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The quest to live longer, healthier, and more vibrant lives is a universal human aspiration. Yet, for many dwelling in bustling urban centers like Los Angeles, the struggle to maintain balanced meals, regular exercise, and the serene mindset that minimizes stress makes this goal feel elusive. This very challenge highlights why America’s calling for community well-being is growing louder.
The Genesis of Blue Zones: Discovering the World’s Longevity Hotspots
Enter the “blue zones” concept, a term coined nearly two decades ago by journalist Dan Buettner. In collaboration with National Geographic and a dedicated team of scientists, Buettner embarked on explorations and research from the world’s most extraordinary populations to uncover the best kept longevity secrets. Their mission: to identify places where people not only live exceptionally long lives but also maintain a high quality of life well into their later years.
They pinpointed five such places, where residents share common lifestyle factors made a significant impact on their longevity, often reaching 100 years with healthy bodies and minds.
These habits include natural daily movement, a sense of purpose (often called “plan de vida” in places like Nicoya, Costa Rica), intentional stress reduction, a diet rich in vegetables (often plant-based food) over meat, and a practice to stop eating when 80% full. Enjoying olive oil, whole grains, and even wine (like other wines in moderation) with meals and friends, alongside strong social circles that reinforce healthy actions and foster emotional happiness, are also key. These are hallmarks of the world’s longest-lived cultures.
“Instead of looking for answers in a test tube or a petri dish, we found real populations where people are living measurably longer,” Buettner tells ETA in an enlightening conversation.
“We really focused on making sure that these places were true longevity hotspots, and then with another team of experts, we did the correlations on the common denominators and what comes up is not at all what people think when it comes to longevity.”
The Power of Environment: Shaping Health Unconsciously
Buettner explains their community successes by highlighting crucial differences in blue zone regions. “These people aren’t taking any pills or supplements, they’re not on diets and they don’t do exercise in gyms. Instead, it’s a holistic approach to longevity that focuses on not trying to change your behavior, but on shaping your environment, so your unconscious decisions are better on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis for the long term.”
This philosophy underscores that creating healthier environments is foundational to lasting well-being. The focus is less on forced individual behavior change; Blue Zones helps communities make permanent and semi-permanent adjustments to their surroundings.
The First Five Blue Zones, Plus New Hotspots
Those first five blue zones have stood the test of time, remaining locales where the inherent environment creates something special, an area where Buettner says people are “statistically living up to a decade longer than the rest of us.”
They are all across the planet, from Loma Linda, California to Greek island, Ikaria, Italy’s Sardinia, Japan’s Okinawa archipelago and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. These represent some of the world’s most extraordinary populations.
Over the years, Buettner and his Blue Zones LLC company have worked to apply our groundbreaking research, helping American communities adopt the principles of the original five. The aim is to design programs that empower everyone everywhere to change their city’s actual environment, fostering a culture of community well-being. This work to create healthier environments seems to be yielding positive results, aiming to transform communities.
“We go to a place, we certify restaurants, grocery stores, workplaces, schools and faith-based communities who all agree to change their designs and their policies so that they nudge people into moving more, eating less, eating better, socializing more,” said Buettner.
These initiatives, known as Blue Zones Project communities, have included the beach cities of L.A.’s South Bay (Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach), which underwent an environmental makeover starting in 2010.
“Instead of looking for answers in a test tube or a petri dish, we found real populations where people are living measurably longer.”
— Dan Buettner
“Those beach cities in California give us credit for lowering their obesity rates by 20 to 30% and lowering smoking by 36%. And we did it not by hounding everybody – those 125,000 people in the beach cities – but by helping the cities adopt policies that favor the nonsmoker over the smoker, that favor the pedestrian and bicyclists over the motorist, that favor healthy food over junk food and junk food marketing,” said Buettner.
This illustrates how changing a place’s environment fundamentally alters the health and longevity of its citizens. The goal is making the healthy choice unconscious, which in turn can raise life expectancy. This approach is pivotal in changing the country’s culture of well-being.
Other U.S. cities benefiting from this model include Spencer, Iowa; Albert Lea, Minnesota; Klamath Falls, Oregon; and Fort Worth, Texas. Each is reshaping its urban landscape to build in a shift towards wellness, contributing to reduced rates of chronic disease like heart disease, and positively impacting healthcare costs and improving workforce productivity. Indeed, well-being reducing healthcare costs is a significant benefit, with some metrics showing health improvements reaching their lowest level in nearly two decades for certain negative trends.
Bringing Blue Zone Principles to Your Doorstep and Life Radius
Buettner suggests that these larger community changes are complemented by smaller adjustments within your own life and home—your immediate life radius, the area close to where you work, learn, and play. “It’s really about looking at the environment that you live with from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed at night and engineering them with some defaults and nudges that are going to make you unconsciously make better decisions,” he posits.
