DAN BUETTNER: The Blue Zones guy shows us the trick to adding 10 years to our lives

Dan Buettner is a National Geographic Fellow and New York Times-bestselling author. He holds three Guinness records for various ludicrous long bike treks across the planet and he's also a bone fide explorer who has discovered things about ancient civilizations and, most notably, about cultures where people live the longest, called the Blue Zones.

Dan and I met when I wrote a blog post about his Blue Zones back shortly after the last ice age (2009) and he chimed in on the comments. We became long-distance friends with many common interests (we're both in the Guinness Book, we've both traversed the globe on our bikes, we love red wine and we are tireless nomads) and he wound up inviting me one of of his Nat Geo explorations in Ikaria in 2012, a wild Greek island not far off the coast of Turkey that has become a second home (some of you might recall the story of my goat herder lover?), and is one of the Blue Zones.

It was almost 20 years ago that Dan travelled the world to reverse engineer longevity and discover 5 five Blue Zones - pockets of the world with the most centenarians. He then Identified 9 principles or secrets to living long and well. He wrote 5 books and in the lates,t called The Blue Zones Challenge, he outlines a 4-week plan to add 10 years to your life, and the wild idea he puts forward after all this – Friends, Don't try to change your behaviour with diets and exercise plans, change your surroundings.

Which throws much of what we have been told about wellness on its head (I love it!).

More recently Dan has rolled out his Blue Zones blueprint to cities across the US. Municipalities employ him to “reverse-reverse engineer” the principles into the infrastructure of their cities, which has added years to life expectancy, and produced massive reductions in smoking and health care costs within years.

Get Dan's latest book, The Blue Zone challenge https://amzn.to/3ylQld3

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