Why Blue Zones are the Healthiest Places on Earth l Doctor's Farmacy with Mark Hyman, M.D. EP6

[Music] so welcome Dan I'm so happy to have you here on the doctors pharmacy I want to just get into first a little bout your background how you get into this whole idea of longevity and wellness you were journalist and adventurer and somehow you kind of came upon this in a new career path of being an advocate for health and wellness so for yours I led expeditions for National Geographic science expeditions that tried to unravel mysteries and they were mysteries like why did the Maya civilization collapse the Marco Polo go to China the human origins and I was like the best job in the world it really was I had a full-time stay out of Harvard archeologists and MIT scientists and National Geographic photographers and our job was to find cool - cool mysteries every year and solve them you're like the Indiana Jones for National Geographic almost yeah probably but yeah you know I didn't have a web only in my bedroom just but the the but it was actually a company that led an online audience of mostly students direct teams of experts to solve mysteries and around that experience we wrote curriculum I I'm more interested in solving mysteries and I'm really an explorer that that my sense of purpose and what I'm good at is going to parts of the world diving deep into the culture and pulling out wisdom that the rest of us can use I probably translational communications is probably my expertise more than anything but in 2000 my team came across an interesting fact the world health organization named Okinawa's the place in the world with the longest disability free life expectancy in the world so they have what we want they live a long time managed to elude most chronic disease and then die fairly quickly yeah we call that the rectangular ization of the survival curve you yeah there you don't die long painful so that's what you get you live a long time healthy well and boom you're dead yes that's kind of what you want to do you know go to bed one night and you know I have good sex and wake up and you're you that's how I'm gonna go I'm gonna go rent a lake a cabin by the lake make love with my wife yeah I have a bottle of wine take a swim and then that's it and I'd really want to see you do that at 120 120 so Okinawans were doing that better and I thought AHA that's a great mystery and really that was kind of the phoning of Blue Zones in 2000 and that that expedition was hugely successful and I had the idea that if there are if there's a Blue Zone area an area where people live a long time and in Asia there must be other areas in Europe and Latin America in the United States and I got funding from the National Institutes on aging to hire demographers to do the science of population to find statistically longest-lived and then recruited a team of experts to help me distill the sort of common denominators and most of these our correlations are not causation yeah but when you see the same correlations and in Asia and in Europe and Latin America this layering of correlation starts to approach causation yeah and so you see there's a pattern there very clear pattern emerging and that's what I've focused on one of the biggest myths you've had and and if we all do things right can we live to be a hundred or more so the first half of that question I think the biggest myths are are that we can diet our way to good health if you look at the recidivism curve of diet they all they they work pretty well for nine months and they fail for 95 to 97% of people after two years exercise has been a public health failure in my opinion and I know that's disruptive but the average American burns fewer than 100 calories a day engaged in exercise so you know we we tell people to go to the gym and do marathons and triathlons but we don't do it about 20% of Americans get the necessary amount of exercise I thought it was a that's an improvement well I think that's 20% of Americans did thirty minutes of physical activity but you know it's it's it is an unmitigated failure supplements I don't believe there are any supplement that will stop slower reverse aging yeah and the second part of the question was you know if we do everything right can we lived in 100 or okay so the at the maximum average life expectancy of humans living in the first world and in a place where there's not high infectious diseases is about 90 to 94 Man 92 for women somewhere in there so in other words right now if you do everything right you can expect 90 or 92 and that's about a dozen more years than we're getting so the value proposition is fairly significant but if you look at others 10% of life or more yes and the real value proposition is you're biologically a decade younger almost every decade until then so people want to look good they want to feel good they want to have energy that's the real value proposition and then living a long time and then dropping off that cliff you talked about dying quickly so when you add all that up and then the healthcare savings we spend about 90 percent of our our lifelong health care dollars the last few years of our life two or three years of our lives yeah and people who die quickly they're not spending money on life support so that's a value proposition and they die quickly painlessly and cheaply as opposed to long painful expensive yeah yeah they're not kicking and screaming on the way out so so ken would have do 100 so interestingly life expectancy for humans has gone up about one year for every four years since about 1840 mm-hmm so if you look at the projection that the curve the trend of that life expectancy curve if you're middle-aged theoretically yes you should be able to make a hundred you sort of suggest that life spec City is possible it's increasing but there's some new data that's pretty alarming