Late on a sunny morning, Dan Buettner is in his kitchen ladling steaming bowls of minestrone—his daily longevity-boosting staple—casually chatting about the mysteries that launched the global wellness movement he pioneered. The explorer-turned-author and National Geographic fellow has spent decades traveling the world in search of places where people routinely live to 100. But these days, he calls Miami Beach home.
Despite the success of Blue Zones, now a household name embedded in the cultural lexicon, Buettner still embodies the curious spirit that first ignited his work. Sitting down together in Miami, it’s clear he remains, first and foremost, an explorer. And he’s not above personally preparing and serving a bowl of his famous three-bean, 12-vegetable Sardinian minestrone when your interview happens to stretch past lunchtime; this writer can confirm his claim that healthy food can be, as he says, “maniacally delicious.” (And he doesn’t skimp on the good stuff: real Parmesan, he points out, is a probiotic.)
Unlike many wellness pioneers, Buettner didn’t set out to live forever and sell you a path to do the same. His journey toward becoming the longevity figurehead he is today began decades ago—perhaps even in childhood, when he recalls being intrigued by a 1974 National Geographic article on long-lived people in the Vilcabamba Valley of Ecuador and Soviet Georgia. Years later, while running an exploration company called the Quest Network specializing in expeditions that solve ancient anthropological mysteries, he was still intrigued.
“We stumbled upon a World Health Organization report in 1999 that pointed to a cluster of islands in Southeast Asia as having the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world,” Buettner explains. “I said, ‘Aha, that’s a good mystery.’” And he set out to solve it.
Armed with a grant from the National Institute on Aging and, eventually, an assignment from National Geographic, he went seeking what are now known as Blue Zones. The process was unglamorous at first: parsing through worldwide census data, scouring for regions with very low rates of mortality. He and his team narrowed it down to a core five: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California, where a tight-knit community of (largely vegetarian) Seventh-day Adventists seem to live forever.
On an early trip to Okinawa, fascinated by all the 100-year-olds in the region—“mostly women, by the way”—Buettner was eager to uncover the constellation of variables that could explain their abnormally long lives; about 20 times more women there make it to 100 than women in other places, and it’s not merely genetic. Buettner cites the Danish Twin Studies, which established that only about 20 percent of how long we live is dictated by our genes—in other words, 80 percent of the longevity formula is something other than the dumb luck we’re born with.
“We reasoned we’d find that formula if we could travel to all five [Blue Zones] and identify the common denominators,” Buettner recalls. And so he did.
The work of researcher Gianni Pes was foundational to Buettner’s. Pes had verified villages with about 10 times more centenarians than the United States with a blue check mark. In Sardinia’s Ogliastra region, he had so many checks that he called it a “blue zone.” When they met, Buettner loved the term and adopted it to describe “a demographically confirmed, geographically defined area where people are living the longest in the world.” And the concept of Blue Zones was born.
That initial notion has blossomed into a large lifestyle and consulting company spanning cookbooks, a Netflix documentary series, an eponymous podcast, a line of frozen foods stocked in major grocers like Publix, Whole Foods, and Costco, consulting work for municipalities on increasing longevity or developing into Blue Zones, and more.
And that’s to say nothing of Buettner’s three Guinness World Records for endurance cycling. He’s completed epic journeys including a 15,500-mile stint from Alaska to Argentina, a ride around the world along the forty-fifth parallel, and a haul along the entire continent of Africa, north to south.
An adventurer first, he came by his calling honestly and remains true to those roots; he’s no wellness guru eager to sell you the latest supplement stack. “I did not set out to make the world healthier,” the Minnesota native reflects. “I set out to solve a mystery, and it turns out that there’s lots of real practical applications for it.”
Some of those applications include, well, not trying so hard. Buettner has found that living long isn’t a matter of making short-term lifestyle changes, implementing a 25-step supplement routine, or adopting healthy habits that require effort to sustain. Rather, longevity hinges on your environment and the life you organically live within it. We can use modern science to understand what’s going on and why, but it’s not about spending millions in efforts to “not die.” Most people in Blue Zones live decidedly simple but—and this is key—fulfilling lives.
