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How to live to be 100+ - Dan Buettner | TED-Ed | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: How to live to be 100+ - Dan Buettner
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[Music] [Applause]
something called the Danish twin study
established that only about
10% of how long the average person lives
within certain biological limits is
dictated by our genes the other 90% is
dictated by our lifestyle so the premise
of Blue zone is if we can find the
optimal lifestyle of longevity we can
come up with a deao formula for
longevity but if you ask the average
American what the optimal formula of
longevity is they probably couldn't tell
you they've probably heard of the South
Beach Diet or the Atkins diet and you
have the USDA food pyramid there's what
Oprah tells us there's what Dr Oz tells
us the fact of the matter is there's a
lot of confusion around what really
helps us live longer better should you
be running marathons or doing yoga
should you eat organic meats or should
you be eating tofu when it comes to
supplements should you be taking them uh
how about these hormones or Resveratrol
and does purpose play into it
spirituality and how about how we
socialize well our approach to finding
longevity was to team up with National
Geographic and the National Institute on
Aging to find the four demographically
confirmed areas that are geographically
defined and then bring a team of experts
in there to methodically go through
exactly what these people to to distill
down the crosscultural
distillation and at the end of this I'm
going to tell you what that distillation
is but first I'd like to debunk some
common myths when it comes to longevity
and the first myth is if you try really
hard you can live to be a
100 false the problem is only about one
out of 5,000 people in a America uh live
to be a 100 your chances are are very
low even though it's the fastest growing
demographic in America it's hard to
reach 100 the problem is that we are not
programmed for longevity we are program
for something called procreative success
I love that word it reminds me of my college
college
days biologist term procreative success
to to mean the age where you have
children and then another generation the
age when your children have children
after that the effect of evolution completely
completely
dissipates if you're a mammal uh if
you're a rat or an elephant or a human
in between it's the same story so to
make it to age 100 you not only have to
have had a very good lifestyle you also
have to have won the genetic Lottery the
second myth is there are treatments that
can help slow reverse or even stop aging
false when you think of it there's 99
things that can age US deprive your
brain of oxygen for just a few minutes
those brain cells die they never come
back play tennis too hard on your knees
ruin your cartilage that cartilage Never
Comes Back Our arteries can clog our
brains can Gunk up with plaque and we
can get
Alzheimer's there's just too many things
to go wrong our bodies have
35 trillion cells
with the tea we're talking national debt numbers
numbers
here those cells turn themselves over
once every eight years and every time
they turn themselves over there's some
damage and that damage builds up and it
builds up exponentially it's a little
bit like the days when we all had uh
beetles albums or Eagles albums and we
make a copy of that on a cassette tape
and then let our friends copy that
cassette tape and pretty soon with
successive Generations that tape sounds
like garbage well the same things happen
to ourselves that's why why a
65-year-old person is aging at a rate of
about 125 times faster than a 12-year-old
12-year-old
person so if there's nothing you can do
to slow your aging or stop your aging
what am I doing here well the fact of
the matter is the best science tells us
that the capacity of the human body my
body your body is about 90 years a
little bit more for women but life
expectancy in this country is only
78 so somewhere along the line we're
leaving about 12 good years on the table
these are years that um we could get and
they uh research shows that they could
that they would be years largely free of
chronic disease heart heart disease
cancer and diabetes we think uh the best
way to get these Missing Years is to
look at the cultures around the world
that are actually experiencing them
areas where people are living to age 100
at rates up to 10 times greater than we
are areas where the life expectancy is
an extra Dozen Years and the rate of
middle-aged mortality is a fraction of
what it is in this
country we found our first Blue Zone
about 125 miles off the coast of Italy
on the island of Sardinia and not the
entire Island the Island's about 1.4
million people but only up in the
highlands an area called The noral
Province and here we have this area
where men live the longest about 10
times more centenarians than we have
here in America and this is a place
where people not only reach age 100 they
do so with extraordinary Vigor places
where 102 year olds still ride their
bike to work chop wood and can beat a
guy 60 years younger than
them their history actually goes back to
about the time of Christ it's actually a
Bronze Age culture that's been isolated
because the land is so infertile they're
largely Shepherds which occasions
regular low intensity physical activity
their diet is mostly plant-based exent
ated with foods that they can carry into
the fields they came up with an
unleavened whole wheat bread called
notus made out of Durham wheat a type of
cheese made from grass-fed um animals so
it's high the cheese is high in omega-3
fatty acids instead of omega-6 fatty
acids from cornfed animals and a type of
wine that has three times the level of
polyphenols than any known wine in the
world it's called kanau but the real
secret I think lies more in the way that
they organized their society and one of
