i think we look pretty good for big one hundred twenty five years old this past year we served over thirty thousand people through our mission which is the elimination of racism and the empowerment of women and girls we care deeply thrive finding happiness the blue zones way and the blues down solution eating and living like the world's healthiest people and i didn't think of that when i was his colors today stopped but  appreciate that that he is the founder of the blue sounds organization which is committed to helping americans live longer and healthier lives by adopting the habits and the choices of elders who are living to a record setting ages in five areas of our globe he and his blue zones team what chill tell you about are bringing these lessons and longevity to cities and businesses across star country including the town of albert lead minnesota where participants have raised their life expectancy and i think importantly lowered health care costs and i would imagine increase joy by nearly forty percent today our guest speaker will share as ideas for transforming a city as large and diverse as minneapolis into a blue zones community ladies and gentlemen please give a warm wonderful october second minneapolis welcome to the westminster tom forum and  thank you for the warm and introduction it's an honor to be part of westminster town hall forum and plus i know my mother will be very pleased when she discovers i was in church on a weekday so i'm going to talk about the last sentence from the longest lived people around the world what they have to teach us as individuals and perhaps more importantly what they have to teach communities about producing longer lived and healthier people dictated by lifestyle and environment so there's good news and bad news in that the good news is that if your parents died young it doesn't mean you have to and the bad news is if your parents live long healthy lives it doesn't mean you have a free pass but based on that finding about a decade ago with national geographic and with funding from the national institute on aging we set out in a sense to reverse engineer longevity we work with demographers to identify five pockets around the world where people are living measurably longer and then we struck off to discover exactly what they've been doing most of their lives and we work with anthropologist and epidemiologist and medical researchers the whole team for decades now for over a decade now and we found in okinawa japan the world's longest of women this is the place where traditionally nobody is lonely they're put in these committees social networks called  wise we never think of loneliness much when it comes to longevity but if you're lonely in this country it seems about eight years off your life expectancy we found the longest of men in sardinia italy up in the highlands a cluster of fourteen villages forty two thousand people mostly shepherds but most interesting more than their diet or their exercise programs they celebrated age or you got the more sober tea where people in their ninety's and hundreds continued to advise the mayor and live with families where they made tangible contributions in nicoya peninsula costa rica we found a population that reaches age ninety at a rate two or to have times greater than we do in america and they do so spending about one tenth the amount we do on health care in the united states among the seventh day adventist in a moment linda california another population lives a long time they take their diet directly out of the bible genesis chapter one verse twenty six god talks about every plant that bear seeds and every tree that bears fruit and as a result there mostly begins and then just last week in fact i will revisit in our fifth and probably the last position on the earth korea greece a place where people have about eight years longer than americans do it's a far flung tiny island off the coast of the coast of turkey but they also produce a population of ten thousand people with about one fifth the rate of dimentia they live a long time and they stay sharp to the very end how do they do it i like to tell a story that sums it up that money bought a chevrolet bought a house in the suburbs got married a greek american woman had three kids but it aged sixty six he found so short of breath his doctor diagnosed him three doctors diagnosed him with a lung cancer he's going to be dead in six months get your first order instead of staying in detroit he moves back to korea moves in with his parents are still alive he does wife move in for those of you think you have a bag of college students returning back but he starts over look breathing the air eating this mediterranean diet he reconnects with his religion his friends come over after every afternoon they find out he's home drink a little bit of wine every day six months coming goes mostly dead but he actually feel pretty good he grows a garden never expects to be around to harvest the garden but he thinks is mine and well my wife will harvest the festivals and she'll think of me when i' gone well to make a long story medium thirty four years later when i met him at age one hundred in two he'd not only harbor said garda he planted a vineyard which produced two hundred liters of wine every year all of which sounded like a flippant answer on the surface but actually it gave voice to what i've been realizing now in about a half say half a dozen years of study long live culture and that was in no place and none of these long hotspots where you're finding spry hundred year olds water skiing and standing on their heads did any of them ever try to live a long time none of them said at age fifty won't go darn it i'm going to get on that longevity died live another fifty years none of them bought a treadmill or joined a gym or called an eight hundred number and started buying