Their dietary trends reflect the same. One common lifestyle factor in Blue Zones is a plant-slanted “peasant diet” with an emphasis on beans; as a primary source of protein, they give you half your daily fiber needs and “about four extra years of life expectancy,” says Buettner. Meat is included in the typical Blue Zones diet as a celebratory food, consumed about five times a month.
Which brings us back to that Sardinian minestrone. It’s one of Buettner’s daily nonnegotiables, a recipe he adopted from the longest-lived family in the world, the Melis, who have a combined age of 841 years between their nine oldest family members.
Buettner’s other everyday musts? Aside from naps, he’d drop everything in his routine except exercise. “I do something active every day that I enjoy, and I’m very militant about that.”
When he’s not traveling for National Geographic, he rises at 7 a.m. and cycles to Caffe Umbria to write (his next book examines newly manufactured Blue Zones, where people live the longest in full health due to good leadership producing healthier lives). Around noon, he eats his minestrone then goes for a walk or a swim in the ocean, reserving his afternoons for business work before wrapping around 5 p.m. and hitting a gym, going on a bike ride, playing pickleball at Miami Beach Golf Club, or practicing at Sol Yoga in Sunset Harbor.
According to Buettner, the way longevity really works is not as a goal we should pursue, but as an outcome that ensues. “It’s a byproduct of the right environment,” he says. “Nobody in Blue Zones is taking supplements or biohacks or running down to Costa Rica for stem cells. They’re just living their lives. But the insight here is very powerful: instead of trying to change your behavior and find a habit, you want to change your environment.”
It’s a concept reiterated in his Emmy Award–winning 2023 Netflix documentary series, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. Longevity is best achieved not by trying to prevent death, but by learning how to live.
That’s part of his mission in Miami Beach, where he already lives in a veritable Blue Zone—at least when it comes to the view. His habitat is a peaceful South Beach condo with expansive views of, yes, the blue Atlantic. His own longevity-friendly lifestyle works well here, but he’s on a mission to spread the ethos.
With parks, beaches, recreation stations, easy access to the sea, and a vibrant community of locals, he sees Miami Beach as a city on the upswing, well situated to become a designated Blue Zone. And so does city leadership.
“Miami Beach is flexing its muscle to enhance its reputation as a global health, fitness, and wellness destination,” says Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner. “By integrating Blue Zones principles, we are sprinting with an action plan and designing a city that fosters longevity, connection, and a vibrant way of life for everyone in Miami Beach.”
Buettner agrees. “I travel all over the world all the time and I think this is one of the most exciting cities in the world right now,” he says. “It definitely has this feeling of a boomtown.”
Miami is an ideal base for him to continue his work. “I tried to retire five years ago, and I failed at that miserably,” Buettner muses. “I’ve realized that what makes life worth living is being useful and putting your purpose to work—and, lo and behold, that also makes you live longer.”
It’s why he’s back, after a five-year hiatus, at the helm of Blue Zones. He also has a documentary sequel underway (this time for National Geographic and the Disney Channel) and pending Blue Zones projects in dozens of cities across America, including Jacksonville and, hopefully, Miami Beach.
The father of three is particularly proud of Blue Zones Kitchen, too. “We’ve sold over 2 million meals already, and I literally look at that as public health,” he says. “We lose about 320,000 Americans to eating the standard American diet a year. So even though I operate in the private sector, it’s a public good.”
At age 65, Buettner finds it all fulfilling enough to keep going, which, really, is what matters most. “I interviewed over 400 centenarians, and I don’t know a single one of them who didn’t want to live to 101,” he says with a laugh. After all, what’s the point in racking up the years if you’re miserable for them?
Of his own longevity goals, he says, “I happen to know my life expectancy right now is about 94, but over the past 140 years, life expectancy has increased 2.5 years per decade. So, I’m on track to live to be 100, but I’m just living a good Blue Zones life. It’s not like this hell-bent mission to make it to 100, but I think I’ll probably make it.” «
What’s most important isn’t whether he does or doesn’t—it’s the way he enjoys the ride along the way.
Facebook Comments