particularly in areas in the south and other areas where there's high diabetes and obesity rates where life expecting is actually going down and it's suggested we may be raising the first generation of kids to live sicker and die younger than their parents yeah sj-o chance ki calculated that first and he's in he's calculated it could be as much as a five-year drop and life expectancy now they oscillate you know life expectancy jumps and then a draw you know the year that we had the swine flu there was anything drop in life expectancy the human species so if you follow that trend line is going up but I would tend to agree with what mark with what you're saying here and there that our environment is toxic and it probably is going to pour 10 lower life unless we do something about yeah but here where this Milken conference and I don't know if you feel any hope but the finance years for the first time or restarting to pay attention to the right things not just you know maximizing their I mean they had Jane Goodall here talking about the importance of a plant-based diet and those are the guys that are gonna make the difference you know I've seen that too i've seen you know i was talking to one of the top guys at nestle which you know I had a pretty negative opinion about yeah and they're focusing on regenerative agriculture their focus on shifting to organic there's focusing on yeah changing the quality their products is there they're being pushed by the market forces that are driving them to make better choices same thing with you know Pepsi I was talking to the vice-chair of Pepsi and they're looking at how do we actually move towards a different form of Agriculture and preserve water and soils it's very interesting you've got these big players trying to change their thinking about what they're doing and they're you know I feel a little dubious about it but I think it's a good trend because and then and there's a huge amount of investment all the venture capitalists here talking about how do we invest in these new businesses that are driving Norplant rich diets you know even Memphis meat which is laboratory-grown meat that sort of takes away the all the environmental and the moral issues around me right right which is pretty fascinating I'm not sure I want to eat it but so yeah I'm an investor so I have known in Memphis me yeah all right all right well there you go I think it's phenomenal I think it's pretty interesting yeah I mean when you look I mean it's all the environmental issues around meat eating is first of all let me just say in Blue Zones people ate some meat but it's about five times per month yeah because they don't wait to kill the goat and they all ate to go yeah being a nauseating ricin yeah they kill it going all the feasts and then they wait yeah it's you know rice beans but they're they're delicious rice and beans but you know you just look at all the issues around around immediate enough devastating I mean I think people are understanding impact on climate on environmental degradation on you know even the set of antibiotic use and yeah even the even the ethical moral issues are becoming more understood and I I think that's that's a challenge that it you know is now being looked at by you know like big groups that are starting to face this and I think at this meeting that's the first time I've heard you know the power players start to talk about this politicians you know business leaders food companies it's really shifting it's fascinating so and it's the Gen Xers you know yeah it's the it's not that it's not our generation mark yeah you know we're we grow over over the hell I just heard this morning that generation include the 20 year olds they're eating about 50% about five times more tofu than we did and about and about seven times more non-dairy milk yeah right yeah no I mean least they're conscious you know who knows yeah they're shifting the practices and and you know I actually heard something very encouraging today that the grocery Manufacturers of America if they were this powerful multi-billion dollar organization and all the food company started pulling out like Nestle's and Campbell's I mean and they were they were not agreeing with the the trends for example transparency and GMO labeling in first of all in Europe there's no GMO because they don't allow it but here you know these grocery manufacturer were lobbying and actually paying for political candidates surreptitiously in influencing elections in inclusion with other all the food companies and and a lot of them said this is not what we want to do like an S phase and Campbell's and Campbell's is voluntary eliminate all GM yeah from their food supply so these are these are really great trends but you know big food and big egg and big beverage they they're often the whipping boys but I actually don't blame them until about 1960 there weren't enough calories the mid 60 they weren't enough calories in America to feed Americans so when we were in the Cold War the mission was to produce more food yeah produce more food and American innovation went to work and we've just over innovated the fact that there are so many calories out and marketers can take those calories and repackage them at a different number of different ways and and market that make them taste good and market they I mean they did exactly what they were supposed to do they've just done it too well and now the epiphany is that well we've over innovated a certain way now we have to recalibrate now for for health because coz the unintended consequences you know like yeah you know I think Michael Milken was saying that if you if you look at a you know how much benefit you get and the cost-benefit ratio of eating french fries that are super-sized or not yeah you might pay an extra quarter for the super-sized french fries but it cost you