The Real Life Diet of Blue Zones Founder Dan Buettner, Who Cooks Recipes From the Longest-Living Family in the World

Photograph: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

Conversations with Blue Zones founder Dan Buettner are always invigorating in a way that makes me feel like a dusty geriatric talking to some young whippersnapper, despite the fact that he’s actually a few decades my senior.

Buettner, who I’d best attempt to describe as “Indiana Jones meets Jimmy Buffet,” is a National Geographic Fellow and explorer, Emmy award-winning journalist and producer, and five-time New York Times bestselling author. Despite his perennial pina colada vibes and the fact that he’d just come from a stint in trendy Nosara, Costa Rica, when we spoke, Buettner is far from retired to island life. The 63-year-old is still very much working, but only for about four hours a day. The rest of the time, he enjoys the life of a socialite 30 years his junior in Miami, which he calls “the most interesting place to live in America right now.”

This life doesn’t precisely mimic life in the Blue Zones—a.k.a. the six regions of the world, made famous by Buettner, where people tend to live exceptionally long lives. He doesn’t observe a 24-hour Sabbath to focus on God, family, and nature like the Adventists in Loma Linda, California, and I’m not sure how many Blue Zones residents occasionally drink 3-5 (my memory is fuzzy) Lychee Martinis in one sitting, as Buettner and I once did. (Although he insists most of them do regularly imbibe.) But that doesn’t mean he’s not a disciple of his own research, with the results to match. “I'm 63, but I probably have the biological age of a 50-year-old and the emotional age of about a 15-year-old,” he says. “So I'm feeling young.”

The Blue Zones-inspired fountain of youth from which Buettner drinks bucks many of today’s longevity trends. He doesn’t spend hours in the gym each day, shun all vices, or “shoot himself up with the blood of children,” as he puts it. His methods rely more so on the wisdom of our ancestors than the advances in technology and science, and this, he says, makes them both easier and far more enjoyable to adopt.

In short, Buettner makes a longevity-centric lifestyle sound fun and easy, the opposite of the overly optimized tech bro version currently en vogue. And that could be due in part to the fact that he’s clear on his true goal, which has nothing to do with numbers. “It’s not just about making it to a healthy 90 or 100,” he says. “It’s about enjoying the journey. Otherwise, it's not worth it.”

What do your mornings look like? You’re not one of those people who accomplish more before 9 a.m. than I do my entire day, are you? I hate those people.

In the Blue Zones, people go to bed, traditionally speaking, soon after the sun goes down, and they get up about the time the sun rises. So they're getting eight to nine hours of sleep. And I believe that most of the time, your body tells you when it's done sleeping. So I fall asleep when I fall asleep, and I wake up when I wake up. I try not to schedule things early in the morning so I can rise naturally.

As far as my morning routine, I'm still traveling a lot. I’m still working for National Geographic, and I’m away probably half the time. But when I’m home, I start my day with a morning walk for coffee.

So, coffee is okay by you?

Yes. Coffee is one of the few indulgences you can enjoy with impunity. It’s certainly a longevity beverage; we see it in three or four of the Blue Zones. It's associated with lower rates of Type II Diabetes, lower rates of Parkinson's Disease, and it’s also one of the most important sources of antioxidants in the American diet—which is probably more of a commentary on the American diet than it is on coffee, but nevertheless, it's a healthy beverage as long as you're not adding a bunch of cream and sugar. A cup of black coffee, next to a nice cup of tea, is probably the best longevity beverage you can start your day with.

Thank God. So after coffee, what’s next?

I live right on the beach in Miami, so I’ll usually get in a little beach time after that. Then, I’ll work a bit—I work about four hours a day—and for brunch, I make Sardinian minestrone soup, which is a recipe I took from the longest-lived family in the history of the world. It’s 100% whole-food and plant-based, giving me about half the fiber I need for the day, enough protein for breakfast and lunch, and a cocktail of micronutrients.

Is the brunch vs. breakfast timing an intermittent-fasting-related choice?

In the Blue Zones, they don’t call it intermittent fasting. They call it “eating breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.” But they all de facto eat all their calories in about an eight- or 10-hour window, depending on which Blue Zone. So that’s a pattern I follow as well. I live in Miami, where most of the social life occurs at dinner, so I probably go out six or seven nights a week. This always occasions eating a late dinner, so I start my fast at 8 or 9 p.m. and end it at 11 a.m., and that works for me.

The ideal for most people, for weight control, and for longevity, is having a huge 10 a.m. breakfast-brunch and then having a 4 p.m. “linner,” lunch-dinner, and then not eating at all after that 4 p.m. meal. Metabolically, that’s the best. But for those of us who like to socialize at night, I would say the pattern I’m on is the second-best thing.