supplements to live a long time in every case no matter if you go to asia or europe or latin america or the united states where people are living a long time longevity happened to them it was not something they pursue it's something that ensued and this is a big pity this is a big aha moment because in america most of what we spend our money on most of the effort and resources that businesses the government level health care is all about proactively trying to get healthier and here are confirmed populations are the healthiest in the world they don't even try no matter where you go in the world you see people living a long time you see the same set of characteristics happening number calories a day in gauge an exercise fewer than twenty percent of americans get the recommended amount of physical activity you can get blue zones they don't exercise but they live in environments where it's easy to move their streets aren't built just for automobiles as most treats in americas are they're built for humans so that every time they go to work or school or to friend's house that occasions walk their houses or d convenience there's not a  push for housework another button to push for yard work another button push for kitchen work they're getting there needing that bread with their hands or running corn by hand or doing yard work by hand our team figured out their notched into move every twenty minutes or so and when you add that up all these little bursts of physical activity it's pretty more calories than you would by sitting in your office all day long your house so they don't and then expect you to make it up in the gym moreover they're keeping the metabolisms at hi they suffer the same stresses that we do but they have ancient daily rituals to reverse the stress and the information that comes with worry in a hurry and being on our devices they pray meditate take naps or too happy  they have the cavalry for a purpose is the big idea we don't pay much attention to purpose when we think about creating greater health but robert butler i happen to know he was the first director of the national institutes an age and did a huge study on purpose and found that people could articulate their life meeting their sense of purpose we're living about seven years longer than people who are rudderless and live in blue zones there's no cavalry for purpose the costa ricans have pan okinawans have a key guy the reason for which i wake up in the world in the morning they eat mostly a plant based diet ninety percent of their dietary intake no matter where you go you look at the past hundred years dietary surveys the past hundred years in all blue zones ninety percent of all the calories that taking come from plants are very anti paleo by the way sixty five percent of all their calories come from complex carbohydrates tubers loss of woman of the world for more than half of their lives over sixty percent of all the calories they consume came from sweet potatoes okinawa longevity died in the world would add about three to four years of extra life expectancy maybe because of the fiber the protein but probably more likely because it's pushing out less healthy proteins in blue zones people did eat meat but only on average about five times a are pig drink all night eat go liver cetera but a thousand of those one hundred meals the default meals that just feel them to the days were mostly simple plant based meals they did enjoy  life then the foundation of blues all cultures every where they put their family first they're actually investing in older people they're not looked at as recipients of health care but people in beauty with the responsibility recognize for their accumulated wisdom  that wisdom is put to work it's actually an expectation of older people to do something other than move to florida or arizona but to stay here and put those decades of work experience or life experience to work  it doesn't matter if they're christian or muslim or or buddhist they're show up four times a month which we know is associated with about four to fourteen x years of life expectancy i don't know if today counts or not but percent better chance you'll be over away so who you're spending tuesday nights with or your weekends makes an enormous difference so curating those five friends around you friends who are the jury are plant based whose idea of recreation is playing tennis gardy or bowling or walking people actually care about you and keep you engaged because when it comes along jeopardy there's no short term fixes no pill there's no supplement there's no  hormone that's going to help you live longer if you're not doing it for the long run it doesn't work when blue zone these people are living up to a decade longer than we are twelve times as many centenarians in some areas one fifth the rate of the big chronic diseases that are bankrupting our country how do we get what they want well in this last book i tried to answer that question i got another grant from national geographic in about two thousand and eight and set out to look for cultures that were not healthy got up healthy are all that's a big problem in our country right now to get populations healthier and i did my research work with the c d c world health unhealthy got healthy in my dismay there are absolutely none in america have no examples of big cities starting out trying to get healthier and actually succeeded we found one place in the world where an entire population got healthy is a place called north korea only if in one looks a lot like minnesota in fact it's on the border with the soviet union former soviet union russia now one hundred forty five thousand people one thousand nine hundred seventy two this little enclave fourteen villages had the highest rate of cardiovascular disease in the world white guys age fifty five dropping dead of heart attacks these guys were mostly