eight dollars over your lifetime in terms of chronic disease and medical bills and yeah prescriptions and nobody-nobody factors that in yeah it's the externalities right yes it's but they we we can we conveniently shut our eyes at those and somebody's gotta pay for it eventually so you mentioned that you you think we're maybe focus on the wrong things when it comes to pursuing optimal health so what should we focus on well the health care system let's face it it it in sense for sickness nobody makes money if you stay well pharmaceutical companies depend on you to get a prescription hospitals depend on you checking in and using their services doctors excuse me you get paid the same if you if you cure them or kill them through like visiting a car that doesn't work you still get paid for it right you don't get a refund right so it's a recalls on so it was jack welch that the CEO of GE famously said they point out the folly of incenting for a and hoping for b so all the incentives in this country are behind sickness yes they seek everybody all business secretly wants us to get sick so they can get paid to fix us there are almost no incentives or keeping you healthy in the first but I know Cleveland Clinic is one of the first places to wake up and smell the cappuccino on that but very there are very few revenue models out there for companies who are really interested in keeping people healthy you know I know for employers there's some there are than seconds for employees you know yes but but it is miniscule compared we out of the know the three point four trillion dollars or so we we spend on health care and its related expenses fewer than 10% of that less than 10% of its actually spent on prevention yeah and eighty percent of that bill is for chronic disease it's caused by lifestyle that's right yes so and ending up fixing that so the problem is we aim at the wrong target we're putting all of our money our effort that the heroes and the rockstars are the are the doctors fixing people and the rock stars should be the people keeping us healthy in the first place yeah like pack a up for example in Finland one of my heroes yeah who's that he ran the World Health Organization's Department of non-infectious disease and he created the North Karelia project which was the first project ever to change the environment 140,000 fins and lowered the rate of heart disease by about 80 percent lower the rate of stomach cancer by 60 percent not by trying to get people to change their behavior but by changing the environment they lived in yeah well let's talk about that because you use an extraordinary project in a little town in Minnesota you just change the physical environment to change the behavior which is this whole field of behavioral economics and you're often naming it the wrong target and you found dramatic reductions in medical costs increases and productivity and Creason happiness it was really perfect you tell us about that project and then you scaled it through other cities and other places around America so if you go to places around the world where people are living a long time and people in their 90's are still standing on their head and waterskiing and a hundred it's not because they tried it's not because they at 50 got on a better diet or not cause fitter yeah in reality they don't know every meals not but longevity happened to them they have no idea by the way they don't have genetic superiority the same genes we have a heterogeneous pool of yeah population the the the big AHA in these blue zones there around the world is that longevity was not something that was pursued it's something that ensued from the right environment so the healthiest foods beans and greens and nuts and tubers and grains are the cheapest and most accessible the option to be lonely which shaves about eight years off your life expectancy wasn't there because you couldn't walk out your front door without running to somebody you know the the social structures were different families and their communities yeah much closer I would say that social structures and they were nudge into movement every twenty minutes or so so people you know you don't find people sitting at their desks eight hours not doing anything you know they're gardening and they're doing things by hand every time they go to work or friends house at occasions a walk so based on that insight and working with AARP at the time and University of Minnesota School of Public Health we created a blueprint for city audition five cities Elbert Lee Minnesota one you know and we're looking for cities that were ready and had good leadership leadership Network the mayor who's on your team mayor but you also want the private sector to these are almost all privately funded and publicly supported and we went about changing the environment changing the policies so that the municipal laws favored fruits and vegetables over junk food favored pedestrian over the automobile favored the nonsmoker over the smoker created this Blue Zone certification for restaurants grocery stores work places in schools got about thirty percent of all the app for mention certified so those environments were healthier and then got fifteen percent of individuals take a Blue Zone pledge to reshape their social network so they had some healthy people organized around a healthy activity either walking or plant-based potlucks you got the grandparents to walk their kids to the bus and yesterday included people in the normal cycle of life right yeah so a big big part of its social you know how we connect people socially and the other big part is shaping their environment I mean you took the plates in their houses and move them from like 12 inch to 10 inch plates the smaller plates right like I hate that when I get too small but you know that changes your behavior you you changed it with the