average of three close friends in the 1980s. Today, that number has dropped to between one and two. If you don’t have at least three friends whom you can call up on a bad day, research shows that you could be shaving about eight years off your life expectancy.

Research also shows that happiness is contagious, but so are smoking, obesity, and loneliness. The social circles of long-lived people have favorably shaped their health behaviors. To reap the benefits that blue zones residents experience, reach out more socially and nurture strong friendships. The more you socialize, the happier—and healthier—you’ll be.

To start: Volunteer in your community for a cause that you care about and that speaks to you. If it’s something you do weekly or monthly, hopefully you will see and meet people with like-minded interests.

4. Start an outdoor or container garden.

In all blue zones, people continue to garden even into their 90s and 100s. Gardening is the epitome of a blue zones activity because it’s sort of a nudge: You plant the seeds and you’re going to be nudged in the next three to four months to water the plants, weed them, harvest them. And when you’re done, you’re going to eat an organic vegetable, which you presumably like because you planted it. Plus, you’re moving naturally while you’re outside enjoying the healing power of the sun and nature and fresh air.

Mugwort, ginger, and turmeric are all staples of an Okinawan garden, and all have proven medicinal qualities. By consuming these every day, Okinawans may be protecting themselves against illness.

5. Optimize your mealtimes.

Focus on food. Turn off the TV and the computer. If you’re going to eat, just eat. You’ll eat more slowly, consume less, and savor the food more. Use smaller vessels: Choose to eat on smaller plates and use tall, narrow glasses. Studies show you’re likely to eat significantly less without even thinking about it.

Excerpted and adapted from The Blue Zones Challenge by Dan Buettner, published by National Geographic books

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Combining subtle flavors from Southeast Asia, East Asia, and some of the world’s most powerful longevity ingredients, the Okinawan diet has produced not only the world’s longest lived population but also some of Asia’s most delicious food. 

Okinawa is a Pacific archipelago that was once known as the Ryukyu Kingdom. Its location—south of most of the Japanese islands, roughly 800 miles south of Tokyo, 400 miles east of the coast of China, and 300 miles north of Taiwan—has meant that it has served as a trading post for centuries.

For hundreds of years, China exerted most of the culinary influence, along with the traditional Chinese medicine practice of categorizing foods as cooling or warming foods. When Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879, the Japanese culinary influence grew stronger. Today Okinawan cuisine is a delicious blend of Chinese, Southeast Asian, and Japanese cooking styles, along with its native tropical vegetables and fruits. You won’t find many of these regional dishes and delicacies anywhere else.

Through the mid-20th century, when the current crop of Okinawan centenarians were developing as young adults and establishing lifelong eating habits, the quotidian diet consisted mainly of tubers, garden-grown greens and vegetables, tofu, and a little seafood. About 60 percent of all calories came from just one source: a purple variety of sweet potato known locally as beni imo. Why? Mostly because typhoons blew through the islands several times a year, wiping out most other crops but sparing these underground tubers. The Okinawan sweet potatoes were abundant, easy to prepare, and—dressed up with garlic chives or sesame oil—could be made to taste delicious.

Over the centuries, Okinawan cooking assimilated rice, sugarcane, and many of the other wild vegetables you might see in an Asian market. Okinawans’ use of bitter melon, as well as herbs and spices like turmeric, is evidence of the southern and southeastern Asian influence. In the 16th century, a semi-savage strain of black swine arrived on the island and proliferated slowly; by the late 19th century, most households kept a family pig, and pork found its way into Okinawan cuisine (though mostly as a celebratory food).

Most of what we know about Okinawa’s longevity diet comes from Blue Zones collaborators Bradley Willcox and his brother Craig, along with their mentor, Dr. Makoto Suzuki. For more than a half-century and in their best-selling book, The Okinawa Program, they’ve chronicled what Okinawans have eaten traditionally and how the ingredients may explain longevity. They reveal that Okinawan tofu is firmer and more packed with protein and phytonutrients; turmeric, used in teas and soups, is a powerful antioxidant and anticancer agent; and goya, the main ingredient in champuru stir-fries, has powerful compounds that control blood sugar. Plus, the ubiquitous purple sweet potato is high in B vitamins and potassium, and it has a higher concentration of the antioxidant anthocyanin (from purple pigment) than blueberries.

