Better Being Series: Discover the ‘Blue Zones’ Where People Live Longer

September 25, 2024 10 mins

Better Being Series: Discover the ‘Blue Zones’ Where People Live Longer

Our Aon expert and guest discuss how leaders can build a team culture that makes healthy choices. Resulting in the greatest ROI of all: longer life.

Key Takeaways

This episode discusses the common denominators including rituals, behaviors, and habits.
The episode shares the characteristics of Blue Zones around the world.
They describe the unmatched ROI of adding a year to life expectancy.

Intro:
Hi everyone, and welcome to the award-winning “On Aon” podcast, where we dive into some of the most pressing topics that businesses and organizations around the world are facing. This week in a special series on resilience called Better Being, we hear from Rachel Fellowes, Aon’s Chief Wellbeing Officer, with her guest, Danny Buettner, on understanding what the Blue Zones are.

Rachel Fellows:
Hello and welcome to Better Being With me, Rachel Fellows. I'm the Chief Wellbeing Officer here at Aon, and unsurprisingly, I'm passionate about wellbeing and human sustainability in the workplace. Globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety at a cost of about 1 trillion US dollars annually in lost productivity. Curiously, only around 30 percent of employees around the world identify themselves as resilient and burnout is on the rise everywhere. As a result, wellbeing has quickly moved to the top of companies priority lists with 83 percent of companies now saying they have a wellbeing strategy in place. How organizations prioritize and integrate wellbeing can have a profound impact on employee engagement as well as talent recruitment and retention and overall business results. So, it's more important than ever to get this right.

A robust wellbeing strategy needs to include individual wellbeing, including things like physical, emotional, social, financial and career elements, as well as what I refer to as team and organizational wellbeing. And it's in this series that I take a look at what makes for better being at work with thought leaders and subject matter experts. I'm particularly excited because in today's episode I'm going to be meeting guest Danny Buettner, he's EVP and Chief Development Officer of Blue Zones. Probably, like many of you, I first heard about the Blue Zones through the brilliant documentary series on Netflix called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, made by Danny's father, Dan Buettner, and curiously hot off the press, that series is just won three Emmy Awards.

Now, watching this series reminded me that wellbeing is not just about one thing, but it's made up of many factors and we could all actively improve our wellbeing through our health decisions and understanding what factors help maximize our longevity. Now, it's been so popular that one in five Americans know about Blue Zones, and I have no doubt there's probably similar ripple effects in the rest of the world. So, if you haven't seen it, I'd urge you to watch and it's been fascinating and informative and as a result, I'm delighted and thrilled to welcome our guest today, Danny. So, thanks so much for joining me, Danny, and welcome to the show.

Danny Buettner:
Thank you, Rachel. Excited to be here.

Rachel Fellows:
Can we just pretend that no one watches tele anymore and has never heard of Netflix? Can we start by explaining what the Blue Zones are, literally going back to basics and also what the broader mission of the Blue Zones Company is?

Danny Buettner:
Yeah. Blue Zones are five places around the world that are geographically defined. Islands, highlands, peninsulas, communities that are also demographically confirmed, places where people are reaching age 100 at 10 times the rate that we are in the United States or in other Western societies. And we've studied them for 25 years. Dan Senior and a team from National Geographic of demographers, of MDs of epidemiologists have studied them for 25 years. And everything that we discover just further validates that they are a phenomenon, that they have best practice from our species going on. And I'm looking forward to getting into that a little bit more today.

Rachel Fellows:
I mean, I love that. My brain literally lights up from that introduction, Dan. So, and just even thinking, can you imagine the amount of change you must have observed over 25 years? And I'd love just to ask, was it always 5 or did it actually become 5 over those 25 years?

Danny Buettner:
So, the original team was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC and National Geographic to go out and find the fountain of youth. And after 18 months of circumnavigating the globe, they thought they were going to find a super gene, an herb or a honey or something like that. They did not find a magic longevity potion, but what they did find was these cultures, these environments that produced these centenarians - 100 year olds - at scale consistently with a fraction of the disease prevalence.

And the first one was Sardinia, off the coast of Italy, longest-lived men on the earth. Then we found the longest-lived women in Okinawa, the archipelago of Okinawa, Japan. Then the American Blue Zones in Loma Linda, California, Southern California where there's a hotbed of Seventh-day Adventists, a Christian denomination. And then the last two blue zones were the Nicoya Peninsula in the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. And then in the Aegean Sea, the island of Ikaria, Greece was the fifth and final blue zone.