work with the grocery stores to put in healthy snacks and drinks at the checkout counter instead of candy and soda and that changed the behavior of these people and and so the idea all the things that you said so we put in place probably 70 or 80 of those defaults and nudges so people don't even realize it but as they travel through their day from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed they may receive 20 or 30 little nudges sort of the Adam Smith silent hand you know pushing them towards marginally better health choices without them even knowing it and it makes a huge difference so over about a two-year period we saw the health care cost and city workers drop by about 40% and that was in our report it was a city's own report we shaved about two tons off their waistline and the average person we took a representative sample of 25 percent of the adult population among those adult population we saw an almost three years on pin life expectancy so that's self reporting yeah but nevertheless it's indicating in indicates there's so many implications for how we address this global chronic disease and obesity problem you know it's like we we known to rethink the delivery model in the environment Paul Farmer talks about structural violence you know one of the social economic and political conditions that drive disease now how do we reach if those to change the environment like yeah he'd them out of Haiti with TB and A's where he didn't focus on better drugs or surgery but by changing the structural environment like having clean water by having people have a place to live by having them have a watch so they knew when to take their medications by having their neighbor come and check on I mean really profound and I think you know we haven't applied those insights into healthcare and I think we we talk about prevention but it's really about often treatment of chronic disease with lifestyle like we know and we can reverse type 2 diabetes with changing people's diet and then not something that we're actually focused on medicine unfortunately so you know one of the things that you know really was was powerful was you know this this idea of this sort of power 9 that you came up with which is this one of the qualities of these societies and what are the surprising things that are in there that we may not think are connected to longevity so you you mapped out the characteristics of these people on the blue zones and I read through them and they were really pretty smart and pretty profound and relatively simple and collectively they have a huge impact yes so the first book I wrote Blue Zones lessons for living longer from the people who the longest the idea was it told a story of finding these places and then the common denominators and this power nine I just came up with is kind of a dumb name but it looks good it's good but but I just wanted to you know curiously no matter where you go and you see people living a long time they're doing the same nine things and they they're clustered in four areas number one they're moving naturally as opposed to exercise so nudge into movement they tend to have a sense of purpose and they can identify they articulate that sense of purpose their downshifting there's things sacred daily ritual is to downshift them so stopping and being as opposed to doing yes but it's it's less conscious and more wrote for example Okinawan women or okay now older Okinawans will always stop what they're doing before they eat they'll say three words Hara Hachi vu which reminds them to stop eating when their stomachs are 80% full mm-hmm Adventists who are the longest lived Americans they'll say a prayer so there's some punctuation between the busy their busy life and their food so they're slow down and eat slower mm-hmm Costa Rican a Katia they take a nap Sardinia they do happy hours you know happy hour nap but everybody does it so it's not like you're the outlier by you know having a couple glass of wine after work or taking a nap at 3:00 in the afternoon so um and then when it comes to what to what they eat they're 95 to 100 percent of their dietary intake comes from plants the pillars of all longevity diets in the world I mentioned before greens grains whole grains nuts beans and tubers so no matter where you go those five things making the daily diet eat meat about five times a month fish maybe two times a week not unless than you'd think a lot of these community coastal communities right they look coastal Oaks oh they're Sardinia Italy Korea Greece Okinawa Japan the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica and Loma Linda three of those fives are kind of island one is Peninsula but the Blue Zone areas are always inland they're always up in the highlands they tend to live on a slope in fact one of the biggest correlations within a long time is the slope of the land on which you live so live on a hill exactly yes well yeah up and down yeah I I mean that that's makes sense to me but there is that was studied very carefully in Sardinia and this the steeper the village the longer people lived so and then the the foundation the power time foundation was keeping your investment in your family being part of a faith didn't matter what faith it was and then really paying attention to the people you hang out with yeah probably the biggest determinant of your long-term health there so if your friends are drinking beer and eating cheeseburgers and fries and drink it'll be yeah and if your friends are drinking green juices and doing yoga yeah that'll be healthy automatically right sail yeah well I wouldn't I to dump your dump your old friends unhealthy friends I will say get new healthy friends yeah Cathi fresh Toones out there I know I changed your life how did that change your life getting a lot more vegetables I'll tell you that yeah you know one of the