Lately, the brothers have been investigating FOXO3, what they call a “genius gene.” It helps our cells clean up waste and reduces inflammation in the body. (Chronic inflammation is at the root of every major age-related disease.) FOXO3 also helps cells detect a malfunction and signals the cell to destroy itself, lowering the chances of cancer. And what activates FOXO3? Turmeric, kelp, green tea, and tofu—all four pillars of the traditional Okinawa diet.

Like all other blue zones regions, several nondietary factors explain longevity on Okinawa. First, the word “retirement” doesn’t exist in the native dialect. Instead ikigai, or “a reason for being,” imbues every adult life. Having a strong sense of purpose is associated with about eight extra years.

Other longevity advantages include the Okinawan propensity to support each other by forming moais (pronounced moe-eye), or committed social circles, and by practicing yuimaru, the spirit of mutual aid. Traditionally, Okinawan peasants didn’t have access to bank loans, so they’d form groups of five to eight people and agree to meet regularly. At each meeting, moai members would chip in a sum of money to be given to the member with the greatest need. Through the middle of the 20th century, moais helped the community, providing aid to farmers needing to buy seed or covering the medical costs of a sick child. While moais are still popular in Okinawa, they’re now mostly a social affair, and an excuse to gather around a meal. Nevertheless, the bond is authentic, and moai members tend to support each other, literally and figuratively. This ancient practice helps prevent loneliness, an increasingly prevalent ailment in the modern world that can be as bad for your health as a smoking habit.

Want a taste of Okinawan cuisine? Try Sweet Potato Bites, a recipe from The Blue Zones Kitchen.

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Excerpted from The Blue Zones Kitchen, by Dan Buettner. Copyright © 2019 by Dan Buettner. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

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Wareham was born in Texas in 1914 and raised in Alberta, Canada, where he worked on his family’s farm as a teenager during the Great Depression. He went on to earn a surgical degree from Loma Linda University in 1942 and served as a Navy surgeon in the Philippines during World War II. In the 1960s, Wareham became a pioneer in the field of cardiothoracic surgery, traveling to perform open heart surgery in countries where it had never been done before. Over his long career, Wareham performed more than 12,000 operations, according to the Adventist Review.

When he was 75, he opted to no longer lead surgeries—but that wasn’t the end of his career. He served as an assistant to surgeons for 20 years before finally hanging up his scrubs at the age of 95 to spend more time with his family. He stayed active in retirement, driving and doing most of his own yard work even as a centenarian. He said that there was “no chance” of his having a heart attack because his cholesterol was so low—117 when he was 100—from following a vegan diet for around 40 years.  

Wareham told his patients that eating a vegetable-based diet and minimizing consumption of animal products “was the healthy way to go,” a conviction he said was based not just on his own health but on the scientific literature on the subject.

“There have been only two people in the world that I know of that have demonstrated that they can arrest and reverse coronary artery disease, and they are Dr. Dean Ornish of San Francisco and Dr. [Caldwell] Esselstyn of the Cleveland Clinic, and they both did it on a low-fat vegan diet,” Wareham said in a 2013 interview. “If you go on a low-fat vegan diet and you exercise, your chances of developing coronary disease will be very low. … Anybody can do those things. Very simple,” he added. He also regularly emphasized the importance of getting plenty of rest and not sweating the small stuff.

Wareham expressed a desire for the medical community to focus more on the power of diet and lifestyle. “The medical profession has done a great job of treating … disease,” he said in an interview with the Glendale News-Press in 2009, “but I think we need to do a much better job of preventing … disease.”

Wareham’s longtime hometown of Loma Linda has a high concentration of Seventh-day Adventists, many of whom are strict vegetarians. It’s also one of the world’s five Blue Zones—a region with an unusually high concentration of healthy centenarians, as described by Dan Buettner in The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. Adventists’ eating patterns and longevity have been the subject of large-scale studies.

Wareham is survived by his wife, Barbara; four children; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

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Perhaps most interesting is how people in the Blue Zones are not only living longer, but better; that is, they remain active in their 80s and 90s, typically without the degenerative conditions that people suffer from in most of the industrialized world. In the United States, for example, the average lifespan is about 78 years (about ten years less than the Blue Zones), and almost 50 percent of adults have one of the three leading risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

Having seen and studied these remarkable people, Buettner has a new passion project: Bring—and implement—the secrets of living long and well to willing communities here in America, and around the globe.

