You know, the days are getting shorter, the weather is getting colder. I actually really love this time of year. Many of us are gathering, more than usual with loved ones, and coming together to share a cozy meal, some comfort food. But in the back of our minds, we probably also know those comfort foods aren't the healthiest for us. So the question we have today is what if those comfort food could actually help us live longer and healthier lives?

Okay, I know what you're thinking. Healthy comfort foods, recipes that promote longevity, it's probably not going to taste very good, right? It's probably gonna be pretty bland. I get it, healthy eating doesn't always have the tastiest reputation. But that's exactly why I invited my good friend, Dan Buettner, who has spent decades studying the world's longest living people to join us on the podcast today.

These simple peasant foods taste maniacally delicious. That's the word I like to use.

'Maniacally delicious. I love that. And Dan would know. He's a world explorer, a National Geographic fellow, and he's also the best-selling author who helped coin the term that you have certainly heard -- Blue Zones. These are places around the globe where people live the longest and healthiest lives. Now, in case you're curious what Dan has been up to recently, well for the last three years he's been working with researchers at Stanford to quote-unquote reverse engineer what flavors Americans like, and then applying what he's learned from the diets of these Blue Zones.

'It all resulted in a new cookbook called The Blue Zone's Kitchen One Pot Meals: 100 Recipes to Live to 100. And it is more than just recipes. I can tell you I've read the book, my wife has post-it notes all over the book. I showed Dan, he was delighted, and today... I sat down with Dan to talk about why taste matters more than willpower, what ingredients should you be incorporating into your diet... And how this could all help you live longer. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, and this is Chasing Life.

You're this guy who's traveled the world. You're a world champion cyclist, but all these things sort of going on, you come across these places as part of your exploration where people are living these extraordinarily long lives. Do I have that basically right? I mean, how did this start for you?

'Out of college, when you were going to medical school and doing productive things, I set three records for biking across five continents, Alaska, Argentina, around the world and across Africa. But my true impetus was an appetite for discovery. I decided, you know, in the same way that you've had the epiphany that you wanted to take your talents and channel them into medicine and then sharing the insights with the masses. My sense of purpose is exploring, but not just for my own personal interest, but in a way that I can bring back something that's useful for others. I was really interested in expeditions that would really help people live better. And longevity seemed to be the right idea. Now, actually, the first Blue Zone we found in Okinawa, Japan, that was really the result of a World Health Organization finding that showed that those people enjoyed the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world.

I said, that's a great mystery, and took a team there in 1999, and really just caught the bug. The first place called a Blue Zone. Gianni Pes, who's still a great friend till this day, in fact, we just found a new Blue Zone last month... He does a very sophisticated analysis of population data. It starts with something called mortality rates. So he finds these place with unusually low mortality, which also means you have a much higher concentration of centenarians over time. And in those villages that reach a certain threshold, he put a blue dot on a map. And I've seen the map. It's just a map on a piece of paper.

And there were so many blue dots in one area in Sardinia, an area called Ogliastra in the mountains... that he just started calling it the blue zone because of the blue cloud. And that's where the name comes from. But the idea actually originates a few years earlier with this idea, which came a National Geographic article to find the areas around the world where people live the longest, statistically speaking, and then find their common denominators.

It's such a fascinating story and it's such a relevant story to everybody because you're talking about places around the world where people live these extraordinarily long lives and then trying to figure out what the insights are for the rest of us.

You know, this has never been a personal quest, nor do I fashion myself a longevity guru. I like to think of myself as more a translator or a bridge to these cultures that really have a lot to offer us.

I imagine it's got to impact the way you live, though.

It does, yes.

In terms of your diet choices, your activity choices, what are some examples of things that maybe you've changed over the last 20 years?

'I stopped eating meat because it's very clear the cultures of longevity are very low meat eaters that are eating peasant food really. So I've learned how to make peasant foods taste good and that's my diet, usually whole food plant based. I understand the enormous power of knowing your sense of purpose, waking up every not with the existential stress of what do I do with my life? And so I'm very clear about how I spend my days. It's ballast in times of uncertainty and it makes decision-making very easy when you know that. We all know how stress shaves years off your life. I know the incredible power of having the right social circle around you.

