Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People
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Dan Buettner
Principles
- Move naturally
- Purpose
- Down shift
- 80% Rule
- Plant slant
- Wine at 5
- Right tribe
- Community
- Loved ones first
Notes
They grow gardens and don’t have mechanical conveniences for house and yard work. Every trip to work, to a friend’s house, or to church occasions a walk.
The world’s longest-lived people have routines to shed that stress.
Hara hachi bu — the 2,500-year-old Confucian mantra spoken before meals on Okinawa—reminds people to stop eating when their stomachs are 80 percent full.
Successful centenarians in the Blue Zones put their families first. They keep aging parents and grandparents nearby or in the home, which also lowers disease and mortality rates of their children. They commit to a life partner (which can add up to three years of life expectancy), and they invest in their children with time and love, which makes the children more likely to be caretakers when the time comes.
From sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday, every week, Seventh-day Adventists create a “sanctuary in time,” spending most of the 24 hours in quiet contemplation or attending church and avoiding TV, movies, and other distractions. At midday on Saturday after church they join other Adventists for potluck lunches. Later in the afternoon, they strike out with friends and family on a nature walk for healthy doses of sunshine and fresh air.
The practices most likely to yield that longevity? Fraser winnowed them down to five, each adding about two years to life expectancy:
- Eating a plant-based diet with only small amounts of dairy or fish
- Not smoking
- Maintaining medium body weight
- Eating a handful of nuts four to five times per week
- Doing regular physical activity
“Breakfast like a king; lunch like a prince; dinner like a pauper.” In other words, make the first meal of your day the biggest, and eat only three meals per day. The routine is the same in almost all of the Blue Zones: People eat a huge breakfast before work, a medium-size late lunch, and a light, early dinner…An Israeli study found that dieting women who ate half of their daily calories at breakfast, about a third at lunch, and a seventh at dinner lost an average of 19 pounds in 12 weeks.
Limit food intake to 500 calories every other day to establish a regular fasting program and safely lose weight. With this and any other fasting program, drink six glasses of water daily. Try eating only two meals a day: a big late-morning brunch and a second meal at around 5 p.m.
Super Blue Foods
Integrate at least three of these items into your daily diet to be sure you are eating plenty of whole food.
- Beans: black beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, black-eyed peas, lentils
- Greens: spinach, kale, chards, beet tops, fennel tops
- Sweet potatoes: don’t confuse with yams
- Nuts: almonds, peanuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts, cashews
- Olive oil: green, extra-virgin is usually the best. Note that olive oil decomposes quickly, so buy no more than a month’s supply at a time
- Oats: slow-cook or Irish steel-cut are best
- Barley: either in soups, as a hot cereal, or ground in bread
- Fruits: all kinds
- Green or herbal teas
- Turmeric: as a spice or a tea
The keys to getting a good sleep are a relaxing bedtime routine and a bedroom environment that is a sanctuary for sleep. If you look at bedrooms in the Blue Zones, you won’t find computers, TVs, or any other electronics. Blue Zones bedrooms are cool, quiet, and dark. People don’t use alarm clocks. Because they sleep enough, they wake up naturally.