Got it. So what happens between Sardinian soup and Miami nightlife?

I usually work out in the afternoon. My philosophy, and what works best for my body, is that I do something I enjoy every day. I think the whole “no pain, no gain” mantra is completely wrong. From observing people in the Blue Zones, if you enjoy doing your physical activity, you’re far more likely to do it for the long run.

And just like everything else when it comes to longevity, there’s no short-term fix, like, “I’m going to do a year of CrossFit.” That’s not the route to longevity. The route to longevity is a regular, low-intensity physical activity you enjoy, deployed for decades. And that’s my philosophy. So, every day, I do something different. Last night, I biked to dinner—I actually had dinner with Ryan Seacrest—and biked back. I belong to a very social gym, so some days I go there and do stand-up paddle surfing. At 5 p.m., I look outside at the ocean, and if it’s calm, I usually go for a swim. I play a lot of pickleball.

You’re a pickleball guy! I wouldn’t have guessed that.

I actually think Pickleball is the greatest social innovation America has come up with for over half a century. Not only is it great physical activity, but we have this huge loneliness epidemic where 30% of Americans don’t get enough social interaction. And the beauty of Pickleball is you not only get an effortless or painless workout but invariably, if you play enough, you emerge with a whole new set of friends. It’s a huge twofer. I arrived in Miami not knowing many people, and about half of my social network comes from playing pickleball.

In fact, I think in today’s world, longevity equals pickleball plus sex.

What a headline! Thank you for helping to ensure this piece gets traffic. What does sex have to do with longevity?

Well, people over middle age who are having sex at least twice per week have about half the rate of mortality than people who aren't getting it at all.

Half?!?! Wow. What a prescription.

Yeah. I met a 104-year-old guy in Costa Rica who was still having sex—I confirmed it with his 40-year-old girlfriend. Sex is definitely a Blue Zone activity.

I’m going to be processing that bit of information for a while. In the meantime, back to your diet. What does it look like more generally?

It’s very Blue Zone-centric, though they eat a little bit of meat in the Blue Zones, and I choose not to eat meat.

You know, the average American eats about 240 pounds of meat, which is driving much of our Type II Diabetes, heart disease, certainly cancers in the GI tract, and I would even argue dementia. In the Blue Zones, on the other hand, they traditionally ate about 20 pounds of meat a year, and it was always from grass-fed animals that they lived with and cared for until they became food.

But I don’t eat any meat. And when I write my books, I leave out meat because it's very easy to make meat taste good. True culinary genius is making the foods that we know drive longevity taste good, which are plant-based whole foods.

Are there any foods you've specifically incorporated into your diet as a result of your research?

I am the self-appointed “king of beans.” People ask me if they should take supplements, and I say, “Yes, you should take 125 every day: black beans.” The cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. People in Blue Zones eat about a cup of beans daily, which is associated with about an extra four years of life expectancy. No other superfood or supplement comes near the longevity potency of eating beans. With beans, you’re 90% of the way there in terms of having an optimal diet, and getting the protein and fiber you need.

And by the way, all this lectin BS… what the charlatans that scare you about lectins and then sell us anti-lectin supplements don’t tell you is that lectins in beans are almost completely neutralized as soon as you cook them. So unless you're crunching on raw kidney beans, there’s nothing to worry about. I try to get a cup or two of beans a day.

They’re not the sexiest food…

The problem is Americans are horrible at making beans taste good. That's why about a third of all my books focus on making beans taste delicious. Our culinary genius is unleashed on meat, which isn’t hard to make taste good. But in the Blue Zones, they know how to make beans taste good because historically, you didn’t have fresh vegetables for most of the year, so you relied on foods you dried earlier in the year, like beans.

I would start with good-quality beans. I use Rancho Gordo—I have nothing to do with the company, but those are the beans I use all the time because they’re artisanal high-quality, and relatively fresh. You want to soak them overnight and then cook them with the same sort of spices and herbs you use to cook meat. Beans are very good at absorbing flavors, so you can make them taste like meat. And then, sex them up with some sort of umami punch—miso, garlic, or even tomato paste.

You can’t be ordering beans at restaurants six nights a week. How do you eat out so much and keep your diet Blue Zones-aligned?

Every time you go out to eat, the average person consumes about 300 calories more than they would have at home. To work around that, I suggest splitting an entree. You can get the right amount of calories and be satiated. And I would argue for completely skipping the dessert.

