>>Dan Buettner: So for the past quarter century or so, while you guys were doing useful and
productive things with your lives, I have spent a career as an explorer.
I led 17 expeditions, including a record-setting 15,536-mile ride from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska,
to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.
Which may sound impressive, but any of you who have looked at a globe know, it's all
downhill.
[ Laughter ] >>Dan Buettner: So what I'm going to talk
about today are lessons from the world's longest -- longest of people, and how we can put those
lessons to work in our lives.
Since about 2002, I've been working with National Geographic to identify the parts of the world
where people live measurably longer.
They either have many more centenarians than we do, sometimes 10 times as many, life expectancy
of up to 11 years longer than we do and about a fifth the rate of chronic disease.
Something called the Danish Twin Study established that only about 20% of how long the average
person lives is dictated by genes; the other 80% is lifestyle.
So if we could identify these demographically confirmed areas and actually go there, using
techniques of demography, of anthropology, of medical research, and find out what are
the common correlations, no matter if you're in Asia, Latin America, Europe or even the
United States.
Along the way, we met about 250 centenarians.
These are all people over 105.
Ed Rawling still a working cowboy, swims every morning, skis on the weekend.
And Marge Dayton, 105, wakes up every morning, eats her oatmeal, followed by what she calls
a prune juice shooter.
[ Laughter ] >>Dan Gilbert: Imagine that for a second and
then get it out of your head.
But then she gets into her 1994 root beer-colored Cadillac Seville where she barrels down the
San Bernardino Freeway, still volunteering for seven different organizations.
And though I've lead 17 pretty hard-core expeditions for National Geographic, I can honestly tell
you that I've never been on an adventure more harrowing than hiding shotgun with Marge Dayton.
[ Laughter ] >>Dan Buettner: So no matter where you go
in the world, you see the same nine things happening over and over and over among these
populations that are living longer.
First and foremost, I put them into four categories.
The first category I talk about is physical activity.
And you never see these long-lived people exercising, at least in the way we think of
exercising.
In fact, as a public health initiative in this country, exercise has been an unmitigated
failure.
The average American burns fewer than 100-calories a day engaged in exercise.
When you look at the environment, people who live a long time, they are constantly nudged
into physical activity because their homes are deconvenienced.
They live in communities where every time they go to church, every time they go to a
friend's house, every time they go to the store, it occasions a walk.
They have gardens.
The second category, also a category that you don't hear much about when it comes to
longevity because there's nothing to market you, is downshifting.
These people have the same stresses we do, but what they have are rituals, prayer, meditation,
Sardinians do happy hour.
But to reverse the chronic inflammation that accumulates after a day of stress.
Every major age-related disease, from Alzheimer's to heart disease, has a common root in chronic
inflammation.
They have a strong sense of purpose, which is worth about seven years of life expectancy.
Do you know the two years of your life, where you are most likely to die?
The first one is the year you're born, because of infant mortality, you can't do much about
that.
The second one is the year you retire.
Three-fold spike in mortality in the year you retire.
[ Laughter ] >>Dan Buettner: Is that because of the wild
retirement party?
No.
I assert it's because you all of a sudden lose that work given sense of purpose and
then what do you do next?
When it comes to what they consume, there's probably no Blue Zone diet, but based on what
I saw last night here at the party, you guys are going to like the first one.
They all pretty much drink.
[ Laughter ] >>Dan Buettner: One culture, the Ikariaians,
they drink about four glasses of wine a day, but on average it's one to two a day.
And no, you can't save up all week long and have 14 on the weekend.
Mostly a plant-based diet.
Very Dean Ornishesque actually.
They do eat some meat, but meat only five times per month.
A little bit of fish.
Mostly beans and nuts.
Turns out that people who eat nuts at least four times a week, two ounces at a time, live
about two to three years longer than people who don't eat nuts.
Then finally, the big insight that these people give us is a little -- rituals to keep from
overeating.
Pre-plating your food before you bring it to the table.
Eating a huge breakfast.
People who eat a huge breakfast actually consume fewer calories than those people who start
their day with a breakfast bar.
Also saying some sort of a prayer.
The Okinawans intone Hara hachi bu between every meal to state some appreciation of their
food, to actually slow down and to remind themselves to quit eating when their stomach
is 80% full.
And then finally the foundation on which all of this rests is how they connect.
They keep their aging parents nearby, they invest in their spouse, they invest in their
kids.
It turns out if you put your aging parent in a retirement home, their life expectancy
drops almost immediately about four years.
People who are married actually live longer than people who are divorced or single.
They belong to a faith-based community.
It doesn't matter if you are Christian, Buddhist, Muslim.
But the people who belong to a faith and show up, go at least four times a month, live four
to 14 years longer than people who don't.
And those people getting the extra 14 years of life expectancy?
Inner city minorities.
And then finally the big insight that these people in Blue Zones, people who live the
longest, teach us is the idea of surrounding yourself with the right people.
If you are alone in this world, if you meet the technical definition of isolation, which
means that you don't have at least two good friends that you can count on, on a bad day,
your life expectancy is about eight years lower than it is if you are surrounded by
a good set -- a strong social network.
Your friends' health habits are contagious.
If your three best friends are obese, there's a 150% better chance that you will be overweight.
If your friends smoke and do drugs, it's more likely that you will smoke and do drugs.
Even if your friends are unhappy and lonely, those traits are also contagious.
So think about who you surround yourself with.
So life expectancy in America right now is about 79.
But the capacity of the human machine, the average life span of the American population,
is between 90 and 92.
So somewhere, we're leaving about 12 years on the table.
And they would be likely to be good years.
As you know, you can tell people all day long the things they can do to engineer those years
back into your life, but how do you get populations to do it?
