What do people eat in the Blue Zones? | Dan Buettner and Professor Tim Spector

In ur heart, behave as a king. At your table, behave as a peasant.

What is a blue zone?

Peasant food for active people. Metabolically compromised, inactive people just get fat!

Blue Zone like Okinawa 'Island of Pork' where nobody eats pork.

Well, in Sardinia they enjoy amazing apricots as a favorite dessert and they use the whole apricot, including the kernel. That is the secret, definitely not the pork 😏

more like this please

Blue zones are regions in the world where people are claimed to live longer than average. The name Blue Zone derived from when scientists, during the original survey, used a blue pen to mark a map to show the areas with long lived populations. This is quoted directly from Wikipedia

The blue zones sound to me as if they have less stress on their bodies as well. Less air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, better sleep I suggest and less stress on the body. This their tissue and dna repair processes will be able to work better.

Interesting - only because this is more confusing than ever. Why post this, leaving us with more questions than before? Shepherds......... First fish consumed at 20? ..... Eating habits of only 6 (remote!) villages..... translate into a Blue Zone? Very limited access to healthy foods...? How do we draw conclusions for today's conditions? I guess we don't. Just eat whole food plant baased.

Didn’t you do this video about a month ago? I guess it’s good to reiterate on it.

Thanks Johnathan I know what "reductionist" means.

Dan seems to directly contradict one of the main Zoe messages at one point when he says habitants of the Blue Zones have very little variety, often only eating 20 different things according to season. The Zoe crew are always expressing the importance of variety for your microbiome... but if you are only surviving on a few foodstuffs - like the Sardinian shepherds eating mostly bread and cheese, but who still live to be centenarians... So what's that all about?

I once had lunch at the house of a little old lady in Nuoro, as I understand it on the edge of the blue zone. It was amazing! It was many, many years ago, so I don't remember the primo, but there was one. The secondo was lamb's inestines in a green pea sauce (it was spring). And finally there was an aged pecorino sarde and oranges. All with wine and water. Everything we ate and drank came from her family's land. What I'd like to say is that even though the products were cheap and in a sense primitive and the portions were not excessive, the food was rich in flavor and very diverse. The pasta and the sauce for the inestines were gathered in the mountains. And the cheese was funky!

Ya! and a whole lot of processed FAT! The Fat you eat is the Fat you wear!

Less diversity more quality

Funny thing about the “traditional” Italian “Pasta e Fagioli” dish : It wasn’t “a thing” until European navigator / explorers discovered Native Americans eating the beans that go into it. Then brought them back to Europe along with Tomatoes etc to be planted up and bred over here. That would have been around 600 years ago!

Take a look at Mary Ruddick’s review of so called ‘blue zones’ - it mostly a big con. Considering it was all started by the seventh day adventists who pretty much trademarked the name it’s no surprise it’s all BS

Outlawing growing things in gardens in the west

Simplistic whole food…key to life. Humans tend to make everything needlessly complicated.

I like the emphasis on peasant food—the simplicity of that description. Yes, I like variety, but it has to be simple enough to be sustainable in a busy schedule.

Maybe time to re-think the format of these conversations? Interruptions, asking experts to simplify, and a muddled summarising are becoming a tad irritating.

The fact that alot of these blue zone communities were poor, probably kinda rationing their food. Would not suprise me that caloric restriction and fasting played a major role in their longevity. Not having access to ultra processed foods ofcourse helps. Living in pristine nature and air with a good sense of community all help alot more than some "magic" bean imho.

Don't pay attention to the super wealthy overweight guy on the left who is going to fancy steak restaurants and eating rich foods which is going to wreck his health, just follow what the Okinawans do, "The present paper examines the relationship of nutritional status to further life expectancy and health status in the Japanese elderly based on 3 epidemiological studies. 1. Nutrient intakes in 94 Japanese centenarians investigated between 1972 and 1973 showed a higher proportion of animal protein to total proteins than in contemporary average Japanese. 2. High intakes of milk and fats and oils had favorable effects on 10-year (1976-1986) survivorship in 422 urban residents aged 69-71. The survivors revealed a longitudinal increase in intakes of animal foods such as eggs, milk, fish and meat over the 10 years."

Dude is projecting his ignorance on ethnicities he sees as "the other"

Just eat meat. All else is superfluous and deleterious. The "Blue Zones" are a farce. So embarrassing to hear these fools babble about beans.

Cherry picked data at its finest

Beans pasta noodles vegetables plus some eggs cheese butter

All evolution is facilitating the gut biome to thrive. Sight, hearing, moving, tasting, we are no more than a glorified and intricate composting tract.
Keep the bacteria in your gut happy and you are good.

Are the "Peasant Foods" in the western world, really "real" peasant foods? Have we not OVER farmed/ modified them?? Is it really possible to now eat in the way our grandparents actually did? 🤔🤐

Top candidate for blue zone in the UK was Tower Hamlets, a socially deprived inner city area in London with highest density housing and short average life expectancy. Astoundingly the borough had 15 people over the age of 105, however they all magically disappeared when the Department of Work and Pensions did a crackdown. Greek blue zone evaporated after similar investigations as have several others.

I read the Hunter-gatherers guide to the 21st century. They recommend eating seasonal whole foods, regionally based on your heritage.

RAMADHANUL KAREEM

Meat is the superfood. Hong Kong is the true blue zone and consume an awful lot of meat !

There is enough evidence to suggest that the ‘blue zones’ are a total fabrication. Each one has been debunked multiple times on multiple levels - from what they actually eat to how old they really are. I’d not rely on this to decide what to eat lol

What is the bean recipe?

Can someone please explain what the heck a blue zone is?

Blueberries, of course.

Tim is missing the point. We have to bring in the poor and poorly educated by reminding ourselves that beans and whole grain, maybe tomatoes and chilli’s can provide the doorway into health

This channel is neither Fisch nor Fleisch. What a load of rubbish about peasant foods, really. Just a romantic idea by Americans who know nothing about Europe. Where‘s the science here? And anyway, nutrition is anything but an exact science - stlll. The only take-away is trying to get as much healthy exercise as possible. Do that, no junk food and the rest is in the hands of the gods and your genes…

The Ikaria study left out these foods in the questionnaire.
Goat
pork
lamb
dairy

The most consumed foods

Tim Spector doesn’t like the “eat like a peasant” talk, because peasants don’t buy apps. He immediately had to change to topic to obscure Japanese fermented foods

A lot of talk for very little content.

So I recall an Italian professor researching long lived people from Sicily , he said “ it’s not the food , he could only put it down to there working in the fields every day , walking , bending , lifting etc I tend to think it’s both 😎

I have been watching your podcasts for awhile. I am just concerned about availability of high quality foods in the store in the US. For example, I can’t even find plain organic nuts at the grocery store that don’t have lots of salt or added seed oils that are inflammatory. There are no healthy breads in the store so I make my own. I buy my nuts online. It is a real effort now. I have the time to research and find healthy options because I’m retired. If you work full time like most people, it would be difficult. These food corporations need to be held accountable for the diseases they are creating in us.

Extract from Mail Drop, Arnold’s Pump Club

The shocking discovery was made by Saul Justin Newman, an Ig Nobel Prize winner and senior research fellow at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies.

Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these (110 year-old) people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.
Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.
The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.