things that you talked about is cooking and longevity and people say they're on time to cook and it's a pain it takes too long you know how do you address that and what's the canary cooking in longevity you hear this all the time I'm so busy that I don't have time well the reality if Americans like took stock in their lives and thought about where that what things they really get satisfaction out of yeah I'm guessing they could cut a lot of you know soccer games or running off to the movie or where the kids need to be driven seven hours of screen time for the average person in America I know two hours on internet yeah and then didn't even exist before so yeah so when people tell me they don't have time I kind of roll my secretly roll my eyes so taking the time to cook especially with your family can be one of most pleasant things and I know it's daunting for people to begin with but if you really want to eat healthy the one of the keys is having the skills to make a few I would say plant-based meals beans I would say is the the should be the main ingredient because they're hearty and they give you the protein you need you gotta cook them yeah probably know the plant paradox but but the raw beans definitely yeah don't don't don't crunch you know I come back I want to come back to that about how do you take care of being so you know take care of you as opposed to the way around but the the the investment we should all be making is to learn how to make a half a dozen plant-based meals that we like mm-hmm and you might have to fail at 50% of them before you make it and and like that or you know it didn't turn out well but you know Blue Zones website we tried that we've tested now probably 500 and we picked the top 100 recipes they're all free yeah and try one of those recipes they're all plant-based and if you find a half a dozen you like you'll make them over and over it'll be easy it'll be a default and in it I could tell you that eating broccoli will add six years to your life expectancy but if you don't like broccoli yeah forget it you're not gonna eat it you'll need it for a while because alrighty I'm be understood but six months you know you'll be back to burgers and fries ya know it's true I mean I think you know we've been brainwashed to believe that cooking is drudgery then it's difficult let me give you two pieces of advice yes please the crock-pot yeah and high-quality glass Tupperware so yeah cells during your leftovers yeah well I sunday is my day cuz that you know I work I travel all the time but I usually I have a half a dozen crock pot meals a Sardinian minestrone and a koreans do with fennel and all the ingredients I can chop and I wake up in the morning chop it up it takes me 15 minutes throw it in the crock-pot turn it on and dinner I have bubbling deliciousness waiting for me yes and we'll have dinner that night and then I'll take the all the leftovers I put them in these glass one serving containers and they have a plastic top and I freeze them like that so it's like a big hockey puck so when I go to work you know I like to bike to work I'll just pull one out throw it in my briefcase is frozen yeah and then when I get to work I take the plastic top off I throw in the microwave so yeah it's so easier than if you know put the top on bring it home to wash it right but it's so it's so those meals cost me probably a dollar and a quarter yeah they have as much protein as a regular hamburger mmm healthier program fiber a lot more phytonutrients vitamins minerals yes yeah it's you know it's like a it's like one giant supplement yeah a stew of healthy amino acids and and yeah it gets me through the day so the bean thing is interesting because you know you talked about how a lot of these cultures consume a lot of beans and there's been a lot of popular books out there lately saying that lectins are an issue and beans are concerning and that they can cause autoimmunity and inflammation but you didn't really find that and and you sort of talked about actually how to prepare them to minimize some of these adverse consequences of beans I mean you look at these traditional cultures they had very sophisticated ways of actually combining different foods of cooking them breaking down these things that actually may be problematic so can you talk a little bit about that yeah III think that was unfortunate propaganda about that B so I all know the lectins I mean yeah I mean yes if you eat them raw they're a problem but I mean here we have 70 percent of Americans are obese a third of our pre-diabetic dropped and dead of heart disease and we're worried about lectin for crying out loud it's it's silly right I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt the the the five cultures who are living the longest we're eating beans almost every day and probably a cup of beans and I would say that I mean as long as you soak them cook them to a boil the lectins aren't an issue but the big issue emotional cooking helps to pressure cooker what will double the kombu what does that do that seaweed yeah seaweed if you soak it with seaweed if you so clear the gas problem it helps the guest from the reality of the gas problem is this you're if you're eating meat cheese and eggs all the time your gut bacteria is is going to proliferate to die to optimally digest meat eggs and cheese sure when you shift and all of a sudden if you if that's all you're eating Egg McMuffins and then all of a sudden you shift to a healthy bean based food your your your gut bacteria say what the hell is going on here it's gonna be a war yeah but that war only lasts for about a week or a week and a half and then all of a sudden your gut bacteria shifts so it can break down those long-chain carbohydrates that are in beings to digestible carbohydrates and you don't have that issue iie beans every single day I have