the most Salient elements of the
Sardinian Society is how they treat older
older
people you ever notice here in America
social Equity seems to Peak at about age
24 you just look at the advertisements
uh here in Sardinia the older you get
the more Equity you have the more wisdom
you're celebrated for uh you go into the
bars in Sardinia instead of seeing the
Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar you
see the centenarian of the month
calendar this is a turns off is not only
good for your aging parents to keep them
close to the family it imparts about
four to 6 years of extra life expectancy
research shows it's also good for the
children of those families who have
lower rates of mortality and lower rates
of disease that's called the grandmother
effect we found our second Blue Zone on
the other side of the planet about 800
miles south of Tokyo on the archipelago
of Okinawa Okinawa is actually 161 small
island islands and in the northern part
of the main island uh this is Ground
Zero for World longevity uh this is a
place where the oldest living female
population is found it's a place where
people have the longest disability-free
life expectancy in the world they have
what we want they live a long time and
tend to die in their sleep very quickly
and often I can tell you after
sex they live about seven good years
longer than the average American five
times as many centenarians as we have
America 1/5th the rate of colon and
breast cancer big Killers here in
America and one sixth the rate of
cardiovascular disease and the fact that
this culture has yielded these numbers
suggest strongly they have something to
teach us what do they do once again a
plant-based diet full of vegetables with
lots of color in them and they eat about
eight times as much tofu As Americans do
more significant than what they eat it's
how they eat it
they have all kinds of little strategies
to keep from overeating which as you
know is a big problem here in America a
few of the strategies we observe they
eat off of smaller plates so they tend
to eat fewer calories at every sitting
instead of serving family style where
you can sort of mindlessly eat as you're
talking they serve at the counter put
the food away and then bring it to the
table they also have a 3,000-year-old
Adit which I think is the greatest sort
of diet suggestion ever invented was
invented by confucious and that uh diet
is known as the hadachi Buu diet it's
simply a little saying these people say
before their meal to remind them to stop
eating when their stomach is 20% full it
takes about a half hour for that full
feeling to go travel from your belly to
your brain and by remembering to stop at
80% it helps keep you from doing that
very thing but like Sardinia okanawa has
a few social constructs that we can
associate with
longevity we know that isolation kills
15 years ago the average American had
three good friends we're down to one and
a half right now if you were lucky
enough to be born in Okinawa you were
born into a system where you
automatically have a half a dozen
friends with whom you travel through
life uh they call it a moai and if
you're in a moai you're expected to
share the Bounty if you uh if you
encounter luck and if things go bad a
child gets sick a parent dies you always
have somebody who has your back this
particular moai these five ladies have
been together for 97 years their average
age is
102 typically in America we've divided
our adult life up into two uh sections
there's our work life where we're
productive and then one day boom we
retire and typically that is meant um
retiring to the easy chair going down to
Arizona to to play golf uh in the okan
language there's not not even a word for
retirement instead there's one word that
imbus your entire life and that word is
eeky guy and roughly translated it means
the reason for which you wake up in the
morning and for this 102y old karate
master hiiki guy was carrying forth this
martial art for this 100-year-old
fisherman it was continuing to catch
fish for his family three times a week
and this is a question the National
Institute on Aging actually gave us a
questionnaire to give these centenarians
and one of the questions they were very
culturally astute people put the
questionnaire one of the questions was
what is your eeky guy they instantly
knew why they woke up in the
morning for this 102y old woman or eeky
guy uh was simply her great great great
granddaughter uh two girls separated an
age by 101 and a half years and and I
asked her what it felt like uh to hold a
great great great granddaughter and she
put her head back and she said it feels
like leaping into heaven thought that
was a wonderful thought my editor at
Geographic wanted me to find America's
Blue Zone and for a while we looked on
the Prairies of Minnesota where actually
there's a very high proportion of
centenarians but that's because all the
so so we turned to the data again and we
found America's longest lived population
among the Seventh Day Advent VST
concentrated in and around Lolinda
California Adventists are conservative
methodists they celebrate their Sabbath
from sunset on Friday till sunset on
Saturday a a 24-hour sanctuary in time
they call it and they follow five little
habits that conveys to them
extraordinary longevity comparatively
speaking in America here life expectancy
for the average woman is 80 but for an
Adventist women their life expectancy is
89 and the difference is even more
pronounced among men who are expected to
live about 11 years longer than their
American counterparts now this is a
study that followed about 70,000 people
for 30 years Sterling study and I think
it supremely illustrates the premise of
this Blue Zone project this is a heterog
genius Community it's white black
Hispanic Asian the only thing they have
in common are set of very small
lifestyle habits that they follow
ritualistically for most of their lives