If you hang out with people who smoke or drink too much or sit around and complain, that's all measurably contagious as is. You know, I'm sort of a pickleball fanatic and a bicycling fanatic. So I kind of hang out with those people. And the biggest thing, Sanjay, when it comes to longevity, and this is a, you know, 20 years of work in finding and examining these places where people live longer, boils down to one phrase. If you wanna live longer, don't try to change your behavior because you'll probably fail in the long run... Change your environment. So I very intentionally, I live in the southern tip of South Beach, Florida. I'm right on the water. I swim almost every day. I live at a walkable neighborhood. I live a place where I'm bumping into my neighbors all of the time. So I have great social equity around me. That's a food environment where it's easy to get healthy food. And so... I mindlessly live a healthy lifestyle. It's not that, you know, I'm not over there weighing my protein powder or counting how many reps I do down in the gym. I just go live my life.

What I've always loved about your work is that you've gone to these places where people are living long lives. So it's not to say, hey, look, let's try this so you can live a long life. You've said, let's travel the globe, see where people who are living a long lives, what is accessible about their lifestyles for people back in the States or other parts of the world. And maybe you learn and maybe you adopt those things. And that has always seemed very sensible to me. So I... I really appreciate that and every time I talk to you, I just want to emphasize that for the audience because again, I think most of the people listening are well intentioned. They want to do right by their health. They want do right the health of their loved ones. But you know, you got to be aware and understanding that there are people around the globe who live these lives that you emulate. Dan Buettner has done the work. He's gone and seen what those lives are like and we can all learn from it. I have.

'Yeah, and I know the image is it's like Dan Buettner in a backpack going to these places. We actually spent three years with a team of demographers, five demographers who've written peer-reviewed articles to first parse through worldwide population data with the signal as low mortality rate, and then we actually go there and look at birth records and records over 150 years and we confirm these places. People are living the longest, that the metric we use is not only concentration of centenarians, but also life expectancy at age 70. This seems to be the most interesting marker. Then we start at looking, what are the common denominators? And you know what, Sanjay, that someone our age, which is 60, they enjoy about 10 extra years of life expectancy, at age 60, not at birth. At birth, it's extraordinary as well. In some of these areas about a 15-fold better chance of reaching age 100. These are real people with a an average set of genes. They don't have any special genes. There are heterogeneous populations and the way they achieve it Are things that I can't make any money off of you. They grow their own food. They sit down to dinner with their family. They take naps they have a spiritual life that they actually show up for. They walk places. They know their neighbors. They value their friendships. And these are things, if you look at the academic literature, you're gonna see that every one of these things, there are studies done that show they yield higher life expectancy. But they're not popular. They're not quick fixes. They're not... Take a pill.

Monetizable.

Monetizable... So that I don't get nearly as much publicity pop, but I've been around for 25 years and I have kind of a slow steady increase in population recognition. You know I speak at the same conference that all these biohackers are and my audiences are just as big as theirs and I think it counterbalances some of the more hyperbolic approaches to longevity and eventually people come around.

'Up next, how Dan used artificial intelligence to determine America's favorite flavors. Turns out we are pretty predictable. Then he translated those favorite flavors into longevity-boosting one-pot meals. We'll be right back.

'I want to talk mostly about your cookbooks. My mom wanted me to ask you if she were to adopt many of these things, start doing the one-pot meals, things like that, how much benefit could she get now at age 80 do you think?

'Three years of life expectancy. And that isn't just off the top of my head. That was a very good meta-analysis done out of Berglund, Norway, followed the equivalent of about six million people for 30 years and found that people who are eating the standard American diet can expect at age 80, three fewer years than somebody who's following largely a whole food plant-based diet. And so yeah, and at 60, by the way, it's six years. And for a 20, for a male, it's about 12 years. For a female, it's about 10 years.