From Curious Adventurer to Longevity Expert

Buettner has a long history of traveling off the beaten path: he holds three Guinness World Records for transcontinental endurance cycling and has an Emmy award for his PBS documentary about his “Afratrek” expedition, which covered over 11,885 miles through Africa. He is also an intensely curious adventurer, which, along with being comfortable with long-term trekking, made him uniquely qualified to unlock the “secrets” of these far-flung places.

Along with his brother Steve, Dan founded an adventure company called Quest in 1995. A pioneer in ed tech, Quest connected thousands of classrooms with their explorations around the world as they tried to unravel some of the world’s greatest mysteries, including the fall of the ancient Mayan empire, mapping Darwin’s route through the Galapagos islands, and retracing Marco Polo’s trail over the Silk Road.

It was during these expedition years that Buettner learned that Okinawa in Japan had the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. It was a mystery he wanted to unravel, so he went there to discover the hows and whys. In addition to students, many adults also followed his particular journey, which showed him how interested people were in the idea of aging gracefully.

Buettner decided this would be his next big mystery and adventure—to visit places in the world where people lived long and healthy lives. He wanted to see what they were doing right, what they had in common, and what they could teach the rest of us about health and longevity. He returned to the States and approached people at National Geographic, who were excited about the project. He then got a research grant from the National Institute on Aging and assembled a team of top demographers, scientists, epidemiologists, and experts.

Together, they started studying the long-living people of Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; and Loma Linda, California. His quest was to answer the question of what these far-flung people and places had in common, including a locale only an hour away from downtown Los Angeles.

The story, when it was finally published in National Geographic as the cover story, became a print and Internet sensation. It got coverage on all the major networks including Anderson Cooper, Fox, and CNN, and Oprah loved him.

Buettner wanted to go further and deeper for his book on the same subject, so he extended his research into other slivers of the world with centenarians who were living happy, healthy lives (low middle age mortality was also a factor). He added Costa Rica’s Nicoyan Peninsula and Ikaria, a Greek Island, to the list of official Blue Zones.

The Nine Principles (Pillars) of the Blue Zones

After years of study, Buettner and his expert group came up with the nine habits and practices at work in these far-flung locations and populations. He discovered it was an interconnected web with food at the center: Centenarians eat 95 percent plant-based foods focused around fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans. Meat is consumed in small amounts on rare occasions. Blue Zones residents also have a sense of purpose (family, volunteer work), have a strong community (friends, family), move naturally throughout the day (walking, gardening), socialize regularly, and regularly take some stress-relieving time to decompress. (See also: What do Do the Healthiest, Longest-Living People in the World Eat?)

Now that lifestyle medicine is a popular idea, some of these things seem like common sense. But Buettner’s team was ahead of the curve, and made the important point that overall health is determined by a number of factors. Even though what someone eats is a key element, all of the Blue Zones residents were doing healthy things regularly as part of their daily lives. Buettner describes it as a “combination of good habits.”

Buettner compiled the research and findings into The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. It was a New York Times bestseller and made another big splash. He was on Oprah, gave a TED Talk, and was part of Bill Clinton’s Health Matters Initiative. People were hungry for more knowledge about how to live longer and enjoy their senior years.

With his team, he spent many months and years talking and meeting seniors who were enjoying happy, healthy lives. Every time he returned from one of his trips in the Blue Zones, he was saddened by the state of health in America. He went on to found Blue Zones as a company, and wanted to find a way to help people at home put the principles of longevity into practice.

NOW: Applying Blue Zones Best Practices to American Cities

His next quest was on home soil, as he sought to figure out a way to bring the “secrets” of the Blue Zones home. We recently spoke to Buettner about this huge mission, and about the difficulties in bringing back the Blue Zone lessons to American culture, rich with fast food, sprawling car-dependent suburbs, and one of the highest obesity rates in the world.

Since community was part of the reason that people in the Blue Zones thrived, Buettner knew he’d have to think big. He explains: “Health behaviors are contagious. If all your close friends are obese, there’s a 150-percent better chance that you are too. The reason 97 percent of diets fail in the long run is because you do them in isolation. Instead of just thinking about diet, we think of good health as an interconnected cluster of characteristics that connect and support each other.”