they take their diet directly from the
Bible Genesis 1 verse 26 where God talks
about legumes and seeds and on one more
stanza about uh green plants ostensibly
missing his meat they take this
sanctuary in time very
serious for 24 hours every week no
matter how busy they are how stressed
out they are at work where the kids need
to be driven they stop everything and
they focus on their God their social
network and then hardwired right in the
religion are nature walks and the power
of this is not that it's done
occasionally the power is it's done
every week for a lifetime none of it's
hard none of it costs money Adventists
also tend to hang out with other
Adventists so if you go to an Adventist
party you don't see people swelling Jim
Beam or rolling a joint instead they're
talking about their next nature walk
exchanging recipes and yes uh they pray
but they influence each other in
profound and measurable
ways this is a culture that has yielded
Ellsworth Wham Ellsworth Wham is 97
years old he's a
multi-millionaire yet when a contractor wanted
wanted
$6,000 to build a privacy fence he said
for that kind of money I'll do it myself
so for the next three days he was out
shoveling cement and Hauling poles
around and predictably perhaps on the
fourth day he ended up in the operating
room but not as the guy on the table the
guy uh doing open heart
surgery at 97 he still does 20 open hard
surgeries every
month Ed Rollins 103 years old now an
active Cowboy starts his morning with
the swim and on the weekends he likes to
put on the boards through all rooster
taals and then Marg toon U Marge is a
104 her grandson actually lives in the
Twin Cities here she starts her day with
lifting weights she rides her bicycle
and then she gets in a rot beer colored
1994 Cadillac Seville and tears down the
San Bernardino freeway where she still
volunteers for seven different
organizations I've been on 19 hardcore
Expeditions I'm probably the only person
you'll ever meet who rode his bicycle
across the Sahara Desert without
sunscreen uh but I'll tell you there was
no Adventure more ing than riding
shotgun with Mar
chatan a stranger is a friend I haven't
met yet you'd say to
me so what are the common denominators
in these in these three cultures what
are the things that they all do and we
managed to boil it down to nine in fact
we've done two more Blue Zone
Expeditions since this um and these
Comin nominators hold true and the first
one and I'm about to utter heresy here
none of them exercise at least the way
we think of exercise instead they set up
their lives so that they're constantly
nudged into physical activity these
100-year-old okan women are getting up
and down off the ground they sit on the
floor 30 or 40 times a day uh sardinians
live in vertical houses up and down the
stairs every trip to the store or to
church or to the friend's house
occasions a walk they don't have any
conveniences there's not a button to
push to do yard work or house work if
they want to mix up a cake they're doing
it by hand that's physical activity that
burns calories just as much is going on
the treadmill does when they do do
intentional physical activity it's
things they enjoy they tend to walk the
only proven way to Stave off cognitive
decline and they all tend to have a
garden they know how to set up their
life in the right way so they have the
right Outlook each of these cultures
take time to downshift the sardinians
pray the
seventh day Adventists pray the okan
have this ancestor veneration but when
you're in a hurry or stressed out that
trigger something called the
inflammatory response which is
associated with everything from
Alzheimer Alzheimer's disease to
cardiovascular disease when you slow
down for 15 minutes a day you turn that
inflammatory State into a more
anti-inflammatory State they have
vocabulary for sense of purpose iyy like
the owans you know the two most
dangerous years in your life are the
year you're born because of infant
mortality and the year you retire these
people know their sense of purpose and
they activate in their life that's worth
about seven years of extra life
expectancy there's no longevity diet
instead these people drink a little bit
every day not a hard sell to the American
American
population they tend to eat a
plant-based diet doesn't mean they don't
eat meat but lots of beans and nuts and
they have strategies to keep from
overeating little things that nudge them
uh away from the table at the right time
and and then the foundation of all this
is how they connect they put their
families first take care of their
children and their aging parents uh they
all tend to belong to a faith-based
community which is worth between four
and 14 extra years of life expectancy if
you do it four times a month and the
biggest thing here is they also belong
to the right tribe they were either born
into or they proactively surrounded
themselves with the right people we know
from the framing studies that if your
three best friends are obese there's a
50% better chance that you'll be
overweight so if you hang out with
unhealthy people that's going to have a
measurable impact over time instead if
your if your friend's idea of of
recreation is physical activity bowling
or playing hockey or biking or gardening
if your friends drink a little but not
too much and they eat right and they're
engaged and they're trusting and
trustworthy that is going to have the
biggest impact over time diets don't
work no diet in the history of the world
has ever worked for more than 2% of the
population exercise programs usually
start in January they're usually done by
October when it comes to longevity there
is no short-term fix in a pill or anything
anything
else but when you think about about it
your friends are long-term adventures
and therefore perhaps the most
significant thing you can do to add more
years to your life and Life to your
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