Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or simply don’t care about your diet), you’ve probably heard of Blue Zones – areas of the world where life expectancy is much higher based on a number of critical factors. New York Times best-selling author Dan Buettner has been writing about Blue Zones for nearly two decades and just published a book, The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100 that chronicles the diets and lifestyles of Blue Zone inhabitants, and how you can increase your life expectancy at home.
“My particular expertise is finding statistically superlative populations and then reverse engineering what they have to teach us. For Blue Zones it’s longevity. It’s all data-backed, and evidence-based. And here’s the counterintuitive ah-ha. It’s that people in Blue Zones don’t do anything special and don’t have special genes. What they do have is an environment that makes the healthy choice unavoidable. That’s the $64,000 answer to the question for how to get Americans healthy,” said Buettner.
Buettner focuses much of his research, and a whole section of the book on Sardinia, Italy, specifically six highland villages of Artzana, Baunei, Villagrande, Seulo, Urzulei, and Talana, which all specialize in longevity dishes such as minestrone soups containing healthy amino-acid-laden goodies like beans, vegetables, and large doses of fiber. “Almost every one of these villages has a minestrone, and we tend to have a fairly static idea of what a minestrone is, but the recipe changes vastly from place to place. These minestrones are usually eaten at lunch and leftover for dinner and most of them are absolute cocktails of longevity. With beans and barley or some sort of pasta you get a much healthier protein than you get from a steak for example,” Buettner explains.
In his book, Buettner lays out many dos and don’ts for longevity diets and has a helpful guideline to get you on the longevity path. “One of the big revelations in writing this book, and the science is leaping forward in this area, is that the end of our digestive tract called the microbiome has 100 trillion or so bacteria that when they’re fed properly produce these short-chain fatty acids that regulate inflammation, immune function, and even your mood. And the only thing those 100 trillion bacteria eat is fiber. So, if you’re starving them like you are if you’re eating burgers and fries and chips and soda, you’re not producing these short-chain fatty acids. On the other hand, if you’re eating a Sardinian minestrone, with several strains of fiber, one from the beans, one from the garlic, one from the cruciferous vegetables, this is a riot of deliciousness, and food for your microbiome which might very well explain the longevity in Sardinia.”
Other tips from Buettner’s book includes retreating from meat, cutting down on fish, reducing dairy, slashing sugar, and eating lots of beans and nuts. “Eat meat fewer than five times a month – none if you can do it. Fish is not a significant part of the Sardinian Blue Zone diet either. They eat about a cup of beans a day. If you can eat a cup of beans a day it’s probably worth about four years of life expectancy,” says Buettner.
Even though the Blue Zones diets can appear monotonous, Buettner explains that making the monotonous delicious is the key to eating well. That and a healthy dose of Cannonau Sardinian red wine. “There’s really only about 20 ingredients that these Sardinians are using over and over again, and what these Sardinians have is this genius that has evolved over successive generations of mostly old ladies who are taking these simple ingredients and making them taste good. As for wine, in general, one to two drinks a day lowers your mortality more than not drinking at all.
Specifically, Sardinian Cannonau or Bolvale, which have some of the highest levels of procyanidins. These compounds are an antioxidant that has shown to reduce inflammation of the endothelium. In other words, it calms the interior of our arteries making it less likely we’re going to develop plaques and eventually heart attacks. And a couple glasses of high-quality Cannonau wine is probably heart-protective.”
Bottom line, according to Buettner (and science) that if you, “…accept a whole, plant-based diet, you’re gonna live longer. The next step is to learn how to make it taste good to you.” Luckily, Buettner has an entire book of 100 recipes to help guide us along the way.