Taking small steps toward wellness isn’t overly complex. “Find the ways to set up your home, your workplace, your commute, your social circle, so that the healthy choice is easy. For example, Cornell Food Lab found that you can engineer about 200 calories out of your day by setting up your kitchen by establishing an out-of-the-way junk food drawer, as opposed to putting food on the counter,” he asserts. Information on longevity foods, beverages, and plant-based food products can be found through resources like the Blue Zones Store can help guide these choices, potentially featuring collections inspired by these regions.
“I could tell you, ‘Don’t eat chips, and develop a habit not to eat chips.’ Or I could tell you, ‘Find a drawer that is around the corner in a pantry, or that you have to stoop for or reach up for and put your junk food there, and your consumption is going to go down.’ We’re talking probably single digit percentages with these things, but that adds up enormously over time.”
Exploring the Original Blue Zones
Loma Linda, California’s own blue zone city, is a community distinguished by its medical school and a large Seventh-day Adventist population. Their remarkable longevity is linked to their commitment to vegetarianism and regular physical activity.
They abstain from smoking and alcohol, contributing to a life expectancy typically at least 10 years longer than the average American. While this small city boasts numerous parks and a nature preserve, its distinction largely stems from the faith-based, healthy lifestyle its citizens embrace.
Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, in contrast, is an enticing destination that has fully embraced its blue zone status. This stunning tropical Pacific Coast region has seen development, like paved roads and beachfront resorts, since its designation, inviting more tourists to explore this once-remote part of Central America’s most welcoming country and its blue zone heartland. Many visitors come to understand the local concept of “plan de vida,” or reason to live.
Consider Hotel Nantipa in Santa Teresa, at the peninsula’s southern tip. Here, the focus is on “individualized ‘blue’ wellness journeys,” encouraging visitors to engage with the local community. This aligns perfectly with Dan Buettner’s advice on visiting blue zones not as a “luxury tourist” confined to a resort, but as an active participant.
“If you go and see these places with an inquisitive mind, as an inquisitive person, really interested in the cultures of the blue zones, you can observe those subtle but powerful environmental components that, when you live in this environment for decades, produces longevity,” he explained.
Buettner is emphatic that vacationing in blue zone regions offers true value only when visitors immerse themselves in the local culture and its rhythm, often including an early evening spent connecting with others. “You’ll get a glimpse of it, you’ll get a glimpse of the social interaction, of the diet. You’ll get a glimpse of the way they move naturally and get physical activity without even thinking about it, because a journey in any direction is a walk uphill or down.
Your recreation is going to be walking down to a beach and taking a swim or walking up in the hills. You’re going to eat corn tortillas and beans, drink local wine, stay up late at night, listen to music and maybe dance with locals. That’s a real blue zone.”
Wellness in Okinawa.
A visit to Okinawa might involve a stay at Hoshinoya Okinawa, a resort that integrates the area’s blue zone elements. It connects visitors through programs featuring local customs, music, weaving, nature walks, and dining on plant-based foods.
Journeying to Ikaria, Greece’s small North Aegean island, means discovering tiny hotels in quaint fishing villages. Settling in, one finds that a perfect day with the long-lived locals includes an ocean swim, a Mediterranean meal shared with friends, and a restorative nap. It’s a lifestyle that’s hard not to embrace.
If you’re interested in exploring other destinations in the region, check out this guide on where to stay in Santorini.
Sardinia, another Mediterranean island (under Italian jurisdiction), was the first blue zone identified. While a genetic marker (M26) contributes to longevity here, undiluted by Sardinia’s isolation, the population also adheres to a traditional, balanced diet of natural, foraged, fished, or hunted foods.
Alongside a vegetable-heavy diet and one to two glasses of local wine daily, visitors will find Sardinia’s infrastructure encourages frequent walking, embodying a perfect balance of blue zone qualities.
Sardina ZonaBlu tours offer small groups access to “ancient wisdom and life rhythms that can only be experienced through mingling with the locals.” The life expectancies of centenarians in the Blue Zones are a testament to these ingrained habits.
Bringing Blue Zone Wisdom Home for Lasting Change
However, as Buettner emphasizes, returning home and forgetting the lessons learned is counterproductive to the goal of living longer with physical and mental clarity. The aim is to transform your life by integrating these principles.
“The average person, if they’re an American, can live somewhere between 10 and 15 extra years. Your body has the capacity to go an extra 10 to 15 years,” he said, a significant increase compared to the current life expectancy of Americans.
“You deserve those years, and looking for answers in the blue zone, among real people who achieve the outcomes that we all want, is the best place to find those answers and a realistic key to longevity. And remember, it’s about changing your own environment, reshaping our environment so that the healthy choice is unconscious, which then raises your life expectancy.”
These factors made a significant difference for the world’s longest-lived people and can inspire how Blue Zones helps communities make lasting improvements so more people can live better, longer. The Blue Zones life resources, inspired by the world’s original longevity hotspots, offer a pathway to not just add years to life, but life to years.