'So these are very real, gold standard epidemiology that just reaffirm what I've observed in Blue Zones, but in a more concrete way. The last book that just came out, also New York Times best seller, is called Blue Zone Kitchen: One Pot Meals. And I made that. We did not go back to the Blue Zone for those recipes because a lot of recipes aren't one pot in the Blue Zone. I teamed up with Johannes Eichstead from Stanford and his AI lab, and we examined 675,000 recipes, and we isolated all the recipes with 100 or more five-star reviews. So we knew that Americans loved these recipes, and then we analyzed them for the patterns. And we found that most of the most popular recipes in America follow one of seven different patterns. And then we kind of reverse engineer deliciousness. So we knew the ingredients of longevity, then we know the patterns or the palates, the combinations Americans loved, and then I got one of the best recipe developers in America to work with me to, under these guidelines, build 100 recipes to live to 100.

Did any of this surprise you? I mean, like in terms of what the top five star recipes were, like what we actually eat?

'Well, here, I'll read them to you right now. So these are America's favorite tastes: stir-fries and curries, not so surprising. Tex-Mex flavors, not-so-surprising, chilis and so much. Traditional Italian flavors, not so surprisingly. Cheese, now that was a hard one. How do people like cheesy things? Well, it turns out with nutritional yeast and a few other ingredients, you can mimic the taste of cheese and the creaminess. You take cashews, you soak them for a while, you put them in a Vitamix, it creates something virtually indistinguishable from whipping cream. And you mix that with brewer's yeast and you get something that tastes like a cheese and you can make a mac and cheese out of it. Another very interesting, very surprising combination, broccoli and mushrooms. You know, the Tex-Mex, duh, but broccolis and mushrooms... Lemon and herbs, that's something that the Greeks give us, that this combination of lemon and herbs. And then an overall kind of rule to make people love a food is to make them spiky. People like sort of intensities of sensations. The best example is an Oreo. In Oreo, the outer part is a little bit bitter. You know, the cacao, that dark chocolate and crunchy, and the inside is soft and sweet and comforting. And it turns out Americans love that, they call it high-tension foods, that crunch and that ooze. So we created something called the Three Sisters Pot Pie, which has beans in there, squash, which is a little bit crunchy, but then we put it in a pie, soft, comforting, savory filling, but then that wonderfully a homey pie crust on the outside, so it created that tension.

'How much did you use things like AI to help? Because if you have these patterns of palate preference, as you outlined, and you want to create the one-pot meal, can you get big platforms like AI to just do this for you? Or what did you do?

Well, we used an AI, Stanford AI lab, that we actually used them. The terminology, we scraped the recipes and then we analyzed them. We had PhD AI researchers doing the analysis and then with the outcome, it just gave us the intel to know what kinds of recipes are likely to be very popular with Americans.

That's fantastic.

Yeah, it was kind of a marriage between the AI and the traditional in a way, that honored tradition, it honored these recipes of longevity, or at least these ingredients of longevity in a way that Americans would eat them.

I hope everyone puts this book in their kitchen, because you obviously will have a quick guide to making a quick one pot meal, but also there's a lot of learning in there about these ingredients in the book as well. You focused on one pot meals. That's in the title in this latest book. Why that?

'We have these Blue Zone project cities that... The entire city takes on an effort to increase their health and longevity. And when you're trying to convince a city to eat this way, when you have the competition from fast food and ultra processed food, one of the biggest objections you're gonna get is I don't have time. Number two, I can't afford it. Number three, I don't know how to do it. Number four, I don't think it'll be delicious. So, the idea of one pot, you know everybody's got a pot. And if they don't have a pot, I suggest getting an Instapot. I have nothing to do with the company, but it's just a quick way to make food. And so I started with this criteria that every recipe had to take less than 20 minutes to combine. It had to cost less than three bucks a serving, and it had to be maniacally delicious. And I think we checked all those boxes. And I really believe we are not going to turn around the obesity epidemic in the country. About 75% of us are overweight or obese until we start cooking at home. Because every time we go out to eat, we consume an extra 300 calories. Those calories tend to be laden with sodium, added sugars, ultra-processed food. At home, we can control the ingredients as long as you can give people the hardware and the software in an affordable, fast way, I believe we can get people back in the kitchen, creating real health for their families.