dairy farmers and p farmers their diet not surprisingly had a lot of melt dairy products and pork in it they woke up in the morning and they had a sixteen ounce glass of whole milk for breakfast they fried their cheese and butter and the national dish with something called north korea steel which had three ingredients water fatty pork and salt and if you wanted it spicy you added more salt so not surprisingly there's a big heart disease  health workers at done forever the typical strategy is to identify the people at highest risk and then you unleash all your resources at those and that works very well for cholera or valarie or a sars breakout but it turns out that pushes working with a brand new type of disease a chronic disease before nine hundred seventy two when daddy died of a heart attack you said you know he died of old age they didn't realize that diabetes and chronic disease were were lifestyle problems and peca push to try to do the typical things that public health officials did they tried to identify people with high blood pressure and cholesterol and tried to aim an intervention at those people and found out he was and after five years or so making any progress at all he teams up with an epidemiologist named jeffrey rose who statistically  when it comes to public health you do not want to fight with a rifle you want to fight with the shock of your time and resources money is best bet unleashing a small intervention on the entire population rather than a heavy he got legislatures to change the incentives so that farmers are producing milk with high butter fill fat but not with just high volume so that we have healthier milk he recognized  that if he didn't want people frying their cheese and butter using some other kind of frying oil that they needed to bring vegetable oil but the problem with vegetable oil it all came from italy it was all boiled was too expensive so he worked with food scientists to create the type of canola oil that could be produced up that far north he recognized that people needed more fruits and vegetables so he taught farmer's wife how to cook with vegetables and then when it came to fruits not many fruits grew in finland but berries grew very well raspberries and blues berries but only for a month the year he helped start out a cooperative that took those berries and froze them and put them in products so they're available all year long and in north korea people love their sausage and there is no way he was going to get people to stop eating their sauces just like we're never going to get why can fans of stop eating hot dogs but he went to the sausage maker convince the sausage maker to add mushroom filling and to take out some of the fat salt and six months later on the whole people eat the same amount of sausage but little do they know they were eating thirty percent less fat twenty percent less salt so he just kept mall team through the entire community making the system wide population level changes and after a decade he brought down the cardiovascular disease rate by eighty percent and the cancer rate by sixty percent and he's maintained it today this is in the british journal of medicine this isn't i wrote about it in the atlantic monthly magazine in april anybody's interested but it is an absolute miracle that's largely overlooked for some reason i try to look for example in minnesota actually a smaller example in in preparation for the speech and i actually found one was actually a big success story right here in minneapolis where highway ninety four hits the river there is a neighborhood in southeast minneapolis called seward it's a neighborhood largely built neighborhood he rolled and in the one nine hundred sixty s it was in bad shape a few neighbors took the reins it's called the seward neighborhood they worked with the school district and developers and created matthew center so that there was a nucle neighborhood place for people to me place for kids to recreate they helped build the sewer co op so that there was an affordable place for people to get healthy through another set of neighbors created milwaukee mall which  is amazing amazing two streets offer frank that if you haven't seen it you should go see it they've they've ripped up the pavement put this beautiful tree lined mall in front of their houses and created this environments where neighbors connected and it was easy to walk they help shape policies and ordinances so that there are bike lanes there are many junk food restaurants and frankly now there's a tree line sidewalk so it's pleasant to walk nineteen thirty in two thousand thirteen the robert wood johnson foundation picked minneapolis as one of three cities to do a lot of jeopardy study they found that in seward and the surrounding areas the life expectancy there was thirteen years greater than it was in neighborhoods just three miles east on ninety four i e frogtown and just three miles west of ninety four i e st louis park does that mean that frogtown and and st louis park the people there are somehow less disciplined or they have inferior gyms or inferior diets now that the neighbors took the reins and decided to create an environment that would promote health i don't have to tell this audience that there's a huge health problem in this country almost seventy percent of us are overweight or obese about forty percent of us are heading towards diabetes disease it costs about seventy two thousand dollars a year to treat right now we spend about two point one trillion dollars a year on health care most of it eighty four percent or so is avoidable and for the first time in living history life expectancy of our children is expected to be as much as five years or less than the life expectancy of us our might expect is that because we're stupid or we somehow lack the discipline of our forefathers or lesser people or we love our