There are places on this Earth where people live to 100 and beyond and enjoy robust health to the end.
Gardens of Eden? Demi-paradises? Geriatricians’ pipe dreams?
A little bit of each perhaps?
Perhaps. But invariably they are places where people live simple lives, where they move a lot during their days, eat simple local food, live close to loved ones with whom they eat and laugh and perhaps pray.
They are the Blue Zones.
Compare them to the way the average Canadian lives. We rush through our days, eating fast food on the run, wishing we had more time to spend with loved ones, maybe scraping out time to go to the gym (and feeling virtuous for it).
It’s a wonder the average Canadian man makes it to 79.63 years old and the average Canadian woman lives to 84.11, according to Statistics Canada. When you stand back and look — and when do we ever take time to stand back and look? — it’s a wonder we live that long. And it’s no wonder that it’s often cardiovascular disease that takes us out, or that we end our days in a fog of dementia.
Dan Buettner is a name you see everywhere once you start researching Blue Zones. He is the explorer and National Geographic Fellow who studied longevity hotspots around the world. He found the original five Blue Zones: Ikaria, Greece; Loma Linda, California; Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Nicoya, Costa Rica. Look at that list, vastly different cultures from practically all four corners of the world. Yet, the people in each one live long, healthy lives. What could these areas possibly have in common?
It’s simple. Their environments make it easy to make good decisions about how they live. For some, such as Sardinia, it’s because they are culturally isolated and live a traditional lifestyle of hunting, fishing and harvesting their food. For the 9,000 Seventh Day Adventists who make up the Loma Linda Blue Zone, it is because tending to their health is central to their faith. They embrace a life of vegetarianism and regular exercise and don’t smoke or drink alcohol.
Public health workers will tell you it’s not enough to tell people what good health decisions they should make. We all know what we should do. Eat fresh healthy food, enjoy time with family and friends and move more. And yet we don’t do these things, to public health workers’ despair.
But if you could create an environment that makes it easier to make good decisions than to make bad ones, the kind of environment that naturally occurs in Blue Zones, you’d have real change. You’d have better health outcomes.
Think of smoking. The evidence that smoking kills was around a long time before smoking rates dropped significantly. That happened only after cigarettes became hugely expensive thanks to heavy taxes and smokers found themselves out in the cold, literally. There was built-in motivation to quit, reasons beyond health.
If you were lucky enough to be born in one of the five Blue Zones, congratulations. You can expect to live a long, healthy life. But if you were born elsewhere, despair not. You are not doomed. There are municipalities that have chosen to remake themselves as Blue Zones.
Singapore is a good example of an engineered Blue Zone. Their president was way ahead of the curve in 1970 when he set the goal of turning Singapore into a healthy country.
The president made driving really expensive. Only 11 per cent of Singaporeans own cars. They don’t need them because they are never more than 400 metres away from a safe, efficient, affordable subway system. And the country subsidized healthy food — brown rice over white — and made it more difficult to get junk food. Singaporeans get a tax break if their aging parents live with them. The result? Within 50 years, their life expectancy increased by 25 years, Buettener said in an educational video.
So what would it take to create Blue Zones in Canada? Airdrie, Albert had a go in 2019, the first community outside the United States to sign on to becoming a Blue Zone. The pandemic messed with their plans.
At Canadian Affairs, over the next five Saturdays, we will be looking at what it would take for five of Canada’s major cities to turn themselves into Blue Zones. Next Saturday, we’ll begin with Vancouver. Stay tuned.
Comments are closed.