Rachel Fellows:
I mean, the biggest thing that makes me smile about all of that is not only is that the most phenomenal bucket list, but I know we don't want to over promote tourism to these areas. But it's also the reality that this is in our control. When we're saying it's not nurture or nature, it's actually we can choose to design our lives to positively affect our own probability. And I love that concept of 10 times the rate.

Just on a little personal note, I actually did my yoga training on the Nicoya Peninsula and honestly, you do feel energetically and lifestyle quite different in some of these places. So, can we just go into a little bit more about the common denominators of those five areas? Are there patterns, are there things that we can begin to learn? And I'm conscious that our audience today is often in the corporate culture. So going back to basics, I'm visualizing lugging olive oil tonight. Is that something that we should be moving towards or not?

Danny Buettner:
Yes, yes, yes. I'll tell you the basics. And after 25 years of longitudinal study, no matter where you are in these five blue zones around the world, we kept seeing the same rituals, habits, behaviors over and over and over again. And we distilled them down to 9 and we call them the Power 9. The first is to move naturally. The next two are purpose and downshift. The next bracket is around diet. In the Power 9, plant slant, were not vegans, none of them were vegans. But we did observe a 90 percent-plus plant-based diet. Beans, nuts, fruits, wine at 5:00 or friends at 5:00 was a common ritual. One or two glasses over a healthy meal. No, you cannot save up and have 14 glasses on Friday night, it does not work that way.

80 percent rule, stopping eating when your 80 percent full. So, I'm sure a lot of people can appreciate that I eat healthier than I did when I was in my twenties, but are you still eating a lot of quantity, more calories than you burn? And then this all sits on a foundation of belonging, right tribe and loved ones first. So, you got to have that almost Maslow hierarchy of needs, this bedrock of the Power 9, which is surrounding yourself with people that are going to promote your healthy habits because we know that who you surround yourself with is best practice. So those are the Power 9 in a nutshell.

Rachel Fellows:
So, a couple of reflections, I think, on the first one when you said move naturally, I often have the slight joke, reflection when I'm commuting into the office that what if say at Liverpool Street Station, they chose to actually stop all escalators. What impact would that have on the London population just to think about moving and the choices like that of just simply walking up the stairs every day? It also took my mind to Sardinia, and I think it was Sardinia, where they actually live on a hill. So even to go to the grocery shop, you've got to do some elevation training. And that was a really interesting concept. So many of us would be curious to just understand if we ever actually go from one elevation to the next.

So, if I'm thinking about this, maybe I lead a team, maybe I'm a manager, maybe I'm a little bit higher up the chain, I'm a leader. I can understand almost some of the self-coaching choices I can start to make, but what could I do within an organizational context? How can I take those learnings and think about the way, especially if we're working in a hybrid fashion, how do I take these?

Danny Buettner:
We get asked the question a lot, all right, thanks for the Power 9 and the 9 best practices. How do I do that in my life, in my work site, in my church or mosque or synagogue, or how do I do that in my community? And that leads to the second-biggest aha of the blue zones. Of the 350 people we studied, not a single one pursued health, not a single one pursued longevity or resilience or purpose or connection or happiness. None of them woke up and said, "Hey, I'm going to be happier. I'm going to do a 5K run. I'm going to go make some friends." None of them pursued it. It ensued just like nobody in the Western world pursues isolation or type two diabetes or stress. It ensues as a byproduct, and this is the second aha, byproduct of where you live, aka, your environment and who you take the journey of life with.

And so, the winning strategy is to augment individual accountability with environments and culture, team culture that makes the healthy choices the default choices, the institutionalized choices. So, the work that we do at Blue Zones is we work with work sites and whole cities to do a silver shotgun approach to environments that make the healthier options, the easier options, and that helps augment people's choices. So, they're making a couple better choices without even knowing it.

Rachel Fellows:
Would you believe it that it's almost time already. So obviously I want to say a big thank you, and there'll be lots of information in the follow-up show notes about how listeners can explore more and of course watch the Netflix series. But is there anything you want to just add before we wrap up today?

Danny Buettner:
Yeah, I salute Aon and you Rachel, for leaning into wellbeing and this conversation. There is no greater ROI than adding a year or two of life expectancy to the world.

Rachel Fellows:
Thank you very much. And that's it for our show today. Thank you all for listening. But that's it for now. So, until next time.

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in to the latest episode of “On Aon” with our episode host, Rachel Fellowes, and today’s guest, Danny Buettner. If you enjoyed this episode, you can get more insights on wellbeing in the workplace and information on future podcasts by following Rachel Fellowes on LinkedIn. In the meantime, be sure to check out our show notes and visit our website at Aon dot com to learn more about Aon.

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