5 daily habits of people who live longer | Dan Buettner

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Would you like to stay healthy until you're 100? For most of us, the answer is of course, yes. But is it achievable? Do you need to become a biohacker or take 43 expensive supplements every morning? Perhaps a meat only diet or a weekly celery juice cleanse will do the trick. While there's a lot of conflicting information on social media, it's worth noting that longevity influencers are never anywhere near a 100 years old. So does anyone have any real answers? The answer is yes. Today, I'm joined by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic fellow, best selling author, and founder of the Blue Zones Project. He has spent decades studying regions where people routinely live beyond a 100 without a biohacking influencer in sight. So how do they do it? We're also joined by professor Sarah Berry, a world leader in large scale human nutritional studies, a professor in nutrition at King's College London, and chief scientist at ZOE. In this episode, we'll learn about the morning routines of genuine centenarians, the name for people who actually have lived for more than a hundred years. And by the end of the episode, you'll have some simple tips to help you start your day like you live in a blue zone and increase your chances of living healthily to a 100. Dan, thank you for joining me today. It's a total delight. It's wonderful to have you back. And, Sarah, thank you for being here. Pleasure. So, Dan, hopefully, you remember, we always like to kick the show off with a rapid fire q and a with questions from our listeners with the strict rules, yes or no, or a sentence if you have to. Okay. Can small lifestyle changes increase my chances of living to 100? Yes. Are diet and exercise the only things you need to live a long life? No. Are the blue zones slowly disappearing? Some of them are. Are people in the blue zones always vegetarian? No. And finally, what's the biggest misconception that you hear about the blue zones? That it's a noun. It's actually a verb. The thing is that the the blue zones are a phenomenon in time. Hundred and fifty years ago, those places weren't blue zones. People were dying of infectious diseases back in the nineteenth century. Now as you correctly point out, as time goes on, chronic diseases, the same diseases that are beleaguering us, type two diabetes, heart disease, dementia, certain types of cancers, they're raising the mortality rates in these places, so life expectancy and concentration of people making it to a 100 are diminishing. They're still going up. They're just not going up as fast. Dan, you've been on the show before, which was a fantastic episode for anyone who hasn't listened to it. But for anyone who either needs a refresher or didn't hear that episode, …