zero issues and you can you talk about how to start out with these smaller beans like - rather than kidney beans or lima beans or probably start with lentils and yahoodi beans that are easier to follow the FOB are the gaseous right if you're not eating them regularly but again if after two weeks of using lentils or peas and and that's an important thing that people don't realize about the microbiome in the role it plays in all chronic disease including obesity and diabetes and so the way to cultivate your inner garden is by eating a lot of plants by eating a lot of fiber rich foods like that an inner garden yeah I mean we got a tender inner garden we got the we got a lot of weeds growing in there that are causing disease and the way you get the weed those you put in the good stuff and it crowds it out so you know when you look at these traditional cultures and I've done this you know in working of a sow sow in Africa they looked at the microbiome of these people eating more traditional diets and then compared to Western diets and what the microbiome is in there and they're completely different and you know that this is really an important thing that that I think probably happening in these cultures where they're all have much healthier digestion as much less autoimmune disease much more anti-inflammatory diets which is which is really what's driving their longevity because we know the longevity is really related to two things one is inflammation or lack of it and two is you know your ability to handle sugar and insulin so insulin sensitivity is another huge driver of longevity so all the things that you're talking about helped those mm-hmm helped those properties yeah the bacterias that favor meat cheese and eggs are gonna also produce as a by-product inflammatory right biochemical essentially though in the context like it you know this guy Cleveland Clinic that's interesting studies Stan Hazen worried he took meteors and then measured a molecule called TMAO you know about this data yeah yeah and he may measure this molecule that seems to be linked to heart disease I mean he somehow convinced vegans to eat a steak and then measure their levels and they didn't produce this nasty molecule even though they were eating the steak Oh interesting so this gun is because they they had healthy gut bacteria not producing these chemicals so you know there's some interesting data on like you know meat and whether it's harmful or helpful and a lot of it has to do with like what the context of overall diet is you know my view on medians I mean in all honesty and Blue Zones people did eat meat was you know they typically knew the name of the animal and they took care of the animal for a long time and then either go yeah yeah it was time for the wedding but you know it was infrequent often as a condiment but for my Blue Zones work and I work now in 26 cities with new clothes on projects and I have you know website meal planner what we made the decision to stay 100% plant-based on what within the blue zone family if you're eating a hundred percent plant base most people that you can pretty much turn off your brain if you're eating a whole food diverse you know the five foods I was talking about you can be pretty sure you're getting all the nutrients so there's some argument for pregnant women or yeah you know especially older people have a harder time digesting protein but I just figure within the blue zone or a 100% plant-based and outside of blue zones people can do whatever they want it's true you know but there is some evidence that you know long term vegan diets can lead to nutritional deficiencies unless you supplements such as b12 yeah omega-3 fats vitamin D iron and and even you know protein as we get older there's some studies that show that people who eat less protein when they're younger do better but as they get older you need more protein for muscle mass and there's a real sort of scientific debate going on now about you know approaching requirements as we get older and muscle mass and muscle mass is a single miss determinant of your insulin sensitivity your hormone level and Ageing yeah so you know you need three cups of beans to get what you'd get in a you know six sounds piece of fish or chicken right so how do you well but you know spinach ounce for ounce you get more protein out of spinach than you would out of beef so the thing is if you need an ounce of an ounce of spinach is like a ton of spinach yeah yeah I figured I need like I think eighty four cups of broccoli to get what you get in like your daily protein requirements if you're eating after to see Brock yeah well first of all according to CDC the average American gets about twice as much protein as they need for so to your point yes when you get to be seventy or eighty you may need a more easily digestible form of protein but I would argue that most Americans are our disease comes from overeating and over yeah I mean that the wrong kind of food which is usually meat not always I mean there's a few one percent of meat is you know grass-fed and if we ate it once or twice a week there'd be no problem but the reality is you know to send of the message that it's okay to meat meat or the longest of people in the world meat people take it the wrong way and if we continue eating it the way we eat in and we continue as experts keep sort of endorsing it right of course people want to hear it people more than say your pork right cuz it would justify you know bacon tastes good I know it's a bacon eteri any only its vegetarian begin except I can't wait to see him so I think you know I I I personally take it upon myself to be kind of an evangelist to bring people yeah first of all I know not everybody's gonna go over be vegan I don't think everybody should necessarily be vegan but if I can pull them from there you know on average