It’s not possible to create a community where there is none. So Buettner did the next best thing—he decided he needed to transform whole cities and communities to make healthy choices easier for residents. He met with Nancy Graham, editor of AARP magazine, with the idea of doing a city health makeover. She was on board. He then presented the project at the United Health Foundation, which was also impressed with the idea. They underwrote $750K toward the $1M project.

Transforming Albert Lea, Minnesota

With the funding secured, Buettner had to figure out where and how to start. He explains how he got the ball rolling on this exciting (and huge) undertaking:

“I asked a health behavior expert [Leslie Lytle] at the University of Minnesota to direct the project with me, and hired a former city planner [Joel Spoonheim] to run daily operations. Lytle and other experts at the University of Minnesota came up with the criteria. We wanted a town of 10-20,000 people with numbers that fit the national average for health conditions like cardiovascular disease and obesity. We also wanted it to be within driving distance to the Twin Cities.”

In 2009, Buettner, the AARP, and his team applied Blue Zones principles to Albert Lea, Minnesota. Buettner describes the impact it made at the time: “It was a huge success. The citywide health initiative raised life expectancy, lowered health care costs by about 40 percent, and residents collectively lost tons of weight.” The need is there, and other communities were eager to get on board after they saw that real changes could happen. “We’ve had over 300 cities contact us since we helped Albert Lea. About 70 percent of Americans are overweight and unhealthy; 87 million are suffering from prediabetes. People and communities know they have a problem, but they don’t know how to fix it. And we found great open minds in middle America.”

That was the beginning of the Blue Zones Project, the public health initiative that gets schools, employers, restaurants, grocery stores, residents, and leaders to work together to improve the health of everyone in the community. Buettner describes it as “transforming the places we live, work, and pray to support people in making healthy choices.” The effort is paying off, with tangible physical and economic benefits.

The Blue Zones Project: How They Do It

The public health initiative has what Buettner calls a “plant-slant” focus, which mimics the diet of people living in Blue Zones around the world (90-95 percent plant foods). But they go beyond just recommendations. He explains: “We have found that if you want to help people to eat plant-centered diets, there are some basic things that make it easy for them.”

These are:

1. Good plant food has to be cheap and accessible in your community.
2. You have to set up your kitchen so it’s easy to cook plant foods.
3. You need time-honored recipes that taste great (like these Mango and Black Bean Tacos, adapted from Blue Zones).
4. You need a social network of people who also enjoy eating plant-based foods.

The community aspect is at the heart of the project. Buettner explains, “It’s really hard to be a plant-based eater when all your friends and family meet up and eat ribs and BBQ all the time. It’s easier to fail if you constantly have to struggle or remember to do something. It has to be natural.”

To institute widespread change, the Blue Zones team sets up about 150 “nudges” in cities to make healthier choices easier. They start with community leaders: “We require that mayors, city councils, chamber of commerce, local CEOs, and superintendents of school understand and support what we’re doing. We have them sign a pledge to support the project to improve the health of their residents. And then we bring evidence-based ways to make healthy choices easier and unhealthy choices harder.”

The Blue Zones team works with cities to optimize ordinances and adopt food policies to make healthy food cheaper and more accessible. To do the latter, they make sure at least one-third of restaurants, schools, workplaces, and grocery stores work towards Blue Zones certifications.

“We give restaurants and schools certifications when they go ‘plant-slant.’ We recognize them when they offer some delicious plant-based meals and healthier options on their menu. They don’t have to be 100-percent vegan or vegetarian.”

At the community level, they work to set up networks and empower people to live healthier lives. They have found that if about 50 percent of the residents take up the pledge, the communities find success. “We set up Blue Zones potlucks where people can learn how to make delicious plant-based meals and taste them. From these, people build social networks around cooking and eating and enjoying plant-based meals. We teach people how to set up their kitchens for success and give them recipes we think they’ll love. We also set up and invite people to take purpose workshops to find volunteer opportunities that interest them. We encourage them to move, to connect, and to make their lives more meaningful.”

So far, the results have been inspiring. After Albert Lea, MN, the Blue Zones Project went to three California communities: Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Manhattan Beach. They’ve also brought the project to 15 cities in Iowa, Fort Worth in Texas, Naples in Florida, and Hawaii. In these communities, obesity, smoking, stress, and healthcare costs have decreased across the board. The quality of life has increased.

What’s next? According to Buettner, the rest of the country and then, the rest of the world.

(Photos by David McLain)

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