Right now, we spend about $110 billion a year on diets, supplements and exercise programs.
And these are actually good ideas.
It's a good idea to get people to eat right.
There's a minority of people who do need supplements.
Exercise programs are good.
But the problem is they don't last.
If I got everybody in this room on a Blue Zone diet right now, out of every 100 that
started, within about three months, I would lose 10 of you.
Within about seven months, I would lose 90 of you.
And within about three years, I would lose almost all of you.
You see the same recidivism curve with gym memberships, exercise programs.
You start with 100, within three years you lose about 90% and the same thing with supplements.
Even if I come back with a pill that promised to reverse your aging, Americans wouldn't
take it long enough to make a difference.
So if diets, exercise programs and supplements don't work, what does?
A few years back, National Geographic gave me a second grant to look at parts of the
world that were unhealthy and became healthier.
And I embedded myself with those programs and I learned two things.
There's one in Finland, and there's another one in France.
I learned two things.
It has never worked in America.
Despite the tens of millions of dollars we've spent on community health programs, they never
last.
You sort get the Hawthorne effect.
The health equivalent version of the Hawthorne effect.
While experts are paying attention, people make the changes, but when experts leave,
people go right back to their baseline.
So based on what was working in Finland and in Northern France, we created American version
of this.
I got about a million dollars from AARP, hired a group of experts and we started to look
about the environment that we Americans live in.
Most of us live within about a 20-mile radius of our home or our place of work.
So our job was to optimize that.
We put together a gold standard of policies that nudge people into smoking less, nudge
people into eating more, places where -- policies that limit the number of fast food restaurants
that can go up in the middle of a town.
We came up with a plan to optimize the built environment.
If you can just make it easy to walk and to bike and to clean up parks, you can raise
the activity level of an entire community by as much as 30 percent.
No gym memberships, no yoga classes, no Ab Masters.
Engineering social networks so we get people ready to change their habits, introducing
them to each other.
There are over 100 building designs that you can put to work in schools, restaurants and
grocery stores that will nudge people into eating less and moving more.
And then there's an element of purpose.
But essentially the idea behind this design is taking what Daniel Ariely was talking about
yesterday, nudges and defaults, and putting them to work in an entire community.
Now, here comes the secret sauce.
Instead of arriving at a city and saying I have the answer for you, we made five cities
audition.
One city, Albert Lea, Minnesota, the mayor, the city manager, the CEO's, the head of the
Chamber of Commerce, the superintendent of school all signed a pledge for us.
They agreed to come in and let us work with their city managers to make sure that there
was at least one vector from every neighborhood to downtown.
That involved only connecting about two and a half miles of sidewalks.
They were going to widen Main Street.
We convinced them to take that money and actually put a trail around a lake right downtown.
So without having to give people incentives or market to them, there's an easy way to
recreate right downtown, easiest thing to do.
We put in about four public gardens.
There's 100 or so different slots.
We worked with 50% of the restaurants to set up nudges and defaults there.
If you go to a restaurant you sit down for a meal, statistically speaking, you're going
to consume about 200 more calories than you would if you ate at home.
There are little things that make a big difference in restaurants.
If you automatically get bread when you sit down, you're going to consume about 75 more
calories than if you have to ask for it.
The big opportunity lies in the menus.
Changing the adjective.
Do you know what adjective most assures that people won't order an entree?
The healthy choice.
Nobody wants the damn healthy choice.
They want something good when they go out.
[ Laughter ] >>Dan Buettner: So you use adjectives like
"crispy" or "Italian primavera," and then people start ordering the salad.
We take foods in grocery stores, created a Blue Zone aisle so only healthy choices were
available when you went through the checkout line.
Worked with schools to optimize their policies.
Got 75% of the population to sign a pledge that got them optimizing their own homes using
-- digging a garden out back, optimizing their kitchen by switching out their plates, using
smaller plates.
We clustered people in groups of five and challenged them to walk together for 10 weeks,
knowing that these were people who wanted to change their habits and I can foster friendships.
And then we put people in -- gave people an opportunity to take part in purposed workshops.
We were there for about a year and a half.
We raised life expectancy by about three years.
We lowered people's weight and we actually lowered the health care costs of that city's
city workers by about 40%.
U.S.A.
Today covered it, Newsweek came out and did a story about a year later, and U.S. News
& World Reports was there two years later and found that our implement -- the programs
we implemented worked.
I don't have to tell this audience that there's a huge health care crisis in this country.
If current trends keep up, 50% of Americans will be suffering from diabetes and about
75% of us will be obese or overweight.
We spend about $2.1 trillion on diseases we could largely avoid.
And for the first time in living history our children are expected to live shorter lives
than we do, up to five years.
Is that because we are stupid or somehow lack the discipline of our grandparents?
No.
Our environment has changed.
We are evolutionarily hardwired for hardship and scarcity, but yet we live in this environment
of ease and abundance.
You can't go to a -- you can't buy gasoline, rent a DVD or buy cough medicine without being
routed through a gauntlet of candy bars, chips and soda pop.
There's a button to push for yard work, another button to push for garden work, another button
to push for kitchen work.
We actually burn about a fifth as many calories in non-exercise physical activity as our great-grandparents
did.
Raise your hand if you used to walk to school when you were a kid.
Now raise your hand if your children walk to school.
It's about eight hands up.
In 1970, 50% of Americans kids walked to school.
Now we're down to about 10%.
We just engineered three miles of weekly walking out of our kids' lives.
The answer to making America a healthier place does not lie with our doctors, it does not
lie with Obamacare.
Mitt Romney is not going to give us the answer.
Big farm is not going to give us the answer.
The answer, I assert, is taking a careful look at the cultures where people are actually
living longer.
Pay careful attention to that and then organize the world that we live in accordingly.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]