two servings a day to two servings a week I feel like I've done a big yeah clearly and you're right defining the quality of the meat matters if it's all and grass fed bison from nobody gets that that's different right but I think are increasing there's an increasing movement to shift agriculture from factory farms to yeah but there's there is no way that 320 million people if we all had a serving grass-fed beef every day they would there's not enough land in America two feet so reality is we end up defaulting to the to the factory raised beef and pork and Japanese right and that needs to stop absolutely it's a huge issue and I could sell a lot more books if I if I endorsed me but I'm not going well it's it's an interesting dialogue right now I think it's it's still emerging and I'm sort of on the fence about it cuz I got and just need to see the data on regenerative agriculture you know if it's true that we can sequester all enough carbon and take us back to pre-industrial era that we can produce larger amounts of me not necessarily the amount that we're producing now which anything is sustainable and that would reverse climate change holds soil water and actually produce healthier animals so one of things you've done to help make it easier for people as you could this new app called the Blue Zones app yeah tell us about how that works what the benefits are how people can find it and use it yes so it's it is a tool very quick and very easy that helps you you load in your dietary restrictions you load in how many people you are you load in if you like to eat a lot if you're trying to eat for immediate health or for longevity and it generates not only grocery lists but also recipes and if you live in certain cities that'll actually place your order with the local grocer and the your house yeah it will show up your house ready to go and it come with cooking videos how to prepare the recipe because that would be awesome that we're waiting for Markheim and I'll do it together what cooks and great me all together nobody took God out and yeah chopped it's the newest thing I'm actually very excited about because like you so I started out with blues I was talking about purpose and the importance of the family and yeah you know I'm shifting but at the end of the day it you realize that the runway for health for most Americans is what we eat yes through our mouth you don't three times a day there are networks people love to eat so in the last year or two I've been really focusing on food and trying to really think through what the longest-lived people ate and how to translate it for American populations mm-hmm and the meal app is one in these recipes that we we've curated and I'm also I'm doing a book with National Geographic now and another story for the magazine where we've gone back to all five of the Blue Zones yes got people over 70 to cook for us because in all the Blue Zones areas since about 1970 is a big sea change yeah they start adopting the standard diet so their their health is starting to go to hell but we captured we had these old people cooking their traditional recipes and they're all peasant they're delicious they have hundreds of years of culinary wisdom wrapped into them and the techniques and the end the amounts and really cook them so I had this great photographer David mcclain I think he's the best photographer in National Geographic shoot the setting the preparation the people cooking the final dish and then I'm trying to take the science so the final book will be kind of a blend between an a cookbook and a national I love that well if you ever need a doctor to go on your trips you know a trip that travels there we go alright Okinawa next week so if you were king for a day and had the power to change our landscape around health and wellness and longevity what would you do in terms of policy law changed I like that question I've thought about that yeah number one I raised the price of gas you'll hate me for that he spit on my grape for this but raise the price of gasoline to $15 a gallon mm-hmm that will drive us out from behind our steering wheels onto our feet which is about half of the problem and if you have olive oil you get thousands of miles per gallon all right but I want people you know the happiest I just wrote a cover story and happiness for National Geographic I saw it the happiest people in America are living in places where it's very bikable and walkable there's a very high correlation and we're not going to start design designing our cities for humans until we wean ourselves from the car and hand that we have the amount we've driven over the last since 1980s about tripled it's been we spend way too much money in our car and then you know the biggest problem I I'd say part of the problem what with what we eat is our eating this much animal food as we do and the reason we do is because the inputs the corn soybeans wheat are so heavily subsidized you know the real cost of a five dollar hamburger is probably eighty dollars exactly if you take off so if we actually had to pay the real price of a hamburger we eat it once a week you know what should be fine what's the real cost of a can of coke right all these there's all these subsidies so so I would take away those subsidies those agricultural subsidies that enable us to buy these really cheap inputs and then create these pretty unhealthy pretty unhealthy foods and those by the way came under Nixon because the price of meat and milk were going up and he thought it was bad to get elected in that environment so he changed agricultural policies to promote the production of excess food at lower costs Earl Butz Earl Butz ya know there's a real name Robus yeah it was yeah Secretary of Agriculture you know it wasn't a bad idea then actually you know we didn't have an obesity problem in 1968 he thought we