And I should point out, you've said this a couple times, but taste is a big part of this for you. I mean, in fact, I think you said taste is the number one longevity ingredient, right? If it's not tasty, people aren't gonna eat it.

Yeah, 2 or 3% of people are vegans and they care about animal cruelty. Maybe 15% of the people really are kind of cognizant of the environment, the carbon footprint of what they eat. Maybe a quarter of people think about their health when they eat, but at the end of the day, when lunch rolls around, they want something delicious, and that's going to carry the day. And if the only thing there is a burger, they're going to eat the burger nine out of 10 times. So we're not going to beat these ultraprocessed foods until we create whole food alternatives. And I'll just offer a data point, which is also a plug. We created these Blue Zone Kitchen frozen meals, 100% whole food plant based formulated for longevity maniacally delicious about two years ago. And they're now the top selling frozen food in many categories.

By the way, congratulations on that. I mean, all these books that you've written, these products that are making people healthier, good. And again, I hope people who are listening to the podcast understand where this is all coming from, the inspiration, the backstory here.

'Plant-based versus meat. Now, you know, in some of these blue zones, people do eat some meat. The book is entirely plant-based. Tell me about that thinking.

Well, people in blue zones do eat meat, except for the Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda are mostly vegetarian, but it's the quantity. Americans eat about 220 to 240 pounds of meat per year, and there's just no question that's driving cancer to the GI tract, cardiovascular disease, and even type 2 diabetes. In blue zones, they're consuming less than a tenth of that, about 20 pounds a year of meat. And meat is a celebratory food. I personally don't believe there's anything wrong with eating meat once a week or something. That's what people in the Blue Zones do, but when it's bacon for breakfast, a burger for lunch, and a pork chop for dinner, that's when you start getting in trouble.

'I'm no longer a vegan, but I lived among vegans for about 10 years. Very healthy Olympic level athletes, bodybuilders that never ate a piece the meat, so you can get all the protein you need from plant-based sources, and by the way, you'll also get your fiber. And that's what we should be focusing on. That's why I wrote these books to be 100% whole food plant-based, because you're also gonna get your fiber and you're gonna get you phytonutrients and your antioxidants that you don't get from meat, eggs, or cheese.

What is your new book about?

So there are new Blue Zones. So the old Blue Zones are being overtaken by the standard American diet and cars and networked electronics. Meanwhile, there's new places where longevity is emerging and mostly they're manufactured blue zone. There's places where really enlightened leadership has created populations where people are enjoying 12 good years longer than we are enjoying in America. And in the same strategy I used with the original Blue Zone, we found the data to identify these pinnacles of health span. And then I first did a complete literature review to understand what's going on in these places and then traveled there, talked to the top experts, found good people who represent these cultures of healthy longevity. And the book is about the common denominators of places where people are living the longest lives without disease and without major disability.

When we spoke, I think last year, you were talking about Singapore. Is that one of those places?

'Singapore is one of them. Yes, it's it's not the one I'm profiling this book. But, you know, I did a Netflix series called Live to 100, which won three Emmy Awards? I only say that because people are more likely to watch it: Live to 100 Secrets of the Blue Zones. They needed a new blue zone and I knew Singapore very well -- one of these places where people are living about ten years longer; ten more good years longer than Americans in it and I named it a new blue zone and deconstructed it a little bit for people to help them understand what sorts of things really drive longevity, and it's not what we think.

The world has gotten to know you. I am really just honored that you join us on the podcast. The book, this is a book that everyone should have in their kitchen. You just have it because you can quickly pull it out as a reference and you can pick out a meal. It takes 20 minutes, three bucks a serving, but it comes from all the topics, all the learnings from a guy who has traveled the world, really developing these things. So we're all better because of it. So thank you, Dan. Thanks for joining us.

It's an honor, Sanjay, and for all the people listening, thank you very much. I hope to see you all when you're 100.

Love it. I'll be there with you. I'll be there with you. That was my conversation with author, explorer, National Geographic fellow, and friend, Dan Buettner. Thanks so much for listening.