I would also look to the sides. For example, the sides are fantastic when you go to an Italian restaurant, and you can have a much healthier meal. Good Italian restaurants will always have cannellini beans, spinach, and potato fingerlings. If you get all those sides together, you’ve got a fantastic meal—and it'll cost you half of what it would cost to order the entree.

I’ve heard you say we make around 220 food decisions daily, but most are unconscious. Does that mean we're extra challenged here in America because the food surrounding us is unhealthy, and we’re just mindlessly eating it like zombies?

Yes, we are extra challenged here. In the Blue Zones, the big advantage they have is that the cheapest, most accessible, and often most delicious and most socially acceptable food is whole, plant-based food. And here, the cheapest and most accessible is highly processed food. Much of it is meaty-cheesy-eggy with salt and sugar and preservatives. Over 70% of all the food that we get in grocery stores is processed or ultra-processed with added sugars.

And yes, much of our eating is mindless, so the best way for you to fight against that is to reshape your food environment, which all of us can do at home. One experiment done by the Cornell Food Lab, for example, found that if your desk has a candy jar on it that you keep full, you weigh three or four pounds more at the end of the year. The name of the game is setting up our surroundings so that our unconscious decisions are healthy.

And overall, the best thing we can do, longevity-wise, to add another six-to-10 years to life is to learn how to cook a whole-food, plant-based diet at home. The most important ingredient in any longevity diet is flavor. I can tell you that fermented miso, or broccoli, is the healthiest food in the world, but if you don't like fermented miso or broccoli, you’ll eat it for a month, maybe, but you're not going to eat it long enough to make a difference.

That’s why I spent about a year and a half formulating my Blue Zones Kitchen meals for longevity—Stanford spent 72 computing hours scraping 650,000 recipes to get four Blue Zones compliant recipes—with a maniacal focus on deliciousness.

Were you this healthy before you stumbled into your Blue Zones research?

I've always been pretty healthy. I set three Guinness World records in long-distance cycling in my 20s and 30s. The big difference is that since I started doing Blue Zones work, I became plant-based. So that’s changed a bit.

What has radically changed is my attitude towards exercise. Like I said before, I think working out too hard is a net negative. People in the Blue Zones don’t pump iron or do marathons or CrossFit. They just garden, knead their own bread and walk.

That reminds me of another soundbite of yours, which was something about how leaning on time-honored wisdom leads to a more enjoyable pursuit of longevity. I’m butchering it, but can you elaborate?

Yeah, right now, anti-aging is about an $80 billion-a-year industry….A lot of these Silicon Valley multi-millionaires are making their bodies into longevity experiments, spending seven hours a day working out, eating spartan meals, and shooting themselves up with the blood of their children. There’s no proof it’s going to work, and even if it does, you’re just extending a shitty life, you know?

And when you look at the life of people in Blue Zones, who manifestly live up to 10 years longer without chronic disease, their journey is joyous. They’re living close to nature. They grow their own food. They know their sense of purpose. They sit down to meals with their friends and family. They take time with their neighbors. That’s why this brand of longevity beats anti-aging any day of the week.

Most people mistakenly think that longevity requires pain and sacrifice. But where there’s real longevity, people live a joyous, engaged, purposeful life. You can’t get that in a pill.

Has all this longevity work changed your perspective on getting older? Asking *for a friend* who is definitely hating the whole aging thing.

Yes. I look forward to it. I know that happiness is a U-shaped curve. In most nations in the world, anywhere between the ages of 50 and 55 are the worst years, the least happy years. After that, happiness increases, and centenarians are the happiest demographic in America as long as they maintain health. So I have my happiest years to look forward to.

I also know that people who have a positive attitude towards older people have about 40% lower mortality rates than people who are afraid of aging and are constantly trying to shun older people and avoid becoming old themselves. I got to interview over 400 centenarians, and there wasn’t a grump in the bunch. The ones who tend to make it to 100 are interested, interesting, live a rich life, and want to share it.

Is it safe to say your personal goal in adopting a longevity-centric way of life is to enjoy your life as much as possible for as long as possible?

Yeah, and I achieve my goal every day I wake up. I rarely do anything I don’t want to do. I have fun with all of it, really.

My general approach to health and happiness—and this is from researching and writing seven books and writing on these topics for National Geographic—is that trying to change behavior fails for almost all people, almost all of the time, in the long run. If you want to make people healthier and happier, show them how to change their environment so that their day-to-day micro-decisions are slightly better. And then you deploy that over decades. That's what works in Blue Zones. That's what works in the happiest parts of the world. And that's what will work in America.

Originally Appeared on GQ