The Blue Zones Study
Recently, from the book The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People and several interviews and Dan Buettner’s talks, I think it is very interesting to follow what Dan Buettner’s claims about people live much longer than average based on the unique groups of people what Buettner’s identified the five regions as “Blue Zones” (a term Buettner trademarked): Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy, Nicoya, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece and the Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California USA. First of all, I truly appreciate Buettner’s approach to his claims about his identification of the five regions are based on data and first-hand observations, for why these populations live healthier and longer lives than others.
Let’s put other key factors to become the healthiest people aside for now and focus on eating like the healthiest people first. It is very difficult in modern society, isn’t it? There are always paradoxes from one rule to the other such as high carb/low carb; high protein/low protein; dairy is good/dairy is bad; legumes are good/legumes are bad; no grains/eat more grains, etc.
Like Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food said, it is confusion about food that people would feel the need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or doctor or government food pyramid, on so basic a question about the conduct of our everyday lives as humans. Pollan raised a strong and simple question: what other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat?
Although, what if, there is nothing complicated about foods because we only can see (or want to see) what we would like to see.
Get back to my current blue zones study, if we compare data of the WHO Life Expectancy for Buettner’s five blue zones regions, Japan has been listed number 1 in the ranking for decades and it is 84.12 years in 2019 data (80.87 for man and 87.32 for woman); No.7 for Italy (83.42 years, 81.23 for man and 85.51 for woman) ; No.26 for Greece (81.69 years, 79.25 for man and 84.14 for woman); No.39 for Costa Rica (80.33 years, 78.04 for man and 82.67 for woman) and No.45 for United States (79.77 years, 77.52 for man and 82 for woman). I don’t think Okinawa and Sardinia are too unique to identify them from the average of countries statistical data.
Second of all, in these five blue zones countries, except the United States, there is a national and universal health care program in the other four countries that make a strong and significant impact on the country’s Life Expectancy.
Furthermore, since Buettner has advocated what we can learn from the blue zones lifestyle to create high concentrations of individuals over 100 years old and low heart disease, low cancer, less obesity or diabetes. I check these specific categories of health concerns from the WHO statistical data and keep figuring out what the missing puzzles keep us away from having a healthy and long life.
(continue later. )