kids less than our parents loved us now our environment has changed one nine hundred seventy there were third as many overweight people but there wasn't as much sprawl we drove half as many miles a year as we do right now there were about a fifteenth as many fast food restaurants it was harder to just go out to me nowadays you can't walk through a pharmacy pick up cough medicine or walk through an airport or drive to a neighbor's house without being routed through a gauntlet of fast food salty snacks soda pops and candy bars discipline is a good thing individual responsibility we hear a lot about individual responsibility a good thing but the problem is discipline is a muscle and muscles for t and eventually our evolutionary hard wiring is going to take over and we're going to grab that food and we see it we're go take rest when we can how many of you walk to school when you were a kid raise your hand how many of you walk to school ok about ninety percent of you have your hands up not raise your hand if your kids walk to school i see about ten hands the whole audience why is it we have a childhood obesity epidemic in our kids don't walk to school well of course part of it is were afraid that can make it back an engineer in that physical activity back into our kids lives every single day about three hundred seventy five images minutes over our brain encouraging us to buy process package food ninety nine percent of which isn't all that good for us the secret to longevity whether it's in your own homes or whether it with a community lies not in trying to beat the dead horse of individual responsibility diets actually size programs and supplements the secret i argue is look at the cultures many of them i have to say outside the united states that have done it better than we have look at the environmental components and import those environmental components in a culturally appropriate way it's been done over and over and over again we just have to pay attention to how it all really boils down to making the healthy choice not only the easy choice but having the courage to make it the unavoidable choice i want to close with one very quick illustrated story members to mind is mor old guy forgot to die drinks two hundred liters of wine a year i actually called him a while back i was writing about him a sit sitting in the caribbean coffee on hennepin i called him in his little i said did you ever figure out how you got rid of lung cancer and he goes yeah yeah i gave it a lot of thought and fact about fifteen years ago i went back to the united states to get some tests i said yeah what do you discover he said not and he said i got back to the united states and all my doctors were denied he with me but you know before this i actually i biked had bike from alaska to argentina around the world and across africa top to bottom it was all downhill but after that i was pretty proud of myself  qana now and there's some argument for that red wine over other red wine but actually drinkers actually outlive nondrinkers as a whole which doesn't mean to say that if you're not drinking now or if you have a drinking problem you should run out day it can be martinis it can be beer but there's some argument for red wine especially when it comes to a company with food if you're drinking a glass of red wine with food  it your ninety seventh birthday the whole village will come out and that's a it's a big difference pocono this is again there's thirty times more female centenarians among people over sixty one woman over sixty in okinawa that we have here in the united states and if you start looking at why they don't have any genetic advantage maybe mostly a plant based diet but there's there's nothing magical it's a sum of a bunch of small things but i believe it's a huge difference this notion that  order you get the more sober it you are and along with that it's not just we honor all the old house there's an expectation that they're going to contribute so what gives them the motivation to get out of bed  morning to get on the easy chair to get their exercise to staying gate to take their medicine i really is this purpose of the purpose comes from an attitude from the culture that i think we can learn from how do you  racial disparities as it comes access to healthy food and communities where that might happen abscess well in this in my city work i try not to focus on one neighborhood or another food policy is a very effective instrument to get cities eating healthier if you look at a place like baton rouge louisiana they have the highest rate of  obesity in the country and they have almost no strictures on how many fast food restaurants per square block are fast food advertising then you look at a place like san luis obispo who city council said a long time ago we're taking these huge advertising junk food ever ties and sides and making them smaller they can't be bigger than a certain size they invest in a citywide farmer's market which is kind of a party every thursday night there's no drive through at fast food restaurants so it's more inconvenient that making the junk food harder and more expensive than making healthy food cheaper and more accessible that cuts across all ethnicities all economic boundaries and and  in two thousand and eight i got a funny from a a r p united health care to see if we could take these blue zones ideas and actually put them to work in a in a community and the idea again was to make permanent changes to the environment not get them all whipped up about a new diet we actually auditioned five minnesota towns and we're really looking for city where the mayor the city manager the superintendent of schools the big c e o s all would raise their hand it because if you don't have a city that wants it you're not going to be effective and it's our experience that you have to change the restaurants the