The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People
by Dan Buettner ![BlueZones_cover]()
Available at Amazon $15.60
My quest for living the longest and healthiest I can has led me inevitably to Dan Buettner. Dan is the New York Times bestselling author of “The Blue Zones” and his new book The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People.
I learned a long time ago that if you want to be rich, do as best you can to do what the rich people do and avoid as much as possible what the poor people do. It only makes sense if you want to live as long as possible do what the longest living people are doing.
My the Blue Zones Solutions book review. If living a longer and healthier life is a priority to you then you’ve come to the right place and this book is definitely for you. If living as long and as healthy as you can isn’t a priority, then I have to wonder… Why not?
It’s always encouraging to find out that they changes you’ve made over the last couple of years, match almost exactly to what the longest living people are doing. It’s like they had also read, Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s “Eat To Live”.
The whole purpose of this website is to share what I’ve learned and help anyone that shares similar goals, no matter where they are starting from. All that you need is the desire to change your life for the better. My journey to where I am today has been my pleasure. I hope I can make it as EZ for you as it has been for me.
Let’s Get Into The Book
Dan Buettner and his team started out to find the world’s longest-lived people. To not only locate places that had only high concentrations of 100-year-olds but also the clusters of people that had grown old without diseases like heart problems, obesity, cancer, or diabetes.
Five places met their criteria:
- IKARIA, GREECE
- OKINAWA, JAPAN
- OGLIASTRA REGION, SARDINIA
- LOMA LINDA, CALIFORNIA
- NICOYA PENINSULA, COSTA RICA
Remarkably, they found long-lived populations, had similar habits and practices.
It wasn’t just how long they lived, it’s also how well they lived. People in the Blue Zones culture not only live longer lives, they often live better lives, with health, meaning, and love –
The Secret Of Dying Young As Old As Possible.
- Choosing a whole foods, plant-based diet (naturally low in fat and sugar).
- Practicing stress management techniques (including yoga and meditation)
- Enjoy moderate exercise (such as walking)
- Maintaining social support and community (love and intimacy meaning and purpose)
In other words, Eat well, stress less, move more and love more.
In addition to preventing many chronic diseases, these comprehensive lifestyle changes can often reverse the progression of an illness.
They proved, that lifestyle changes alone can reverse the progression of even severe coronary heart disease… can reverse type 2 diabetes and may slow, stop or reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer.
It’s Not About Your Genes
You can change your lifestyle and actually change how your genes work. You can turn on the genes that keep you healthy and turn off the genes that bring on diseases like; heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and diabetes. It’s not going to take a lifetime to change, we’re talking months. Is there a better time to start changing?
Research has found that diet and lifestyle changes may even begin to reverse aging at a cellular level by lengthening telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that regulate aging. The more you adhered to these lifestyle recommendations, the longer your telomeres become. As your telomeres get longer, your life gets longer.
“It’s not all or nothing. You have a spectrum of choices…
what matters most is your overall way of eating and living.
If you indulge yourself one day, eat healthier the next.
If you don’t have time to exercise one day, do a little more the next.
If you don’t have time to meditate for 30 minutes, do it for one minute.
Just as Dan discovered in the Blue Zones,
we found that the more people changed their diet and lifestyle,
the more they improved and the better they felt- at any age.”
~Dean Ornish, M.D.
We Are In A Health Crisis
If we continue as we are, by 2030 three-fourths of us will be overweight or obese. Half of us will be suffering with diabetes.
We spend almost a trillion dollars a year on preventable diseases but devote only 3% of our health care budget to prevention. The vast majority of our money went for treating an illness that we could avoid, such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Meanwhile. two-thirds of us were obese or overweight.
Hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical and insurance companies all make a fortune when you get sick… and it’s a safe bet you’re going to get sick. But, nobody makes a profit by keeping you healthy. There is No Profit In Prevention. That’s why it has got to be your priority. Does an average of eight more good years sound good to you?
It’s Probably Not Your Fault
Evolution has hardwired us to crave calories- all of that rich fat and flavorful meats and sweets and salty snack and carbs. For most of human history, those extra calories were hard to come by. Our bodies hoarded calories to survive. When we got our lips wrapped around those high-fat, high-carb, high-salt foods, we’re acting upon primeval organic impulses: to ingest as many calories as possible when they’re available. The problem is that by design they’re always available and inexpensive. At the same time, we’ve engineered physical activity out of our lives.
Try as you might you can’t avoid being confronted by a barrage of salty snacks, candy bars, and sodas. Even high-sugar snacks disguised as “health bars”. Restaurants know that they can make a bigger profit by presenting you with bigger servings. So, we overeat when we go out for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The brightest minds on Madison Avenue, the food industry spends $11 billion a year to entice us to buy their products- mostly sugared, salted, flavor-enhanced processed foods like pizzas, pastries, chips and sodas. They don’t hesitate from using catchy phrases in their advertising to trick you into thinking you’re eating, “Healthy!” “Low Fat!” “All Natural!”
It Doesn’t Mean We’re Bad People
Or that we’re not as strong willed as our grandparents. What has happened in the last half century is that we’ve gone from hardship and scarcity to one of abundance and ease. How can we make the most of this abundance without letting it ruin our health?
The Traditional Answer… Eat Less… Exercise More
The problem is that it just doesn’t work long term. It requires long-term discipline and routine- both of which goes against human nature and our evolutionary design. We crave the new and the novel… we get bored.
Most people stick with diets for less than seven months, and often only weeks. Only 5 out of 100 will still be on that diet’s maintenance plan two years later.
To Lose Weight and Live Longer- Diets Are Useless
The Blue Zones Solution offers an alternative– food ideas and eating practices, plus ways to change your environment that make it all the more likely that you will live a longer healthier life.
It Takes A Village
“Research has shown that if your best friends are obese, there’s a 50% greater chance that you’ll be overweight too.”
If people wanted to live longer, the most important things they could do, after giving up smoking, would be to eat moderately, exercise regularly, maintain friendships, and pursue an interest that makes life meaningful.
If you hang out with overweight people, you may be more likely to be heavy yourself. If you hang out with smokers, you’re more likely to keep smoking. The reverse is true too. Solution: Interact with more people who want to be healthy and happy.
The Blue Zones Solution to take the pressure off the individual was to attempt to reshape whole towns by turning them into their own Blue Zones.
How successful have they been? As a result of Blue Zones efforts, more than Five Million People Today live in communities that support better health behaviors. Most of those five million have made life-enhancing changes without ever having to think about it.
What You’ll Learn From The Book
This book is amazing. Although it’s reinforced a lot of what I already knew about health and nutrition, it broadened my scope of how we can help and influence ourselves, our friends, families, communities, and our country. That’s huge!
You’ll start off learning about the individual Blue Zone inhabitants, the how and whys of what they’re doing. Then in easy steps how you too can implement these life changing practices into your life.
How you can take what you learn to benefit and lengthen not only your life but those around you. The tools are there, the support is in place. You can do it and you can Pay It Forward!
But Wait…There’s More!
It’s one thing to know what you should be doing and eating, but it’s another thing to do it. In the last chapter, you’ll find 77 recipes that are easy to prepare from readily available ingredients, so that you can make the dishes that the world’s healthiest people eat every day.
The Blue Zones Solutions book review is it should be mandatory reading for anyone that cares about their health and longevity. Who knows, maybe even if it’s not a priority for you now, it will help you identify why your well being isn’t paramount in your life. You do know you’re only getting one…right?
I hope I’ve whetted your appetite for a longer healthier life. I could not recommend this book any more highly. It’s a must read. Get your copy here and now.
The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People.
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