Dan Buettner is the walking-talking embodiment of his health and wellness focused creation, Blue Zones. On a recent afternoon he pulled together a dinner party after work in an hour. A steaming pot of minestrone soup, cornbread and a tofu dessert were on the plant-based menu. His guests were one of his moais (pronounced “mo-eyes”), a Japanese word for a social support group. He’s part of another moai of 10 friends planning a week-long bicycle trip in Vietnam.
For more than 15 years, Buettner has pursued the secrets of healthy living and longevity, first as a National Geographic Explorer discovering regions of the world where people live long, healthy lives – regions he dubbed blue zones. That was followed by several best-selling books – most recently his cookbook, Blue Zones Kitchen, which includes the minestrone recipe – and founding the Blue Zones company. A decade ago he created Blue Zones Projects, partnerships with communities to promote better community health outcomes.
Buettner attended the Monterey County Blue Zones Project kickoff in Salinas last June. In January, the project began promoting walking moias, a chance for people to walk with a group of others partly for the physical activity, but also for fostering social connection, two Blue Zones principles.
Weekly: You’ve been a National Geographic Explorer. Did you imagine yourself exploring the globe as a kid?
Buettner: It happened slowly. I was born into a fairly lower-middle-class family and we camped at a nearby park for adventure, but when I was 14 I was selling newspaper subscriptions and winning trips to Spain and Africa and the Carribean and it got in my blood. I didn’t know how it would manifest, but after college, I set off biking from Alaska to Argentina and then across Africa. I definitely developed a zeal for adventure and exploration and discovery.
How many newspaper subscriptions did you have to sell to win trips to foreign countries?
Surprisingly not that much, maybe 100. That was in the heyday of newspapers when people got a morning and an afternoon newspaper and that was the main way for communication. I wish those days continued.
What started your career as an explorer and journalist?
When I was 14 I started biking bigtime, biking 80 miles from my home in St. Paul to my grandmother’s farm in rural Minnesota.
In my early years, I worked with George Plimpton who was a participatory journalist. He really got me thinking big and made me realize that you can shape your own future and you don’t have to be bound by the strictures of what people have done before you. I really started envisioning and inventing this career as an explorer and participatory journalist and it all began with the bike rides.
There are children now who are much less physically active than you were. Does that set them up for a life of inactivity?
Yes. In 1970, about 50 percent of kids walked to school and now we’re down to about 10 percent. There are two main reasons for that. The first is, the way the news has gone, hyperbole gets eyeballs. When a kid gets snatched, it’s front-page news for weeks. Every year around 100 kids are snatched and most are found. Meanwhile, more than 250,000 kids are injured in traffic accidents.
The second is the way we zoned our cities. It used to be that there were neighborhood schools where everyone could walk. Developers discovered you can buy a cheap tract of land and bus kids there and it seemed more economically attractive, but it’s wrong thinking because now kids are suffering from obesity, which will expose them to chronic disease. At Blue Zones we’re big proponents of getting kids walking to school again.
Part of Blue Zones is to create a supportive atmosphere where people can get healthy, but I can’t pump gas without getting hit by ads for soda and candy. What can a community do?
A courageous community will pass an ordinance that prohibits that or curbs it. You are right: The amount of junk food we consume is a function of how aggressively it is marketed to us. On our policy menus we have these ordinances that work elsewhere to curb junk food consumption. Whether or not there is the political will to adopt it, we don’t know yet.