Overview:
Over the next five weeks, Canadian Affairs is taking a critical look at five Canadian cities to see how they stack up as Blue Zones. Simply put, Blue Zones are places where people eat simple food, move a lot during their days and live close to loved ones with whom they eat, laugh and perhaps pray.
In the search to find the best place to create a Canadian Blue Zone — a spot to live to 100 in good health — Vancouver is a pretty good place to start.
It has that magic ingredient common to the five Blue Zones worldwide: Ikaria, Greece; Loma Linda, California; Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Nicoya, Costa Rica. Its environment makes it easy to choose healthy habits over bad ones.
“We think making healthy choices into easy choices is really impactful,” said Dr. Michael Schwandt, medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health, a regional health authority.
“The environment that people live in is very important for that. The approach of simply telling people what they ought to do is definitely not enough.”
Let’s start with diet.
Vancouverites pay a lot of attention to locally grown food, Schwandt says.
“I would say that it’s a big [thing] being in a part of the world where there’s a rich source of many different healthy foods, whether that’s fruit and agriculture or seafood.”
But from a “health equity perspective,” rising food prices are now preventing some in the community from putting healthy meals on the table, he says.
Schwandt speaks admiringly of a program in New York City called the Healthy Bodegas Initiative. The city’s public health department works with bodegas — Spanish stores that are fixtures in most neighbourhoods — to boost the availability of healthy foods.
The city concentrates on neighbourhoods with the highest rates of poverty and chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, which are often markers of poor diet. The bodegas receive tax breaks depending on the amount of fresh food they carry.
Schwandt would like to see Vancouver introduce incentives for food producers and retailers to keep prices down to make it easier for people to choose healthy food over “less healthy, processed foods, [which] remain quite inexpensive.”
A social species
Another vital pillar of Blue Zones is social connection. People who live in the naturally occurring Blue Zones live close to loved ones and often share meals with them.
They also tend to have fun and laugh a lot with family and friends, according to Dan Buettner, the explorer and National Geographic Fellow who found and studied the five Blue Zones.
“More and more research shows this has such a positive impact on people’s health,” Schwandt says. “We see that people describe less anxiety or less depression when they have regular, high-quality social contact.”
This makes sense, Schwandt says, because humans are a social species and spending time with loved ones is pleasurable.
As Vancouver builds more high-density housing, the city has introduced some local initiatives that promote opportunities for social connection, Schwandt says. The Hey Neighbour! Collective, a non-governmental organization, is working to ensure that opportunity for social connection is built into housing, particularly social housing.
Often a simple design tweak, such as incorporating a plaza or park into a development, is enough, Schwandt says.
The social connection pillar feeds into what Schwandt calls British Columbia’s largest health problem: the overdose crisis. “I think it has a lot to do with social connection and people’s mental health needs not being met.”
The overdose crisis stems from “traumatic experiences, experiences like homelessness, poverty, trauma and life even in childhood.”
In 2023, the leading cause of death in B.C. is drug toxicity for people aged 10 to 59. At approximately seven deaths per day, more people are dying from overdoses than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural diseases combined, according to the province’s coroner.
“There’s a saying that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety; it’s connection,” Schwandt says.
“I think this is an area where [the city] can keep improving… Trying to meet people’s basic needs, including social connection, is really important.”
Safety trumps weather
Given Vancouverites’ reputation as fitness fans, you would expect the city to score well on how people get around the city. And you’d be right. The city has more than 1,400 kilometres of bike lanes, which are well used.
More surprisingly, it’s not the city’s relatively mild climate that keeps cyclists on those lanes.
Research has found that the perceived safety of using bikes plays a major role in whether people choose to use them for transport or recreation, Schwandt says. “Having safe spaces to bike is very important… much more so than the weather.”
“These lanes have not been without controversy over the years. What’s usually been found is that once these spaces are created — which usually does take some vision, community action and political will — they’ve almost invariably been very well-received.”
Schwandt is also a big fan of urban designs that encourage residents to make walking part of their day. Just like the shepherds of Ikaria and the gardeners of Okinawa.
“If we have communities designed so people are able to get to their work, do their grocery shopping, make it to appointments… with some combination of walking and public transit and other active modes… it really helps people add physical activity into the day without any particular planning.”
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