How To Incorporate AI Into Your Work: List Of Free AI Courses By Google & Others

 

Crystal Cox/Business Insider

• Minnesota native Dan Buettner pioneered the idea that the world includes five Blue Zones.
• The Blue Zones are spots where people tend to live to around 100 years old.
• Buettner says it's not genetics or willpower that boosts longevity in Blue Zones. It's a lifestyle.

Dan Buettner, a continent-trekking cyclist and storyteller, figured out that the world consisted of at least five Blue Zones in the early 2000s. That's when he made the term — first coined by the European demographers Michel Poulain and Gianni Pes — a household phrase in a best-selling cover story for National Geographic.

1 / 6

These are the world's 5 Blue Zones, where people live the longest lives©Getty Images

• These are several regions in the world where people appear to live longer and healthier lives.
• These places, called Blue Zones, include parts of California, Japan, Greece, Costa Rica and Italy.
• These regions share several features including healthy diets, natural movement and a sense of community.

There are regions in the world where people are believed to live the longest and healthiest lives.

These areas, dubbed Blue Zones, share several features in common, including eating primarily whole, plant-based  and non-processed foods, do regular, low-intensity physical activity and have a sense of community and purpose.

Researchers Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain discovered the first Blue Zone, and the concept was built upon by Dan Buettner, who identified additional regions and conducted extensive research into these communities.

Buettner has explained that there is not necessarily anything unique about the genes or willpower of people who live in Blue Zones. Instead, they thrive due to an "interconnected web of characteristics that keep people doing the right things for long enough, and avoiding the wrong things," Insider previously reported.

So what can we learn from the places where people live the longest?

In this handful of hidden corners scattered across the globe, he discovered that people were sailing past the 100-year mark with surprising frequency, and often avoiding dementia. 

People residing in these Blue Zones are outliving us because they have figured out what others have not, according to Buettner. They consistently eat a healthful diet, and they also move around about every 20 minutes or so during each day. 

But he says it took him years after that initial discovery to figure out exactly why the rest of us are getting the simple diet and exercise formula so wrong. 

"People start thinking that the entrance way to a healthier lifestyle — for most Americans — is through their mouths," he previously told Insider. "But the core tenant of Blue Zones, and it took me about 10 years to realize what I'm about to tell you, none of them have better discipline, better diets, better individual responsibility, they don't have better genes than us." 

Instead, "they live a long time because longevity happens to them," Buettner said.

An elderly troupe of singers and dancers from Kohama Island in Okinawa. Okinawa is one of the world's five Blue Zones. Toru Yamanaka/AFP via Getty Images

The homegrown, plant-based diets of the Blue Zones residents are only about half of the longevity equation, Buettner estimates. The rest is about making healthy choices the easiest ones by turning them into instinctual rituals of daily life that people don't have to think about or use willpower to fight for.