did that we did yeah it was about one third of what it is today so and then I think in schools we teach kids how to cook em you know the the No Child Left Behind instead of teaching in math they should be taught right away there's a very successful program in France called the epode program that teach first graders it's a six-week program that teach first graders what a vegetable is mm-hmm what it smells like what it sounds like finally what it tastes like and there's so many kids we work in the beach cities of California here and about 40% of the kids in that community could not correctly identify a banana as a fruit mm-hmm so or yeah Jamie Oliver did that show where he looked at in West Virginia these kids trying to ask him what an eggplant was her tomato or now they can't identify them so I mean that what we eat drives our productivity it drives our health care costs it drives our happiness we should be teaching this in the first grade like math it should be it should be a basic skill so what else would you do if you were king cooking and changing the diet and yes so I would I would limit the number I'm not saying there shouldn't be fast food but you can put this cities can choose to limit the number of fast foods I wouldn't have any billboards at all any place the happiest cities in America have no billboards who likes billboards by the way nobody except the guy who owns them in the advertiser there is a direct correlation between the amount of billboard junk food advertising and the obesity rate of the adjacent popular food marketing and as a whole yes billions of dollars so a law that completely eliminates that I I would probably make sodas a lot more expensive they are and they're the number one source of refined sugars in the American diet I would say second only to tobacco as a public health menace and we oughta they've exceeded in terms of global chronic disease obesity and diet-related diseases far outstripping smoking now I didn't know that but yeah this so the industry ought to pay for that or or we ought to pay the real costs for it so yeah and that would make the problem go away right so I it may be unpopular with the externalities have to be included in the price you know and Prince Charles talked about accounting for sustainability in his book the future of food was a speech he gave at George Washington University and basically said you know we're not in clowning for all the hidden costs of the degradation of the environment the climates change loss of soil the depletion of our water supplies to chronic disease burden the educational productivity losses and kids who can't function and go to college I mean all those things are not included in the price of the food we're eating and we arrived we've subsidized through so that fast food and junk food is 40% less and fruits and vegetables are 40% more since the 1970s which is yeah so that's well why are people yeah now you know why people are buying those things the last thing I do is I take a big chunk of the healthcare budget and probably you know tighten up on the number of heroic interventions we that typically are very expensive and shift that money to prevention yeah so Costa Rica which I just covered in this book Blue Zones of happiness every man woman and child in that entire country has the right of one visit a year from a health care ambassador they'll spend a half hour with you they'll take your blood pressure check you for diet for diabetes for depression to go out in your backyard and look for standing water to the look in your kitchen to look for signs of chronic disease they're catching chronic diseases before it's a three-alarm six figure yeah issue they spend 115 fee amount on health care that we do in the United States and have about 20% lower rate of lower mortality middle-aged mortality on we do so they're healthier they spend a fraction but there's instead of spending a thousand dollars fixing the disease they're spending a dollar to prevent it and yeah we ought to be doing that but we don't have the political courage our leaders don't have the political courage to shift that's true we're looking at food pharmacies as a sort of a medical intervention great prescriptions they found for a diabetic a thousand-dollar prescription that we pay for will save twenty four thousand dollars on the back end yeah you know it's pretty amazing well this has been a great conversation I people can find you wear it lose lose owns calm calm yes amazing work is it it's you know combines the two things that I'm most passionate which is the power of food and the power of community and building that sort of social structures that drive healthy behaviors which is like it's all interconnected it's diets and exercise they don't stand and they're all I think of it's like collagen it's like we holds your good-looking face in place totally together right and it's the sense of purpose it's the right social network it is living in the right community that hold the right kind of eating and physical activity in place so you do one for long enough to not get a chronic disease it's amazing well this has been Dan Buettner talking about the Blue Zones longevity and health the doctor's pharmacy we'll see you next time thank you very much mark you [Music]

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 46,202

Rating: 4.6701031 out of 5

Keywords: dr mark hyman, dr hyman, dr hyman interview, dan buettner, national geographic fellow, blue zones, what are blue zones, healthiest places in the world, blue zone, national geographic explorer, interview with national geographic explorer, interview dr mark hyman, mark hyman interview, mark hyman, real life indiana jones, indiana jones, how to be healthier, lose weight, diet advice

Id: YXS5i1ACRuU

Length: 46min 34sec (2794 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2018