How does living to 100 in vibrant good health sound to you? What would it be like to face your 10th decade looking forward to each new day? And why isn’t this happening in American society?
Every so often, a team of researchers will discover a little corner of the globe where- inexplicably- people routinely live to 100 or more. These areas have come to be known as “The Blue Zones” and scientists have spent hundreds of research hours trying to uncover their secrets.
Most recently, the innovative explorer and writer Dan Buettner has been taking teams of scientists around the world investigating these areas. His work was funded by the National Geographic and the National Institutes on Aging, and his findings were published in the best-selling book, “The Blue Zones”.
The four “Blue Zones” Buettner investigated were a mountainous region of Sardinia off the coast of Italy, the Japanese island of Okinawa, a community of Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California and the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. More recently a fifth “blue zone” has been discovered- an isolated and gorgeous Greek Island in the Aegean Sea called Ikaria.
Now understand something here. These folks don’t just “survive” till age 100. Many are out milking cows at 4:30 in the morning in their mid and late 90’s. Many are climbing mountainous regions in their daily duties as shepherds. Very very few are feeble and none are living in assisted living homes! These are vital, happy, healthy people!
What are their secrets?
As it turns out, there is no one secret to living longer successfully, but there are clusters of behaviors that continually show up in all these regions. They don’t all eat the same diet (but their diet has a few things in common). They don’t all live the same lifestyle (but their lifestyles have a lot of things in common). And there are some things that just about every one of the residents of every one of the Blue Zones does on a regular basis.
In “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer” I took the research of Buettner and others and put together what I believe are the most powerful “secrets” of living longer, learned from the most successful “long lived” people on earth.
I’m a big believer in “learning from the winners. And in the anti-aging sweepstakes, the clear winners are the long-lived people who populate the Blue Zones.