grocery stores the schools the city policies and a critical mass of individual simultaneously and if you can hit that critical mass you don't go anywhere and as it turns out in about two years we hit that critical mass you you stated some of the statistics but it made big national news and there's still a blue zone today half of their days in the county are there some fasting going on but the bigger idea stop at eighty percent actually comes from the confucian adage ha ha ha she who which is still lab did three sets of studies on the difference between prepared in the food immediate family style and found that people prepare their food consume about twenty to twenty five percent fewer calories so it actually works  permits for biking from alaska to argentina and i meet with a merry christmas and he reminds me use of he was a senator here and congressman here and in minnesota for many years great guy he reminds me that that that all government is local and i think you get a lot more done working with them in a simple governments than you do trying to take on the feds because there's so much policy out i'd like to see things happen this year so i keep focused on the local community family is always first vs centenarian in those places but why they work their whole life they're always going to say their kids or grandkids or or their community they tend to have a very strong sense of community it koreans for example will identify themselves first as it koreans and then only second as greeks even in america there are twelve thousand the koreans if you meet them in detroit report jefferson or florida a them what their nationality is they'll say it korea and they're really gre well first of all none of the blue zones except for maybe loma linda can people just carry guns so i don't think that kind of disaster what would happen i get i think it's rooted not so much in hope and more in  in purpose and vocabulary a purpose and having that sort of lead and living in the moment more so that some a magic future that might be better than right here right now think that we get pushback from them but for the most part all we do is come in and point out that their environment yields health or lack thereof and we bring them a set of tools and they choose what's right for them i think bloomberg who tried to do similar things in new york was sixteen ounce sodas and so forth he cut our force the issue as opposed to coming in with the menu of thirty or forty things all of which are like that which would make the default healthier and then  health i think we do agree on a great job i think we have to keep an eye on food policy there's a number of things that minneapolis could be doing to make a little bit harder for us to access junk food and easier for us to access healthier food and to continue the great work that actually think the blue cross blue shield plan here in minneapolis does minnesota and making bicycling a viable choice for transportation do you know that people who ride their bike or take a bus to work have eleven percent lower rates of heart disease than people drive to work so right there that's better than your insurance policy rather than your of people over sixty and found about one fifth the rate we use the same test the national institute on aging uses for cognitive health we found one fifth the rate of dementia that we have here in america america if you hit age eighty five is about fifty percent chance you're suffering from dementia there was about a twenty percent chance of ten percent when you look when you see how it koreans are living there eating the strictest version of the mediterranean diet so they're eating fish catnap they drink him every day we had those three tea sent to the university of athens school pharmacology and found that all three teas were strong anti inflammatories and mild to strong diure have contributed along with the mediterranean diet along with the fact that you can't find more than one hundred yards of flat land on the whole island so there always get the work out  well that's a tough one i mean it's consensus to kids before they're fifty heed your i think you're either born one way or not but i think our schools could address this notion of being civically engaged earlier probably produce a society that is my street i have i i eat mostly a plant based diet i used to be a fanatic cyclist and now i do things gentle low intensity physical activity i think the key is doing something you like every day when it comes to physical i q not forcing yourself to get on a treadmill peate the treadmill i know that the happiest americans are socially interact in between six and seven hours every single day so i'm a naturally social people person so i give myself permission to go out every night and build my friends all these things we know actually that volunteers volunteer my time to provide you i'm a big fan of the minneapolis foundation the volunteers we know have lower rates of heart disease there would be a mice and they have measurably lower health care costs so these are all things you don't hear much about because people s clean air clean water they grew most of their food close to their homes and so you see very clearly that environmental health this is overlapping with bodily health consensus of the top step the titians and happiness thinkers that are usually economists or psychologist to form a consensus on what policies are most likely to yield life satisfaction and nations and i think there's all to ok i'll tip my hand to just one thing and then i'll sign off here but we tend to think that maximizing g d p so the wealthier the nation the happier it is but actually that flattens out at about forty thousand dollars a year the thing that most highly correlates with happiness in nature is the quality part of it is economic equality but gender equality and tolerance and