Many oils derive from plants, and they are all preferable to animal-based fats. Researchers have also found that people who consumed a quarter pound of fruit daily (about an apple) were 60% less likely to die during the next four years than those who didn’t. The best of the best longevity foods in the Blue Zones diet are leafy greens such as spinach, kale, beet and turnip tops, chard, and collards. Studies have found that middle-aged people who consumed the equivalent of a cup of cooked greens daily were half as likely to die in the next four years as those who ate no greens. In Ikaria more than 75 varieties of edible greens grow like weeds many contain ten times the polyphenols found in red wine. In the blue zones people eat an impressive variety of garden vegetables when they are in season, and then they pickle or dry the surplus to enjoy during the off-season. At the same time, increasing the amount of plant-based foods in your meals has many salutary effects. While people in four of the five Blue Zones consume meat, they do so sparingly, using it as a celebratory food, a small side, or a way to flavor dishes.Īs our adviser Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health puts it: “Meat is like radiation: We don’t know the safe level.” Indeed, research suggests that 30-year-old vegetarian Adventists will likely outlive their meat-eating counterparts by as many as eight years. Favor beans, greens, yams and sweet potatoes, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Limit animal protein in your diet to no more than one small serving per day. See that 95% of your food comes from a plant or a plant product. Blue Zones Food Guidelinesįollow these guidelines and you’ll crowd out refined starches and sugar, replace them with more wholesome, nutrient-dense, and fiber-rich foods-and do it all naturally. Here we provide some guidelines you can follow to eat a Blue Zones diet like they do and live to 100. We analyzed more than 150 dietary studies conducted in blue zones over the past century, and then we distilled those studies to arrive at a global average of what centenarians really ate. We needed information that was not just anecdotal or based on interviews, visits in the kitchen, or shared meals with individual centenarians. The findings here represent a long-term, statistical, and science-based study. What may be just as important, though, are the guidelines for food selection that we have developed after visiting numerous blue zones and finding the best ways to translate those values for North Americans. The particular foods important to blue zones centenarians vary from one culture to the next. They have inherited time-honored recipes or developed recipes on their own to make healthful foods taste good-a hugely important part of the Blue Zones diet, because if you don’t like what you’re eating, you’re not going to eat it for very long. They have incorporated certain nutritious foods into their daily or weekly meals-foods that often are not even found on the shelves of convenience stores or on the menus of fast-food restaurants across the country. If not growing these food items in their own gardens, they have found places where they can purchase them, and more affordably than processed alternatives. Most of the blue zones residents I’ve come to know have easy access to locally sourced fruits and vegetables-largely pesticide-free and organically raised. As we have applied the wisdom of the world’s Blue Zones diet to transform cities in the United States, I’ve begun to believe that we can create the same sort of culture here. They don’t restrict their food intake-in fact, they all celebrate with food. No one said at age 50, “You know what, I’m going to get on that longevity diet and live another 50 years!” They don’t count calories, take vitamins, weigh protein grams, or even read labels. None of the blue zones centenarians I’ve ever met tried to live to 100. Excerpt adapted from Blue Zones Kitchen by Dan Buettner, which captures the way of eating that yielded the statistically longest-lived people and explains, in some detail, why that food has enabled populations to elude the chronic disses scourge that has befallen Americans.
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